Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/18

Freethought groups are known to function on limited budgets. Typically, or in the vast majority of cases, they do not receive any financial support. They lack the infrastructure for self-sustaining seen in many religious institutions.

So, what is the reason for this apparent paradox? The paradox of limited funds and functional organizations in spite of a dearth of funding. Part of the reason is the provision of any kind of community is seen as valuable to the freethought wanderers in societies.

Many people in societies, including theocracies, do not adhere to the dominant religious tone, tenor, or theology. They disagree with its tone of delivery. They do not see rationale in its tenor of application. They outright reject the formal theological positions.

Freethought organizations are simply and solely important for the provision of a community for those who do not have another. People are willing to provide finances and support to religious organizations because of the constant demand.

Freethought organizations function on a band of devoted volunteers and continual, and increasing, demand for community. It happens in all sorts of ways, whether Satanist activism, humanist human rights defending, atheist and agnostic public speaking, Sunday Assembly community building, and so on.

All relevant for the development of a common sensibility among those freethought people who want community, even need it. So if you are a freethinker in want of a community, then I would recommend looking for individuals to plug into community and then financially supporting them.

But as with any of this work, your efforts, in general, are best done locally.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/21

Prof. Douglas I.O. Anele is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lagos. Here we talk about the necessity of skepticism in Africa.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Religion is the worst intellectual virus invented by human beings” was a powerful statement from the Sceptical Africa lecture given by you. What makes religion the worst intellectual virus known to humankind? 

Prof. Douglas I.O. Anele: It is so because religion promotes the deadly pandemic of gullibility, ignorance, in addition to intellectual indolence and dishonesty masquerading as faith or piety. It cripples critical thinking and the quest for scientific understanding of the world. Unlike other viruses that attack the body, religion attacks the human mind by fostering hatred, discrimination, slavery, fear, cruelty, sheepish reliance on supernatural intervention through purported miracles, and dogmatic acceptance of the pronouncements of ancient peoples of old (mostly men) as the inspired or revealed inerrant word of imaginary deities. In fact, virtually every instance of man’s inhumanity to man is caused either directly or indirectly by the religious mindset. 

Jacobsen: “This is the time you must eat, drink, sleep scepticism.” Another piercing statement from the series. What is the crucial time in the university and in school generally for young people to become acquainted with and informed about scepticism?

Anele: The best time to introduce scepticism, the critical or sceptical attitude to a child is immediately he or she begins formal education. Unfortunately, the capacity for critical thinking in an overwhelming percentage of parents and teachers have already been blunted, if not damaged irreparably by their exposure to religion from early childhood. Still, for growing children, the danger can be minimized if right from the commencement of formal education they are introduced to critical thinking, informed about the importance of asking questions, together with the benefits of basing their beliefs on sufficient evidence and withholding judgement if evidence is either inconclusive or unavailable. It is never too early to train child to form the habit of healthy doubt. At the tertiary level, non-philosophy students should be made to study courses in logic, critical thinking, the history of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics so that they can learn the virtue of scepticism. Despite the fact that religion has weakened the capacity for critical thinking in most people, it is still possible through strong advocacy by individuals and nongovernmental organisations across the world interested in spreading secular humanist outlook to help them undergo a paradigm-shift by rejecting religious dogmas and embracing the scientific or critical attitude. Moreover, given the epidemic of fanaticism spreading in various parts of the globe presently, particularly virulent violent Islamism represented by the Taliban, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and so on, the imperative for the adoption of the sceptical attitude by human beings is a matter of life and death and preservation of the planet and its amazing contents. To be clear, no time is too early or too late for any human being to adopt the sceptical or attitude, especially towards religion.

Jacobsen: “Scepticism is very important for intellectual maturity.” How can dogma be differentiated from scepticism as intellectual immaturity is differentiated from intellectual maturity?

Anele: The difference between dogma and scepticism is analogous to that between intellectual immaturity and intellectual maturity. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. Being dogmatic means accepting claims and belief systems as true without question, without bothering whether the claim or belief in question is backed by sufficient evidence. Religion is necessarily dogmatic because it is based on faith, which is defined in The Holy Bible as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Religious or irrational faith is persistence into adulthood of children’s unquestioning belief in the truth of bedtime stories that parents told them in order to get them to sleep.  On the other hand, the sceptical attitude differs from the dogma attitude since unlike the latter the former derives from the recognition borne out of experience that human beings are fallible and can make mistakes in their quest for truth or reliable information about reality. Therefore, a sceptic tries hard to align his beliefs to the evidence, and refrains from drawing definitive conclusion if sufficient evidential support is unavailable. In fact the sceptical attitude is an indispensable sign of intellectual maturity; it allows for flexibility in thinking and readiness to change one’s opinion on any subject-matter or topic whenever better evidence becomes available. This implies that an intellectually mature person must be a critical thinker and a sceptic, always willing to ask searching questions in order to enhance knowledge and understanding. Conversely, a person who is intellectually immature tends to be dogmatic, gullible and naïve towards opinions expressed by people in positions of power, authority and influence, especially members of the clergy. In his mental calculus, the question of evidence and truth is of secondary importance; what really matters is the status of the speaker or writer. In religious matters, an intellectually immature believer sees every criticism of religion and the clergy as a taboo, and gets angry quickly when presented with an opinion that contradicts his own. To such a person, questioning what is written in “holy books” or changing one’s opinion as a result of superior evidence is a sign of weakness. That is why the intellectually immature are drawn to religion the way iron fillings are drawn to magnets.   

Jacobsen: How did the students take the lecture by you? 

Anele: The lecture was well received by the audience, which includes staff and students from the University of Lagos and Lagos State University, and others.  Some of them raised the usual questions regarding the existence of God, witches, miracles and the creation-evolution debate. I tried to respond to the questions as well as I could. It is somewhat disappointing but not surprising that even philosophy students exposed to the rudiments of logic and critical thinking still accept uncritically the doctrines contained in the Holy Bible and Holy Koran, and other superstitious beliefs of their cultural groups. Nevertheless, I encouraged them not only to imbibe a healthy dose of scepticism but also to investigate the topics further from an open-minded perspective to deepen and broaden their understanding.

Jacobsen: What do you consider the cultural gaps in the educational system for students in developing critical thinking and sceptical capacities? 

Anele: The fundamental hiatus between “the will to believe” by students and igniting their critical faculties through encouraging them to adopt the sceptical attitude is religion. As the late scholar, Prof. Ali Mazrui pointed out, Africans are the bearers of The Triple Heritage, namely, indigenous cultures of autochthonous African communities; the colonial imperial legacy of the West; and the spiritual and cultural influence of Islam. This triple heritage did not emphasise the importance of inculcating critical thinking and the sceptical at titude in the system of education that flowed from them. Aside from being suffused with supernaturalism and religion, traditional African cultures laid stoo much emphasis on respect for the opinions of elders, a situation that discouraged questioning accepted beliefs and critical thinking. Now, central to the educational system inherited by African countries colonised by the West is the spread of Christianity through the mission schools, whereas several countries in West and North Africa were Islamised through jihads. Consequently, even today the problem of surmounting cultural impediments to teaching students how to sharpen and deepen their critical faculties and mainstreaming it into the curricular at various levels of education is a herculean task. The situation is worsened by the domination of the commanding heights of educational institutions by devout Christians and Muslims. 

Jacobsen: How powerful is religion and anti-science thinking within the local educational curriculum? How does it limit the possibilities of the students as they progress through life and become adult citizens, workers, taxpayers, and so on?

Anele: It is extremely powerful, as could be seen in the compulsory routine of singing religious songs and prayers during the commencement of each school day, prescribed school uniforms designed to meet the requirements of religion, domination of both academic and non-academic positions at all levels of education by Christians and Muslims, the spread of faith-based institutions, and the teaching of religions from the primary school level to the university level. This is inimical to the production of citizens with the appropriate level of critical thinking and sceptical attitude required for navigating rationally the hydra-headed challenges posed by the fast-changing, knowledge-and-technology-driven globalising world.

Because religion is based primarily on fear – fear of death and the purported hereafter, fear of the unknown, fear of failure in one’s undertakings, and that vague generalised fear existentialists called angst – it limits their capacity for creative thinking and imagination in handling the problems of daily life (both personal and professional) after graduating from school. Religion places a lot of economic burdens on believers, as many Christians are required to pay tithes and all sorts of offerings to finance numerous church programmes and the lavish lifestyles of church leaders. They are also victims of extortion by unscrupulous “men and women of God” who promise them miracles and divine interventions to solve their problems. Many Christians have ruined their lives, families, friendships and careers by unquestioning acceptance of hifalutin insipidities emanating from various pulpits across Africa. Similarly, thousands of Muslims have lost their lives fighting jihads or holy wars, and by enforcing the antediluvian bloodthirsty blasphemy laws have murdered people for no good reason. Specifically, the lunatic accusation of insulting Allah or Prophet Muhammad has been used as an excuse to either imprison or kill people in the most gruesome manner. Unfortunately, devout Christians and Muslims do not understand that religion is at bottom a human invention that reflects the good, the bad and the hideously ugly in our species.      

Jacobsen: What is your major aim in lectures and public work for scepticism in Africa?

Anele: My overriding aim is to wake Africans up from their dogmatic slumber and open their minds to the immense benefits, both individual and social, of imbibing the critical or sceptical attitude in their dealings with themselves and others. I also want to make them realise that the easy irrational resort to religion and rampant supernaturalism is the main reason for the chronic underdevelopment of the continent. I am convinced that the more Africans abandon religion and embrace the scientific or critical attitude, the attitude of basing their beliefs on sufficient evidence, the brighter the future of the continent. QED.

Douglas I.O. Anele PhD

Professor of Philosophy

University of Lagos

NIGERIA.  

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/17

Sometimes, the shortest interviews are the better ones. I came across one in Yale News with David Gorski.

The January 6 Insurrection, according to Professor Philip Gorski, was a symbolic representation of White Nationalism. In the interview, he, recently, published the book entitled The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

When asked in this 2022 interview about Christian Nationalism, Gorski, said, “First, it is an ideology based on a story about America that’s developed over three centuries. It reveres the myth that the country was founded as a Christian nation by white Christians and that its laws and institutions are based on Protestant Christianity. White Christian nationalists believe that the country is divinely favored and has been given the mission to spread religion, freedom, and civilization.”

Those blessed by God to spread the Good News. The threat, from this perspective, becomes individuals who cannot be identified as white, as Christian, and as immigrants.

In a sense, the national soul of America becomes impure and polluted in this moral and theological framework. Given its theological orientation, God’s Law and Will are being poisoned. Why wouldn’t they be against non-white immigration who are non-Christians? They are philosophically consistent in this view. That’s respectable. As a simple matter of fact, most others disagree with them.

“By digging into the historical source materials, you can see this perspective taking shape in the 1690s, which is the title of one of the book’s chapters. In a way, you can trace it back even further,” Gorski explained, “because this idea of a white Christian nation does have roots in a certain understanding of the Bible that weaves three old stories into a new story.”

I have been told this is a form of selective literalism. These have practical effects on actions in the world. God promised a special land, a promised land for the Israelites. The problem was a discovery of the Amalekites in the land. Early settlers found themselves in this biblical narrative as a chosen people.

“North America was the new Promised Land. The Native Americans were the new Amalekites and the Puritans felt entitled to take their land. Another strand is the End Times story, which today is viewed as the Second Coming of Jesus in the most literal sense. It’s a belief that Jesus is going to come down to Earth for a final showdown between good and evil. And the Christians in America will be on the side of good,” Gorski explained.

The sense of nationalism and the interpretation of chosen people in Christian formulate the idea extant over centuries of this idea of a white, Christian, national geographic bounded structure guided by God’s Law. The peculariarity, according to Gorski, of whiteness — the sociological race concept — arose as a “justification for slavery.”

Gorski continued, “The traditional justification for slavery, theologically speaking, had been that heathens and captives of war could be enslaved. Initially, this is how slavery in America was justified, but a couple of generations later, the justification didn’t really work. You can’t argue that a young boy of African descent born in the Virginia Colony in 1690 was a captive of war. His mother might have converted to Christianity, in which case he’s not a ‘heathen.’”

This is so tragic. The new biblical justification for this racism became the story of Ham seeing his father, Noah, drunk and naked. God gave the mark not to Ham but Canaan, Ham’s son, and then condemned the children to slavery. This is one of the justifications for slacery of Africans.

Gorski expounded on the timeline in a merger in 1690. “The three biblical stories merge in 1690. You can see this very clearly in what is still one of the authoritative histories of early New England, which was written by Cotton Mather III from the great family of Boston preachers. Once this script is in place, it gets revised as time passes. Maybe the Promised Land is out West. Maybe the Native Americans are no longer the enemy, but it’s immigrants from the southern border who represent the threat.”

So, this story, as you can see, goes through evolutions as to the source of the problem or threat to Christian national identity. The political mentality focuses on the idea of a libertarian sense of social freedom. Gorski takes this as an idea of white men on top and everyone below them.

“You can really see this in the Capitol insurrection. It occurred against the background of the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide calls for racial justice, which white Christian nationalists view as a threat to the racial order. It offends their notion of freedom and liberty,” Gorski explained, “It leads to guys showing up to the Capitol with cattle prods and bear spray ready to beat up police officers in the name of their understanding of patriotism. In the book, we call it a Holy Trinity of freedom, order, and violence.”

Gorski touched briefly on the delusions of some of the populations, not in the idea of a transcendent father figure and real estate agent. More in the idea of the Christian supporters of Trump believer Trump is a devout Christian, and a good one. They see Christianity as under attack. They like Trump because they see him as fighting for the faith.

Christians should have a right to believe and practice their faith. Democratic values and countries provide freedoms for so many religious people. Democracy brought religious freedom to different groups of Christians. Gorski sees the issue as the hard right sociopolitical turn of this population.

Emphasizing, “White Christian nationalism is a dangerous threat because it’s incredibly well-organized and powerful. There’s absolutely nothing like it on the left. The white Christian nationalists boast local and national networks that can raise money and to turn people out to the polls and to school board meetings or protests. They can effectively communicate messages and support policies that are out of step with liberal democracy, such as the coordinated attack on voting rights.”

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/16

Dr. Daniel Bernstein is an instructor in the Psychology department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University located in British Columbia, Canada. Kwantlen has four campuses spread across the Lower Mainland, including Surrey, Richmond, Cloverdale, and Langley. Dr. Bernstein is most often found at the Surrey campus. Dr. Bernstein also holds adjunct and affiliate positions in the Psychology departments at the University of Washington and Simon Fraser University. As a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Bernstein’s work focuses on memory and decision making, most notably false memory, fluency, the revelation effect, hindsight bias, Theory of Mind, perspective taking, and lifespan cognitive development. Click here for Dr. Bernstein’s CV. Danny is an old boss, long-time mentor, and the one who was the transition from an interest in individual differences to writing and journalism. There are many people like that in my life. And I am eternally grateful to them. Here we talk about Lifespan Cognition and the Lifespan Cognition Lab. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: My first introduction to a psychology course was an Advanced Placement course at my high school. I immensely enjoyed the course, but I didn’t consider pursuing this as a possible course of study until later in early life for me. When I went to university, first, it didn’t seem like a reasonable possibility given family financial situation and coming from an alcoholic home. It was a bit of a precarious situation on all fronts. Yet, I recall, and knowing the fragility of human memory this should be taken with a pinch of salt, going down the second floor of one of the buildings in Kwantlen Polytechnic University Surrey campus. I accidentally wandered into the main office for the psychology labs, mostly Danny’s space. I was redirected by one of the lab members at the time, Louise, back down the end of the hall to the offices. This is where the memory is more cloudy. If it is accurate, I met Danny, briefly. That, eventually, began a period of mentorship over time and then attending KPU for a time. 

To this day, Danny still answers random emails thrown his way. He’s been exceptionally generous with time and expertise, and support, for me, whether attendance at conferences, learning some of the basic ropes of psychological research, meeting Dr. Anthony Greenwald over dinner in my early 20s, or being able to connect with the famed Prof. Elizabeth Loftus at the University of California, Irvine who very generously gave time for two or three coffees when I was researching at or visiting UCIrvine over the last few years at the UCI Ethics Centre under Distinguished Professor Kristen Monroe (another exceptionally wonderful and brilliant person, which eventually earned a Tobis Fellow position for 2022/23 and a renewal for the 2023/24 year too, at UCIrvine). I do all this ass-kissing to begin a lab-based update on lifespan cognition research now, because I’m curious how the research, since I was in the lab, has been progressing. For those stumbling across this interview, Danny Bernstein is a former Tier 2 Canada Research Chair at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The Lifespan Cognition Lab, which Danny directs, is located at the Surrey and Richmond campuses of KPU. Dr. Bernstein’s research is into “cognitive and developmental psychology to study perspective taking in everyone from preschoolers to senior citizens” through the Lifespan Cognition Lab.

So, as this is a lab-wide interview, individuals can answer specific inquiries. To those who want to take part in this interview, here’s one for everyone, what is your specific research question in research in the Lifespan Cognition Lab?

Carolyn Baer, Post-doctoral fellow: My research asks how we learn to reflect on what we are skilled at. This is a cognitive ability we call metacognition: the way our minds think about themselves. One project we’re working on right now is looking at how elementary school-aged children track what they are good at over time. We’re hoping that this can tell us more about how children learn about their unique strengths and weaknesses.

Jacobsen: What is the state of lifespan cognition research now, whether the big unanswered questions or the newest answers provided about the principles of memory and perspective taking across the lifespan?

Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein: The field of lifespan cognition is still in its relative infancy. People have been interested in lifespan cognition for a long time, but few researchers tackle the young child to older adult lifespan. That’s the age range I study, which presents unique experimental challenges. One challenge is designing tasks that are appropriate for all age groups. Even if one overcomes this challenge, one can never be sure that all age groups approach the same task in the same way. For example, the preschooler might not understand the task in the same way that older children and adults understand the task. The same problem applies to any given age group and any given task (e.g., some adults might approach a memory task in one way, while others approach it in an entirely different way). All things being equal, though, the variability in how people approach a given task is greater across age groups than within a given age group. So, lifespan cognition researchers must remain mindful of measurement error, and strive to minimize it. 

As for the big unanswered questions, I am excited to see how the field tackles questions related to what is called theory of mind across the lifespan. Theory of mind refers to one’s understanding that minds differ from one’s own mind, and that people can hold mistaken or false beliefs about the world. There is a lot of work on this topic in children, and a growing body of work on infants and adults. However, few researchers are exploring theory of mind across the child to adult lifespan (see Bernstein, 2018; 2021). We know that people can have a mature theory of mind, but fail to use it properly in situations by acting egocentrically. Just because I know (or feel) something doesn’t mean that you also know (or feel) it. Future work on this question will help us answer how and why people, and possibly cultural groups, fail to use theory of mind in certain situations. 

Jacobsen: Only to the principal investigator: With your research done in your career so far, what research finding has most surprised you – both in your own work and in the field as a whole?

Danny Bernstein, LCL Director: I’m both always surprised and at the same time not surprised by findings in cognitive psychology. The human brain is so complex that most of what we learn about our own thinking is bound to surprise us and then again, not surprise us. One of the most surprising findings of the past little while involves what psychologists call the “Replication Crisis.” The fact that many results don’t replicate doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is how Psychology has embraced this crisis and how it has worked hard to remedy the problem. We’ve done this in relatively short order, if you consider that Psychology as a whole became aware of a “Crisis” circa 2015 with the publication of “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). If you’ve read and studied Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” you might expect that Psychology would resist accepting the idea that it has a replication crisis. Some in the field certainly resisted at first, but not nearly as many as we might expect from other scientific revolutions. What is especially heartening to see is how Psychology’s handling of the replication crisis has influenced other fields, including biology and medicine. Indeed, it is nice to see Psychology blaze a trail for how science as a whole should handle failures to replicate. 

As for my own work, I’ve been surprised by many findings from experiments that I and colleagues designed and conducted. One example is how the mere presence of a photograph related to a factual claim (that might be true or false) increases people’s belief in the claim’s truth. We called this effect truthiness, based on the comedian Stephen Colbert’s use of that term: truth that one feels in one’s gut rather than truth derived from books, logic, or factual evidence (Newman et al., 2012). For example, people tend to believe that giraffes cannot jump when they see a picture of a giraffe. The picture itself tells us nothing about the claim’s truth (this claim is false, by the way). We have extended this work to videos. In more recent work, people who watched a short video of someone landing a plane thought that they themselves could land a plane safely in an emergency. Although it is possible to land a plane safely in an emergency, it is highly unlikely for someone who has never flown a plane (Jordan et al., 2022). This effect extends to watching foreign shows with subtitles and then thinking that you can understand that foreign language (Jordan et al., 2024).

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/15

I was talking to an old boss. He asked about the current state of international journalism. Certainly, there are those in better-situated positions to give more authoritative commentary on the developments over time. 

However, as I have seen, there are some issues in the journalistic world on the national level, on the international front, and with the emergence of new technologies. When I decided to switch from pursuing individual differences in passion, IQ, and personality for writing and journalism, I entered one of the worst periods for it.

I may still be the king of interviewing high-IQ society members because I am still doing it after a decade or so, though. For outlets, everything has been declining in size because the transition from print to electronic is the issue. Electronic means subscribers rather than newspaper readers.

This implies a different form of income stream outside of advertisements. People are less willing to buy subscriptions to major publications. There is less income generation, meaning fewer jobs and fewer field jobs moreso.

While this transition happened, people cannot be paid. They can’t pay people for as much stuff. As well, we are entering a Type 1 Civilization. A global community with a different form of information consumption than in previous centuries. This shift may cause a change in the landscape of journalism from external factors.

For example, people go to social media. Algorithms can manipulate those messaging systems, though. The agglomeration of media. The team downsizing, and the like, these impact the quality of the reportage in spite of the quantity of reportage. 

I was told by one woman who has been a many award-winning journalist and even an editor or writer for The New York Times for many years, at one point, that at one of the 6 or 7 schools for journalism in Canada has fewer students and graduates, and applicants, than many other years. 

This raises a spectre of reduced field of reportage. Are we looking at a dying field and an entrance into what Musk calls a Town Square through X and other media? If so, sophisticated AI will mean easier manipulation of public opinion, in myopinion. 

Because the nature of algorithms in the current incarnation of artificial intelligence systems is the nature of big data. Lots of data points provided by posts or tweets across platforms. They can be analyzed and used in nefarious ways, potentially. A public town square may be one of those ideas only appealing on paper. 

Back to the song of this article, who is on the beat? Who is pursuing the stories? There may be fewer on each story. As one panel member noted at the 2023 Canadian Association of Journalists’s conference, there used to be way more people on the same story.

So, there was both a camaraderie, but also a competition on the same story and for the same sources of information. It became a driver for great news. What about now? Honestly, people at last year’s conference, like Amber Bracken. 

I got the image of someone who gave up, however many, tens of thousands of dollars per year, to do work on leftist political issues because the journalism, the narrative building, was a passion for her. It was more than a job, than a profession. She was given a standing ovation after her presentation. 

Outside of the financial arena and the use of mass social media as potential means of undermining democratic institutions, we have an internal issue within the journalistic landscape. That being, there aren’t many conservative media outlets. That’s a bias in the landscape. 

And the ones that are conservative, they’re typically corporate. Corporate doesn’t mean conservative. It means for-profit. Nothing necessarily wrong with profit. However, profit as the primary driver can override truth as the primary driver, which is the goal of journalism and an important channel for democratic decision-making. 

So, political affiliation-wise, we have the same issue as psychology. What has been termed in the psychological literature as WEIRD people, educated liberal types, or more precisely: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic subpopulations, these fit more to some of my biases. That’s a problem. There should be people more unlike me, more non-kin sensibility-wise. 

This leaves the landscape highly biased. Corporation-wise, though, at the same time, we have the same issue as Western societies generally: assaults on the rights of the populations by multinational corporations, too. For example, religion was the major fight in Academia at one point. Religion is decidedly lost, because institutions are secular. 

The main fight is an ugly secular face in multinationals wrecking small-time politics, and politics is reliant on a diverse media landscape. If everyone looks different and thinks the same, then we have a problem, not in diversity but in monocular visions of the true meaning of diversity.

This is an argument for the protection of people like Lindsay Shepherd and other conservative people who have had a harder time. It’s an argument for diversification of the media landscape, financing of media more, and widening the definition of diversity in the media room.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/14

My biological father was not a pleasant person. He was a drinker, a drunk, or, in the clinical era, an alcoholic. He drank his face off for decades. I have heard enough stories as an adult to get a clearer picture.

He was a product of his generation, his culture, and his substance misuse. An adaptation to discipline as a youngster involved beatings and overindulgence in the home as a man from a house of means in Canada.

A man with excellent grades who then found girls and liquor, to paraphrase my late grandmother. A man who went, his partner wanted him to be home. He would be, as one, talking to a brick wall, ignoring the clear need for his partner’s home and his family.

Do not be this guy.

He hated working in Whistler. However, he would work there to make much money. A man stuck in a box of “should be” for a man. GMP publisher Lisa Hickey calls this the Man Box. It’s the similar condition of a woman stuck in being the perfect housewife.

Nonetheless, this became the eventual trap for him. He set himself a gender role trap, which would be his undoing, but the seeds for this began in the formative years for him. These scripts came from parental sources, which generally arose from cultural scripts in Canada, arguably North America.

Do not be this guy.

However, as a cognizant adult, he has to own everything despite his childhood. He did not change. He became more entrenched and resentful. He began to relinquish self-control to liquor and substance. He would not come home. He would always stay out, which is fine. Unless you say you’re going to come back, then do not.

Food made, thrown out. Kids waiting, now in bed. Wife sitting, now sleeping. Rinse, wash, and repeat for years. My mother became fed up. She set boundaries. What followed? He went to a woman, giving false comfort.

A woman looking to leave a marriage with a Hell’s Angel member. Does this make sense? He would leave on weekends to the place he hated the most, Whistler, to do minor repairs for the construction company. Why? He was too selfish for that behaviour. My mother knew immediately that he was cheating.

Do not be this guy.

At this point, he is an estranged father, ex-husband, alcoholic and barely working man. Is this a legacy? Is this a man? Is this healthy? Is this an image? In order: of a negative kind, destructive kind, and no.

It is an image of a kind, but it is only worthwhile as an image in the inverse or the negative. An example of that which one does not want to be in life should not be in life. Like me, I would take this from another guy who had to suffer through that father: do not be him.

Moreover, I learned from his example in reverse, as I did, to be a good guy. By not being that guy, you will fall and make mistakes. However, you can always commit to being better each month, each year. You will only see the changes in retrospect.

The gods have not haven’t left us.

They have not returned.

Why?

Because they were never here in the first place, we only have each other. We have one life. Eventually, we will have to pass on what was left to us as something to someone else. What better story than a transmutation, a transformation of tragedy into something, at least, a little better than the yesteryear?

A breakage of a cycle of tears and terror. We are our stories. We only have our stories. We are made of stories. And those stories will, eventually, go away, too. Wisdom is depositing the metanarrative of human culture for the good.

Something that will evolve into something unknown to you or your descendants but bearing characteristics far beyond you. It will be for them, but maybe a bit better than it was for us.

Be that guy.

As Lenny Bruce reminded us, as a pierce in the shade of history, a long time ago in a culture near you, someone ‘gifted’ an ought to people. A way that the world should be rather than itself.

But living the way the world “should be” or “ought to be” is a terrible, terrible lie given to the people a long time ago. There only is what is. My father is a bad man by many metrics, but my father was victimized by his time and his culture.

Douglas, my middle name, his “should be” or “ought to be,” was around me, imposed on him as a boy and then as a man. These became the expectations, then became thoroughly internalized. If culture’s lies broke his authentic Self, then his internalized lies broke his life as the fruits of his life. I wept a lot for him as a child, many nights. I do not anymore, as I do not know him and only see him insofar as I see half his reflection in the morning and the evening, waking up and going to bed.

Be that guy.

In the end, these are choices. Some are more difficult, but the choice for change sits with us.

Even though I am of him, I do not have to be him.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/13

Hacks are valued, even cherished in the modern period. They’re as ubiquitous as podcasts and 24-hour news cycles. The truth of the news is the truth of podcasts is the truth of hacks. There are too many of them. News can be summarized in an hour show, generally. 

Podcast quantity outstrips quality. Same with hacks. There aren’t truly that many real hacks in life. Most of them are fluff. The truth that we all know when we have accomplished anything beyond the mundane or mediocre: hard work is the only path. 

For the most part, any form of achievement will involve suffering and a lengthy form of it. Then another form of suffering in endurance to maintain the achievement. That’s simply the fact of the matter. I’m like you. If I look back on my life to this point, any time I achieved some decent; I had to work hard to get it. 

Probably, harder to get it, but still hard work to maintain what was achieved. And the drive, the motivation, the pleasure can be part of this painful process, but the main way through to a gateway of growth and expansion is a sense of duty. 

Do you continue to grind or not? Do you continue to sustain yourself? These are more than simply questions. They are actionable demands. Do you choose to give up and fail or continue to build on the achievement before? Those are the real questions. 

Again, there are no hacks to make anything of yourself beyond simply putting in the time, the mental effort to figure out the processes, and then grinding through it. You can get a dietitian, an exercise coach, a language tutor, watch as many YouTube inspirational videos as you like. 

But it won’t do anything until you make a conscious decision that giving up is not in the cards or isn’t an option at all. Once you make that decision and push and grow, you’ve come to re-realize, bring out the depths of tacit knowledge, something we all know and often forget. 

We have all the internal resources that we ever needed. As I told one mentee, ‘You never needed me. You had the internal resources the whole time.’ You have to forget all the external nonsense, including the idea of drive, motivation, and pleasure as necessary. You make a commitment and perform on the routine, the duty to your own oath. 

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/12

The most bureaucratic organization on the planet, that most cumbersome of institutional juggernauts, is, almost inarguably, the United Nations. The United Nations forms a basis for international governance, structure, and law for negotiation, discussion, and compromise. 

When the United Nations fails, the consequences for the international order tend to be terrible. The United Nations was founded in 1945 to promote global peace, security, and cooperation among countries. It addresses issues like human rights, environmental protection, international law, and development. 

With 193 member states, the UN works through its various agencies to achieve its goals. The General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Secretariat are the main bodies of the United Nations. 

The United Nations has its educational arms developed by universities, student bodies, or interested students and alumni. The basic formulation of the United Nations educational programs is interactive. These are called Model United Nations.

“Model UN simulations engage hundreds of thousands of students each year, helping them to learn more about the principles of the UN and how it functions. Many of today’s leaders in law, government, business and the arts – including at the UN itself – participated in Model UN as students,” the United Nations says.

That’s true. It is one of the most valuable experiences for young people and some adults. It provides a foundation for engaging with the international community in a spirit of democratic debate, dialogue, and negotiation. 

The basic premise is some students organize. Other students come as delegates or representatives of particular nations. They simulate an aspect of the United Nations, as in a model of the United Nations, hence the name Model United Nations. 

I took part in so many of these models of the United Nations. I love them. I believe every aspiring international relations student, business student, political science student, and student of other degrees should honestly take part in these because of the value they provide to people. It is a sense of a unified vision of the world. 

For me, it was akin to an anti-mercator projection vision. For example, the moment of seeing the world from the moment in a photograph: no borders, no boundaries, one planetary system. The United Nations respects the boundaries as a superimposed image on top of the moon-based photograph. 

It is a marvellous idea, but difficult to achieve because of so many governance systems, cultural backgrounds, big personalities, and things to accomplish. The United Nations is meant to achieve some modicum of establishment of a common international rights-based order. It does, in some sense. It fails in others. 

The importance of Model United Nations – and what I would recommend for all aspiring students – is the simulation of this from the basic to the advanced level. There is a level of competitiveness to it. However, the best delegates are those who know compromise, timing, teamwork, cooperation, and establishment of national and regional ties on common objectives. 

There is a time for partying after hours, naturally, as young people do. Yet, the main purpose is meeting so many talented and smart people from all over the world and then working intensely with them over the period of 1 to 5 days, depending on the conference. 

Get involved, have fun, and work to develop skills the world so dearly needs.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/11

*Interview conducted February 5, 2024.*

Ms. Oleksandra Romantsova is the Executive Director (2018-present) of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 under her and others’ leadership in documenting war crimes. This will be a live series on human rights from a leading expert in an active context from Kyiv, Ukraine, to complement live on-the-ground war coverage in the war zones from Romanian humanist independent journalist Remus Cernea. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are back for round 3. We talked about Prigozhin’s suspicious and untimely death in a plane crash. Today, we will talk about funding, politics, and scandal. International financial relations and internal politics seem to be the two themes here. What are some significant updates regarding the EU in general about the upbeat side of international financing for Ukraine?

Oleksandra Romantsova: The EU has finally decided to support us. It will be many for the social part of our budget. Because, you know, 60% of our budget goes from EU support or other partner support, from Canada, for example. In our economy, 40% still produces. We use it to produce guns and to give salaries for all of our army. It is many people. Five times more than peaceful times in terms of personnel. What does this mean? It means the EU, first of all, has a deal with Orban’s Hungarian guys. 

One week before, we had Slovakian guys here. These guys started to support Orban, “Yes, we will, maybe, not support Ukraine.” But we speak. They just met at Uzhgorod (The city is the center of the region of Ukraine closest to the EU borders. During the entire period from the beginning of the invasion, the Russians were not fired upon.) They cannot come to Kyiv because Kyiv was shelled at the moment.  They started saying that “There is no war in Kyiv at all – everyday life is there. But we will not go there. We will meet in Uzhgorod.” [Laughing]. 

It is a big question. How will we move? We have this budget now. It is not budget enough to cover everything needed for our fight, for our defence, because, now, the problem is munitions, e.g., bullets and artillery shells. It is specific munitions. We do not have enough now. So, why so? When the USA gives us support, partly, they give this by money. They use the money to buy shells in the military industry to produce military items. In the USA, they give us shells. That is why we are waiting. The second decision is the decision from the USA Congress. The USA Congress is mixing the three questions: support Ukraine, support Israel, and the migration crisis. 

It is a big problem because it is before the elections. The Republican Party, on one side, wants to support but wants to push the Democratic Party to solve or accept their decision about migrants. So, now, it is a significant pain for us. Our army is there without shells. It means we don`t have any active moves. It becomes impossible. 

Europe, first of all, the German and French presidents speak about if the USA cannot do that, cannot give us enough money; Europe needs to be prepared to cover this order by themselves. They actively speak about it. Why so? They argue that other bills will cost much more if Ukraine falls. They feel that the USA cannot do that because of the fighting between two parts of Congress. It means Europe can take all of this responsibility by themselves. It is the same logic. It is logical. It exists like this. Do we have a panic? No. 

Our economy is entirely frozen. It is interesting. You can see working shops, malls, and supermarkets in Ukraine. They are full. You can see Ukraine produces many products and goods that they produced before. You have open restaurants and banks. However, it is only a tiny part of our economy. It is a lot about money taken from our place and to troops, from roads and so on. Part of our many is coming from our place, internally. Secondly, it is for sure grain. We produce a lot when we have these measures to export so much grain. We have a business here for grain, sunflower, and other agriculture because it is the best soil in the world. So we can push our economy full-scale. 

That is why we need to have support from Europe and the USA. We need a decision. So, now, the frontlines do not have many changes. We hear about Russia trying to push out our guys from some region of Donetsk Oblast, but still, they are fighting for it. Now, it is not moving a lot. Sure, we want to release everyone because every day is an occupation. It is not changing the flag. It is an everyday war crime. Every day, it is killing people and destroying city and, land and territory. A territory where millions of people live. It is a lot.

Jacobsen: What about the military chief and the president?

Romantsova: The head of our army. He is popular in the army. You need to understand respect and trust from soldiers. It is essential to argue why this person needs to be there. It is always a question because political management and politics exist. It takes part in all of this war. They bring in money. They bring in support. They put the main goals, so the president sets the goals. “We need to release Crimea” or something. Nobody knows what is happening inside in terms of communication between them. Outside, it looks terrible. It looks like they do not have regular communication and do not have a standard way to speak with all other populations. For us, it is unnerving. Seriously, you decided to have a scandal between the two of you, now? It takes much emotion because we do not have other political moves around this. We do not have a scandal between a party. We do not see what happens in the parliamentary session because it is closed for security reasons now. That means that it looks like an empty place for a political movement. It needs to be much less paid attention to, to me. Yes, it is possible. Now, every day, our newspapers will talk about Valerii Zaluzhnyi being replaced any day. This sort of thing. What happened after? Do we have good enough military management? I think so. Do they choose a good enough general who gives some results? We do not know [Laughing]. So, it is this way.

Jacobsen: What about Sevastopol?

Romantsova: Yes, it is a city in the Crimean Peninsula. This city always has a special status. For example, Kyiv has a special status, like a region. Sevastopol has a special status. In Crimea, you have a capital city. However, Sevastopol is the biggest port in Crimea. That was a place in the Russian navy base. We have this agreement that the Russian navy can stay in Crimea. It was a prolonged by Yanukovych agreement. However, Sevastopol is a big port. Now, it is shelled a lot from the Ukrainian side. Because the headquarters of the Russian troops and fleet is based there.

Jacobsen: Right, okay. The ICJ, the International Court of Justice, has agreed that the case will go forward for Ukraine. 

Romantsova: We have two cases. The first case coming to Court in 2017 was the International Court of Justice of the UN. We took two conventions. First of all, the financial support of terrorist activity. So, Ukraine complained that Russia supported LPR and DPR. They act like a terrorist. Russia financially supported terrorists. That is the first convention. The second convention is the discrimination of Tartars in Crimea. So, it is the convention to protect people from discrimination based on ethnicity. So, in this case, the video was taken from 2014 to 2017. They appealed in 2017. This case had a decision. It was a decision of what we can say for Ukraine. The Court recognized a connection with the Russian Federation, but not that the Russian Federation gives them money. When we talk about Russian weapon on Luhansk, it is “sorry, not financial support.” It is tricky. It was the subject of the convention. The convention only focuses on financial support. They recognize that Russia took part in the war in 2014. 

Regarding ethnic discrimination, the Court recognizes Ukrainian ethnic discrimination/ethnic discrimination of Ukrainians in education in Crimea, but not about Crimean Tartars.

That was a specific answer because they are a recognized minority.  Unfortunately, the fact that Mejlis and Kurultai were banned by the occupying power of the Russians was not recognized by the court as discrimination against the Crimean Tatars. Mejlis and Kurultai – It is a system of political self-representation of Crimean Tartars. It were not recognized as permanent ethnic representatives of Crimean Tartars. Although Russia did not just ban, but recognized them as a terrorist organization on its territory. Ukraine will be continuing in this way. So, we will have recognition of the ethnic discrimination against Ukrainians. 

In addition, on January 31, a decision was made regarding another case filed by Ukraine and a group of other countries against the Russian Federation. Ukraine appealed to the International Court of Justice regarding the Genocide Convention on February 26, 2024, after the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation.  Both countries recognized it and ratified it. In the world, you only have three reasons for having enough arguments to start a war:  

1. The war is without any reason. “I simply want to start a war.” That is called aggression.
2. The second reason is defending. An example of defending is when Russia shells Ukraine. After this, we attack her. A formal counter to the aggression. 
3. The third reason can be to stop genocide.

So, Russia talked about a mythological genocide of Russian ethnics in the Donbas region. Who they are? [Laughing] We do not know. Russian-speaking people are like my family?  Because my family is Russian-speaking – we did not need any defending. They talked about Ukraine making a ‘genocide.’ That is why they – Russians – are coming to protect us from this genocide. Exactly that, it was the subject of this complaint. Ukraine complained to the International Court of Justice. “Guys, we want you to look inside the framework of this convention about genocide. We did not have genocide before Russians came here.” They recognize it. So, they recognize that this is not a decision in the end. “We see this situation. We have jurisdiction. Use this convention to look at this situation and decide if it is a genocide or not.” 

Now, Russia needs to bring up all the arguments that we here in Ukraine have any politics of genocide of some Russian population or something. It is impossible. For many, many years, Russians pushed this message that the Ukrainian population is like Nazis. They discriminate against people with Russian-speaking skills. So, it is not finished. This will not be finished until we have a decision. The International Court of Justice must have a decision before. That Russia does not have any arguments. That is why they are told to stop their “special military operation.”

Jacobsen: Didn’t Putin slip up recently and call it a war? Putin was talking about what was previously called a special military operation in an interview and accidentally called it a war. This is more than a gaffe.

Romantsova: When they realized that they could not fight according to the propaganda of genocide, they argued then that NATO was prepared to attack us. “So, we are – Russians –  self-defending”! 

Jacobsen: So, they have gone from anti-genocide to self-defence. 

Romantsova: When they understand the law, they will never have enough arguments about coming to Ukraine. They started this genocide because “NATO was preparing to attack us. We are using self-defence against NATO attack”. 

Jacobsen: To parse that, having the three reasons put forward between no reason, self-defence, and genocide prevention.

Romantsova: It is simply aggression because no one has a mechanism to judge aggression. The last aggression was “crimes against peace” in the WW2. So, after this, nobody except the UN Security Council can bring some international intervention. Russia is there. China is there. So, we will never have a reaction to Russian aggression against Ukraine through the Security Council with Ukraine through the UN. 

Jacobsen: So, that first option, we are simply engaging in military aggression. It is a non-starter. You are setting yourself up for trouble with international law and rights.

Romantsova: Yes, because we do not have a mechanism to answer if someone started aggression. Because of this, it will be okay if you are trying to stop genocide or if you are in self-defence. If you do it as aggression, you decide to take this part of the land. It is aggression. You will be held to the mechanism of the UN. Now, they choose: If it is not genocide, we will speak about how it is self-defence. 

Jacobsen: So, the flip there, the original reason was to prevent genocide. 

Romantsova: At the beginning.

Jacobsen: Then it was self-defence. It sounds like they did not realize the trouble they would get into now. 

Romantsova:  Look, the reaction for Crimea occupation and Donbas war was so low; it was the same as previously in the reaction for the Georgia and Moldova cases. “Russia is a big army. They do something. It was the small places where they attacked.  So, we will not react.”  Because this previous action was so small, they decided to bite more. When the occupation of Crimea and Donbas started, we told them. “War is coming. If you do not react, they will try to bite more.” Now, it is happening like this. The whole world security system is stuck because no one knows what to do; nobody has instructions on what to do. If one of the members of the Security Council of the UN is the aggressor…

Jacobsen: …not only that! One of the aggressors on the UN Security Council with Veto power.

Romantsova: Exactly.

Jacobsen: Because they are a Permanent Member.

Romantsova: It is power.

Jacobsen: There are countries in the world – this is a more significant point on a geopolitical and international base – where some actors or Member States would like to rewrite the international order in a more self-interested way, not an internationalist way.

Romantsova: Yes.

Jacobsen: Does this leave them room to do so?

Romantsova: We need to rebuild the security system. However, it is essential. We need to rebuild it with the basis of human rights values because it is easy to decide. “Okay, human rights are not so important now. Security is more important.” That is why we see a solid security system as one of our goals. They will try and create a new one. It is essential for all of us, whether humanists or human rights defenders, to work on this basic system. Now, if you look at the OSCE, you will find that they started to not care about human rights. They will say, “Human rights will be when we have peace and a high enough economic development level. After this, we will have human rights.” No, bringing back human rights as one of the constant points inside this security system is essential. Now, we feel it. We need to defend it for Ukraine and the whole world. The human rights system was created for the prevention or reaction of wars. Ukraine has resistant potential only because, before that – for 30 years, we have had freedom of speech and association. These groups of freedoms give you tools to protect yourself. We use it. We create new initiatives. People can join themselves. We can create a political party and speak louder about what we want. The Russian army cannot figure out who the centre of decision-making is because the centre is everywhere. Because human rights give you flexibility and responsibility inside the whole population. This population has the tools to join themselves to units in different ways and then react. If you do not have an army, you can create an army after four years if people feel they have enough free space to fund each other and then start to prepare themselves. That is what happened with Azov because we have freedom of speech and freedom of information. Because you can download manuals. You can download or create new businesses because you have the freedom of an entrepreneur. So, people can create new bodyguards, drones, and all of this because it is freedom. Freedom is social freedom and human rights. These give you flexibility. You prevent wars. You can react against aggression because of freedom. Because of your human rights. 

What happened at Russia? How did war and Russia decide to start this in the first place? Because 20 years before, they cut their human rights at Russian society. They cut freedom of speech. They cut freedom of assembly. They cut freedom of association.

Ultimately, it is always war—one of the biggest challenges for all of us, not just Ukraine. Imagine tomorrow, we fall. I move from here. I am dying. All of that. What happens? Imagine this: Tomorrow, we are all dead. Ukraine does not exist. Ukraine is not fighting anymore. What does this mean? It means the world has a vast, massive challenge because Russia will know: “it does not need to respect any human rights; just concentrates all the resources of big system and controls all the people through propaganda. This model is a win”.

This means that all 24 countries that have a democratic structure – from ~200 – will start to be like a small group of marginals. So, it matters. We think now, not only about us. So, that is why it is a big challenge for all of us.

Jacobsen: I have one last question. So, there are well-respected international intellectuals with a prominent stature. They make a counterargument from a lot of Western presentations of Russian aggression against Ukraine. They will state, “We are against the Russian aggression against Ukraine. We do not think Russia stating some hypothetical genocide as some vacation for this aggression,” or the more recent idea about self-defence. “We Russians are defending ourselves against aggression.” They make a historical case back to the Soviet Union, where there was a promise not one inch to the east for NATO expansionism. They look at NATO expansionism as provocative or a provocation on the part of the West against Russia, and, therefore, they may not necessarily agree with the extent of the aggression, but they see this as understandable on the part of the Russian Federation and President Vladimir Putin. What is a Ukrainian orientation on this?

Romantsova: First of all, Ukraine needs to be part of NATO. That is all. When we speak about this expansion of NATO, if it is a good union, why can’t you join it? Why do you think that it is aggressive? Can you remind me of the last time when NATO did something aggressive against the Russians? In 2006, Russia did ask to be a member of NATO. What the fuck, seriously? When was the last time NATO shelled Russia or did something aggressive in the post-Soviet era? It has not happened ever. The previous two years, I think, were all the Covid time. NATO’s base in Europe sent back different guns to the USA. Europe, NATO does not precisely have itself heavily armed.

Jacobsen: So, they dearmed from Europe back to the United States. 

Romantsova: All of these bases. They collected. They do not have the tools exactly to attack someone. When you think about NATO, you think about… I do not know what, an army of tanks? First of all, it is a system of information and a system of self-defending. It is not the main topic. The main topic is that we need to understand from one side. All this action from the Russian side. It has put the Europe question. Do we need to have an army or not? They made a decision: Yes. Now, they put a budget or cut budget inside of the countries to give more money for the army, not for a comfortable life as they did before. It is to have an army to produce guns, shelling, etc. If the Russian aim was to make less of a NATO representation, to make it less aggressive, then the aggression was the wrong strategy to attack someone near the border of NATO. 

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time today.

Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):

Humanist

Humanists International, Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United Nations (2024/01/08)

Personal

The Long Happenstance of Iceland and Copenhagen (2023/12/09)

Romanian

Remus Cernea on Independent War Correspondence in Ukraine (2023/08/25)

Zaporizhzhia Field Interview With Remus Cernea (2024/02/21)

War and Destruction With Remus Cernea (2024/02/22)

Ukrainian

Ms. Oleksandra Romantsova on Ukraine and Putin (2023/09/01)

Oleksandra Romantsova on Prigozhin and Amnesty International (2023/12/03)

Dr. Roman Nekoliak on International Human Rights and Ukraine (2023/12/23)

Sorina Kiev: Being a Restauranteur During Russo-Ukrainian War (2024/01/27)

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/10

The God of the Bible rested on the seventh day and was meticulously detail-oriented, even allowing freedom of the will for human beings.

Apparently, this is the problem. The Devil tempted Adam and Eve. The Fall happened. The world is henceforth cursed. Human beings with free will corrupt God’s Creation in the freedom to make evil choices and then choose evil over God. Which is to say, both God and Man say, “The Devil made me do it,” or, “It’s the Devil’s fault.”

Eve blamed the serpent. Adam blamed Eve. God blames the Devil. The Devil seems like a conceptual scapegoat when you look at it. When the authors of the creation myth of the Bible sat down and made this stuff up, they must have had this in mind. All observed errors in the world are attributed to a secondary powerful being deemed evil.

The non-theist Satanists may have the most useful interpretation of Satan in the Bible as a liberation figure for humanity. Meanwhile, God drowned the world and got the Amalekites slaughtered while setting women spiritually equal and actual servants to men.

I spent a long, long time interviewing atheists, agnostics, humanists, Satanists, and the like around the world. I can note two big trends. One, the more difficult the circumstance, then the more strident versions of non-theism found and the hardier people.

They don’t report crimes against them as much, even as basic hate crimes, but they undergo worse treatment by theists. At the same time, the theists are bigoted against each other and against non-theists. Non-theists simply want equality; to many non-theists, this removal of privilege feels like persecution.

Two, the definition of non-theists differs only in two major respects: in reference to the dominant religion and narrowness within that frame of reference. I can explain both as some qualitative trends for your activism.

For the first, people are killed for non-theism. It is a punishable offence by death. People are imprisoned in several countries for non-theism. They can lose jobs. They can lose family. They can lose friends. They can be persecuted by the larger society, up to and including mob murders of non-theists in public by adults.

The hate crimes statistics are, in fact, low. Meanwhile, the actual numbers are much lower. I suspect the numbers are artificially low, as with the ⅓ women subject to specific forms of violence, which is an understatement of the actual fact. Non-theists should make a concerted effort in legitimate cases of violence, hate, and discrimination to report them.

These statistics can provide a basis for mass activism and socio-political change throughout society. We have to make a concerted effort because the majority of the world is religious, and a significant hunk of them hold a spectrum of myths about us, where hate and bigotry are grounded in hate and fear.

Those can be combatted as other forms of hate.

Now, to the second, if someone is a non-theist, and if they are coming out of a society in which individuals adhere to the dominant religion as Christianity, the non-theism in reference, or the God disbelieved, is in the form of the God of the Bible, particularly the New Testament.

“Why would God need to impregnate a virgin to kill Himself in order to absolve wrongs? Why not simply forgive them? Oh, right, people made this up to control people. Powerful people like creating myths to control others, especially women.”

If you are a non-theist in India, you can find individuals who reject the gods of Hinduism. If they are from Iran, they become ex-Muslims like Maryam Namazie and Armin Navabi. Yet, their non-theism appeals to a wider range. They are smart people and take a broader range, but others will take non-theism if in similar circumstances, to mean rejection of the Allah of the Quran.

Non-theism becomes a cultural end-product. Many aspects of the god concept can be geographically situated, which is to say, Culturally. A belief in a god, statistically on a mass psychology basis, can be determined by geography. Same for non-theism, by the way.

On an individual basis, it can differ. Reasons become more nuanced. The most pronounced formulation of this cultural mandate of leaving religion or rejection of formal religion is in North America. Canadians and Americans leaving religion typically mean the God of the Bible.

Because of the degree of steep Christian religion and culture among all ethnic backgrounds in the countries. Although, the total numbers are declining to a significant degree. The consecutive cultural waves of influence continue to ripple, but in smaller and smaller waves now.

The most extreme forms of demonization image of the non-theist are, basically, the bastard children and slave-servants of the lowest evil found in the Devil and his fiery pits deserving of the worst condemnation of God, his angels, and agents on Earth. That becomes public reprisal in poorer, more religious societies.

What I do note across the world is that in encouraging quietly for years and years and lifting up the lesser-known voices in these communities, they’re emboldened by the attention. Christians in my hometown, some of them, used to stalk me on buses, to my home, and then be ‘friends’ to me to get information to defame and ruin my reputation.

Conservatives remain the kinds of cancel culture. Now, everyone does it, unfortunately. That told me that I am effective. Those empowered people pursue the aims of secular culture locally and show an example to everyone else. It’s my life’s privilege and honour to encourage and give voice to these people. I work on the details, in other words.

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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/09

Lynne Denison Foster is the mother of Rebecca Foster, owner of the Bale and Bucket restaurant, and Tiffany Foster, a professional equestrian show jumper ranked the highest in Canada. She was an aviation professional for 48 years, beginning with Pacific Western Airlines in 1969 in the Edmonton Reservation office and moving to Vancouver in 1973. She helped with the implementation of the first computerized reservations systems for a regional air carrier in North America. Since 1974, she has been an instructor and in 2012 was awarded BC Aviation Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to educating the aviation community. At Canadian/Air Canada, she trained CEOS, Pilots, Aircraft Groomers, and worked on training initiatives and programs for aviation safety management system, computerized reservation systems, corporate change, customer services, frontline leadership, human factors, interpersonal skills, management practices, and service quality. She taught at BCIT between 2000 and 2017. Foster was key in the development of the Aviation Operations Diploma Programs. She was Chief Instructor for 7 years. In 2015, she won BCIT’s Teaching Excellence Award. Here we take a comprehensive look at her parenting and parenting philosophy. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with…

Lynne Denison Foster: …Lynne Denison Foster…

Jacobsen: …who is the mother of…?

Foster: …Tiffany Foster…

Jacobsen: …and?

Foster: …and Rebecca Foster…

Jacobsen: …who are known for?

Foster: Tiffany is known for being a professional equestrian show jumper. She has been to the Olympics twice and won the Pan-Am gold in 2015 with the Canadian Team. Rebecca owns a restaurant at the horse show, at Thunderbird Show Park in Langley here. She has been offering food service for the last 11 years from her restaurant. Before that, she worked in hospitality with me and prepared food.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: So, that is what she is known for, her good food.

Jacobsen: As you have shown me with great hospitality in your home, so thank you very much for that.

Foster: Oh, you’re welcome. 

Jacobsen: I enjoyed the apple cider vinegar with honey. It was good. I wanted to start recording some of the things that you were describing [Ed. extensively describing] of the earlier history of your role, self-identified role, as a mother, which was with Tiffany’s child acting or being in film, in commercials, and the building of some life skills that would be important later on, especially given some of your background at teaching adults these business skills, interpersonal skills, at the Airlines and BCIT.

Foster: Right.

Jacobsen: These are more important than a lot of academic skills. As we are noticing in Canadian society and many, many developed societies, women are increasingly becoming the majority of the workforce. They are far more educated. The “soft” skills important for business and general social acumen are much, much more important than muscle, brawn, force, of voice or of body, to get things moving because much of the infrastructure of societies has been built. So, those skills that you were building at that time were, in fact, building character and skills for modern society. To me, this is one interpretation that I’m taking when I hear these stories when they are kids [Ed. Off-tape in the evening, Lynne’s kids.] of building those skills moving into the present, where they are succeeding in restaurants or professional show jumping. I was taking those as principles of parenting with practical examples that you were giving. How do you interpret now, looking back, as a parent? You’re making decisions about the progression of a child and giving some skills that will be helpful down the line.

Foster: First of all, I am very proud of both of my daughters. What I think has been really incredible for them is that they have been able to have careers pursuing their passion. That is a great accomplishment for them. Perhaps, the way they were raised might have had something to do with that. My family’s motto on my father’s side is “Perseverando”. “Perseverando” means “by persevering”. As you already know, both of these girls have worked since they were kids, and Tiffany, as I mentioned before we started the principles, was working from the time she was 7. She has continued to work until she is 39 now. From age 7 to 11, she was a principle in 32 television commercials. When she finished television commercials, she had to work for her horse board and her lessons. Approaching it from that perspective, what I have tried to encourage in them, I have it right here. 

[Shows tea mug]

Jacobsen: “If you want the best the world has to offer, offer the world your best…”

Foster: This was given to me by one of the student pilots when he graduated from the polytechnic post-secondary school, BCIT. That was one of the things that I really wanted to instill in my daughters, is that if you have to work or do something for somebody for whatever reason, then make sure that you do the best that you possibly can with what you’ve got, so that when you leave; they will either want you to come back or will wish you never left. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s great.

Foster: I did that with my adult students who were coming to BCIT, British Columbia Institute of Technology to study for a career in Aviation. That is what I also told them until I found this quote,which is much more succinct. I posted it in all my classrooms. That is what I thought was important for my children to understand as well. When they were working, they were working for Brent and Laura, your employers. They were young. They were tired and wanted to go home. I said, “No, you stay here and do it right to the best of your ability. Otherwise, you are going to have to do it again”. That was one principle of my parenting style for my children. The other one was… can I tell you a story?

Jacobsen: You can go right ahead.

Foster: When Tiffany was about 10-years-old, I asked her to do something. She chose not to do it. I asked her again. She just was not going to do it and ignored it. I said, “I am asking you to do this. If you don’t, I’m going to have to give you a consequence”. I didn’t believe in depriving my kids by saying, “No, you can’t have riding lessons” or “you can’t go to granny’s tomorrow”. I didn’t think that was an appropriate consequence. She was going to go to her friend’s place for a sleepover. I said, “You will not be able to go to Vanessa’s until you do what I am asking you to do”. She ignored my request. She was too busy.I asked her  a couple of more times. She just didn’t do it. I said, “Okay, Tiffany, you have chosen. You have made a choice. You are not going to Vanessa’s tonight”. She got very upset with me. She was crying and blaming me. “Why? You are so mean! You won’t let me do this”. This kind of stuff. I said, “What do you think would have happened if you had done it? I don’t want you to be a victim”. I had a colleague that she knew. This colleague, every time something happened because of her own actions; she would blame our employers. I said, “Do you want to be a victim like Auntie Izzy?”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: “Do you really, really want this?” She said, “Yes, I do”. I said, “There is an obstacle, which is the consequence of your action. It is your responsibility. You created that obstacle. But now, you know that I am a reasonable person. If that is so important to you, then why don’t you think about how you can overcome the obstacle and get what you want, which is to go to Vanessa’s. But it is your actions that caused that obstacle in the first place. What do you think you can do? Go away and think about it”. She went away and came back, “Okay, how about I do what you asked me to do?” I said, “No, that is not enough. The obstacle is the consequence because you didn’t do it. Think about it again”. She went back and said, “Okay, I did what you asked me to do. How about I do this and if I…” I said, “That’s not good enough”. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: “How about the consequence?” So, she chose her own consequence if she didn’t follow through with what she told me was the solution. I said, “Okay, that makes sense to me, because you decided your consequence. If you don’t do it, then it’s the consequence you have to live with. You understand that?” “I do”. We all make mistakes. We all have poor judgments. She had made a poor judgment. There was a consequence to that. But if it is something that you really want, then you have to find a way to get around it. That is what I believe. I saw it as a teaching moment for her. Again, I am not the one to blame… if I make a threat like a consequence, then I have to follow through. As they got older, I‘ll tell you this story, too. When they were teenagers and doing things that they should not have been doing, or making mistakes…

Jacobsen: …as teenagers do…

Foster: …Yes. So then, I thought. I told them this. “As you get older, I know you want to be more and more independent and be able to be responsible for making your own choices. I think that’s good. Because you need to learn how to make your own choices and live with them. But if you make a bad choice, it’s my responsibility…” – and I laid it on thick.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: “… as your mother, I want to be a good mother…” 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: “…I want to be sure that I look after you and guide you. If you do something that you are not supposed to do, then I have to help you with that”.As I did with that situation when she (Tiffany) was 10. “So, I have to take away that responsibility from you, and I have to take it on. Your punishment, or your consequence, is that you are stuck with me. So, it might be 24 hours. It might take 48 hours, depending on the severity of the errors of your ways. But I am telling you right now. If you don’t do what you are supposed to do, then I have to take it on, as your loving mother”. I laid it on thick. [Laughing] 

Jacobsen: That’s pretty vicious.

Foster: I said, “I will call work. I would ask for vacation time because I will be with you. I will be with you when you are sleeping to make sure you make the right choice. I will travel with you to school. I will talk to your principal saying, ‘Rebecca or Tiffany can’t make good decisions. So, I hope you don’t mind that I am in the classroom and at school with them so I can help them.’. You will be stuck with me to help you make your decisions for a certain amount of time.” And…I only had to do it once [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: Rebecca, I never had to do it. Because Rebecca was always watching what Tiffany did and learning from her ‘mistakes’. [Laughing] “Oh my God!” It was just so embarrassing, right? So, again, I don’t remember what it was that required my interception. “Okay, Tiffany, I guess I’ll just have to stick with you”. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: At the same time, her friend came over to visit her. I think they were 15 or 16. Something like that. Her friend said, “Tiffany, come outside, I’ve got to tell you something”. I was coming along with Tiffany, because she was stuck with her mom to help make good decisions. “Carry on, don’t mind me, I’m just here to help Tiffany”. We go outside. Her friend says, “Well, uh…” Finally, Tiffany goes, “Okay, mom! I get it! I get it!” And that was it. That was the only time I had to do it. Both girls weren’t stupid and they knew I would do it again if I had to. That is the parenting I did. Tiffany tried to run away from home a couple of times too. [Laughing]

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: I came after her. “We have to talk. Running away is not going to help. Let’s work it out”. Ask me another question, I get sidetracked. Punishing a kid for making mistakes doesn’t work. So, I laid it on kind of thick. “I am your loving mother. I just want to help you make good decisions”. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: Another question?

Jacobsen: Yes. So, in the article we found together in the 50th/bicentennial of Show Park magazine, it stated. Rebecca and Tiffany started early. Costs were an issue. What were the first reactions to the costs? How did you take that approach of facing the problem, problem solve, towards those kinds of costs when income may not necessarily be so high in a sport that was expensive at their level, even more expensive now?

Foster: You should get Brent to tell you this story. Because he was telling it when we were at the World Equestrian Games in Normandy. I said to him, “Brent, tell me the story of how Tiffany Foster came to your barn as if I am not me.” He tells a really good story. So, you should ask him. 

We came from the North Shore with three other families. They thought we had good money for our kids because the other families did. 

Jacobsen: Which isn’t an uncommon thing in this industry.

Foster: Yes, basically, you have to. He kind of thought that we were… He spoke with the other parents of the other kids. Because he kind of saved me for the last, I guess. I don’t know. Tiffany and Rebecca were nice kids. And I was a nice person. So, we had a meeting with Tiffany and Rebecca, and Brent and Laura. He [Laughing] asked me how much I was willing to spend. Basically, what was in my budget for my kids…

Jacobsen: I can imagine how those conversations would go.

Foster: You should ask him, because it is a funny story. He says, “How much are you thinking of spending on your daughters’ lessons?” Brent would, probably, remember. I couldn’t remember. I said something like, “Uhhhh, probably, $12,000 a year.” [Laughing] He and Laura looked [Laughing] like, “Is she delusional?” Brent realized, ‘Oh, this lady has no idea how much these girls need if they want to ride and compete in equestrian sport.’ But he said, “Since these two scrawny little kids were such good little kids and the mother was nice, they decided at the time that they would give us a break.” At the time, he said, “It costs more than that. We need a working student. If you pay for your pony’s board, the girls could work for their lessons…” then he said, “Tiffany needs another horse.” Laura had this horse. They paid a lot of money for him, and he was injured. He was on rehab. They could free-lease him to Tiffany, and she could earn her lessons anddo  a couple of other things if I paid for the board. That is how the girls got into that. He said, “The next day, there they were. The mother and two little girls hauling hay and mucking stalls.” Whenever my girls had to do something new, I went with them, showed them how it was done, explained what they needed to do, then “let’s do it together” and then “show me how you do it.” Rebecca was nervous. But they were confident because I was there. So, when they knew what they had to do, then it was like, “Okay, get out of my way, I know what I am doing.” Tiffany did a babysitting course when she was 12. A young couple from our church were her first customers. I asked them  if I could come with Tiffany, orient her, and explain to her that a good babysitter didn’t just look after the kids, she should do more than that: cleaning up the kitchen, tidying up, etc. I followed the same formula with her: Do it together, explain, let me see how you do it, then do it alone. Even with Rebecca and her cooking, it was the same thing. That was another principle. “Let’s do it together, discover it, be clear and understand what our tasks are, and then I will watch you and give you advice, and then let you do it by yourself, when you are ready, I won’t be there anymore.” 

Jacobsen: From your own perspective, these are principles, ways of thinking, ways of delivering those ways of thinking to your kids at appropriate ages, with appropriate consequences, even choosing those consequences. What about situations for yourself as a parent, as any parent has?

Foster: I think I was very lucky with the children that I had. They weren’t hard to raise. I have to say, like I find it more challenging as an adult parent to adult children than I did when they were children.

Jacobsen: How so?

Foster: They were devoted to me. They really were. Do you want another story?

Jacobsen: Please.

Foster: It is kind of late. I’ll do a quick one. We lived in North Vancouver. Part of being in grade 6, children were enrolled in outdoor school for 1 week and learned about  nature. Rebecca, whose birthday is in January, was 2 years behind Tiffany in school.  The same incident occurred with both of those girls. I took Tiffany to the bus. We lived right behind the school. We walked through this greenspace, which the girls called “Fairy Land.” It was easy for me to walk them with their little backpacks. She was getting on the bus to go to outdoor school. Tiffany asked, “Why aren’t you coming with me?” 

“No, Tiffany, I can’t.”

“What?! You have to come.”

“Sorry, Tiffany, there are already enough parents who volunteered.” 

“No, you have to come with me. You have to come with me! I don’t want to go by myself.”

She started crying. Clinging to me, and didn’t want to get on the bus, I finally convinced her by getting one of her friends to help me. She got on the bus and I saw her face looking out the window at me with tears coming down her face. Rebecca knew nothing about that. Two years later, “You’re not coming with me?” Exactly the same kind of reaction, they were attached to me, because their dad was a kid. He goofed around with them and loved them , but really didn’t parent them. That was part of it. Another time, okay, riding, they were, probably, 9 ½ and eleven. I decided that they should go to an English riding camp in the summer for a week. So, I was telling them I had registered them.   The first words out of their mouths: “Are you coming?” 

“No, no, it is a kids’ camp. I can’t go.”

“We’re not going if you’re not going.” 

“It is going to be exciting,” blah-blah-blah. So, they wouldn’t go. They didn’t want to go and were upset. Then I found out there was a mother-daughter weekend camp in May. I said, “Hey, let’s go to this one, you’ll see. Then you’ll go to the other one without me.” So, we went to the mother-daughter [Laughing] camp. That was the first and only time I’ve ever ridden English, on this postage stamp piece of leather [Laughing]. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: I was used to sitting in a Western saddle with this big saddlehorn to hang onto, sitting on a big comfortable seat queueing on a trail ride. That was one thing I did for my daughters. I took this English riding camp. I was so sore. I could hardly move [Laughing]. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Foster: They were not difficult children to raise. They were usually happier when their mother was around. You know what I am saying? There was another thing. I taught customer service and leadership skills to the staff and management at the airline. One thing that was very important in the Pacific Western/Canadian Airlines culture was the concept of reward and recognition: how necessary, critical, and important it is to humans… I studied this theory developed by a guy named Eric Berne, a Human Behavior psychologist. In the 70’s, Thomas Harris wrote a book called I’m OK – You’re OK, based on Berne’s research. It was very popular in those days. 

Jacobsen: I recall these phrases.

Foster: He developed transactional analysis. 

Jacobsen: Transactional Psychology.

Foster: Yes. 

(Belgian military, Chief of Humanist Chaplains and 2-Star General, who was visiting me and joined us) Hans De Ceuster: Games People Play.

Jacobsen: Games People Play.

Foster: In the book, Games People Play, Eric Berne described three principle needs humans instinctively crave. You may be familiar with this as well.  Although you’re probably more familiar with  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and all that. I liked Berne’s theory because it is much more simplified. He explains that humans crave three things: Recognition, Structure, and Stimulation. So, I did extensive  research and included it in my course. Being in the Service industry, I focused most on recognition. But, as a parent, I realized that all three of them are important. That’s, basically, the principles that I raised my children by, in many ways.

Jacobsen: What about recognition?

Foster: In terms of recognition, often, as parents, typically we will focus on what kids do wrong instead of what kids do right, right? The principle I learned from Eric Berne,  is that what gets recognized gets repeated. When teaching this to the leaders for their employees and staff, I use the example of children. Let us say you and I meet in a supermarket; I have my children. You and I are in a conversation. The kids want my attention, saying, “Mommy, mommy.” I say, “Behave yourself, be quiet.” The kid wants my attention. Because I am talking to you and ignoring the kid, sometimes, the kid will knock over a display, hit the brother, or do a naughty thing. Then, what does the parent do? They pay attention to the kid. Now, the kid learns that the parent will pay attention to them if they do naughty things. My principle is that it’s more important torecognize when the kids do good things. Because what gets recognized, gets repeated.

So, instead, say to the little child, “I am speaking with Scott. Let us listen to what Scott has to say, then it will be your turn.” and then at the end, say to the child, “Thank you for being polite and listening to what Scott has to say.” Coincidentally, I made a point of recognizing a good action the day before yesterday. There was a kid competing at the horse show. His dad had left his riding boots in the car. The car was way over in the east parking lot. The kid had to go right away to the ring and get on his horse. The dad says to me, “Lynne, I left Jairo’s riding boots in the car. Do you know any kid who can let him borrow boots so he doesn’t miss the class?” 

Do you know Veronica Dromboski?

Jacobsen: No. 

Foster: Veronica is a trainer and she was there, training some of her younger students. She said, “Skye, can you lend Jairo your boots?” Skye said, “Yeah.” I said, “Skye did something nice and readily helped him out, without hesitating. She is eight years old.” I spoke to Veronica. I said I wanted to recognize Skye for that. I got some George bucks (Thunderbird gift certificates) and wrote a note to say, “Thank you so much for your kindness and generosity, and it was good of you to give up your boots and allow Jairo to enter the ring.” I gave it to her yesterday. The girl was over the moon. This is another example of how much recognizing even the simplest ordinary gestures can have an impact on the person who did something nice. It made her day! You must recognize this. That even not-so-great, ordinary gestures can be recognized. 

Jacobsen: I cannot say. However, you have made a very kind gesture for a young lady, a teenager I know. One was having a tough day. That was a very sweet thing that you did. I appreciate that. Things like that are the currency of many equestrians I know. 

Foster: Yes. I am fortunate because I did have children who were easy to [Laughing] manage. I do not know how to explain, but it is easy to impose those principles. However, I have to say. I had a father who was like that. He would do similar things and help us learn things by living our lives. 

Jacobsen: You mentioned earlier the church you’re a part of; your partner, Glenn, was more of a kid. 

Foster: He is still a kid. He is 74. I am still his mother [Laughing].

Jacobsen: Did you feel alone in that parenting effort regarding the heavier lifting?

Foster: We were married for ten years before we had children, and we were married for 25 years when he chose to leave the marriage. I always say I was a better mother than a wife for him. He needed a mother at the time. I was told by my childhood friend, who is still my friend. “You have always been a mother, even when we were in elementary school. When someone was fighting, you would try to help them resolve their issues.” I realized I did not know what kind of person I was then. Even a few days ago, I was cleaning the house, and found a good citizenship award certificate I received when I was 11 years old. Also, when I was a young teenager, I belonged to the Anglican Girls’ Auxiliary, and was awarded the GA Honor ring. It was an honouring of my contribution to the values and principles of that organization. I didn’t realize that was the kind of person I was; I probably imposed some of those principles on my daughters when they were growing up. 

Jacobsen: It is a sense of temperament rather than role. There is a sense that temperament comes first, and the role is derivative. 

Foster: I wanted children so much. I lost one child. She was born too early. But there was a reason for that. I am very grateful for that. That is another long story that I don’t need to tell you. I had Tiffany when I was 35 and Rebecca when I was 36. Sometimes, you have a different approach when you are that age. Like, my friend said, I was always a mother. I had that attitude and gratitude for being gifted with two precious daughters. Tiffany was a very sweet baby. Rebecca, if she could eat, she was happy. [Laughing]

Jacobsen: There is a trendline there, too. I have approximately two years in the industry with no background. When I am at competition grounds, do work, or even at the home barn, most of the people who show up for these kids are the moms. In much of the community, at least in English riding, show jumping, and eventing, the mothers are the ones who are the support, the infrastructure as you called it yesterday, for the wellbeing and trajectory of health and wellbeing in this sport for mostly girls in this country. 

Foster: Your original question was if I feel alone.

Jacobsen: Yesterday, I interviewed one woman who is the mother of a girl in para-dressage. I asked her, “Do the mothers talk and have a similar experience? “She said, “Yes.” Not necessarily the aloneness, but just the anxiety about getting kids to a functional, independent life, such as it is. I would assume a similar thing for you and other mothers of daughters in show jumping. 

Foster: At the North Shore Equestrian Centre, we would sit there watching our children, and we became friends. As a result, when the three families chose to come out to Thunderbird, it was the moms, not the dads, who were there. The moms initiated, ‘Our children should be going somewhere else’. The environment wasn’t good for them or the horses at the time.  It was another mother and I who did research and site visits. Also, we were all living on the North Shore. One family did move out to Langley. My husband was a firefighter and worked four days on and four days off. He used to say, “It is a pain in the ass, to have to drive the girls to the barn” etc, even though he had the most free time of all the parents.

Jacobsen: That’s horrifying. 

Foster: The one set of parents that moved out to Langley had one daughter. The other six kids had to be driven there from North Van six days a week. The other Moms also had children who were in different sports. So, they were only able to drive one day a week for the six days. I drove three days a week. 

Jacobsen: That’s the teamwork. 

Foster: We supported each other. I had two daughters who were both in the sport. They each had two more kids in sports that they also had to support. I lived in North Vancouver, worked at the airport in Richmond, and had to get out to Langley from the North Shore. The best I could do most of the time with their father, Glenn, was to have him drive the kids over the bridge so I could get them to their lessons on time. There was a Costco on the Grandview Highway and Boundary Road. He would bring them there, all of them. I would pile them into my car. I would drive to Langley after work, hang out with the kids, and bring them back. We developed a system that worked. I don’t know if I felt alone because I had those women. I had the women who were there. The dad provided the money to be able to have the kids go. Mine didn’t. He liked to spend the money on other things that were important to him. But again, you manage as you can. Tiffany and Rebecca began working and earning their lessons and things like that.

Jacobsen: Do you notice any changes in cultural trends, speaking of equestrianism? Women in developed societies are a significant portion of the employed economy and are far more educated than men. It is not even close. For instance, in some countries, women are 40% of the breadwinners, making more or being the sole income. Do you think dynamics are changing some of the assumed roles within a partnership, a heterosexual partnership?

Foster: I was the only mother of those families that worked. The other two (women) did not work. They were stay-at-home moms. I suppose, yes, it must be changing. I cannot say because I am not in that society anymore. I am 74 years old. I have a 37-year-old and a 39-year-old children, now women, who are my daughters. Perhaps, in my role with Thunderbird, I do see. But I do see fathers there more than when my kids were younger. I do see dads supporting their kids and being with them. A lot of them support their young kids. Then there are the  mothers who are the ones that are riding, and the fathers are there with the children. That is a different society than what it was when I was there. Again, my kids didn’t start riding until they were 8.  It wasn’t like competitive riding, and  I wasn’t a rider.

Jacobsen: Also, the options available to women were more limited.

Foster: I was a working mom, an airline customer service instructor who had to regularly travel for my work.I did not even think about a hobby. I was involved at the church in my community in North Vancouver when my children were younger.  We had a group called  St. Martin’s  Players. We did musical theater and performed pantomimes. I also was a Brownie leader. That was my recreation. When my husband and I split up, and I moved to Langley, I joined an A Cappella singing group. That was my personal self-preservation indulgence. I was also very lucky in my life path because of my daughters and their interests. 

Jacobsen: You’ve given your life to them.  

Foster: I did. I did. I gave my life to them. That was important to me because I wanted children so badly. I love kids. 

Jacobsen: My mother had miscarriages and a similar sensibility. 

Foster: You value them so much. They are very precious assets or whatever. I don’t know. But if you can provide something to help them to grow, why not do it? I get a sense of accomplishment. I can take credit for providing the opportunities to pursue those paths because they couldn’t do it without me. If my husband and I hadn’t split, we probably wouldn’t have come to Langley. They wouldn’t have started to work for Brent and Laura. Tiffany wouldn’t have shown that she has this talent. Brent and Laura wouldn’t have put all this effort into Tiffany because she was riding their sales horses. Maybe, if we had the money, Tiffany wouldn’t have gone that path anyway. She would probably be an amateur owner doing it as a hobby. I don’t know how to explain it. I feel like there was a destiny kind of thing.

Same for Rebecca. She has great respect in the food service community with influential people because she worked with them. Rebecca is an incredible person, too. She was attending university and because we could not afford her to attend full-time, she would go from September to December. Then, she would work in the horse world grooming from January until August to earn money and then return home to attend the fall semester.  I started working in the industry to keep my eye on my kids because they were working. I wanted to ensure they were doing what they were supposed to do and that they weren’t exploited. Young kids, “I love horses. I will do anything.” Sometimes, adults take advantage of that. 

Jacobsen: Correct.

Foster: I did not want that to happen to my girls, particularly with Tiffany in the film industry. I was there, so I made sure everything worked for her. I wanted to do the same when they were working in the horse and equestrian worlds. By that time, I was working at BCIT.  I was getting nine weeks of vacation. Brent suggested that I go talk to Dianne(Tidball), Laura’s mom, to see what I could do for work at Thunderbird during the horse shows. He said, “Dianne could probably use some help at the new facility, go and see.” I did. That’s when she said, “You can do hospitality.” I was feeding everybody. She wanted all the employees fed: office staff, in-gate people, ring crew, officials, and also to provide some interesting exhibitor events. 

I was the only one in hospitality at the time. I did it. But I had a 13-year-old, Rebecca, who loved to prepare food. She helped me when she wasn’t grooming or going to school. Then Chris Pack who was working at Thunderbird, and his friend, Pat Kerr bought this little trailer that they made into a little food concession. They called it The Tasty Bit. I co-signed a loan for him. They were going to university at the time, and I thought, “I need to help you with this.” So, we developed a menu that offered a healthy alternative to fast food, and Rebecca became a cook at age 15. She stood at the 4-burner stove in that trailer for 3 to 3.5 hours a day preparing custom-ordered hot pasta without a break. She would cook the food and I would buy local produce and prep it for her.  It was a good concept…healthy fast food.

By the time she graduated high school and had attended four semesters at university. She thought, “What am I doing going to university?” She thought that was what she had to do. She loved working with food, so she switched to Vancouver Community College and registered for the Culinary Arts Diploma program. While going to college, she got a job at a Belgian-style pub.

There were three jobs available. One was dishwashing. The other was hostessing. The other one, I forgot, was doing food prep, maybe. She applied for the dishwashing job. I said, “Rebecca, you have been helping me prepare food and you have experience as a cook. Why are you applying for a dishwasher job?” She said, “I applied for a dishwasher job because I already know how to be good at washing dishes so I don’t have to worry about it when I’m at work. If there are other things I can offer to learn to do that aren’t my responsibility, I will get more skills.”

‘If you want the best the world has to offer, offer the world your best.’ She did. Then she started helping the chef and the sous chef. Pretty soon, the restaurant owner said, “Rebecca, I want you to do this and that…no more dishwashing!” They were teaching her things because she was eager to learn. She did her job well. So, he wanted to reward her. She went to culinary arts school and then graduated top of the class. As a result, she had an opportunity. 

Do you know the Chambar Restaurant in Vancouver?  Nico Schuermans, a chef originally from Belgium, owns it. He is well known. He co-owns the Dirty Apron Cooking School and Cafe Medina. Rebecca worked for him. He thought she was incredible. He is still her mentor. By thinking, “When I go to work, I want to do the job well. Then I can learn more things and can contribute,” she has gained a very valuable relationship with someone who willingly has supported her in her venture as a restaurant owner herself. It will be 12 years next season that The Bale and Bucket has offered healthy fast food at Thunderbird Show Park.  

Jacobsen: Start with what you know. Before starting here, I worked in four restaurants. I took any position I could get, even Event Coordinator, for a little while. They even made a card. Everyone gets thrown in the dishpit to start, to know what that is like because everyone thinks it is the worst job – because it is.

Foster: Another opportunity! Thunderbird asked Rebecca to come into the horse world and take over the restaurant that was there.  When she took it on, she had an advantage that others who had been in it before her didn’t have. She was a groom. So, she knows what the grooms need when it comes to food service and she had her previous horse show food service experience.The timing was everything. She has been there 11 years and people rave about her food.

Jacobsen: Do what you can reach out to because you will be surprised by the cross-linkages; I can give you an example if you want – it takes about a minute. I have been doing interviews for about a decade with Mensa and various other high-IQ groups. There is one that is called the Mega Society. It was a one-in-a-million society when they had the world’s highest IQ category in Guinness; that was the society they used as the metric. Smart person and a comedy writer for Jimmy Kimmel for about 12 years; there were other members like Marilyn Vos Savant and Keith Raniere. This guy (Raniere) is one of the worst scandals I have seen in the high-IQ world. He formed a multilevel marketing scheme in the 90s. Then he formed a cult. The cult branded like cattle, women. These women would sleep with him. He was involved in trafficking. It was an organization called NXVIM. His name was Vanguard within it. Two ladies who got involved with him were part of a family fortune. He swindled them out of $150,000,000 (USD). If you check their bios, it says, ‘Brief equestrian career.’ I asked my friend about it. I check it up. Those names were Clare and Sara Bronfman. When I talked to one of my bosses, they knew about it. They were in that world. One has been safe-sported, at least. I will be writing on the SafeSport cases. One, at least, is in jail. It is weird to me that this one area was related. With cross-pollination, you should pursue your passions. Explore your talents; they can be dramatic or benign, like being a groom and dishwasher and knowing the timings in the different industries. 

Jacobsen: Because of that, there is a lot of corruption in this world. There is a lot of exploitation and things like that. Getting back to the role of the mom, where do you belong? 

Foster: I am not an important person, but I am part of the infrastructure because I went in and worked for Dianne. Dianne had some strong principles. Her daughters and son will tell you that as well. She ran the ship. She had expectations. One of the things she told me. “You are Hospitality. But when you are at the Show Park, you look after it. Whatever you can do, do it. If a toilet is plugged, unplug it. If there’s litter on the ground, pick it up and throw it away. It is important that that is part of your role as well. Make sure it is clean and safe.”

 It is based on her personality of hospitality and a family-oriented environment. Making sure if there was anything I could do to make anyone else feel welcome and safe, I would do it. My career was in a safety and service-oriented (another word for hospitality) industry, which brings me to my current job at Thunderbird. You read the article. It was about rewards and recognition. 

I am now responsible for coordinating Ribbons and Awards, and I volunteered to be the employee advocate. One of my jobs that I felt was necessary, was to provide support to the crew, (which I haven’t done very well this year because I have been super busy), and introduce myself to each one of the employees.

I used to do orientations. We’ve let it slip by the wayside because other things, like COVID  have distracted us. We would do orientation sessions at the beginning of the year. Just because you pick up poop or  serve coffee or serve food, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be part of the team. I initiated the Tbird Spirit Recognition program. But again, I have to depend on management to see it through because I am a seasonal employee and don’t have the ability to provide special awards and stuff like that. I had it all laid out for them. It has fallen to the wayside because they thought other commitments were more important than that. 

I also created the Legacy Club. 

Because I did hospitality and fed everybody when this Show Park started up , I knew all of the old regime; the people who were judges and stewards and the coaches 23 years (or so) ago. Eventually, they retired. More people now come to the shows and there are more employees. They don’t know these veterans of the equestrian sport. I know them because I fed them. They were retired people working as officials. I saw Dave Esworthy, an elderly gentleman who was well-respected and known in the industry, wandering around Show Park maybe 12 years ago, looking for someone who knew him so that he could go and watch the Grand Prix.

Jacobsen: No one knew who he was. 

Foster: No one working in Hospitality knew who he was. Dianne, by this time, was ill. She had early dementia, and Jane had recently taken over. At the time, Jane didn’t know him because, originally, Jane wasn’t in the equestrian sport world. She was in the skiing world when she was younger [Ed. Olympics, Jane Tidball]. I greeted Dave with pleasure and asked, “Are you going to the Grand Prix field?” I took him to the TimberFrame, introduced him to the hostess and invited him to take a seat. 

I thought it was so sad that this man was such a longtime integral and influential contributor to the sport and on that day, he was a nobody until I recognized him.  So I approached Jane and Chris and said, “I think we should have…” You will get a kick out of this. I wanted to do something to give recognition to the people who initially supported the equestrian industry years ago because, in Canada, equestrian sport is not a high-visibility, popular sport. Right? Here was Dave; he put his heart and soul into it since he was young. He was a trainer, rider, and coach. He was a judge. That was how I knew him because I fed him as a judge. I introduced him to Chris and Jane. I said, “We should be honouring these people and offering them some kind of membership in a club.”They wholeheartedly agreed. Because everyone knows “Captain Canada,” Ian Millar, we wanted to think of a good name for these folks. You’re going to get a kick out of this.  I suggested “The Pasture Prime Club”, but Jane didn’t like it, so we settled for The Legacy Club.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s very good.

Ceuster: [Laughing] You’re past your prime. 

Foster: Isn’t that good? When a horse has done its best and is finished doing its job it’s put out to pasture. And prime is a word used to describe the best possible quality or excellence!

Ceuster: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: The girls at the barn would know. That would be something I would say. 

Foster: The farm Tiffany operates out of in Belgium is now the retirement farm. Those barns are in a pasture. 

Ceuster: Antwerp?

Foster: Just outside of Antwerp.

Ceuster: Vrasene.

Foster: Yes! That’s it! 

Ceuster: Yes, I found it on the website.

Foster: Thank you for doing that. That barn is still there. It is now also a breeding farm. Artisan Farms still owns it. The owner of Artisan Farms keeps his favorite horses there and Tiffany’s Olympic horses are retired there.  They spend their time in the pasture. They were prime.

Jacobsen: These horses must be incredible.

Foster:  Yes! So, we called it the Legacy Club instead. It’s kind of boring, but it does offer membership to someone who has contributed to the industry, is over the age of 70, is not actively working anymore, and has retired basically from whatever their contribution was, but their heart is still there. What they get is free access to the VIP area and the TimberFrame; they can go anywhere in Thunderbird and enjoy being a special person there. There are about five of them that come to the shows these days and have been welcomed into the Club.. Dave passed away as did Alfie Fletcher.  To me, that’s a part of honouring the infrastructure there.

Jacobsen: You have to do this. 

Foster: You cannot put on a show without having those people. 

Jacobsen: The best form of memory right now is institutional memory. Word of mouth degrades fast. Print, few people read. So, having a place for these people, they can tell their stories.

Foster: It is to show that we respect and honour them and have gratitude for them, for they have made the industry what it is now. 

Jacobsen: As a teenager, I was kicked out of the house for several months. I was a troublesome kid. I got back! I got back. 

Foster: I can tell you. I am surprised you didn’t end up at my house because I took in a lot of kids whose parents kicked them out. After all, they weren’t happy with them. 

Jacobsen: One of your kids, you told me, threatened to run away.

Foster: Tiffany only tried twice, but there were other kids. One was hooked on speed. The other was promiscuous. Her stepfather said, “Get the hell out.” She was 16! Tiffany said, “She has nowhere to go. Can she come and stay with us?” Long story short, it was eight years that I lived just outside of Walnut Grove by the Redwoods Golf Course; the house was brand new in 1999 when my girls and I moved in. When I sold the place and went back to North Vancouver, I thought, “This place has had a lot of people (besides my two daughters and me) live in it.” I decided I would figure out how many, using the time frame of anyone who had lived with us for more than three months: 13 people…not all at once, but over the eight years.

 I had a homeless guy staying in the basement once. But the girls that worked for Brent and Laura and lived in my house, they felt uncomfortable. Brent was the one who found him. I don’t know where he found this guy. He was trying to help him out, and asked me if he could stay in the basement. I was okay with him. The girls weren’t. I had to ask him to leave.  Jesse, Sarah, and Sid were living there when I sold . Jesse and Sarah had been there for three years. They were disappointed when I said I was selling and moving back to North Vancouver. Jesse is the one who is now married to Chris Pack, who also lived in my house for about 2 years. 

Jacobsen: It is a very tightknit community, like Fort Langley. Once they are there, they’re there. 

Foster: I’m surprised you didn’t come to live at my house! [Laughing] How old are you?

Jacobsen: 34. 

Foster: Yes, so you could have been one of those kids. 

Foster: So, questions?

Jacobsen: Last question.

Foster: Did you get what you needed? 

Jacobsen: Oh yeah. You mentioned about a half hour ago. It is more challenging to be a parent of adult children now than of children. 

Foster: I was 50 when my husband and I split up. I was married at 25, ten of which I had no children, and 15 with the kids. I was working in a high profile job and involved in several activities. I am not a solitary person. You probably gather that.

Jacobsen: Yes!

Foster: I had my husband. Like I said, I was a good mother to him – maybe not a good wife. As a mother, I was occupied. I had a lot of things happen at the same time. I grew up in my career because I was 19 when I started working, almost 20, in the airlines. I always had a goal or something to work for, etc. Then, when my husband and I split, Air Canada gobbled up the airline I grew up in. I left my community where I had my society with the church and the performing and all of that kind of stuff. I left that and all of my friends. I came out here for my kids. Then, I was able to take on this new role for Dianne.

I also took on launching two new diploma programs and teaching for BCIT Aerospace Campus. I was busy. I was needed. Then, I wasn’t thinking of myself in terms of what I needed. Somebody to support me or to be there for me. I was busy being there for them. My daughters went their separate ways. Then, I had another tragic incident that happened. I was able to support the affected family through that. I was needed. So, I was okay doing that. My daughters left me. I had the other girls in the house. I had people with me. Then, I moved back to North Vancouver, and Rebecca was going to UBC so she lived with me for the semester. Then she said, “I am 22-years-old. A 22-year-old should not live with her mom.” So, she moved out. But, I still had my students at BCIT until I retired in 2017.

Suddenly, I am by myself. My daughters had moved on. There is some other stuff, a dynamic, which was hard for me when I went to Florida. That’s when I was lonely. I was done at BCIT. My daughters were doing their own thing. I tried to explain to them how I was feeling. They didn’t want to hear it. Eventually, I called a meeting with them. It was a meeting with expected desired outcomes because I felt I needed to express how I felt. I felt I was being left out of their lives. Do you know what Tiffany said to me? She said, “You are the reason why. You raised us to be independent, freethinking, good thinking, capable, confident women who can now solve their own problems.” She didn’t say it in this way, but I got the message: We don’t need you anymore.

Jacobsen: You gave us the principles.

Foster: I was used to being the one who gave everything. Then they didn’t want anything. That was hard for me. Then, Debbie, you didn’t meet her. She is cleaning the bedroom over at the house right now. She and her sister have been a part of my family. My husband and I would borrow these kids before we had ours whenever we wanted a ‘kid-fix’.. Their mother…we had been friends since we were 11 years old. Sorry, I like to make long stories longer. Anyway, their mother died at age 35, a week after Debbie turned 13. Her sister, Becky was 11. It was three weeks before Tiffany was born.  Those girls helped me with my new baby because it was summertime. Becky has always been very close to me. She is now grown up and she is my sounding board, but she lives in Ottawa..

I was feeling so lonely and hurt because my daughters weren’t integrating me into their adult lives. They were moving on, etc. That kind of stuff. I kind of vented how I felt with Becky. She said – and there is more to it, “Okay, all right, I want you to answer this question. If I asked Tiffany and Rebecca who they would choose for a mother, would they choose your sister? someone else? or you?” I didn’t hesitate.. I knew they would choose me. I was just lonely. I had no partner, you see. If I had a partner or somebody I could talk to and feel like he cared for me, my state-of-mind would be different. I didn’t have that with Glenn because I cared for him. I do not mean to make it sound like it was one way. He was devoted to me as long as I was devoted to him. You know what I am saying? But when I had children, I focused more on the kids than on him. He was used to 10 years of just him.

Jacobsen: It was probably a blow for him.

Foster: He couldn’t handle the responsibility of parenthood. So, he had an affair with a woman for two years. The girls were the ones who found out. Anyway, that is another story. I felt like I wasn’t needed in their lives anymore. So, that was hard for me. I think if I had a partner and if I had somebody, it wouldn’t… you know. I think there were some other causes, but they were resolved. I had my students. I retired in 2017. What do I have? I have Thunderbird and I drive around and wave at everybody; then everybody waves at me. That makes me feel good. [Laughing]. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing]

Ceuster: So, you’re part of Pasture Prime. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, ahhh!

Foster: I should be put out to pasture now. [Laughing] So, that’s what I mean. Does that make sense to you? It was a big part. My kids were devoted to me, and then they were gone. Like Tiffany said, “You were the one who helped us be who we are today.” 

Ceuster: Sometimes, my mother feels that way. She is in Europe. 

Foster: So, you understand.

Ceuster: My mother was part of the European Parliament and started an NGO. 

Jacobsen: She was! God, your whole family. 

Ceuster: She started an NGO to combat human trafficking. My youth was with the children victims of human trafficking in the house the whole time. 

Foster: Is that why you chose the path you’ve chosen for your life?

Ceuster: I first ran away, not physically. I ran from Antwerp and went to Brussels for school.

Jacobsen: Another runaway. 

Ceuster: Antwerp was too scary and dangerous. My mother was being protected by security. All the while, she was fighting mobsters and human trafficking. 

Foster: Mobsters, woah. 

Ceuster: Albanian. 

Foster: Where is your mother now?

Ceuster: In Belgium. 

Jacobsen: So, Albanian mobsters were after your mother.

Ceuster: She is still there. She can come to Vancouver to teach at the university. We have students from Vancouver coming to Belgium for our NGO. 

Jacobsen: Did she ever go to Albania?

Ceuster: Many times, all over. So, now, she is taking care of my father. 

Foster: How old is your mother?

Ceuster: 71

Foster: Oh, she is younger than I am. 

Ceuster: I can understand if you’re always with or helping people. 

Jacobsen: Any more questions? Any final feelings or thoughts based on the conversation today?

Foster: I think I would ask you that question.

Jacobsen: [Pause] I asked first.

Foster: [Laughing] I talk a lot. I tell a lot of stories. I was raised to trust people. Unless they prove untrustworthy, I would trust that the information or the stories I have given you will be treated with integrity. Does that make any sense?

Jacobsen: Accurately represented in the text. They would be veracious. They would have veracity. They would have truth value in presenting tone, context, and word choice. My thoughts: Your personality resembles the one you noted about Berne. “I am okay. You’re okay.” Hence, the concluding statement about raised to be trusting. To me, that seems more like temperament than how you were raised because I think many of our temperaments and proclivities are inborn. It seems. We seem to be an incomplete package. But a snowflake will form if it is frozen water or freezing water. How that snowflake will form? We don’t know.

Similarly, I think our character, temperament, and talents are largely heritable. The form in which it takes will also be dependent on culture. We find this in linguistics, as Noam Chomsky told us or taught us. There is something like generative grammar, where we see these differences in languages, representations of languages, symbols, and symbolic structures. Yet, those differences in symbolic structures have a standard grammar and structure. So, you can draw all of those surface differences rather than differences to an underlying core structure. It is similar to our character. 

What I notice with you, I see, “I am okay. You’re okay.” We all have encountered people who are, “I am not, you’re okay. You’re not okay.” We typically say those people are depressed [Laughing]. Other things that come to mind. 

You use practical examples to convey principles. Those principles are taught as per your self-identified role as a mother. Both of your children are very successful in their chosen passions. One recognized nationally for her food prep is in the restauranteur world. The other is recognized internationally in terms of current Longines rankings as the best Canadian rider, just behind Laura Kraut as the #2 woman rider in the world. It’s very tight, like 25, 29. Last year, in July, she was number one. Erynn Ballard, the first half of the year, was number one. The reason for Canada creating such great women riders is from Mac Cone; in my interview with him, he put it down to a focus on equitation and hunters. That’s probably a reasonable thing to think. Your parenting is devoting your entire life to your kids. So then, it has been a thought to me. Less as a journalistic point, if you look at the top riders, typically, they will be European, Western European men. 

Foster: Yes.

Jacobsen: I think if there was an effort to have more gender balance for show jumping in that way, maybe that area of the world – The western European region – could consider Mac Cone’s statement to me. If the focus is on equitation and hunters to have so many great women in the industry in Canada, maybe, if they had more focus on equitation and hunters in Europe, you could get a little more talent development and interest from girls for a little bit of a better balance.

Foster: It is quite puzzling when you look at the younger kids who come to the show, mostly female. I don’t know if that is what it is like in Europe. But it is primarily females who are coming.

Jacobsen: Everywhere has said this. 

Foster: Yet, when you get to the professional level, Tiffany was the leading lady rider in the world but was number 33 in the standings. 

Ceuster: I was thinking. Does Tiffany have a partner or have children?

Foster: No.

Jacobsen: No, she has mentioned this in interviews: She doesn’t have a partner, a husband, or children. She is doing this solo. She has her team.

Ceuster: It is not about solo. Still, in this society, women get their careers sidetracked. I do not know anything about show jumping or horses, and I do not know what age you are in your prime to be a rider. 

Foster: That’s an interesting question, Hans. This is what I say to my non-horsey people: There is no gender differentiation at all. And…there is no age limit.

Jacobsen: That’s right. 

Foster: Ian Millar was 69-years-old, I think at the London Olympics. The last time he competed. he was 72. 

Ceuster: It is about the age between 24 and 40 when…

Foster: … when they have childbearing and stuff. You have to time your childbearing.

Jacobsen: There are extremes, though. There is a Brazilian rider. She has been on the Olympic team for Brazil 2 or 3 times. She was first for the Olympics for dressage at age 16 or 17. That’s insane. Yet, you can have outliers like those who set that time range in a different mixup. What I find with a lot of horse people is that there are too many variables with a live animal. So, a lot of stuff is a rule of thumb. You can say 24 to 40. 

Ceuster: It is about giving people chances. What you see now is the mothers riding. The fathers…

Foster: …looking after the kids. 

Ceuster: Maybe, there will be more.

Foster: There will be a shift. You’re right. I just thought of something. For Canada, for the team, the successful team, all women. 

Jacobsen: Erynn Ballard, Beth Underhill, Tiffany Foster, and Amy Millar.

Ceuster: His daughter.

Jacobsen: They went to Herning, Denmark. 

Ceuster: Maybe, it is getting better.

Foster: She (Tiffany) was the only one who qualified for the final. They had some issues there. 

Jacobsen: We can leave those for articles. People can get mad at me. 

Foster: It is not really my position to discuss it. The point is that there were four women on the team. 

Ceuster: Women fade out of careers because they become mothers.

Foster: I was surprised this year. There were so many babies at Thunderbird for the season!

Jacobsen: Yes. You should see the barn. So many kids! So many.

Foster: These were babies. All these women had their babies in the last year or so.

Jacobsen: Miriam!

Foster: The dads are there packing their little kids around in their pouches.

Ceuster: In Europe and Belgium, it is pretty normal to have kids later and pursue your career.

Jacobsen: In that department, I would argue that America is 25 years behind us and Europe is 25 years ahead of us. 

Foster: Yes, it is interesting. Just based on gender more than anything else, women tend to be more resilient than men simply because they have to be. You guys don’t have to go through any pain to have those children [Laughing].

Jacobsen: Correct.

Ceuster: We don’t need the muscle as much to develop the countries. Public schools are needed right now.

Jacobsen: In the not-too-distant future, it’s just a matter of reverse engineering in a way, or just improving that engineering, before you get semi-autonomous robots, which can do basic tasks for us. They will be expensive at first. They get cheap like every cellphone. Who knows? Some of these artificial intelligence are well-developed in the military. Thank you very much for the time and hospitality and for being so wonderful. 

Foster: I tend to tell a long story. I hope I gave you what you wanted and what you’re looking for. I can talk a lot about infrastructure. 

Jacobsen: We talked about those before. It’s not the physical infrastructure. It is the understanding: Pick one of these choices, and they have various consequences. You live in a free country – go. They learn this at a young age. So when they make those choices, you are teaching them the non-tangible infrastructure of life. Life is just about choices. There is no single answer. That’s life. You’ll find out the hard way or as you grow. 

Foster: Can I give you one theory which I have?

Jacobsen: Go!

Foster: It is about one’s life. This is my theory: From 0 to 20, you, as a living, breathing human, don’t have much control over your life. Your life is influenced and managed by your parents, caregivers, teachers, and maybe your first employer in the first 0 to 20 years of your life. You are not managing your life. Somebody else is managing. You are a vessel. They are contributing to your growth. Your caregivers are depositing their values and ethics based on what they have learned themselves, so they are influencing you. Like with my daughters, I am contributing to providing that influence. I, as a parent or as a caregiver or as a teacher, from 0 to 20. 

After 20, you get to take whatever you’ve got from those who were managing your life at that time or caring for you during that time, and you get to try it on and see. What is it that fits you? What doesn’t? Go and experience your life, seeing other families, cultures, religions, environments, whatever; you check it all out and see what fits with you based upon what was given to you first, learn things, and try them on yourself. I have this theory. I have said this to quite a few young people. We ask our kids to decide about the future and their lives too soon. How can you, at 17, say, “Yes, I am going to go to university and study this, that, and the other thing”? Unless you have a specific passion like Tiffany. You always wanted to be a doctor. You want to be a truck driver, whatever. Most of us don’t know that yet. I certainly didn’t know that at 18 or 19. 

So, you’ve got from 20 to 30 to figure it out. What you’ve been given, what you can use, how you can gain more. It is your responsibility to go out, learn and make mistakes, have triumphs, whatever it takes. Then, at 30, if, after you’ve tried yourself on for ten years and you still didn’t find what fits for you, you have to decide, choose a path, and take that path. Maybe it is the right path, or it could be the wrong path. By 50, if you haven’t found the path that leads you to your self-actualization needs, as Maslow talked about, you still have a chance at 50. 

Now that you’ve got 50 years of experience, 30 of which you’ve had within your control, you can still go and try something new and see, especially if you feel you haven’t gotten what you’ve wanted in your life. Until you’re 70, then you must either reap your rewards or accept your punishment [Laughing] for your bad decisions because it is too late to do anything about it. You’re now on the downward slope and just looking at your life, either reveling in it because you’ve gotten so much out of your life or “shit.” My ex-husband is that way. He is a man riddled with regret. He dwells on the past. Be grateful for what you’ve got; look for the good things in your life.

Ceuster: The last phase after 70 is the latter, right? We talk about it in our meetings. 

Jacobsen: The NATO meetings?

Ceuster: Yes. At certain points, people start to reflect on their lives, regret what they’ve done, and say, “I’m sorry.”

Jacobsen: If they have a conscience… There is a small portion of the population who have none.

Foster: Right, that is when you can seek restitution. If you realize, “Oops,” [Laughing], “What have I done? What have I done to others?” Something else: Tiffany and Rebecca…when we found out that a very close family friend was suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer. She only had about a month, if she was lucky, to live. These girls, they were in their teens then, were stunned and wondered how she was dealing with the fact that her life would end sooner than ever expected.. “Auntie has been told she only has that amount of time to live.” I said, “What we are guaranteed in our lifetime is that we will die. How or when do we die? Most of us don’t know yet. We have a certain amount of time on this earth. You have to live your life as if every day will be your last, and do what you can to make sure you have no regrets. That is all you can control.”

Jacobsen: That’s true. That’s true. 

Foster: So that you have no regrets. You have to live your life. My kids always say to me, “YOLO.” [Laughing] You only live once. 

Ceuster: No, you only die once.” 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] I have heard that retort once.

Foster: You do. You have to live your life. If you leave today, will you regret not doing what you should have done? Will you regret something that you did do? You have to think that there has to be a purpose on this Earth to do some good. Unfortunately, there is a certain length of time for you. We all have an expiration date. What you are focusing on is that you’ve got to build up that purpose instead of the corruption and evil in this world as you talk about humanness. 

Ceuster: I do not know the term that you use for it. I always call myself a positive naif. I am positive, nice to people, and naive because I don’t know the reaction. Someone says, “Bad person.” I can find that out for myself. Most of the time, I don’t get hurt. 

Foster: You’re right. Pre-judgment is called prejudice, and attracts  negative behaviour. Right after I graduated from high school, I went one year to university. I shouldn’t have gone then because I was not ready for it. I came from a small school and went to this big university, and I didn’t know anybody except for about 12 other students who were in my high school graduating class. I didn’t do well in university, so I didn’t go back after the first year.The following year, my sister and I spent a summer traveling through Europe in a Westphalia Volkswagen camper that our parents gave to us as a Christmas gift. We were 17 and 19 at the time. We celebrated her 18th birthday in Belgium. When we returned, I started working for the airline and turned 20.. We traveled for six weeks, driving our Westphalia camper, which we picked up at a factory in Germany. I had never travelled that long without my family. My dad, he trusted me. He made assumptions about me, which I was able to fulfill. When my dad gave us the gift, he said, “You’ve got to work to earn spending money for your trip. So, I got you a job as a front desk clerk in a new hotel in Yellowknife. I went to work in Yellowknife, saved all the money I earned and used it for travelling expenses for my sister and me.

Ceuster: [Laughing].

Foster: My dad gave me a single envelope which contained the bill of sale for the van, the insurance, the flight tickets, a woman’s phone number and that was it. . He said, “The van  is at a Volkswagen factory somewhere near Hanover.” 

“You are going to fly from Edmonton to Amsterdam. My insurance agent’s sister lives in Amsterdam. He told her that you’re coming. Get ahold of her; she will help you a little.”  That is all he told me.  We were driving to pick up my sister from her last exam from high school. Then we drove straight to the airport so we could catch our plane. I said, “Dad, what do I do when I get there?” [Laughing]

Ceuster: [Laughing].

Foster: “I have to contact this lady. Then what?” He said, “It is your holiday, kid.Do whatever you want, but just make sure you take care of your sister.” That is all he told me. 

Ceuster: Now, people can get five years for that. [Laughing] 

Foster: We flew to Amsterdam. We had to figure out how to get from the airport to the city and meet up with this lady. I will tell the whole story but  it is getting too late and we must go to bed. I phoned her. She said, “It is good you are here.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Foster: “It is 6 a.m., and I must go to work. I won’t be done until 7 o’clock tonight.” We travelled 12 hours. Now, we have to wait another 12 hours. We are in this strange city. [Laughing] What do we do? We figured it out. What you were talking about when you said naive, we trusted everybody. The Dutch lady did help us. A kid from Canada whose sister was a flight attendant on our flight was at the airport. He was travelling and ran out of money. His sister brought money. He befriended us and gave us some tips.

‘Go to VVV or the tourist information centre at every central station,’ we learned that and stuff. The German people were nice to us. We brought six pieces of luggage with us. We didn’t know. [Laughing] We were carrying all this luggage because we had to carry our sleeping bags, camping gear and things like that. The German people looked at us getting on these trains with all our bags as if we were nuts.

We wandered all over Europe naive, like you wouldn’t believe. We picked up hitchhikers, drove them, left people with our Volkswagen van, the key and passports and went off with these Italian guys we just met on the beach; no harm came. We had a good time. Something could’ve happened. We could’ve lost everything. Just trusting and believing, we had no idea what we were doing. We met many people who guided and helped us during the six weeks of travelling. I looked after my sister. So, when you said naive, it reminded me of that trip because we were quite naive and extremely trusting because we assumed that everyone had good intentions, like us!. 

An interesting thing is that a classmate of mine from school went to Europe  in September that same year. He bought a motorcycle in England to use for transportation. Two weeks after he was there, he was mugged. His motorcycle was stolen. All his money was stolen. He had to come home. Our experience was so different. Crazy, huh? Anyway, you guys have to get up early. Are you staying with Scott?

Ceuster: No, I am going back to Vancouver. 

Jacobsen: I have two interviews. We will see if she is up. She is constantly travelling and giving talks. She is based in Kyiv. She went from New York to Rome and then went every few days to a new country with a very high-demand schedule. The other one is that he is in the war zone, but his money might run out. I will send some to them and other charities. 

Foster: When are you going (to Ukraine)?

Jacobsen: [Laughing] I have mouth surgery on November 22nd in the morning. Then I will go straight to the airport. 

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/08

What makes a humanist? Is it a commitment to freedom above all other values? That sounds like a libertarian. It gets close with a focus on individual responsibility to carve one’s life. Is it a commitment to the freedom of speech as a free speech warrior? That sounds like a one-dimensional free-speech advocate. It gets closer because the core idea of freedom: the ability to think it, then speak it.

Central to humanism is the concept of freedom, a multifaceted principle underscoring the capacity of individuals to forge life as they see fit balanced with the same rights for others. In the humanist view, freedom encompasses the liberty to think, question, and express oneself openly, fostering an environment where critical thinking and rational debate flourish.

The use of cancellation as in cancel culture is less an act and more public penalty culture. I do not mean a justifiable cancellation in any particular instance or a culture, or cancellation in completion for that matter. I aim more towards understanding. The left and the right undergo this. Amber Bracken is a leftwing journalist who has been cancelled. Lindsay Shepherd is a rightwing journalist who has been cancelled.

I have been cancelled from several publications, boards, and professional relationships from conservative, religious, and patriarchal institutions, groups, and individuals. My orientation tends towards the self-governance, self-management of the Native Americans seen before colonization with the implementation of more advanced communications technologies seen now. Something related to democratic socialism or libertarian socialism, libertarian-syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, but distinct.

Is it leftwing, centrist, or rightwing? All wings of the same bird to me.

Americans have admirably protected free speech to a high degree. Satire is a protected right in the United States. ‘My’ problems arose in secular writing in 2016/17 for Conatus News. Based on experience rather a stereotype, a statistical generalization, the ‘thinner skins’ of individuals come, more often, from these demographics: over 40 years old, European heritage, North American culture, conservative, and often religious tending towards the Christian (Protestant sect). Let’s take a recent case study example: a satire about my hometown, Fort Langley.

A bunch of dads’ representatives, for 27 of them from my hometown, read a satirical article about them, by me, as literal. “That’s your problem, right there.” People have the right feel what they feel, to say what they want as an expression of that.

Do they have the right to shut someone down? It depends. These men from a conservative town did try to cancel me. Their misreading, somehow, became my fault. That’s odd.

So, they went to several listed professional associations to defame me — without CCing me. If any defamation in a satirical context, it seems less serious, certainly, than actual defamation to employers in a non-comedic situations. You see the issue. It was a circumlocution for reputational damage. Others done this before.

There can be public forms of this. However, typically, it gets laughed off. One can see this in the case of Andrew Copson and company being called demonic and debauched on live television in Britain. Such naughty lads!

The idioitc thing, though, the sending of the correspondence in the first place. These come to me as the bullet from these pee-shooters. It’s pretty extraordinary and cowardly. Again, men of the above types of demographics in part. This is neither the first time nor the second time.

Ever since the writing became international, some have destroyed several professional relationships over articles written about them. I’ve succeeded in spite of them. But it’s real.

Older men from the 70s down to early middle age harassing and defaming a person in his 20s, now 30s. Unsure if they will continue, after forcing them to communicate with me directly. Yet, that’s not how this works. They direct private correspondence of no particular note to those professional associations again. This is intimidation to cancel after direct defamation did not work. It is not clever. But it is once in a blue moon effective, so used.

After some correspondence and as a courtesy, I chose to take down the article respect thee 27 dads’ feelings, in the end. While, ironic, it was only 1 article out of hundreds in one outlet alone. A woman dissenter in the town to these dads, in the satire and in the actual news articles, has been harassed one woman. She is a lawyer. Same with her law firm. This is small-town petty politics. Men trying to be petty potentates.

I am not a victim here. I do not take myself as a victim ever. I see this as victimization of me, but I do not see a need to carry this as a marker of identity. Does that make sense?

How is humanism and freedom relevant here?

Humanism advocates for the freedom from dogma, superstition, and unfounded authority, promoting a worldview based on reason, science, and evidence. Our freedom involves the recognition of our shared human condition.

It is about the pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and empathy. We form our actions and make moral choices. These are the basis for personal fulfillment and happiness. A subtle, profound balance struck between individual freedom and social responsibility.

As I can assure you, we face intolerance, inequality, and injustice. Our lives are difficult because the world is harsh. We can construct a world in which individuals can live authentically. When facing persecution from elders, from illegitimate authority, from patriarchal institutional challenges, from self-doubt, we can rest on freedom in humanist values. That realization of freedom, which we simply call humanist as we experience it.

Which is to say, I’m free; if not already, you can be too.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/07

Dr. Roman Nekoliak’s biography states: “Roman Nekoliak (1992) ambitious young professional with a demonstrated history of working in the civic&social organization in Ukraine and Belgium.  A Law graduate from Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (BA, MA Kharkiv). Afterward, he continued to study law at V. M. Koretsky Institute of State and Law in Kyiv, where he achieved his Ph.D. in 2018. Furthermore, he graduated from LLM program in International and European Law, Gent University mainly focused on IHL, EU institutional law and human rights. European Solidarity Corps volunteer in Ieper, “In Flanders Fields Museum” Research Center at West Flanders (2017) . Former Council of Europe DGI trainee in Strasbourg (2020). Roman became professionally involved as a human rights defender at the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) in 2021, where he has since been responsible for international relations, advocacy and communications. He speaks Dutch, English, Russian and Ukrainian. Interested in modern politics, history, cultural diplomacy, World War I, philosophy and the history of European unification. My hobby is the history of the First World War, literature, theatre, philosophy, jogging and badminton. Here we talk about lessons from World War I and World War 2, International Humanitarian Law, the Rome Statute, and profit and war.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In studying the events of World War 1 and World War 2 in-depth, what are the major takeaways about the gradual development and then rapid onset of atrocities and excuses for mass demographic crimes?

Dr. Roman Nekoliak:When analyzing the development of the Western Front, Great War historians applied the idea of ‘the learning curve‘. This concept first appears in British academic circles and shows the BEF’s capacity for learning amplifying its 1918 victory and explaining the 1914-1917 devastating losses.

Brits were among the first to apply field gray uniforms, machine guns, barbed wire, casualty clearing stations, and tanks. While Germans were forced to counter, adapt and develop their own tactics with limited resources. The German military was the first to use far-range heavy artillery to annihilate Belgium and France’s fortifications and to terrorize Paris, and to use poison gasses. They became experts in submarine warfare and invented tactics that will be called the Blitzkriegstrategy during WW2 (Operation  Faustschlag, 1918, occupation of Ukraine). Oskar von Hutier maneuvers, “Hutier Tactics” entails bypassing major enemy strongpoints while using smoke and gas shells.

One notable German artillery general on the Eastern Front during the Great War (World War I) who contributed significantly to the development of new tactics was Georg Bruchmüller. His innovative approaches to coordination, communication, and the use of artillery barrages to support infantry advances which was tested on my countrymen at the Eastern Front.

Bruchmüller developed tactics such as the “Feuerwalze” (fire wave) which involved a creeping barrage that moved ahead of advancing infantry to suppress enemy positions and allow for a more effective assault. His methods were instrumental in breaking through entrenched enemy positions and were later adopted by other armies during the war. As well as poison gasses, at the end of the war they were used by the French, British and US armies, powers that have technical capacity to produce them.

Both sides used aircraft, machine guns, tanks and armored vehicles, but the Allies had material and personnel advantage. In the present war, the use of AI, air and water drones and Starlink are the ‘learning curve’ examples. 

The logic of warfare is simple: the belligerent parties will use any means possible to cause as many casualties as they can.

The lessons learned from both world wars have driven Europe towards closer integration and cooperation. However, a new conflict simmers in Europe—a conflict that tears Ukraine between two opposing directions: authoritarianism and democracy, with the looming specter of further Russian aggression in the region, potentially thwarting or undermining democratization efforts in neighboring countries.

Jacobsen: Is contemporary International Humanitarian Law struggling to deal with the modernization of the battlefield and violation of human rights into the digital sphere with digital warfare and media through dis- and mis-information campaigns?

Nekoliak: Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, a dynamic thinker of the 19th century, grappled throughout his life with understanding and coming to terms with the profound changes in warfare witnessed during the Napoleonic Wars. He likened war to a chameleon, morphing into various shapes and forms with a proclivity for escalation. Margaret MacMillan, in her Foreign Affairs article, highlights how the 1899 Hague Convention prohibited the use of poison gas, yet Germany defied this ban and deployed it in 1915, leading the Allies to follow suit by the war’s end. In 1939, the United Kingdom refrained from bombing German military targets, citing fears of retaliation and ethical concerns. However, a year later, the UK adopted a policy of unrestricted air warfare, even at the cost of civilian lives. Consequently, during the later stages of the conflict, the Royal Air Force targeted German cities, prioritizing civilian morale as a strategic objective.

Nowadays, the following controversial question arises: Can IHL in its current state, address the instruments of modern warfare and the instruments of hybrid war alleged to Russian Federation.

Of particular concern is the deployment of cluster munitions. This trend toward escalation is evident, raising the specter of Russia resorting to the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons as the next conceivable step.

The Ukrainian frontline stretches approximately 1,500 kilometers in length. In certain segments, it features heavily fortified three-line defense systems comprising concrete bunkers and outposts, while in other areas, the role of the Dnipro River mirrors that of the IJzer in Flanders, which was flooded deliberately to stop the German advance. The conflict in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022 is described as asymmetric or hybrid, blurring the lines between wartime and peacetime, as well as between combatants and civilians. This hybrid warfare exhibits diminished adherence to international legal norms, as it diverges from contemporary laws of war. The methods of warfare have evolved rapidly, outpacing legal frameworks. Legal scholars highlight concerns such as legal ambiguities surrounding cyber and drone attacks, as well as shifts in the nature of actors engaged in extraterritorial conflicts.

Jacobsen: Is the Rome Statute limited in its efficacy with Russia and Ukraine? For example, Ukraine is not party to the Rome Statute. The Russian Federation is not party to the Rome Statute.

Nekoliak: British international lawyer Lauterpacht coined the concept of crimes against humanity, advocating for the protection of human rights from violence. Lemkin, on the other hand, coined the term “genocide” to protect groups of people from mass extermination. Sands tells their personal stories that influenced the formation of these abstract legal principles.

These two concepts were first used at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi political and military leaders. This was a turning point in the history of international criminal law. However, more than half a century passed after this trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 2002 on the basis of the Rome Statute.

In pursuit of justice and accountability for crimes committed by Russia, Ukraine should ratify the Rome Statute. Ratification of the Rome Statute will allow Ukraine to become a full member of the Assembly of States Parties to the ICC and to have all the procedural and organizational rights of the States Parties to the International Criminal Court.  Only as a full-fledged member of the ICC will Ukraine be able to influence future processes and decisions on possible changes to the Statute.

The issue around ratification is the issue for the state to abide by international law. Ukraine advocates for parties in a conflict to comply and respect IHL rules. The CCL’s work to educate the public on IHL rules is based on the idea that a sound acquaintance with the law is essential for effective application and, consequently, for the protection of the victims of armed conflicts. CCL works toward compliance with the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols by strengthening the international criminal justice system

At the moment, Ukraine has only cooperation obligations. In turn, the Court will benefit by gaining valuable experience from Ukrainian lawyers and lawyers currently working on justice issues in eastern Ukraine. In addition, it will be a significant step towards strengthening Ukraine’s international reputation. Also, ratification of the statute is one of the requirements of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (Article 8 of the Agreement).

The adoption of the Rome Statute is not a panacea that will solve all the pressing legal problems in the context of the Russian invasion, but it is a step in the right direction, as international cooperation against impunity for the most serious crimes is our ultimate goal. The ICC is intended to complement, not replace, the national judicial system. The work of the ICC in Ukraine and the implementation of the principle of universal jurisdiction over the most serious crimes, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression, will strengthen Ukraine’s role as a fighter against Russian aggression for justice not only for Ukrainians but also for other countries and peoples affected by international crimes.

By ratifying the statute, Ukraine will confirm that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community should not go unpunished and that their effective prosecution should be ensured both by measures at the national level and through enhanced international cooperation.

Jacobsen: What seem like the most efficacious ways to deal with the documentation of crimes and, not only demand but, deliver accountability through international law?

Nekoliak: After Russian 2014 invasion of Ukraine Ukraine’s civil society organizations have joined national resistance and defense efforts, expanding on their traditional advocacy and watchdog roles. In this regard, the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) has had a crucial role in gathering records of war crimes after Russia’s latest invasion, building on its experience documenting war crimes and torture since the start of the War in Donbas in 2014.

The process of documenting human rights violations is a vital undertaking involving the collection, analysis, and preservation of information and evidence concerning the perpetrated abuses. This process serves a pivotal role in bringing attention to violations, holding accountable those responsible, and seeking justice for the victims.

Adherence to established standards and guidelines is fundamental in human rights documentation to ensure uniformity and credibility. For instance, the Istanbul Protocol offers guidance for documenting instances of torture, while the Minnesota Protocol provides direction for investigating unlawful killings. These frameworks standardize the documentation process and offer specific directives for documenting various human rights violations. Civil society organizations engaged in documentation efforts can benefit from familiarizing themselves with and implementing national and international standards such as the ICC Guidelines and the Berkeley Protocol. These resources furnish comprehensive guidance on human rights documentation, guaranteeing adherence to legal and ethical standards. The awareness and application of such guidelines can bolster the quality, credibility, and effectiveness of documentation endeavors in the pursuit of justice and accountability.

The documentation of war crimes and other breaches of international law necessitates strict adherence to guidelines. In 2022, the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust) and the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued practical guidelines for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in response to requests for clearer direction on effective documentation methodologies. These guidelines prioritize the protection of individuals, particularly vulnerable individuals, and underscore the importance of preventing multiple interviews with the same person. This approach aims to safeguard the well-being of individuals providing testimony and to uphold their willingness to participate in the accountability process. Consequently, the ICC’s guidelines focus on approaches to vulnerable individuals, the handling of testimonies, photographs, videos, documents, digital information, physical items, as well as the storage, safeguarding, and analysis of collected information.

Our documentation work as well as the efforts of other NGOs and journalists have helped to highlight issues that need to be addressed immediately to prevent further mass human rights violations and spark response from international community. Such as the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens including children to the territory of the Russian Federation.

Jacobsen: With the new dimensions in modern warfare, what updates may be necessary for International Humanitarian Law in adapting to modern conflicts?

Nekoliak: Thus, one of the preludes to the war of aggression has been the continued increase in Russian hacking with high-level attacks on certain infrastructure – power stations, telecommunications centers, businesses. At the same time, the Russian Federation has significantly increased the amount of disinformation disseminated – not only in the media, but also on social networks through controlled bloggers and trolls – thus preparing the ground for the invasion.

In 2022, Ukraine (officialy, confirmed cases) suffered more than 4500 cyber attacks from Russia. During these attacks, Moscow is primarily targeting civilian or government infrastructure: the energy and logistics sectors, government databases or military facilities. Targeted attacks are carried out against companies in order to take control of them and disrupt the functioning of services. Ransomware is also deployed in an attempt to encrypt computers. To carry out these attacks, the Russian government can count on groups of hackers close to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence.

Ukraine obviously wants to prevent unbacked up databases from being manipulated, or critical infrastructure from being hit and data lost. At the beginning of the conflict, for example, a government data center was damaged by Russian missiles. Ukrainian citizens could also be put at risk if some data fell into Russian hands, allowing for example the tracking of population movements. These reasons again motivate the Ukrainian government to get the data out of the country.

Cyberattacks on Ukraine since late March include phishing emails targeting the government and armed forces and various organisations, as well as the use of a LoadEdge backdoor to install surveillance software. Cyberattacks on Ukrtelecom and WordPress websites caused communication disruptions and restricted access to financial and government websites. On 30 March, the MarsStealer ransomware gained access to the credentials of Ukrainian citizens and organisations.

The main goal of hackers is cyber espionage, disruption of the availability of public information services and destruction of information systems. Experts from the State Cyber Defence Centre have recorded a significant increase in the spread of malware that enables hackers to steal data or even destroy it. Microsoft has launched a report Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War, it highlights that Russia tends to start its attacks both in digital space and through massive shelling simultaneously. The clear example of it is the launch of missiles against the governmental buildings of Dnipro, while launching the massive cyberattack. The Microsoft concludes with the following statement: “we will proactively work to prevent our platforms and products from being used to amplify foreign cyber influence sites and content. … we will not wilfully profit from foreign cyber influence content or actors.” These shows that establishing the security within the digital space and enforcing the digital rights of the population could be done in the collaboration with the main private companies such as Microsoft. It is in both, states, and private business, benefit to counter the threat which circulates in the digital space.

Communication is essential  in wartime, so network infrastructure has been targeted early on by Russia. Connectivity disruptions are mainly caused by physical damage to optical cables or relay antennas. Through these attacks, the Russian Federation is trying to fragment the Ukrainian digital space, for example by switching people living in occupied areas to Russian networks (by distributing Russian SIM cards). The aim is twofold: to cut off the access of these populations to factual information about the war and to open a new channel for Russian propaganda. Two days after the beginning of the invasion, Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation made a request to Starlink terminals to fight against these attacks. This is a satellite internet connection service launched by Space X, a company of Elon Musk. Ten hours later, Elon Musk confirmed the activation of its network in Ukraine. Ukraine’s efforts in these areas via digitization makes the occupation of the territories by the Russian army significantly more difficult. In the territories from which Ukraine has temporarily withdrawn and where the occupation administration has launched Russian rubles and erected its symbolic markers – such as flags and monuments – the Ukrainian state is represented digitally and remains in contact with its citizens.

On March 29, 2022 for example, Ukrainian forces arrived in Irpin and found that the population was unable to contact their relatives after the destruction of 24 relay antennas in the city. On March 31, a terminal is brought to the site, an antenna mounted on a mobile motorized base and the whole is powered by a generator. As a result, the city is once again connected and the inhabitants rushed to their phones to inform their relatives that they were safe and sound.

This scenario has been repeated all over the country. In spite of the important damages on the infrastructures, many Ukrainians still have access to Internet thanks to Starlink which would count not less than 150 000 daily users in the country. The satellite network could be operated in Ukraine thanks to the government’s authorization to use certain ranges of waves (contrary to France which prohibited it).

Since February 24, 2022 Telegram is the main communication tool for Ukrainians. It is used to disseminate information and first-hand video and photo documentation about the war. It also serves as the main tool for coordination in emergency situations. A Ukrainian citizen with a smartphone and access to the Internet can become a digital activist. The content about the war that Ukrainians are creating en masse has made it impossible to hide the truth about what is happening and has reduced the effectiveness of Russian propaganda.

There is also an organizational innovation: the digital crowdsourcing of collective action. People come together on Internet platforms to form volunteer groups: from digital troops launching cyberattacks on Russian state websites to communities buying and distributing humanitarian aid. Most of the time, these are local initiatives with a startup logic: there’s a problem, let’s solve it. The group that comes up with the first viable solution “wins”.

The situation in Ukraine shows that the division between “civilian” and “military” use of technology is becoming obsolete. In peacetime, Starlink delivers Internet to farmers and drones deliver ordinary packages. In wartime, satellite Internet is used by artillery, while drones assist with intelligence and launch missiles at enemy positions. Gone are the days when the military-industrial complex was a closed sphere: it is now easy to transform peaceful civilian technologies into military ones and vice versa. Although any technology is value-neutral, it can be used both to unify society and implement the rights and freedoms of citizens in a democracy, but also to control and establish authoritarian dictatorships. The “cure” for technological dictatorship is the conscious implementation of the values of democratic freedoms in the digitalization project.

Before the start of the large-scale war, Ukraine was already actively digitizing, guided by the concept of “the state in a smartphone”. Thanks to the Diia application, citizens had access to a passport, driver’s license, vaccination certificate, digital signature, the ability to petition, obtain certificates and register legal status for private business activities. During the war, the chatbot êVorog was created, based on Diia. It allows citizens to securely transmit information about the enemy to the state authorities, even while in the occupied territories. Another example of what the application enables is that the need for digital identity solutions has become acute due to the conflict. IDPs may no longer have access to their paper documents, and those who have taken refuge abroad urgently need to have their Ukrainian identity recognized in their host country. They can obtain a simplified digital ID through Diia, which is recognized by local authorities and border guards in neighboring countries. Similarly, workers living in conflict zones can check their entitlements to financial aid and apply for it directly through the Diia app. The service delivery system has also evolved over time, from almost no services in the days following the invasion, to the provision of all but 28 of 2230 important services three months later, once the system had been adapted to the new risks.

The war has prompted the Ukrainian government to apply for membership in the European Union and, in turn, for access to the EU’s digital single market, which requires alignment with international regulations and standards. On February 28, 2022, the European Council received Ukraine’s application for EU membership. On June 17, the European Commission issued its opinion recommending that the Council accept the country’s application. In this opinion, specific mention is made of Ukraine’s “particularly good performance” in the field of information society and media (within the thematic group “Competitiveness and inclusive growth”).

The war has shown us that a digital state is not only a state that provides digital services to citizens. In the most difficult times, it is the digital infrastructure that plays a key role in security, solidarity and the implementation of democracy. Ukraine’s experience can help create a coherent vision of digitalization by linking it to the idea of European digital sovereignty.

Jacobsen: With the third year of the conflict upon us, what are the prospects for peace?

Nekoliak: Recent developments raise questions about whether the momentum towards establishing an international rule of law has diminished. Interstate crises in various regions suggest a renewed focus on geopolitical spheres of influence. Efforts to address global challenges through universal international law face hurdles. In this context, are we still witnessing the advancement of international relations governed by universally accepted values, or are we seeing a trend towards informalization, reformalization, or even the erosion of international legal norms? Alternatively, could the slowdown in progress towards an international rule of law rooted in shared values simply be a temporary phase? Furthermore, is the current landscape witnessing the resurgence of realpolitik, signaling the emergence of a different type of international law?

This scenario aligns with the French proverb “a la guerre comme à la guerre,” which advocates for a pragmatic stance toward warfare. It suggests making the most of available resources to accomplish necessary tasks without dwelling on the associated costs. Russia’s utilization of diverse conventional armaments without achieving their objectives implies a potential shift towards non-conventional means, such as chemical or nuclear weapons, prohibited by international law.

As the conflict in Ukraine enters its third year, two-thirds of the world’s population resides under autocratic regimes. The prospect of Russia emerging triumphant in Ukraine raises concerns about a bleak future where force dictates governance and borders are redrawn through violence, potentially setting the stage for a more devastating confrontation in Europe.

Furthermore, such an outcome would reinforce the perception of a significant decline in Western influence and the universal principles it espouses. The European Union’s success, coupled with Ukraine’s aspirations for EU and NATO membership and the United States’ support for Ukrainian democracy, poses a threat to Russian ambitions to establish dominance in the region. Snyder argues that Russian political elites are engaged in a propaganda campaign to discredit the EU as a morally decadent institution, fearing that its success may inspire dissent within Russia itself, thus jeopardizing its existence.

Putin’s aim to dismantle democracy in Ukraine and strip its citizens of their political identity and civil liberties has resulted in the loss of countless Ukrainian lives, widespread destruction of critical infrastructure, mass displacement of millions, increased incidents of torture and sexual violence, and heightened repression within Russia.

The future of Europe hinges on its Eastern borders, where a struggle between incompatible systems—democracy versus authoritarianism, individualism versus totalitarianism—unfolds. If the First World War shattered empires and the Second World War epitomized extreme nationalism, the success of the EU lies in integrating former imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most significant bastion of democracy. EU will fail without Ukraine.

Jacobsen: What are the relevant human rights organizations reporting on Ukraine now?

Nekoliak: Various initiatives are underway to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine, aiming for accountability, justice, adherence to the rule of law, establishment of truth, preservation of historical memory, and future transitional justice. The collection and preservation of information about these crimes can empower national and international courts and authorities to pursue prosecutions, providing a solid foundation of testimonies and evidence even before international investigators arrive on the scene.

Firstly, Ukrainian state investigative bodies such as the Security Service of Ukraine, the General Prosecutor’s Office, and the National Police are actively engaged in documenting, investigating, and prosecuting these crimes. Secondly, the international criminal justice system, including organizations like the ICC, UN, OSCE, and the Council of Europe, plays a role, albeit to a lesser extent. Thirdly, Ukrainian and international civil society organizations are actively complementing, assisting, and sometimes leading documentation efforts.

Two Ukrainian civil society communities, T4P led by jointly by the Center for Civil Liberties, UHHRU, KHRG and Coalition 5 AM led by ZMINA, are specifically focused on documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Additionally, numerous international organizations are pursuing accountability for core international crimes committed in Ukraine, including Amnesty International, Bellingcat, the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Global Rights Compliance, the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Mnemonic – Ukrainian Archive, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), Redress, Clooney Foundation for Justic and TRIAL International.

The collective efforts of these organizations have resulted in the publication of several reports, including the OSCE Report on Violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity; the GAN UTF White Paper covering war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian Federation; the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) report; reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others.

Jacobsen: Roman, thank you for your time again. 

Nekoliak: Thank you.

Further Internal Resources (Chronological, yyyy/mm/dd):

Humanist

Humanists International, Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United Nations (2024/01/08)

Personal

The Long Happenstance of Iceland and Copenhagen (2023/12/09)

Romanian

Remus Cernea on Independent War Correspondence in Ukraine (2023/08/25)

Zaporizhzhia Field Interview With Remus Cernea (2024/02/21)

War and Destruction With Remus Cernea (2024/02/22)

Ukrainian

Ms. Oleksandra Romantsova on Ukraine and Putin (2023/09/01)

Oleksandra Romantsova on Prigozhin and Amnesty International (2023/12/03)

Dr. Roman Nekoliak on International Human Rights and Ukraine (2023/12/23)

Sorina Kiev: Being a Restauranteur During Russo-Ukrainian War (2024/01/27)

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/06

Something important came out of last attending the World Humanist Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2023 after attending the General Assembly of Humanists International in 2019. 

English is the proverbial lingua franca of the humanist world, generally speaking. These are contingent facts based on a Western European grounding of the modern history of humanism. We should not mistake the aspects of this history and the organic impacts on the current humanist moment. 

Many societies continue to be in transition. Some are more authoritarian and patriarchal structures. I do not know the reason much for, sometimes, strong pushback against terms like “patriarchy.” Certainly, it can be vague if undefined because the construct involves a lot of analysis in one. 

Yet, when we state patriarchal structures, we tend to understand. Political and social systems left women historically at a disadvantage, with contingent leftovers leaving them at a disadvantage in some places today. Something like that. 

Other societies continue to move towards more majoritarian; when unhealthy, they lean into the populist. When healthy, they move into an enlightened, self-interested majority. I do not know of a society entirely composed of the latter. 

Even with these shifting landscapes, more democracies or pseudo-democracies exist today as they continue on with the traditions of mini-revolutions called elections. Humanists emerge more in the health mentioned before. They come out of democratic traditions and reinforce them. In extreme cases, they can help form them. 

When I arrived in Keflavik and went to Reykjavik and intermingled with global humanist leaders in Iceland, I did not notice it. Our common language was English. Granted, it can be considered the language of the empire in some sense. Not only the American one but the one before it, the British.

If we lived in the time of Romans, humanists would speak eloquent Latin, whether native tongue or internally translated from a mother tongue into the second or Third language of Latin. These all seem like balanced and middle-road positions to me. Yet, at the same time, they’re grounded in a secular philosophical system. 

Most of the world does not adhere to these tenets or premises. Thus, it is, indeed, decidedly not common sense in a world bound to different senses of “sense.” And when I went to Copenhagen, once more, we spoke English. 

A comment arising from the interactions among the many global leader humanists at the events, workshops, and speeches was the character of the interactions. Individuals from the Global South, particularly, came at a linguistic disadvantage. 

They are capable, eloquent activists and political commentators with a zest for scientific knowledge. Yet, here we were, presenting in English, speaking in English, and writing in English, and this created boundaries or difficulties for them. 

Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with the historical contingency of English as the lingua franca or individual speakers from those backgrounds. Some movements work to shame people into conformity in leftwing politics over words at the moment. That seems misaligned with humanist values. 

What does align with humanist values? Education of individuals who may use inaccurate terminology or non-scientific concepts to describe known phenomena. We live to understand and compassionately express this to people. Satire and barbed humour are another matter.

What about the people who come to global humanist events after overcoming the other hurdles to engage? Language becomes a barrier. It occurred to me, as it was expressed to organizations and the community, that English isn’t the issue. It is pacing one’s speech and using the clarity of word selection when presenting, talking, and writing to a global humanist community. 

This goes with the historical current of English as the lingua franca while providing context for understanding. The point of most English language use is clarity of thought, deliverance of a message, and navigation of social norms. 

It is an interesting consideration. To think about English language use among many Global North countries in interaction with Global South nationals, it might be something to take into account when hosting events posting communications, and reaching out.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/05

*The interview was conducted on February 8, 2024.*

Kirk Kirkpatrick scored at 185 (S.D. 15), near the top of the listing, on a mainstream IQ test, the Stanford-Binet. He is the CEO of international telecommunications firm MDS America Inc. Here we talk about the American political moment.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so we are back with Kirk Kirkpatrick after a couple or few years’ interlude. I wanted to get your take on the current American political situation. What do you think is the current context of knowing what will happen next for Americans? I think that is a nice lead-in to this.

Kirk Kirkpatrick: The problem with knowing what happens next is making these predictions. You need to have data. You need to have data that you can calculate. But the problem in the U.S. right now is that a large part of the United States is not dealing with reality, with what is real. So, it is hard to predict if you start dealing with imaginative, imaginary things because you can’t know what somebody will imagine next. I think your problem in the U.S. is probably an extension of what Rick and I discussed earlier. In that, you have a lot of people looking at a lot of information and don’t have either a means or a motivation to validate the information that they’re looking at, so they get a piece of information, and if they like it, they believe it no matter how unreal or implausible it seems. That’s a problem. Because if you are not dealing with reality, you have a big problem. I think a lot of people know this right now. But predicting where it is going to go, I haven’t the slightest idea.

Jacobsen: It does help give a bit of grounding. For the first part of that response, one thing came to mind: What concepts or fantasies are Americans most wrapped up in now, if they are even now?

Kirkpatrick: There are a number of them. It is not all Americans. For example, let me give you some good examples: if you look at the last election, you had an election where a popular vote did not elect Donald Trump. He won in an electoral college vote. He lost the popular vote. His disapproval rating or what people thought about him as a president. His negative rating never dipped below 50%. The entire time he was President. So, if you are an alien looking at American politics from 1,000 miles up, the first question you would probably ask is, “How could this guy ever expect to be re-elected?” Since he was one of the least popular presidents who mishandled the COVID-19 problem, how could he expect to be elected?

Yet, when he comes out and says, “They stole the election.” You have many people who will just suspend their disbelief and just believe it anyway. The economy right now is booming. We are doing better than most of the OECD countries. The reporting on it, until recently, has been lukewarm at best. You have people who imagine Biden is too old to be President, which may be true. But the man running against him is four years younger than him. At 81 or 80, the difference between 77 and 81 is not very great. So, in order to be sitting there, “I might vote for Trump because Biden is too old.” That’s not rational. They’re both old. So, we have reached the point where – I shouldn’t say, “We” – many Americans have gotten to the point where they’re not looking to inform. They are looking to confirm. They have a belief. They think something is a certain way. They want to confirm this, one way or the other. The sad part is you are seeing it spill over in foreign policy and many other things to the point where we are not dealing with facts anymore. The way I would explain it in an off-kilter way. I used to explain to the Germans and the French. One of the problems of competing with the Americans is “we’re you.” So, if you have a group of Germans, they tend to all be German and think like Germans.

As Americans, you could have a German on the team with you or someone of German descent. So, you got to this thing in World War II called the “Yankee ingenuity.” They took the ideology out of it and just solved the problem. We have become ideological animals in the last 20 years to the point where we are living on ideology rather than what is real, to the point that I went to Russia to hire my chief engineer, probably in 2005. This person was a man who grew up in the Soviet Union and had been educated in the Soviet Union. I hired him when I was working in Moscow. I hired him to bring him here to the U.S. After living here for about five years, this was probably about 2011 or something. He came to me and said, “Kirk, you know, an observation is when I grew up in the old Soviet Union. We knew our propaganda was bullshit. You believe yours. You believe your propaganda.” You can see that illustrated in going to the street and asking somebody.

“Is America the greatest country on Earth?” A rational person would probably say something like, “By what criteria are you defining ‘greatest country,’ What does this mean?” but many Americans would answer that question with “Yes.” Okay? Then you ask them, “Have you ever been outside the U.S.?” “No.” Do you see the fundamental disconnect in this question? “I believe America is the greatest country on earth.” Okay, “Have you been anywhere else?” “No.” So, where does the belief come from faith? This belief in rational thinking is killing us. It is going to kill us, as it does anybody else.

Here is a question I could ask you, Scott: Many people are worried about the “open border.” Our open border is pretty strong if you have crossed any international borders. I believe you are Canadian, right?

Jacobsen: I am Canadian.

Kirkpatrick: So, travelling to Canada, the border is not as intense as it is in Mexico. My question is better placed if we think through history. What societies have been destroyed by immigrants? What societies have we seen fall or damaged because they took in too many immigrants? Compare that with the number of societies that have fallen because they were run by xenophobes, like Hitler’s, for example.

Jacobsen: They implode.

Kirkpatrick: They implode, right? The United States’s strength was that it took in people from everywhere. It adapted them to become American. They didn’t become “American.” They have been Italian American. They bring new ideas to the table. They might have been German, Mexican American, or African American. They bring new ideas. They are not thinking like the other guy, okay? That is a positive thing. It is not a negative thing. So, my only point is that I am not advocating one way or another on that problem. I am saying, “If you take a step back and look at the rational aspect of this, it’s hard to scream about closing the borders. You may want to regulate them more, and so on. Here is another perfect example: Are you familiar with Matthew 25:36? Are you familiar with this? This is a story in the Bible that Jesus tells. It is in the Gospels. He is talking about – I believe the Bible parable is ‘the sheep and the goats’ – basically, the story is the end of time, and Jesus is judging people. He separates the people on the left and the right. He tells them. You people on my right side. You came and visited me when I was sick. I was a stranger. You let me in. I was in prison. You came to visit me. I was hungry. And you fed me. Of course, they responded, “Lord, when did we ever feed you and visit you in prison?” I don’t remember you being a stranger and letting you in.” Jesus responds to them, “These things that you did to the least of them. You also do unto me. So go into Heaven and receive your reward.” Then he turns to the other people and says, “Now, you people, I was a stranger. You wouldn’t let me in. I was hungry. You wouldn’t feed me. I was thirsty. You didn’t give me anything to drink. I needed clothing. You didn’t give me any clothing.” Of course, they say, “When did we deny you all this, Jesus?” he said, “That which you didn’t do to the least of them. You didn’t also do to me. So, now, depart into the Hell that God has prepared for the Devil and his angels; I don’t know you.”Now, if you’re an Evangelical who knows the Bible, this should not align you with present-day Republican thought. So, “I was a stranger, and you would not let me in.” Uh, guys? This one is pretty straight. Jesus never mentioned abortion. But he did talk about this. I find it hard to believe that Evangelicals don’t know this story. So, this is a problem. When you’re not dealing with reality but with what you want reality to be like, it is a problem.

Jacobsen: Based on it, do you think the central issue among Americans, bipartisan wise, is confirmation bias? Coming to the forward, that is a source of many of these issues.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, one of my principles of politics is that all politicians lie. But politicians tend to lie when the truth doesn’t work. Do you understand what I mean? So, for example, if the Republicans want to cut taxes in the United States, if they complain about taxes, the U.S. has one of the lowest tax burdens in the industrialized world. You are Canadian. You should understand this. In order to say that we’re overtaxed, you have to lie. Okay? If the Democrats wanted to raise taxes, they don’t need to lie. It is not like they wouldn’t lie if they needed to, but they don’t need to because they can point out that we have the lowest taxes in the OECD. So, I don’t need to lie about this, if you know what I mean.

Jacobsen: I do.

Kirkpatrick: When John Kennedy was the President, the highest income tax bracket in the U.S. was 92%. So, at that point, if you want to lower income taxes on the wealthy, you probably don’t have to be deceptive about it. You can just say, “We have a 92% interest rate on our wealthiest Americans, which is onerous.” There is no need to lie. The problem has come, if you look, Scott. Let me ask you a question as the interviewer.

Jacobsen: Sure.

Kirkpatrick: Can you name a country run like the Republicans would want to run the U.S.? So, low taxes, libertarian type, open gun laws, no abortion- the ideas that you see when you tune into one of the right-wing television channels- free market healthcare, and a small or diminished welfare system- what country would fit this description?

Jacobsen: Without even those policy recommendations in particular, but if looking at the outcomes that would be likely, take Healthcare, for instance, with abortion or privatized healthcare system, those would reduce the quality of life in the short and the long term of society. It would be a much higher cost rather than a benefit…

Kirkpatrick: …that’s the effect. My question is, “What country can you reach out to today and say, ‘That is like it is going to run it if the Republicans run it.’?”

Jacobsen: On all of those, it would be a fantasy country as far as I know.

Kirkpatrick: It doesn’t exist. Here’s my point: I live in the state of Florida. I live in the state of Florida. The governor of Florida calls the state of Florida, where Wake comes to die. Very much, every time he gets up there. He talks about woke. So, my obvious question to him is, “Governor DeSantis, where else does he go to die?” Let me assist you; it goes to Iran. It goes to Russia. They don’t tolerate woke in Russia. They don’t tolerate it in Uganda. You aren’t going to be woke in Uganda or Saudi Arabia. They won’t take that. They won’t stand for it. They’re going to arrest you, put you down, whatever. Is this a group you want to belong to because you can probably be woke in Sweden or Austria, which are nice places to live? It is a nice place, Germany. My whole point here is: If you take a look at, if I stand back – and, of course, most Americans have never been anywhere, but if I stand back – and start thinking about the United States moving to the left. We have become more like Canada. Which is not a bad place to live; we don’t move from where we’re at to Venezuela by moving a little bit to the left. We must go through Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Sweden. All of these other places were long before we reached Venezuela. But if the U.S. moves to the right, what is the next country to the right of us? It is nothing that is a developed country. There are no developed countries with the same political rights as the United States except, maybe, Hungary. Even Hungary, I am not sure I would put it there.

Jacobsen: Orban is not a very pleasant character. I have interviewed one of the – I guess you could say – political people or secularists active there. He has been hounded for years. He is currently in lawsuits. The quality of the country has declined since he has been elected – since Orban has been elected, according to this person who is living there, Gaspar Bekes.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, you’re right. It has gone downhill. They have, for example, Universal Healthcare (Hungary has), which most people here would consider a left-wing idea.

Jacobsen: Certainly, Gordon Guyatt is an epidemiologist at McMaster University. As far as I know, he is Canada’s most cited person ever. He was the co-founder of Evidence-Based Medicine. I think in 1991. His co-founder may be deceased. In his analysis in interviews with him, he draws it down to what he calls Values and Preferences. The simple version is that the values and preferences of Americans regarding healthcare are towards autonomy, and most of the other countries with a similar quality of life are towards equity. So, the American phenomenon of Healthcare, for instance, on one issue, is very much an outlier. However, the inefficiency is probably about a magnitude of 4 because it is twice the cost at half the outcomes.

Kirkpatrick: As a Canadian, do you know the show The Greatest Canadian?

Jacobsen: [Laughing] I am aware of it. I do not own a television. I haven’t had much time to watch it or associated things.

Kirkpatrick: It was only one season. Basically, they went through Canada’s history and wanted people to vote on the greatest Canadian in history.

Jacobsen: It was, probably, Tommy Douglas.

Kirkpatrick: What?

Jacobsen: Was it Tommy Douglas?

Kirkpatrick: I love the way you said it. You said, ‘It was Tommy Douglas.’ Terry Fox came in number two, strangely enough.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: Most Americans wouldn’t know who Tommy Douglas was, but how do Americans discuss healthcare with those who tell me how bad the Canadian healthcare system is?

Jacobsen: They don’t know better.

Kirkpatrick: This is my point. My point is: Guys, listen, the Canadians are glued to the United States. Of all foreigners, they know the U.S. better than anybody because they are right here. More than this, if I were to knock you out in the U.S. and wake you up in Canada when you looked around, you’d still think you were in the U.S. Unless you saw a gas station.

Jacobsen: You might not necessarily because it depends on the reason; you’re knocked out. In Canada, you would, at least, wake up in a hospital bed.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] Exactly. My point is that these people know our system. They know theirs. They selected the guy who created their system as the greatest Canadian in history. Do you think they had a bad system? It is amazing.

Jacobsen: That is a bit of a Northern reference frame to Americans. What about the South, Mexico, and Latin American countries? How are they looking at the current political situation in the United States? How does it affect them? How do they view it in general?

Kirkpatrick: No, I have to defer to what I call the American Disease again. Scott, I don’t have any information about it. I will not form an opinion about it. I know Europeans. I know the Middle East. I know the Far East to a certain extent. I don’t speak Spanish. I do speak German, French, Dutch, and Chinese. So I can evaluate these places. But in Mexico and these places, I’m a news watcher. But more important is how the rest of the developed world looks at us.

Jacobsen: That is an important distinction. It is a good point.

Kirkpatrick: The reason is, these people in the developed world. I don’t know a better way to say it. I’ll say it with an analogy. When I first left the U.S., I went to Germany. I was blown away by how similar Germany was to the United States. I was expecting a foreign country to radically differ from where I lived. But it was the same with tweaks. There were fewer Fords and more Mercedes. Stuff like the houses looked a little different. Things like this. Then, I went to the communist world while it was still communist, and I found the environment I was expecting in Germany. Nothing looked similar, if you understand what I mean. So, for me, the developed countries are the ones who identify with our lifestyle. When I look at somebody living in Khartoum, their main drive is making sure “I have enough to do today.” Instead of paying off my second car for somebody in Canada or the U.S., I like to keep the comparisons as much as possible within those countries. But the sad part for me is that you have been watching what is happening in Germany.

Jacobsen: I can go check right now. I have been in a work and a home transition.

Kirkpatrick: Let me give you a short breakdown; they have a party called the AfD, the Party for Germany. It is, basically, a far-right party. But they’ve been significant ground among the German electorate. Enough so that it was becoming scary; they were getting to be the biggest party in certain local elections. Then, they had a meeting with some ultra-right wingers. It was recorded. It slipped out. It got out into the media. The AfD, even some people from the CDU, which would be the German republicans, were recorded at this white nationalist meeting talking about re-immigration, meaning taking people who had already been admitted into the country and given permission to live there to make them go back and then try to get back – deporting them and then getting them to attempt it a second time. When this came out, there was a big stink. They called for a protest against it. The protest was huge. There were a lot of people that came out. A lot bigger than they expected. It seems to be continuing. So, the next weekend, another big protest. The next weekend, another big protest, all against the rightwing.

Jacobsen: Four days ago in the Guardian, “About 200,000 people protest across Germany against far-right AfD party.”

Kirkpatrick: Yes, that’s a positive sign. The negative sign is that Geert Wilders became the largest party in the Dutch parliament.

Jacobsen: Yes, he did.

Kirkpatrick: So, my point is: I think this pushback is starting to hurt Trump and them in the U.S. The point is, as long as you have a cult-type adoration for somebody, it will end up poorly. That’s the problem if you are not dealing with factual information, if you are dealing with cherrypicking what I want to believe, if you understand what I mean. Every judge is against – every judge. It is frustrating.

Jacobsen: What about your background and expertise in knowing so many languages and travelling to different areas? What about more developed Asian countries or in the Middle East? How are they reacting to this political moment in the United States? Is it even a concern to them?

Kirkpatrick: Of course, it is a major concern to them. I can tell you this. I work with people in the Middle East all the time. Of course, when you get somebody who’s out of control, and if they decide to do something and don’t stop them internally, it is not like Hitler. Hitler did bad things and whatever. In the end, the assembled might of the world ended him. I am not sure that is possible in the case of the United States today. I think the United States military may be so hegemonic that the assembled might of the world cannot defeat them. I am not asserting it. It is, at least, a possibility. It would be a devastating, destructive fight. Whoever is the guy who is in charge of the U.S. and wants to be a dictator or an authoritarian ruler? If he goes off the skids, they’re impossible to stop.

I had a business partner who was an Israeli Arab. He was 55 years old. His English was flawless, perfect. When he spoke, he sounded like an educated American. I said to him, “How come your English is exquisite? It is perfect. Why do you speak like this?” He said, “Language of the empire.” I said, “What?” He said, “Language of the empire if this was the time of Rome, my Latin would be perfect. But this is you guys. You guys rule the place. So, it is the language of the empire. More than that, it is the language of the previous empire.” But that’s the point. When Caesar goes mad, the world’s got a problem. But the more important part is what I was telling you at the beginning: I don’t think Donald Trump is so much the problem as a symptom of the problem. That is the point. I am unsure if my generation, the Baby Boomer generation, is the problem. My younger brother calls us – and he is part of the generation – the spoiled brats of the Greatest Generation. I don’t understand the reason. If you understand what I mean, you get the feeling that it is a sports contest.

Jacobsen: I do. That’s also an American phenomenon too.

Kirkpatrick: Yes. Of course, the Americans, when it comes to sports, are the best at sports that only we play.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: That’s right. World sports are only played by Americans.

Kirkpatrick: We’re the best at the sports in the world that only we play. [Laughing] It is like a sports contest. I was told by a guy in Egypt one time. He said, “The guy you elect as President affects my life more than yours. I don’t have a say-so in it.” That’s the problem.

Jacobsen: That’s a powerful point.

Kirkpatrick: As I tell people who haven’t lived in other countries. One of the big differences between the U.S. and France, Germany, and even places like the Philippines is that I virtually never turn on the news and see a story about what is happening in the Philippines. But if you live in Manila and if you turn the news on, the chances are almost 100%. There will be a story about the United States. Maybe China is having a problem with the United States or something like this. What happens here affects people’s lives there. If a populace goes crazy or is irrational, it is a problem for everybody.

Jacobsen: Do you think, and this will tie into a future session with Rick (Rosner), the impact on other countries as the major world power more than it affects Americans internally in some cases, and the ignorance about that is another symptom outside figures like Trump of what you’ve termed the American Disease?

Kirkpatrick: I am not so sure. So, Scott, when you look at countries like the U.S., if I had to put my finger on what countries are most like the U.S. in the way people think, I would say, “Russia and China.” The reason I say that is Canada does at some points. You can walk up to somebody in the U.S. and say, “Have you travelled a lot?” They would say, “Oh God, yes, I have been to Wyoming. I have been to Texas. I went out to California. I went down to Key West.” Then you say, “Have you ever left the U.S.?’ “No, no, no,” or, maybe, “I went to Vancouver.” It is the same in Russia. You ask somebody if they have travelled. “Oh yes, I even went to Irkutsk. I have been to St. Petersburg. I went to Sergiyev Posad. “Have you left Russia?” “No, no, never.” China is the same way. Also, if you walk up to somebody in Russia, they expect you to speak Russian. Same in China. In Germany, it is not at all unusual to find somebody who speaks Greek or English. They just don’t speak German only. Americans tend to have this big country thinking. Because of that, they think internally. Scott, I’m sure You get American media.

Jacobsen: I do.

Kirkpatrick: What do you think when you hear an American news anchor? This is a country where you can freely express your opinion. It’s like, “Yes.” I could, frankly, pretty much freely express myself in Egypt. Not everyone could; if I owned a press, I wouldn’t be able to, but walking down the street. I can say whatever I want. Definitely, in Canada, you have no problem expressing your opinion. So, these guys hear this stuff. The good one, I am sure you hear it. “There was this giant hurricane that hit Texas. But only in America did people pull together to help their neighbour out.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: No! They do that in Canada, Germany, Norway, and even in places like Cameroon. People just do that. In the U.S., the media will say, “Only in America do they do this.” I am sure you understand what I mean.

Jacobsen: Sure, it ties into another thing that you were saying. It connects to big concepts- one in the discussion and two in another discourse- the notion or idea of American Exceptionalism. The American Disease and American Exceptionalism are, in many ways, intertwined concepts.

Kirkpatrick: Absolutely, and if we’re greater than you are, why should we learn anything from you? If we could copy the Canadian healthcare system and it would have good outcomes for us, why should we do that if we are better than you?

Jacobsen: It’s an inflated self-esteem.

Kirkpatrick: It’s more than this, Scott. It’s purposefully switched-off reasoning. Another example is that you, a group of people, and I want to work together. We say, “We all want to work together for a common goal. We want x to happen. So, let’s everybody put our efforts together, and let’s make x happen.” I tell you, “Okay, guys, I will help out. But understand anything that happens at all. It is me first.” Okay?

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: What was your attitude toward that person? So, the point is, you’ve got a politician and a group of Americans and legislators running around screaming, “America first.” It’s like, “Guys, think about the message you’re sending to everybody else.” By the way, I belong to the Triple Nine Society, which is like Mensa. However, they require an I.Q. at the 99.9th percentile. I was at one of their European meetings. It was in Germany. I was talking to Germans there, several of them. I would walk up to them and ask them. How would they translate “America first” into German? Of course, they know I am fluent in German. They know I am asking for a reason. Probably 80% thought briefly and said, “Deutschland über alles.” Are you familiar with that term?

Jacobsen: “Deutschland Uber”? Germany super…

Kirkpatrick: …over everything. That was the German national anthem. It was Germany over everybody, over everybody in the world. That was the lyrics. The national anthem is only the third verse of that song because they don’t say, “Deutschland über alles.” But “Deutschland über alles” was a big slogan of the Nazis, also “Deutschland zuerst,” which is Germany first. Those guys hearing Germany first think for a second and immediately tie it to a Nazi slogan.

Jacobsen: That’s right.

Kirkpatrick: It doesn’t work out for you internationally. It makes people suspicious of you. For me, it would be a much better position to get up and say, “The United States will take the position that is best for humanity, no matter what it is. What is good for everybody is good for us.” But you against me? It means that you will not be the biggest dog on the block someday. Then you’ve got a problem.

Jacobsen: Michio Kaku, a while ago, made a point that a lot of power, as you noted before, of the United States has been for a long time has been human capital, has been the H1-B Visas. To turn these people away or to turn them off from coming over, these people stay home or go back home. Not just, they don’t just pick up another job. With that skill, they create whole industries.

Kirkpatrick: Right, of course, the best example is you know who Jobs was. Jobs’s father was a Syrian immigrant.

Jacobsen: I haven’t done an analysis. I would like to do that by looking at the biggest people in the key industries, I.T. and so on, who have created the most successful businesses, then their family or personal history. I would assume you would find quite a few people from other countries because they were looking for a better life and opportunity. They contributed hugely.

Kirkpatrick: There is a beautiful video. You can probably find it if you Google “Guy Kawasaki.” Inc. Magazine, probably, “immigration,” do you know who Guy Kawasaki is?

Jacobsen: I know the name. I am not fully aware of this person.

Kirkpatrick: Guy Kawasaki was Apple’s software evangelist when they made the Mac, the Macintosh. So, his job was to go out and get software companies to write software for a new computer that was coming out called the Macintosh. If the Mac had no programs, it wouldn’t be worth anything. His job was to talk to existing software manufacturers, like Microsoft, in writing programs for the Mac before it came out. He then became, after he left Apple, a venture capitalist. That is why he is talking about this. He very interestingly said that he had a prototype Macintosh in a bag to show the software companies. He said, typically, he would meet with the CEO, CFO, and the CTO (the guy in charge of the programming). He said they would sit him down, and the CEO immediately said, “We’re going to need you to include a copy of our program with every Macintosh you sell. You pay us as you sell the Macintosh. You pay us for the program. That way, we are not marketing or anything.” The CFO would tell him, “On top of that, you will need to give us $250,000 in co-development funds so we can start this project.” The CTO would say, “And on top of this, you will need to assign a full-time engineer for when we have problems with it, and so on. You’re going to have to assign him here on-site. And you’re going to have to give us the computers and the programming environment we will need to create this program.” Kawasaki would say, ‘Before we discuss it, let me show you the Mac. He would turn it on and play this 3-dimensional chess game. Then he would close it and play with Mac Paint for a little bit, draw a few things, and then close it. Then, he would turn the computer off. He would look at them. He would look at the CEO and say, “We will not buy any of your programs. You’ll have to give the Macintosh team a copy of the program for free. But we won’t bundle it with any Macs, so you must sell it yourself. He would turn to the CFO. “We are not going to give you any co-development money either. If you decide to do it, you must finance this independently.” Then he turns to the CTO and says, “You won’t get a full-time engineer. We only have one full-time engineer for all of the developers to reach out to. He is going to be hard for you to get ahold of.” Then he’d say, “That’s all the good news. The bad news is that you will have to buy these leases that cost $10,000 apiece to develop this. You’ll have to pay $750 for a beta development environment with photocopied instructions.”

They’d say, “Okay, when can we get started?” But the point is, Kawasaki makes a great point about the fact that if it was him if he were in charge, he would do more than H1-B. He would tell people from anywhere. “If you have a great idea, you can come here and make it work. Come on down! That is exactly what we’re working for.” In Germany, I ate at a Syrian restaurant with some beautiful Middle Eastern food. I talked to the owner. He was one of the Syrian immigrants they let into the country. He had a restaurant and employed 8 Germans.

Jacobsen: There you go.

Kirkpatrick: I’m opening another restaurant. Here’s a guy who they let in as an immigrant fleeing Syria. Now, he employs 8 citizens and will open another one.

Jacobsen: Honestly, what better way to live up to what some would see as key American ideals than by coming out of a very difficult situation?

Kirkpatrick: Of course.

Jacobsen: And with a sense of hope and renewal.

Kirkpatrick: The amazing part is I have a close friend. His father came here from Greece. He is somewhat anti-immigrant. So, I never understood it. Now, of course, the other side of that is my kids are half-German. So, my ex-wife is German. My daughter lives in Germany. So, I work for Arabs. My girlfriend is Filipino. So, [Laughing] I have always considered the world my oyster. If I had it, I’d have a world passport and go anywhere. In the end, it is another political division. The amazing part for me. What was it that made the country division so important? Do you understand my point?

Jacobsen: I do. A huge indicator is the detachment reality in some of those political ideas. So, you were mentioning earlier about the age difference between Trump and Biden being significant and people being in denial that Trump is only four years younger than Biden. At that age, the distinction is not that great. Another one in the United States, certainly, looking from the outside…

Kirkpatrick: It is worse than that. Biden has been somewhat of a healthy person his whole life. Here is the other thing: let me give you another one you’re probably unaware of: Biden is a millionaire. The reason he is a millionaire is because he sold a memoir that sold in the millions. When Joe Biden became vice president, his net worth was around $360,000 (USD). He had been a senator for 30 years. That is very interesting. Think about that for a minute: he had been an American senator for 30 years. He had a $360,000 net worth. How corrupt [pt is this guy?

Jacobsen: He lived in the upper areas of the United States, but he did not live a detached, ultra-rich lifestyle.

Kirkpatrick was the senator from Delaware, which is tiny and right next to D.C. He never moved while he was a senator. He lived in his house in Delaware and took the train to work every morning.

Jacobsen: So, he had that interaction. He had that sense.

Kirkpatrick: He was a working-class guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who moved to Delaware. My point is: You turn on rigrightwingV today. You hear about the Biden crime family. This was a guy who was a senator for 30 years and wasn’t rich. That’s almost unheard of.

Jacobsen: Another big one in the United States, which one can’t mention, is the degree of Religiosity compared to many other developed nations.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, yes.

Jacobsen: The evangelical vote was very strong. There was an ethnic colouring – so to speak – to this as well. How strong is this playing into this? The problem is Religiosity. The Middle East is more religious than the developed world. I don’t know the English word, but in German, you would call it schein. It is visible but not real, if you understand what I mean.

Jacobsen: Pluralistic ignorance, you know? [Laughing]

Kirkpatrick: You’d have people in the Middle East who are Muslim because they’re Emirati, Kuwaiti, whatever. So, he is a Muslim. You find out that he hires servants. The servants are all Filipino. 2 or 3 a Filipino maid and a Filipino houseboy helping him out. Why are they Filipino? They are Filipino because the Filipinos are Christians. When he is sitting there with a glass of Scotch in his hand, they don’t think anything about it. But his persona outside of his house is not that he is in here drinking. It is, “I am this observant Muslim and so on.” I think you have a lot of this in the U.S. I spent a few months in the Philippines a few months ago. This is a country that is not only very religious, but it is publicly religious. It is visible everywhere, if you understand what I mean. You may not know if you have never been to the Philippines. They are intensely religious. You see it everywhere.

Jacobsen: I know some of the secular community there. I have done some interviews with Filipinos and Filipinas. To them, it is sometimes a little more than hard. [Laughing]

Kirkpatrick: You know abortion is illegal.

Jacobsen: Sure, it makes it doubly difficult.

Kirkpatrick: More than this, the laws are skewed hard against women, unfortunately. In any case, my point is Religiosity; if people were truly religious Christians, then Trump would be the biggest turnoff you ever saw.

Jacobsen: Someone pointed this out to me. They made an interesting distinction. We talk about fundamentalists and literalists of the Bible, things of this nature. They added an extra term that made an important distinction to me. So, I cannot take credit for this. I cannot remember who did this for me. They called them “selective literalists.” That encapsulates a lot of it. They take certain Bible passages, read those literally, and then ignore the inconvenient parts.

Kirkpatrick: I can be more specific than that. What passages are they looking at?

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: Do you know who Dr. Will Durant was?

Jacobsen: That name sounds very familiar.

Kirkpatrick: He wrote a series of books called The Story of Civilization. They are wonderful. It is a history of mankind from the beginning of civilization to the French Revolution. It is 11,000 pages long in 11 volumes. It is wonderful. But Dr. Durant said that Protestantism is Paul’s victory over Peter, and Evangelicalism is Paul’s over Christ. So, the problem is that the Evangelicals are cherrypicking the words of Paul, who was a man who never met Jesus, never spoke to him, never saw him, and frequently was at odds with the early church. So, Paul wrote things like, “If a man doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat.” Jesus never said anything close to that. Another one is Paul wrote in Corinthians, “Women should not speak in the church, even if they have a question. Let them be silent and ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church.” That is opposed to the teaching of Jesus. There is your cherrypicking. They are cherry-picking Paul and ignoring Jesus. That is what it is. The concept of Hell was not a big concept for Jesus. It is a huge concept for Evangelicals.

Jacobsen: Do you think politics trumps religion in the United States now?

Kirkpatrick: Absolutely, politics trumps religion here. I think if a lot of the people on the right who claim to be Evangelical Christians got a preacher who preached what I just said, “It is time to get back to the teachings of Jesus and not Paul, and in order to do that we can’t follow a guy with three wives who has assaulted women and found guilty of sexual assault. I think you’d have a large number of people leave the church.

Jacobsen: Do you think politics trumping religion is a religious impulse driving a lot of political discourse now, too?

Kirkpatrick: It can be. It certainly could be. I can tell you this. It is a natural progression of civilization. It will happen. Unfortunately, religion will get less and less. Eventually, it will destroy civilization. Then we get a new one. By the way, I can’t take credit for that one. That is one from Dr. Durant, who said, “You have religion. You have a secular society. At first, religion is very powerful. Pretty soon, it starts getting trumped by reason. Then, eventually, reason wins out, and people become weary and profane and “Why am I even here?”. Then something happens and brings forth a new religion, and he ends at once saying, “As long as there is poverty, there will be gods.”

Jacobsen: That is backed by the statistical evidence.

Kirkpatrick: The big problem we have today and what the conversation should be is the next two years or one year. Two years ago, I was talking about the Russian man I was talking about, I was talking about Vladimir Putin. He liked Putin. But Putin was in his second term as President of Russia. My friend was a little weary about him. He liked him, generally. I told him. “I don’t believe so, Gregory.” I gave him the reasons why. But we agreed that if he didn’t step down at the end of this second term, he would stay the ruler of the country that Russia had a problem with. Now, you see what that problem is and how it manifests itself. I will say the same thing here. If Trump is re-elected, the world has a problem. It has a serious problem. I don’t know how it will manifest itself. But it has a serious problem.

Jacobsen: Kirk, thank you very much for your time today.

Kirkpatrick: You’re certainly welcome, Scott. Keep me informed.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/04

Dr. Leo Igwe, Gary McLelland, and Victoria Gugenheim sit on a long list of people I greatly love. I wanted to write about something coming up in some of the humanist communities. One of those was the separation of Humanism and humanitarianism, related and distinct. I needed some quotes. When I asked, those three answered.

Many humanist organizations look to acquire funding from providers of grants, especially from national and local contexts in which finances are not readily available. They would make applications. They provide ideas and timelines, looking for legitimate backing. All good, fair, and aboveboard, the framing of the organization becomes the issue. 

Fundamentally, they orient themselves as engaged in humanitarianism. If you want funding from humanist organizations, then the work should be for Humanism as a life rather than humanitarianism primarily.

How do these two relate? You can borrow different discipline terminology. Humanism is the moral dimension in an individual being’s world line. As we’re all thespians at this stage of life, we have choices before us. Each has ethical dimensions. 

Global Humanism is a group predominantly composed of democratic, ethical, non-theist peaceniks. A natural bowl upon which humanitarian waters can rest and ripple. Humanism is like the pattern of motion. Humanitarianism is the actual water with the ripples or the air with the wind.

Humanism, the values, act as a theoretical framework. An invisible constellation of interrelated principles of action in the world relevant to human beings. As discussed earlier, in some sense, ethics remains inevitable once conscious embodied deliberative action enters the universe. 

After begging and pleading a whole one time, humanist artist and body painter Victoria Gugenheim gave a nice coda on that definition. “Humanism is the theory; Humanitarianism should be the practice.”

So here we are, all conscious and such, what gives? Humanism can be more. Humanitarianism can be more. 

As Gary McLelland, Chief Executive of Humanists International, said to me, “Humanism is the celebration of our shared human experience, embracing reason, compassion, and the pursuit of knowledge. It’s about recognizing our inherent dignity and worth. Humanitarianism, on the other hand, is the active expression of that Humanism, translating empathy into action to alleviate suffering and promote justice.” 

I like that. The idea of using human experience as a metric, compassion as a driver, and reason and the pursuit of knowledge as an expansive sense of exploration of the world. You need evidence of the world. You need sensory experience. You need compassion for other creatures encountered. You need the capacity to reason about it. Those might be European flavours of Humanism translated into humanitarianism, though.

Dr. Leo Igwe is a longtime colleague and a prominent African humanist. What about an African flavour to Humanism?

Igwe, Founder of the humanist movement in Nigeria and Advocacy for Alleged Witches, said, “Humanism is an outlook that accords primary importance to humanity as opposed to divinity or the supernatural while humanitarianism stands for caring for the human being. By this definition to be a humanist one must be an atheist or an agnostic, one must be non theistic. But to be a humanitarian, one can be theistic or nontheistic. Too often, people confuse Humanism with humanitarianism. Some humanitarians mischaracterize themselves as humanists.  This is understandable because both Humanism and humanitarianism resonate with focus and care for the human. Many people turn to humanists or claim to be humanists when when they face difficulties, need asylum or suffer persecutions. Yes humanists care for humanity but Humanism is not humanitarianism. It is important not to conflate Humanism and humanitarianism.”

That is more precise and makes a primary, integral distinction between the necessary non-theistic ingredient to Humanism and the theistically ambiguous, ambivalent, or agnostic input for humanitarianism. In a certain sense, to do humanitarian work is humanist, that’s true. 

At the same time, you cannot decouple the individual from the acts. If individuals believe in a god or in doing moral acts they are doing so for the purposes of a god or a higher power, then they are not humanists. 

To do a moral act within the framework of Humanism narrows the formulation of humanitarianism to the non-theist. In a way, non-theist humanitarianism doesn’t hope for a Heaven or fear a Hell. It acts in a frame of here-and-now and the non-fantastical. It is a superior ethical frame because it frames within the physical, the natural, and the informational. 

The physical reality of the world around us consists of entirely natural laws and the relative reliability of information processing of cognitive beings such as ourselves. I love that. Humanism can provide a frame for humanitarianism but is not humanitarianism; however, when Humanism is needed for humanitarian acts, it provides a superior, more mature foundation for ethical acts without reliance on a supernatural being, whether in the Global North or the Global South.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/03

*The interview conducted September 18, 2023.*

Mandisa Thomas is the Founder of Black Nonbelievers, Inc. One of, if not the, largest organization for African-American or black nonbelievers or atheists in America. The organization is intended to give secular fellowship, provide nurturance and support for nonbelievers, encourage a sense of pride in irreligion, and promote charity in the non-religious community. 

Dr. Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson is a Registered Doctoral Psychologist with expertise in Counselling Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Human Resource Development. He earned qualifications in Social Work too. Duly note, he has five postsecondary degrees, of which 3 are undergraduate level. His research interests include memes as applied to self-knowledge, the evolution of religion and spirituality, the aboriginal self’s structure, residential school syndrome, prior learning recognition and assessment, and the treatment of attention deficit disorder and suicide ideation. In addition, he works in anxiety and trauma, addictions, and psycho-educational assessment, and relationship, family, and group counselling.

Here Mandisa and Dr. Robertson talk about contexts for Indigenous and African American freethinkers.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To frame the conversation today with backgrounds and descriptions, the idea is to get some insight into the experiences, the narratives, the views, the needs, the communities, the individuals who are either coming from an African-American religious background into an atheist non-religious freethought forefront and similarly those individuals in a Canadian context coming from an indigenous background and believing less and less in the supernaturalistic elements of some indigenous culture. Indigenous in Canada has a tripart type meaning, and it means Métis, First Nations, and Inuit. They have different terms and different meanings in different contexts, but formally, in Canada, it doesn’t mean that. 

So, to start, as an overview, what are the challenges and needs of individuals in the African American atheist community and the indigenous freethought community?

Mandisa Thomas: Well, I will say that for the African-American community, there is a need for more resources as far as tangible because the church’s perception is that it provides a much-needed community resource as far as gathering, as far as representation, as far as what it needs to be institutionally represented in black communities and this is only true because of the historical aspect of things and also how most black and African-Americans in the United States became religious to begin with. I think there is a need for better information, more education, and tangible resources to help organizations like Black Nonbelievers continue to offer more financial resources for people who can have spaces across the United States. It doesn’t necessarily mean like churches but to have either similar or the same type of economic foundation and structure to where we can sufficiently help people to help themselves. 

This takes place in several forms, whether we can better connect people to resources where they can find clinical help or make it easier to live their everyday lives without so much religious pressure and overtones. I would say that that is the primary need and also a focus. There’s also a need for more people to get more involved in the spaces of racial justice and economic justice so that there’s more representation in non-religious voices when it comes to issues like reparations when it comes to issues like reproductive justice that do impact people of colour more so. So, I mean, there’s a lot that’s needed, but I would say that the primary need is more resources for us to do our work. 

Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson: Scott, can you refresh my memory? What was your question again?

Jacobsen: What are the needs and challenges?

Robertson:  Okay. I’m going to reference our Aboriginal circle. I didn’t explain in the introduction that the program I’m involved with has various branches. One of them is an Aboriginal circle looking at these, and I’m a member of that circle.

Jacobsen: You’re speaking about the one I’m part of, correct?

Robertson: Well, Scott, you are as well, that’s true too. Now, the issue here as we see it is that, and I agree with much of what Mandisa was saying there about the challenge of religion or religious thinking to our emancipation. We had an elder, he’s still part of our circle, an Anishinaabe elder, who did a wonderful article earlier this year outlining the issue. He gave up his pipe. Now, the pipe is a very important part of ceremonies, and he was called on to do ceremonies in his communities as he was trained to do. However, increasingly, it was associated with a religious way of thinking. So, he felt he was being fake because people interpreted it as an alternative to science, reason, and rationality. 

I’ll give you an example. Another member of our circle is non-Aboriginal; he’s a member of The New Enlightenment project who is not Aboriginal and not part of the Aboriginal circle. He developed the theme that we are all of African descent because, more than a decade ago, he was invited to speak at a university in Texas. He heard that Texans were a bit rightwing and that they’re Republicans down there, I guess. So, he developed the theme of this talk that any racist ideology, given that we all are descended from African origins, is untenable, philosophically untenable. He presented this same theme when he got back to his university in Canada for a graduate philosophy class, and two members of the class took exception because they said that the Aboriginal way of knowing was that the Creator placed Aboriginal people on Turtle Island.

Our member, said, “Well, let’s have a class debate on this, and I’ll pick two debaters, and your side can pick two debaters, and people can make up their minds.” No, that was not good enough. The issue was brought before the dean, and there was an inquiry; he was not fired but did not have tenure and was not re-hired. That was his last semester teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University. From that, we can see this is a religious way of thinking. A Creator gave a particular part of the world to certain people; therefore, it historically belongs to them. Frankly, I find that religious thinking like that has become a problem within Aboriginal communities in Canada, at least. I can’t speak for outside of Canada. However, there is a struggle between those who would like to see the world through a secular, scientific, and rational lens and a resurgent religion. In an article I wrote; I called this new religion Native Spirituality because it’s a set of beliefs held to be true irrespective of time and context beyond the issue of evidence. So, this is an issue we are dealing with here in Canada, and this is a reason for our organization.

Jacobsen: So, the challenge is having an evidentiary basis for the beliefs held within the indigenous communities within Canada. I’m not speaking outside because contexts will be different. However, in this particular case, I’m aware of institutional backing to probably benevolent purposes to prevent an individual from teaching boilerplate evolutionary history: we’re all one race, one species, one humankind. So, how does this get extended in the indigenous communities when individuals are bold enough to challenge some of the supernatural or historical beliefs that are not based on evidence? How is this taken when individuals within Aboriginal communities within Canada are challenging those supernatural assumptions?

Robertson: Not well. In some ways, I think we’ve regressed. I was Director of Life Skills for the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College in the 1980s. In the 1970s and 1980s, affirmative action meant something different from what affirmative action means now. Affirmative action meant that you look at a situation, study why the situation is there, and take action to rectify it. So, for example, a situation we studied was why there were very few Aboriginal graduates from universities in Canada at that time. I went to the University of Saskatchewan, and you could count the people who graduated of Aboriginal ancestry at that time on your fingers; they were few. So, we took a look and found that one of the major things that was happening was that potential university students  coming underprepared. We, being the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, were affiliated with the University of Regina, at the time. SIFC later became First Nations University.. The issue was that potential students were not coming with the needed skills. 

So, my job was created as Director of Life Skills to teach university life skills to students from remote communities. However, we look at all Aboriginal communities, including Métis. We were also teaching basic literacy because there was a gap there. This resulted in  an extra year tacked onto university education, but we got a lot of people graduating, so it was a huge success. Some students would ask, “Why do we always have to become more like them every semester? Why can’t they become more like us?” What they were talking about was those habits of mind that were formed during the Enlightenment, and in my book, Scott, you will know this: I argued that the self didn’t arrive with the enlightenment that occurred in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. No, the self is that mental map that we have that we can take ourselves as an object and place ourselves in remembered pasts and possible futures and different situations; this allows for a whole lot of rational thinking and development that the self has been on the planet for eons possibly as late as three millennia ago. In some form, a lot older than that, there’s… I don’t need to get into the archaeological evidence, but parts of the self can be traced back 50,000 years.

So, the self is what the Enlightenment did, and the way I like to put it is the Enlightenment was going to happen somewhere on the planet. The conditions happened to be right in Europe at that particular time because the mechanisms for keeping the self-repressed were weaker for various reasons. So, we did have an enlightenment process that resulted in a scientific revolution and a commercial revolution, and there were negatives there. However, there were a lot of positives, and overall, we’ve had a lot of technological progress. So, when students ask why we always have to become like them, they wonder why we couldn’t stay in what is romanticized as an idyllic life that maybe existed a thousand years ago.

One of the challenges I had with people who would like to live off the land, and I think we’ve all fantasized about, is to go up North. I’m from Northern Saskatchewan, Mandisa, a wild country. It’s mainly lakes, trees, fish, and moose, and try living off it now. It’s not the same as it was even 150 years ago. So, we can’t live in that world, but I don’t even know if we should go back to it because a lot of good can come with the knowledge bases we’ve managed to develop as a civilization. So, the issue then is not us becoming like them; the issue is developing, tying, and indigenizing those skills. Indigenization means taking the technologies here and tying them to a culture so that it feels like we own it; we take it as our own, which is the challenge. That is not something that we have done successfully.

I’m doing a workshop in Toronto in about a month. On this, is using the medicine wheel to further these enlightenments. The medicine wheel is a very flexible method of depicting holism. I understand 343 stone medicine wheels have been discovered, and the Great Plains area stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to Northern Saskatchewan. This is a way of tying the culture to the technology and owning it because science is not Western; it’s universal, and what we’re challenging is the idea that there are different ways of knowing, and that sounds good, but the concept of ways of knowing is being used to say “Well, if you’re Aboriginal, you believe things or you see things this way” Well, no, I’m sorry. That’s preventing discourse and growth in thought, which we can only get through dialogue and objective means, and we’ve been losing that, I think, to some degree in some circles. Sorry for being longwinded.

Jacobsen: For Mandisa, the need for financial contribution and sustainability of community and organizations is something that African-American religious organizations have through tithes, zakat, and so on. These continual contributions of finance make them more sustainable. As far as I know, have something of an equivalency to that in any of the secular communities, let alone the African-American secular community, as well the imposition and the weight of religion and this is something you taught me, especially for African-American women coming out of the church. It’s quite an issue because you’re giving up a lot of support structure, not just leaving the church and the god concept. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Thomas: Absolutely, Scott. So, the challenge with the church being supported through tithes and donations is that it’s often to the detriment of families. It’s like most African Americans in the United States; there’s a lot of economic spending power, but as far as wealth, there is still a severe wealth gap that we are dealing with. We still deal with economic disparities even though there has been progress over the years. Much of the sustainability for the churches and these institutions often comes from common working people, which isn’t always to the community’s benefit. Now, I will say that what would help institutionally as far as sustainability for families, individuals, and black-led institutions like Black Nonbelievers is the push for reparations. In the United States, globally, there was a push for economic reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Where some families and companies benefited economically from slave labour, they profited from slave labour. And when slavery ended, none of that transferred over to the formerly enslaved or their descendants.

So, there is a huge push to put reparations into law, which would significantly be beneficial for many African-American families. That would give much more of an edge that was denied before institutionally because you have to remember that historically, many measures were put into place that prevented African-American progress, that prevented educational opportunities, financial opportunities and also which fed like a school-to-prison pipeline or which criminalize African-Americans more than anyone else. So, these are institutional factors that we have to take into consideration. However, we also look at the church and its representation of our communities and where that financial support is now because of the Advent of the Prosperity Gospel of the 1970s. The Advent of the Prosperity Gospel encouraged more people to look to the church for miracles and put their trust in these institutions that weren’t necessarily returning on the investment. It was providing emotional support for the time being or in a time that people felt they needed it, but ultimately, it took advantage of a lot of people and, working class and poor people in the United States especially.

So, there is this perception of the church being this support system for the black community when the black community has been pretty much supporting the church more than anything else. Again, considering the disparities we still face, it has not always been to our benefit as a community. So, I think when people come out of the church, especially in African-American communities… there are a lot more people who will utilize these communities and these organizations. However, there is a need for more philanthropic support because most, especially black members of Black Nonbelievers, they’re able to chip in a few dollars when they can and just try to get to the point where we can impress upon people that the support and the community and the resources that we provide are worth supporting to the point where we can continue to support others. I think that some other larger secular organizations have had that support. 

If more people consider leaving foundational gifts to organizations like Black Nonbelievers, as others have done for other organizations, that would be very helpful. We’re still a very young organization, so there’s still time to build on that, but I think because many religious institutions do the same, they encourage their members to leave legacy gifts to their churches. So, trying to get more of our members to do the same would be beneficial, but we’re not doing so from a place of guilt or manipulation; we’re doing so to hopefully encourage people to continue to leave a legacy for the future of secularism and within the black non-religious community and then black communities as well. So, it’s about leaving; it is about preparing for our future and how we will have an organization that provides educational and support resources that result in institutional growth and turn around many of these other factors.

Jacobsen: Something coming to mind linking some of the references and the responses is the idea of the life skills development that Lloyd took on board decades ago as the Director of that program in Saskatchewan to help with using an empirical method to gather data, do an analysis, and then come up with recommendations based on that data and analysis. That’s how to do it because, as he noted, there was a success. Many in atheist, agnostic, and humanist communities will typically have higher educational attainment or know more about religions and other topics in general. It has me thinking that the disposable income of individuals in our communities, in particular, should be more well-set to make some contributions because many organizations typically get a $50 membership fee for the year, and that’s the contribution. 

As far as I can tell, they could go a bit farther than that. It’s just a matter of giving a reason for the impetus to do that. I think atheists, agnostics, and humanists don’t do fervour well; I think that comes with the package. So, the continual renewal on a Sunday or a Saturday or Friday religious service to give money or 10% of income isn’t necessarily something that would be expected except maybe something that might happen in the Sunday Assembly if it does that. Do you think there’s some kind of enticement that could be given within African-American free-thought communities or indigenous free-thought communities? However, I know the contexts are a little bit different on these things because there are, for instance, former organizations, as Dan Barker notes, for the African-American secular community as opposed to the indigenous free thought community, which is still unformed inchoate at the moment.

Thomas: Yeah, if I may just respond to that quickly. You find that most religious people give to their churches out of a sense of obligation. It is their ticket into heaven, so giving for a reward tends to be, as Lloyd said before, as far as religious thinking could also be considered religious thinking. I caution that simply wanting to give just to get something back could result in division, and we’ve seen this historically in movements that speak for liberation and justice. Unfortunately, that can get in the way, but I think the enticement or the incentive again, well, I know for Black Nonbelievers, we now co-sponsor a scholarship, right? We want to develop more programming that helps people tangibly if they need connections to education and other connections. I would say that that piece is important. However, considering the injustices that have been committed against several people of colour where our ancestors were robbed of resources, I think that it’s important to have that conversation about economic justice. This is not to point the blame at anyone but simply to point out that there were folks, our ancestors, who were robbed of the ability to have this education and these life skills to where they could be successful.

So, in addition to providing them, there also does need to be reparations, and I think that as a community that does gather information as a community that prides itself on evidence, these are not unreasonable things to look at, especially for communities that have been marginalized. So, a lot more work needs to be done as far as looking beyond the educational aspect. There need to be those institutional factors that can incorporate institutional reparations or repair some sort of reparative justice for those communities who were denied it.

Jacobsen: And like you mentioned the overall emancipation question or issue before us earlier in one of your responses, do you consider religious thought or Dogma with a religious flavour as the main impediment within indigenous communities in Canada to more free existence?

Robertson:  I think what Mandisa has been talking about has been the standard of Christianity, and there are many reasons why people are religious or have historically identified with religion. One of them is to gain answers; some do so through supernatural beliefs,  directed morality and that kind of thing. There is another very important aspect of religion that has to do with community, and perhaps what has happened and why is religion so important in the United States and black communities? Mandisa, you’ve already mentioned that it has built and preserved a sense of that community. In indigenous Canadian culture, it’s a little different. I think the majority of Aboriginal people in Canada are probably still Christian. There is one book called Reservations Are for Indians; it’s before your time, Scott. It was written in the early 1970s by Heather Jane Robertson and is about the community of Norway House in Northern Manitoba. One of the things she pointed out is that if you added up all the numbers  for all the religious groups that had members in their community, the combined membership was seven times the population of Norway House. What that meant was people were signing up for all the religions if they could, and one of the benefits is that if the religious group… and most of them were started by missionaries, they would help out with finances while you got a little extra, but there’s another powerful thing. Theistic people are all saying that each has  the way to heaven, and we can’t tell which one is true, so we’re going to join all of them and make sure we get there. Sounds rational to me. 

The issue, though, now is not Christianity in Aboriginal communities; that is an issue, but it’s not   the primary issue. The militant issue in Aboriginal communities now is another form of religion which we could call a secular religion. I’ll give you an example because earlier I mentioned the medicine wheel, and in the medicine wheel there are all kinds of ways of creating a medicine wheel; it represents wholeness, but of the medicine wheels that I talked about, two of them are divided in 28 ways, and we don’t know what each of the divisions represented because they’re like 600 years old. There’s nobody around that to explain it to us. Other medicine wheels have no divisions but are in the middle, so the medicine wheel is a very flexible way of looking at holism. It’s got a lot of potential there. However, in the religious forms, there’s something called ‘the’ medicine wheel, and it’s divided into four quadrants, which stand for physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional. So, suppose you believe in this medicine wheel that has been promoted as the medicine wheel. In that case, you’ll note that the physical is one element, but you have to work on the spiritual, and the definition of spiritual involves a belief in things not seen; it’s religion.

So, there are people who believe in the Creator I talked about earlier, but the religious thinking has been secularized, but it’s still there. Stephen Pinker, in 2003, noted that a new proto-religion had developed, with three pillars –  the myth of the Ghost in the Machine. That’s sort of like a soul. Then there’s the myth of The Blank Slate that the culture around us  creates the entirety of who we are, which means we can be recreated differently by changing the culture. The third myth was the myth of The Noble Savage, that life was idyllic 700 years ago, and everybody was living in harmony with nature, and nobody went hungry, and people lived in full equality and all that. I can tell you I studied this, talked to Elders, and worked on this; it’s not true. 

Mandisa, you talked about slavery. Well, slavery has been common in, I think, pretty much all cultures and that includes Aboriginal cultures historically. So, what are the attributes? One of the great developments of the modern era is the abolition, more so than ever before, and the rejection of slavery. So, now when we hear that clothes, for example, are made in what is effectively child slave labour in Bangladesh and  we say just because it’s cheap, don’t buy it; it’s made with slave labour. We have that moral ethic now. That’s  now ingrained in our modern cultures, and I think that’s a positive we developed. No, things were not idyllic five or 600 years ago. There were problems then, too; there was exploitation, there was war, there was disease, and there was misery. We need to use our modern rational means to empirically investigate problems and develop plans to overcome those problems. That’s the objective of the organization I represent. 

Jacobsen: Are there any questions that either of you would like to ask one another? Mandisa can go first if you’d like.

Thomas: Let me see. How successful has your organization been in doing this work, especially in representing the indigenous people of Canada?

Robertson: Not very. The organization is not primarily Aboriginal. We do havey Aboriginal members, but in terms of addressing the enlightenment, I’m afraid the question that was asked when I was with the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College is, why do we have to become like them? The answer to that has been more recently, and this has to do with the Proto religion that Pinker talked about: “Well, we shouldn’t have to be like them. We should be able to have our economies and cultures, and it should be fully funded.” And so, I hope it doesn’t go in that direction when you talk about reparations. I want to see money there for all disadvantaged, regardless of race, to help us all come together. I’m concerned that we’re being divided by race and that there’s a sense of entitlement. I’m afraid that’s affected Aboriginal people, in Canada at least, and that is okay. We do not have to participate; if we do participate in the modern economy, it will be on our terms, and we should be funded. So, we have a $6 billion-a-year Aboriginal industry in Canada doing the funding. There are reparations already, and I’m not sure it’s making a society where we could all contribute and progress together. Instead, it’s building a kind of a set of silos where each silo has certain entitlements and that somebody should provide for that. 

Jacobsen: Lloyd, do you have any questions for Mandisa?

Robertson: I think it was implied in my last answer, and that is okay. When you’re talking about reparations, you mentioned it several times, and you said because of the history of black slavery, there’s something old here. How will it be used to ensure that the people in the communities receiving it are using it to enter a world of enlightened equality?

Thomas: Well, that is up to the legislation and the people working on it, and that is what they’re working on now. Of course, I disagree with you about the sense of entitlement. It’s not about entitlement. If you have known anything about the history of enslavement at all, which, of course, yes, historically has been, the enslavement is nothing new. It is common throughout the world, but when you look at the transatlantic slave trait and how it has impacted black people across the world, which is called the diaspora, the scattering of Africans across the world and how their descendants have been adversely impacted. Others have been made rich from their labour; we cannot dismiss that as rational, evidence-based, and more enlightened human beings. Yes, we must consider that not just as a tragedy but as a world tragedy. We are talking about something that changed the global economy. Suppose the funds help more disadvantaged African Americans find a home and establish college tuition for their children or themselves. In that case, I think the legislation can make provisions to do that. That is what is being pushed through the United States government now in many forms, but just having the resources to do that. It implies that just being given money could be considered antiblackness, and there’s this presumption. I’m not saying that this is intentional, but I think the idea that these people will not spend it on what they should be considered a bit presumptive.

So, I think caution should be placed in that, but several people are relying on reparations and the inequitable funding for those of us who are already doing the hard work. Many folks are already doing work who do not get the resources needed for several institutional factors, and no one is asking for a handout. I think there’s a cartoon of what it means to be equitable, and everyone is given the boxes or the step stools, but some people still can’t see as they’re not as tall, but being given enough step stools to be able to everyone who has the same view and the same access is what’s important here. I think when we look at it, it doesn’t just impact the United States because even though there were a number of enslaved people who escaped to Canada in the period of the time that slavery was legal in the United States, this impacts the descendants of the enslaved throughout the world.

So, this is sort of a global movement. However, in the United States, there was more of a push because of again the fact that there were companies and families that benefited and generated their wealth through slave labour and that were never compensated, especially once slavery ended to those who were enslaved. And so, there does need to be more of a deep dive into that. I think some provisions can be made to ensure the future for our children and everyone because this could set an example for Indigenous people here in the United States. I mean, even though they have provisions for casinos and as such, the way many Indigenous people live here in the United States is still very much below the poverty line, which needs to change. So, this could also set a good example for other marginalized groups. 

Jacobsen: If I may, we’re just about to run out of meeting time. So, final statements: either can start, and we’ll go from there.

Thomas: Yeah, this is definitely an ongoing discussion that requires much-needed dialogue and much-needed solutions. I think that we are able to put our heads together and work towards those solutions to ensure a better future for all of us.

Robertson: I appreciate this discussion and agree that we need more discussions. There is a diversity of thought, and a part of my background, Mandisa, is that I’m also a psychologist and haven’t met a bad person. I met people who have different ideas as to what goodness is. Al Capone thought he was a public benefactor. We need to reach out to each other and find that goodness, including that goodness which is in part of some of those religious people we’ve been talking about as well, because everyone has that spark within them, and we need to reach that spark and talk to it.

Jacobsen: Mandisa and Lloyd, thank you for your time today. 

Thomas: Thank you, Scott.

Robertson: Thank you.

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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/02

*The interview was conducted on February 13, 2024.*

Rick G. Rosner earned high scores on tests by high-range tests by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations. Kirk Kirkpatrick scored at 185 (S.D. 15), near the top of the listing, on a mainstream IQ test, the Stanford-Binet. He is the CEO of international telecommunications firm MDS America Inc. Here we talk about the continuance of the era of superempowerment.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are back after a few years with a conversation with Rick Rosner and Kirk Kirkpatrick. Last time we talked, we talked about what you termed Kirk, the American Disease, and Rick, Superempowered. Kirk, have you had any updates to your definition of this idea of the American Disease?

Kirk Kirkpatrick: The biggest update is that I think Rick’s term is much better than mine. I am not that certain that it’s limited to the United States anymore. I have seen it in a lot of places, internationally. So, I think it is spreading all over the world. 

Rick Rosner: Yes, we talked before we started taping, reminding me that we discussed this in 2017 [Ed. “Superempowered: How We Turned Into A Nation (And A Planet) Of Asshole” with Rick and follow-up with Kirk and Rick, “Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Kirk Kirkpatrick and Rick Rosner on the “American Disease” and “Super Empowerment”], so it is seven years later and seven years worse. I think what we talked about back then – you reminded me – was people choosing their truths or choosing out of big, messy balls of facts, cherrypicking facts. It is worse. In that, partisans promote lies, now, as truth, unapologetically. 

Kirkpatrick: Exactly, that’s a good way of putting it. I’m unsure, Rick, whether that is a cause or a symptom. For any of that to work, they need compliant people willing to suspend rational faculties, which is what I am calling. It has become bizarre. 

Rosner: Yes, propaganda has a huge hand in this. Russia is the king of propaganda.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: Social media carried propaganda, and Russia’s pushing of discord and disruptive BS into the Western democracies is increasingly blatant.

Jacobsen: It is. I don’t know if you’ve followed what has happened in Germany. They had an instance of the far-rightwing party, which has become rather powerful, having a kind of a meeting with ultra-right nationalists talking about the mass deportation of people who have already been admitted into Germany into some of the, what they call CDU, what would be the American Republicans. It was more of the AfD or Alternative for Germany, a rightwing party. It has achieved the majority in a couple of provinces. It had become powerful. 

Rosner: I didn’t see this, but it was over in England and Belgium. I do a couple of shows every couple of weeks with my Trumpy friend.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: He thinks that Europe is in constant danger from Muslim immigrants. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: I was just over there in a fairly rough part of London. Yes, you see a lot of people who are apparently Muslim because Europe, at this point, is – what? – 10% Muslim compared to the US, which is 1% Muslim. I saw people going about their business. They had a head covering. They seemed the same as everybody else on public transportation, not sending off a hostile vibe. People come to the US and European countries to make a better life, not to take over the country. You’ve got 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. With that many people belonging to a demographic, you’re going to get some a-holes. But the idea that they are this force that is trying to take over the world is crazy BS.

Kirkpatrick: Of course, it is. I would like to give you a rather amusing and true example of exactly what you’re talking about: this idea of economics as the reason for moving. I was born and raised in a small town in North Georgia. It was in the Bible Belt. Until I left, it was a dry county. They eventually allowed you to sell beer in packaged stores in the county’s main town. It was no blacks, no Catholics. It was as rural backwoods as you can get. In the 70s, it was dead. Everybody left. There was no employment. A guy brought in a railroad car made out of glass. He started something called the Blue Ridge Scenic Railroad. It took people up through the mountains. 

Rosner: Nice.

Kirkpatrick: It attracted tourists. Because of this, this woman started a mountain antique store. That took off. It attracted that type of store. Pretty soon, there were several of these on the main street and some decent restaurants. Now, here is the killer: the woman who started the antique place was gay. The entrepreneurial people that she attracted were predominantly gay, including restaurant owners and things like this. What has happened is that this backwoods, Georgia Bible Belt, redneck town is an LGBTQ hotspot for Georgia right now? So, these people didn’t move up there to change society. They moved to economics. They didn’t change their society either. I have to agree with Rick. When I was in London, I spent ten years living in the Middle East. I am comfortable with Muslims. I sought out Muslim barber shops because they do quite a good job with your hair. As Rick said, there are people out there trying to make a living in an economically advantaged place. That’s all they’re there for. Also, when I was in Berlin, I met a Syrian refugee who stashed away money while he was working in Kuwait. It brought the money into Germany when he got into Germany. He opened this Syrian restaurant and employed 8 Germans. 

Rosner: I have another argument about what to worry about. In 2008, there were probably roughly the same number of Muslims in the world as now: maybe 1.3 billion instead of 1.4 billion. In 2008, there were zero smartphones. Now, there are 7 billion in the world. I have a buddy in a bunch of tech fields who says by the year 2100; there will be a trillion AIs in the world. Not all of them are conscious; none are your robot girlfriend. If you are worried about something disrupting the world, I would worry about tech more than I would worry about immigrants. That tech will outstrip immigration, particularly in America, where our immigration issue is based on a much lower percentage of immigrants than across Europe. 

Kirkpatrick: As I like to point out to people, as I think about history, I cannot think of a society that was destroyed because it took in immigrants. I can think of more than one or two that became very xenophobic, and that helped in their fall. But I don’t know that they just perished because they took in too many immigrants. 

Rosner: I have another statistic. A hundred years ago, America had 14% non-native-born people at the turn of the century. Now, it is 14% non-native-born people. We’re not being overwhelmed.

Kirkpatrick: It was the Germans in the late 1800s that were overwhelming us, then it was the Irish. Of course, the Chinese have been overwhelming us for years. Our first immigration faults were against the Chinese. So, they still haven’t taken over in 150 or 200 years down the line. They’re still trying [Laughing]. Immigration and this whole idea are, as Rick hasn’t said explicitly but has implied a big, nothing burger. It is not that big of a deal. It has become blown up to where it is a big deal for both sides. ‘Our borders are porous.’ Seriously? Have you been to any other borders? By the way, do you think having a non-porous border helps? The Israel-Palestine border was pretty damn strong. Yet, people got through it.

Rosner: You can see that border if you watch World War Z. In the Brad Pitt zombie movie, they show the wall. There is a whole scene of this 30-foot wall that Israel built around a lot of Gaza. It is a crazy frickin’s wall. It outdoes anything that we have on the border, wall-wise. 

Kirkpatrick: My point: Not to mention, I like to take the bigger vision. If I am looking for this strict border, really strong ones, where will I find them? North Korea-South Korea is one of them. That is not the place for me. Iran-Iraq is, probably, another one. So, places with not-so-strict borders, like Canada and the US or all of the EU, tend to be nice places to live. That is my point with a lot of this stuff. I don’t know whether the media is the cause or the media is the result of people wanting to be scared.

Rosner: Especially in the last week with the Biden report by the special counsel, Hur, liberals like me have been going crazy about both sides-ism. Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show after nine years away. In his first show last night, which was funny, it made me and a bunch of liberals upset because he did a lot of sides-ism. Where both candidates are old, both of them make verbal slipups, and Trump says nonsensical stuff. But Trump is much more despicable and, I believe, unsuitable to be president based on his record than Biden. But Biden, the media, including Jon Stewart, often treats them as equals.

Kirkpatrick: Exactly, that’s patently, more than this, an example of what he is talking about here. Even take a step back if we take a step back, you are talking about a 77-year-old man who eats junk food a lot and an 81-year-old man who works out and is in considerably better health than the 77-year-old man. On the idea of being old, they’re essentially matched up. As Rick pointed out, one is incompetent and seems to lack a moral compass. Other than what is “good for me.” The other guy is a man who went into the vice presidency with a net worth of $365,000 or something dollars (US) after being a senator for 30 years. It is incredible.

Rosner: So, I would have to think Biden has a higher net worth than that.

Kirkpatrick: He does now. 

Rosner: I misheard.

Kirkpatrick: He wrote a book while he was vice president that sold, as you can imagine, like crazy. They became millionaires while he was the vice president, in the same way the Obamas became millionaires.

Rosner: Yes, when you leave office, after holding high office, I think Bill and Hillary Clinton were broke when they left the White House from all the legal bills. After a few years of speeches and books, they had a net worth of $ 100 million or something crazy.

Kirkpatrick: They were making $50,000 per speech, $150,000 per speech, easily, and books. One of my first trips to China was in 2006. I have pictures of going into a bookstore. There is a big table where they are featuring Clinton’s My Life book in Chinese. It is not on the shelf. It is in the middle of the store on a big table featured as the book. He must have sold a tremendous amount. That wasn’t in Beijing. That was in Chengdu.

Rosner: This argues against corruption. In the four years Biden was out of office between being VP and President, he and Jill Biden made, through speeches and books, $ 16.5 million. Why would a guy who has been in politics for almost 50 years at that point understand the rules and has engaged in proper behaviour his whole career? Why would that guy jeopardize everything by making ridiculous, corrupt deals through his kid?

Kirkpatrick: It is silly. It is absolutely silly. Whose kids are we talking about? I’m sorry. Are these the people prohibited from running a charity because they are self-dealing? They do not compare in any way at all; it is ridiculous. But the point about what we’re talking about is that even though it is ridiculous. It is not. We are surrounded by people who absolutely believe it to be true. 

Jacobsen: Is this sourced to more long-term trends around what is in the education system or what is kept out of the education system over decades?

Rosner: To me, it points in the direction that people in the future are going to need help from technology to figure out the world. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes. That’s a good way of putting it. 

Jacobsen: What would be some of these first areas of human understanding of this world, an average person on the street?

Rosner: There have been a lot of articles and talk in TV news about not being able to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake. At first glance, that can be the case. But if you scrutinize stuff, you can generally figure out what is real and what is bullshit unless you are being willingly gullible. 

Kirkpatrick: Plus, there are companies now developing, several companies, AI systems that detect AI fakes. So, it is hard to push one by somebody or some organization because of the software detection. In the same way, these large language models can be very good at writing poetry in Urdu. They can be good at looking at what Rick is talking about, which is the hallmark of the fake and identifying it as it pops up if it is an AI-generated video. It is not real. You might have them in your glasses in the not-too-distant future.

Rosner: I picture people having Jiminy Crickets on their phones. Little superegos that help them make the best decisions. 

Kirkpatrick: I have been testing out Apple’s Vision Pros. They are literally mindblowing. I can certainly see where you could have a pair of glasses on and its processing. You see a video. It says, “Nope, this is fake” in the glasses itself. It tells you. “This is fake.” The glasses would be your phone or sunglasses. 

Rosner: I am on Twitter a lot. In the past week, I have had several accounts that have started actively commenting on my tweets. Their comments are strangely bland and slightly off-point. I attributed it to them being from other countries and maybe not native English speakers. What I have concluded is that they are AI accounts whose job is to go around and comment on tweets. I have no idea why. I don’t know who is putting these accounts out there. But they seem to be there. 

Kirkpatrick: They’re probably dropping words for an algorithm. I haven’t been active on X or Twitter lately.

Rosner: It is terrible and swampy and full of lunatics.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] That’s why.

Rosner: [Laughing]. 

Kirkpatrick: If I see one or two people writing something making sense, it is like they’ve flown into a pool of piranhas. 

Jacobsen: What are other ways the public is assaulted to make them softer and more susceptible to these kinds of media propaganda interventions?

Kirkpatrick: I would say one way that you get it. This will be a both sides-ism. It is the encouragement of people to look into this themselves. It is the same thing; I think when I see BioLogic advertised for an immune system disorder, You’re advertising to the end-user of a complex medication. At the same time, we’re telling people to do research on things that they probably have no way of validating, even the basic data that they’d need to do the research if they wanted to do the research. They wouldn’t have a way of doing that. By encouraging both sides to do that, what you’re doing is encouraging people to go out and Google things, and then, as Rick has said here, they will find this vast swathe of knowledge. They will cherrypick to confirm what they decided before they started the research. 

Rosner: My buddy who is super Trumpy and anti-vaxx. He sends me papers and videos which are supposedly scientific. They don’t hold up to even a minute’s worth of scrutiny. They’re, on the surface, people who don’t know how to do science trying to do science. On Twitter, if I decide to mute somebody, I will look at their profile. There are a zillion MAGA people who are claiming to be scientists or engineers of one type or another. If they are, then it is super depressing. Because that means people doing science are super gullible. But I prefer to think that a lot of these people are BSing. I got into it with somebody who claims to design nuclear reactors and is working on a fusion reactor. That person turned out to be completely fake, using somebody else’s photos. I asked them one basic physics question. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: They shut up. 

Kirkpatrick: I knew that was coming. That is the problem with that. I used to do the one with the Vaxx people. Somebody would come to me and be bitching about the vaxx and how it’s bad for you. I would look at them and say, “Can you tell me what Kreb’s Cycle is?” They’d say, “What?” I’d say, “The citric acid cycle, the Kreb’s Cycle?” If you do not know the basic cycle of human physiology, how are you going to discuss some in-depth subjects like the viability of vaccines? On the basis of what? I don’t understand; you want to discuss it. That’s the point. They don’t have the basis to do research.

Rosner: I’ve lost much of my ability to concentrate and read books. I used to read a ton of books. But now, the immediacy of information and the rate at which information and BS come flying into my feeds. I feel like that level of distractability happens in general. 

Jacobsen: Do you think people become evangelists for a cause, any cause, in this kind of mediasphere, an ecosystem of information? For instance, you mentioned how Lance sends you these papers and videos, and any amount of scrutiny would fall very quickly. It reminds me of these tales, which are some form of fundamentalist religion sending letters and emails, scripture and so on, to family members to, hopefully, bring them into the fold. It reminds me of a similar kind of psychology or social phenomenon. Do you think there is an evangelist fit there, too?

Rosner: Yes. Anything that happens has to fit into the chosen information bubble. There are pundits on each side. However, the fabrication of conspiracies, I believe, is owned more by the right. Anything that happens needs to be spun in such a way that it fits into the overall narrative. That the anti-vaxxers are pro-Trump. There is a whole set of rightwing beliefs that are afraid of immigrants. In any development, some things can fit in without being spun. The Hur report on Biden is spinning itself. So, the right will absorb that uncritically and be happy about it. When Trump is found liable for sexual assault by a jury in his slander trial, that side has to fabricate a pattern of facts that allows people to continue to believe in Trump. “Trump is a rich guy. Rich guys are victimized by false accusations of rape. By the way, Biden showered naked with his daughter and raped her.” Obviously, not true.

Kirkpatrick: The other thing you have is this phenomenon is not just Trump. It is the right. First of all, I am going to amplify what Rick said. The problem that you have with the rightwing in the United States, the democratic world, the first world in general, the liberal society that has been built is working. To be honest with you, most people, even the poor, have a pretty nice life compared to people outside of the bubble of the developed world. But the one thing that you do have is technological innovation in society, and because of that, it causes a separation in ability between the people who are intelligent and the people who are generally not so intelligent. The Trump phenomenon has empowered the last group. So, people whose political opinions weren’t taken seriously 40 years ago are now. That is a danger. The reason is that it doesn’t matter what Trump says or does. They know he is still empowering them, if you understand what I mean. It won’t matter.

Rosner: You have tens of millions of people who are willingly gullible. Who will listen to Tucker Carlson or Hannity and buy what is being said uncritically? Scott, you are up in Canada. I feel like up in Canada. Things are less nuts up there. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Rosner: You may not have the full panic or uneasiness that we have down here because things are more nuts down here. 

Kirkpatrick: A lot more nuts, a lot more.

Jacobsen: When it happens, they’re outliers. Any of the figures that tend to have an American styling to them in their means of disseminating bullshit. They’re typically marginalized, or if they become famous, they pretty often become infamous. So, it becomes an obvious mark that, even though famous, one should not necessarily trust what they say. If they have any professional qualifications or a deep passion for something, so they have something relevant to say about it, you can listen to them within that sphere. But outside of that, you don’t listen to them too often. I am not too glued to social media or anything like that to get away from it.

Kirkpatrick: Scott, I was sitting in a Kava bar a couple of days ago. A guy sitting beside us was one of our “I want to wear a gun everywhere I go,” and so on. We were discussing this. One of the things I said was, “Guy, we live right up the street from Fort Pierce. It is a pretty dangerous place. But you can go out on the street in London. You are not going to get killed, generally.” The first thing he did was tell me about the epidemic of knife attacks in the UK. Which, of course, has been in the news, especially in the rightwing news, “It is an epidemic for the UK.” 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] I see what you’re saying.

Kirkpatrick: I pointed out to him. “Guy, with their epidemic, there are still 3.6 or so people per 100,000 killed with a knife in the UK. There’s 4.8 killed with a knife per 100,000 in the US.”

Jacobsen: Cornel West made a point a while ago. I don’t necessarily agree with his theological leanings and such. I like his passion – let’s say. He made a good social commentary comparison, or contrast rather, between the United States and Canada, particularly California. He noted that in terms of how Canadians kill each other in all ways is about the same as how Californians kill each other with stabbings. 

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: Right.

Jacobsen: So, it is a relative metric. So, when people talk about the most dangerous city in Canada, I used to work in a psychology lab that worked with the RCMP. It was an Indo-Canadian centre in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. I interviewed three times; when I first started interviews, Sgt. Baltej Dhillon was the first person in the RCMP to be able to wear a turban. He had to fight for that. It was controversial in the 90s. Not a big deal anymore. He won the case, naturally. In that particular city, you can say, “It is the most dangerous place in Canada.” You have to always contextualize. Yes, but in Canada, which is one of the safest places in the world, even at a high rate here, it is amongst the safest in the world. It is a relative ranking or comparative metric. I agree with the point. 

Kirkpatrick: If you don’t count freezing to death.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s why most people live close to the border.

Rosner: Kirk, you said earlier that liberal centrist government, non-crazy government, has been working pretty well. I’d argue that I want a normal government, even if it is a little dysfunctional because I want the government to not be insane. Until tech can come along and make a lot of our wishes come true, that is obviously what is going to happen. Tech will bring some dystopian aspects that we’re already experiencing. It will bring a lot of the benefits that people associate with the Singularity, like vastly extended lifespans. Entertainment is already tons better than it was when I was a kid. The quality of life will improve vastly. Although, weirdly, if we can keep from going crazy for the next 15 years, one other thing. We were talking about forces of derangement, more or less. I have a nutty theory in addition to the derangement caused by propaganda and the Russian firehose model of disinformation. I wonder. Looking back on history, we had a flu epidemic started in 1918. That pandemic killed at least 50,000,000 people worldwide and messed up a lot of people’s brains. Within ten years of that pandemic, you have the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Within 20 years, you had World War 2. We know that Covid eats your brain. That a bad case of COVID, bad enough to hospitalize you, does the equivalent of 20 years of aging worth of damage to your brain. I’d say at least half of the people on Earth have had Covid by now. It is still out there in huge numbers. I am wondering if Covid is making us stupider and more subject to crazy behaviours and movements. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] It makes me wonder if Fox News eats your brain. [Laughing]

Rosner: It does. It is a common story. “My dad was a moderate Democrat. Until he started watching Fox News, now, he is not.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: You have a few of the old sticklers on both sides. You have old Republicans who shouldn’t be Republicans today because they’re not Trumpsters. My father, who has been dead for quite a while, was one of these old-time democrats. Big labour guy, in the end, when he was in his 80s, he was basically aligned with the Republicans. But he would have caught fire and burned before he pulled any levers for Republicans. No matter what, he was one of those. I do believe that Rick might have a point with the brain damage. I am not sure if that hadn’t happened before Covid; maybe it had accelerated. The funny part about the Spanish Flu. The pandemic he was talking about. It is believed to have started in the US. 

Rosner: Yes. 

Kirkpatrick: They were so quick to blame China. The Spanish Flu epidemic was believed to have started in Kansas. 

Rosner: That was being censored. There were reports of the King of Spain getting the flu. So, that is where the “Spanish Flu” came. It is goofy that way.

Kirkpatrick: It was because it was World War I, and Spain was neutral. There was no new censorship in Spain. So, they reported their flu statistics. Where all of the other European countries were at war, they weren’t going to report this. They kept silent. That’s why they called it the “Spanish Flu,” remember 1917.

Jacobsen: I want to focus on 2 points of contact here too. There are two populations of prominent types of people who can probably fall into two categories. One would be cynical operators. The second would be useful idiots. Do you think those classes of prominent figures who are cynical operators who want to encourage these types of conspiracy theories and bad theories about reality – how the world works politically, socially, scientifically, and so on – and useful idiots who extend the reach of those cynical operators through giving them microphones are equally bad, or do you think they are differently bad in different ways?

Rosner: The leaders, the Alex Jones’s of the world. I think the term for them is “accelerationists.” The “let it all burn” folks who want to have things get heated as fast as possible because only after things come crashing down can you rebuild. Yes, those people are super bad. I am not a Christian. I do not believe in Jesus as a holy person. But I keep wishing Jesus would come back…

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: … and rapture all the a-holes of the Earth. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] It reminds me. There is a company out there. That will take contracts for taking care of your animals after the Rapture. So, if you know you are going to be gone, Fido will be here by himself, starving to death. They guarantee that they are 100% atheist. Nobody is going to heaven. After they are gone, you pay them now. Afterwards, they take care of Fido for you.

Rosner: That’s a really good business.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] I can think of a lot of other Rapture-based businesses. The problem is you’re taking advantage of some dimwits. Sadly, stupidity is dangerous. It is a problem. As Rick has said, I am not sure if it’s not going to get worse before it gets better. It gets better because it always does. But if you consider that the Nordic countries have achieved, probably the highest standard of living humans have ever achieved in history, they tend to be less authoritarian than even places like the US. It gives a model of what you should be working at. That is the last thing or one thing I wanted to say. You used the word “bad” when you were asking Rick about the ‘bad people.’ I would like to define “bad.” For me, a politician is bad when his motivation is not the betterment of society for everybody. I mean that in a malleable way. There can be people like Mitt Romney, for example, with whom I don’t agree on a lot of things. I do believe that he believes that he is honestly and earnestly working to better his society, to make life better for everybody. Even if I don’t agree with his methods of doing this, you have a lot of people in our government today who do not have that as their motivation. It may be self-aggrandizement in the case of Trump. It may be “I am on the back of a tiger that I can’t let go of,” in the case of Lindsey Graham. Those are the bad people. That is what bad means. You are not working towards the betterment of society as you should as a public figure.

Rosner: The job of being part of a national elected office has changed to where it attracts a lot of terrible people because of money and politics. You are not allowed to fundraise on the job. You can’t make calls from the Capitol. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: There is a separate building. You, a congressperson, have to spend 20/25 hours a week as part of your job cold-calling people and begging them to donate money. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: That job is so miserable among other unsavoury aspects of public office, which means a lot of rotten people have been running for office lately.

Kirkpatrick: When I first started, I spent three years on the Hill with lobbyists as the head of a telecommunications company. I would go in and see congressmen and senators about my issue. Of course, it is a big place for me, too. When I first went up there, I was going with Bob Dole’s ex-assistant chief of staff. Bob was our lobbyist. The first person we saw was Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska. I saw down with him. I started to tell him what my issue was. Two minutes into a 10-minute explanation. He said, “Kirk, I don’t have time for all of this right now. I am going to have cocktails tonight at this bar in DC. I will have a lot of time there. If you want to come, we can sit down and talk about it.” I said, “Oh wow, thank you very much, senator, thank you.” He sat up. He said, “Goodbye.” He left. We left. I turned to Dennis. I was excited. I said, “We will have cocktails with the senator tonight.” Dennis said, “You understand it is $5,000 dollars a person to get in the door.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: Ah.

Kirkpatrick: He said, “If we go, it will be $10,000.”

Rosner: Oh.

Kirkpatrick: You can imagine. I had lots of experiences like that up on the Hill. Where everybody had an ear to listen and a hand to get some campaign donations. In fact, I saw everybody on the Hill: 500 or so people. Of the 500, only 2 of them one was direct enough to be rude. It was Senator J. Rockefeller of West Virginia. When we sat down with him, he basically said, “Listen, guys, I want to tell you something.” If you are not going to sit down to tell me something to help the people of West Virginia, you are wasting my time. I want to get out of my office.”

Jacobsen: Ha!

Kirkpatrick: How’s that? 

Jacobsen: It’s good. 

Kirkpatrick: ‘I don’t care what your problem is. If it is not something that I can help my people with…’ Also, we sat down with Nathan Deal of North Georgia. He essentially said the same thing. “Listen, I don’t want to sit here and listen to this if f it is not good for the people of North Georgia and what I represent.” Everybody wanted money. 

Rosner: Bob Dole was a decent Republican politician. I remember him conducting his presidential campaign with restraint and dignity, like John McCain. 

Kirkpatrick: In fact, to be honest with you, Scott, you are probably too young to remember. Rick, do you remember Barry Goldwater?

Rosner: I remember him being characterized as a dangerous extremist. 

Kirkpatrick: He was a dangerous extremist. He was nicknamed “Mr. Conservative.” He is Reagan’s role model. He is considered to be or was considered to be the father of the American conservative movement. By the time he died, I believe in the 1990s. He said to the establishment Republicans, “Don’t associate my name with anything you do. You have damaged the party far more than the Democrats ever have. You are extremists.” He said to Bob Dole, “Can you imagine we are the liberal wing of the Republican party now?”

Rosner: It’s crazy.

Kirkpatrick: It is crazy. Bob Dole was a conservative from Kansas.

Rosner: Some of my favourite people on Twitter and in general are former Republicans who got disgusted with what is going on. They have the courage of their convictions. They’ve close observers. I like Joe Walsh, a former congressman. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Rosner: I like Rick Wilson. Probably, in the future, he will be a campaign strategist. He probably came up with some of the campaigns and tactics in the former years. Now, he is working to stop Trump from getting re-elected.

Kirkpatrick: Mittt Romney!

Rosner: If you gave me a choice now, “You can have Biden with a 50% chance of getting elected, or you can just go with Romney and get rid of the risk.” I would take Romney over the risk of having Trump.

Kirkpatrick: I am a solid Democrat. I might even take him over Biden, to be honest with you. The reason is Mitt Romney is a technocrat. This is a guy who gets things done. That’s what he does. He has very little ideology and is very much a technocrat. 

Rosner: He came up with the precursor to Obamacare. He ran a Winter Olympics.

Kirkpatrick: And made money! They made money! 

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: Who else has done that?

Rosner: Nobody, we have an Olympics here in 4 years. We may not lose money because we have had two previous Olympics and a ton of sports arenas in Los Angeles. I am hoping it is not a boondoggle. 

Kirkpatrick: I hope the weather straightens out. I will tell you. LA has gotten strange.

Rosner: I don’t know. Last week, we had the biggest rainstorm in two decades or something. Stuff is increasingly volatile everywhere. 

Kirkpatrick: Oh yes, it is terrible. “Terrible” is not the word. I can give an example of what has happened here with global warming. I am from a place where we get 33 degrees Fahrenheit one night a year at 5 in the morning. We will have three nights, which will be in the upper 30s and six nights below the mid-40s. Winter is generally in the upper-50s as a low for the day.

Rosner: That is LA weather. We will see ice on the ground, maybe a few days a year.

Kirkpatrick: We don’t ever freeze.

Jacobsen: That’s the Canadian motto.

Kirkpatrick: My point is: Last year, we had one 30-degree day and four 40-degree days. This year, we’ve had 3 40-degree days and no 30-degree days at all. It is warming up. It is 78 degrees right now where I am. We didn’t have any 30-degree days at all. Only four or five 40-degree days. It is exceptionally warm. In LA in June, I messaged you to see if you were in town. 

Rosner: I am bad at getting messages, but okay. 

Kirkpatrick: I think you answered me after I left. It was cold as shit in June. My friend said, “We have June gloom, but this is ridiculous.” 

Rosner: I think climate change will eventually result in LA being abandoned by the entertainment industry. 

Kirkpatrick: Because of the weather?

Rosner: People in entertainment. We’re all babies. We don’t like to be uncomfortable. If we start having 25, 30, and 100-degree days a year, a bunch of 80- 90-degree days, water becomes an issue. I think you’ll see more and more industries moving North. Plus, with telecommuting, you don’t need to have capital. The entertainment industry moved from New York to LA over the course of the 20th century. I think over the course of this century. It will disperse to every place. 

Kirkpatrick: That is probably a good way of putting it: Disperse to every place.

[Break, session 2 begins]

Jacobsen: Okay, so this is a follow-up session 2. In the last one, we were discussing the larger context of the American Disease or Superempowered. Kirk, you were noting that “Superempowered” is probably a better term than American Disease.

Rosner: I like “American Disease” more. “American Disease” reflects the current dysfunction better.

Jacobsen: What about Kirk’s point earlier that it’s spreading more and taking on an international flavour

Rosner: That is another point in favour of American Disease.

Jacobsen: Oh, because it is being exported, that’s a good point. Kirk, in your interview with me, you noted that was big country thinking. Can you delve into that?

Kirkpatrick: What I was saying is some of the propaganda that we live under, some of the things like “greatest country on Earth.” I mentioned to him what we are talking about. Many times, somebody would say, “This is the greatest country on Earth.” I say to them, “How many countries have you been to?” I would say, “I have never left the US.” I’d say, “How do you know it is the greatest country on Earth?” What we didn’t get into, you might speak to many Americans who might consider themselves rather well-travelled because they have been to Alaska and never left the US. This is a phenomenon that you will see in Russia and China: what I call the big country syndrome. If you walk up to someone in Sergiyev Posad in Russia, they expect that you’re going to speak Russian to them no matter what you look like. Same in China. Same here in the US, as you know. This is beyond the big country syndrome. 

Rosner: You could make the argument, plausibly, that this is the greatest huge country on Earth. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s good. That’s very good.

Rosner: You’re up against China India, which have their own dysfunctions and Brazil. Depending on what your priorities are, the Heritage Foundation does an annual freedom index, which is basically how capitalist your country is: the US is 25th out of about 170 ranked countries. But it outranks any other mega-country.

Kirkpatrick: Right.

Rosner: The little countries, there are lots of great little countries like all the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, the Nordic countries. With their populations of 2 to 7 million, they are nimble enough that they can do all sorts of cool stuff. 

Kirkpatrick: Estonia is one of the most connected countries on Earth.

Rosner: Yes, you can become an e-citizen of Estonia without living there. You can be an electronic citizen somehow. We are a big old cruise ship that takes 3 miles to make a turn. Even more so now because we’ve got obstructionist governments, which is another problem with huge countries. The more people, the more assholes and the more homicidal assholes, so you are going to see more maniacs doing maniacal stuff.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, absolutely, and you could be more extreme in doing it because you’re doing it from a larger sample. 

Rosner: Yes, my parents were Republicans. They were fine. They had a party every time Nixon was elected. Everyone was invited, even if they didn’t vote for Nixon. My dad was a small businessman. His whole day was spent hanging in and around his store, talking with people. If he had started crazy talking and conspiracy talking, his friends, customers, and poker buddies would have set him straight. I feel like there is a loss of person-to-person, face-to-face, in the flesh, interaction. It has been replaced by anonymous messaging. This does two things. It gives lunatics a network to be lunatics in. It closes out messages from beyond the network that say, “You’re frickin’ crazy.”

Kirkpatrick: Or say, “You are frickin’ crazy.” The other thing is there has been this acceptance of everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. About things that aren’t opinions, if you understand what I mean, it is not my opinion whether it is summertime or wintertime. You can communicate facts to people who simply take them as your opinion. Their opinion is different. 

Rosner: Because there are all these structures where when my Trumpy buddy presents an article that tells me a so-called fact. What is the source? It is  Epoch Times.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: Breitbart, the deal is: I was a fact checker on game shows. You need to come up with two legitimate sources that agree. That your fact is a fact. After getting some questions wrong, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? raised their standard to four sources. The deal is, on the right, My buddy Lance can come up with eight sources who all reinforce each other about what is a fact. They’re all BS. They are all part of that sphere. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes. People either aren’t capable or don’t bother thinking past something they like; they read, and they like. A statistic that was floating around for a good, long while was gun lobby selling the idea that there are 2.5 million defensive gun uses in the US. 

Rosner: Which sounds plausible.

Kirkpatrick: It could sound plausible, except were that the case, it would imply 2.5 million is 1% of the adult population of the United States.

Rosner: Right.

Kirkpatrick: If they are using it defensively, it implies they are using it against, at least, one other person. That is, 2% of the adult population of the United States is involved in gun usage instances every year. Suppose I am 50 years old and have been an adult for 50 years. Statistically, a good number of the adults I know should have been involved in one of these instances. Yet, nobody I know is. I come from the backwoods of North Georgia. 

Rosner: You poke at the number. A) You can poke at the number for half a second, do the analysis you did, and say, “That doesn’t sound right. Maybe it is 2.5 million per year. Maybe it is 2.5 million since they started keeping statistics.” You look it up. You find it is, maybe, illegal even to keep these kinds of statistics.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: The CDC is legally prohibited from keeping some kinds of gun death statistics because the NRA didn’t like that.

Kirkpatrick: My whole point is that it was the first time I read that statistic. It immediately jumped out to me. This cannot be possible simply because the number involved implies a lot of people who you know should come home one day and say, “Holy shit! Some guy pulled a gun out on me.” It should be somewhat common for you to know this.

Rosner: Yes, except a lot of people aren’t good at math. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Rosner: I am kind of frustrated with the American math curriculum. You go to geometry, algebra, trigonometry, precalculus, and calculus. If you are trying to get into Ivey, you might get all the way up to differential equations. There is no class in probability and statistics.

Kirkpatrick: Even what the classes are teaching, what is the proficiency? What is the proficiency level?

Rosner: My kid is now an art historian. She wanted to go to a good college. She went through differential equations. When is she going to use differential equations?

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Rosner: She could use probability and statistics. Probability and statistics, you can apply to anything. You could do some statistical analysis if they found this many samplers from this era. How many more might be out there somewhere? People don’t have the habit of doing back-of-the-envelope statistical analysis. COVID is a hotbed of people coming to wrong scientific conclusions, and nothing comes to mind immediately but wrong mathematical conclusions. 

Kirkpatrick: Wow, a lot of correlation doesn’t equal causation-type analysis. 

Rosner: Like VAERS, are you aware of VAERS?

Kirkpatrick: No. 

Rosner: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), somebody goes to a doctor and says, “I broke my arm. I have a headache. I am peeing blood. If this happened, within a month or two of them getting vaccinated, it is supposed to go into a database.” Based on the database, if you have a ton of people peeing blood, and if you compare it to the people who weren’t recently vaccinated, then you see if there is a higher occurrence, a statistically higher occurrence. If it turns out, people occasionally have blood in their urine. Then, no, it is not a freakout. You, maybe, don’t need to look further. 

Kirkpatrick: Mine was a little more active than that. I got my COVID vaccine through the VA. The VAERS program would send me a text message every week and ask me. “Have you had any of these conditions?” Have you had anything happen this week?” And so on, then, we’ll talk to you next week. 

Rosner: That is a good thing. Unless it is used by idiots.

Kirkpatrick: Of course.

Rosner: There is a group, a webpage, and documentaries called ‘Died Suddenly.’ It is based on a misunderstanding VAERS, in which x number of people died within a month of getting vaccinated. You do the Bayesian simple analysis. How many people, regular people based on a similar population, would have died suddenly? Or LeBron’s kid keeling over with a heart attack on the court at age 18. People say, “That never happened before.” No, if you look at sudden deaths among people under 30, dying on the basketball court is – dying under 30 is rare – not rare on the court among that population.

Kirkpatrick: It is not that rare. It has been happening forever. It is not something that is more, now. 

Rosner: Taking people through the math. Try taking people through the math on Twitter; people aren’t going to hang around for that.

Kirkpatrick: What’s math?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] Right.

Kirkpatrick: I used to, when I Twittered, of the argument: If someone wanted to do math with me, and if I wrote out an equation like x+7=4, and their response was, “You can’t add letters and numbers.”

Rosner: Wow. 

Kirkpatrick: That would end the conversation immediately for me. “Sure, sure, that’s enough.” You have the functional equivalent of this happening quite a bit on Twitter. 

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: It was funny. You talked about Estonia being so connected. The head of our Estonian broadcast unit was a native-born Estonian. He’d grown up in New Jersey. I came in one day. He said he’d been offered a position as ambassador to the United States for Estonia. I congratulated him. He said, “If I take it, I have to give up my American citizenship. Because I will serve another government and be an American at the same time.”

Rosner: I see.

Kirkpatrick: He accepted it. Five or six years later, he was the president. He served two 5-year terms as the president of Estonia. The reason that I find it a little amusing is that he was a big MacIntosh user. When he became President of Estonia, I wrote him and asked him if he was still using the Mac like he always did. He wrote back to me. I wrote to his presidential address. He said, “Look at the return address.” It was thelvis@mac.com.

Rosner: He turned the whole country, Mac.

Kirkpatrick: He was continuing. The Estonians were already knowing they needed to push hard into the internet. They became the most connected country on Earth. They are a little scared now, of course, especially given Trump. There is a substantial Russian-speaking minority in Estonia. 

Rosner: What percent?

Kirkpatrick: I don’t know. However, they have been vocal about keeping Estonian as the language, drunken Finnish, as they sometimes say. Estonian and Finnish are virtually the same language. 22% Russian. 

Rosner: That’s a lot. That’s disturbing because of the justification for trying to take away chunks of Ukraine. 

Kirkpatrick: Exactly. They are concerned. He is not the biggest Trump fan. I am not speaking for him. I am telling you. You can imagine the Baltics, especially, but they are NATO members. 

Rosner: I am sad that Russia’s leadership went so bad. I like mosaics. When people think of mosaics, they think of crappy mosaics, mostly because that is what most of them are in America. Historically, there have been some nice mosaics. I like those. Out of St. Petersburg, I bought a couple of excellent mosaics. I was thinking, “At some point, taking trips to Europe, it might be nice to go there and meet these people in person.” Now, I will not even communicate with them over email because that is a way to get flagged.

Kirkpatrick: It could be a way to get them flagged as well.

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: That is the bigger problem. I was in Russia last in 2005. I had not been there for probably ten years. So, maybe, from 1994 to 2005, it totally transformed itself. It has become a modern metropolis. I was absolutely blown away by the transformation in Moscow. I can’t believe that they threw all this away. It boggles my imagination. This transformation was amazing. 

Rosner: China, I read an article on China. It suggests China is throwing a lot of its modernity away. What is his name? The guy people say looks like Winnie the Pooh.

Kirkpatrick: Xi Jinping.

Rosner: He is an old-school dictator and makes bad economic decisions in order to have more control over the country’s dictator style.

Kirkpatrick: That is definitely happening. He is reining in a lot of people who had serious economic power. That is also happening. The amazing part is, in spite of all this, the things these guys are doing are absolutely amazing. China put in more solar power in the last two years than the US has done in history. 

Rosner: Yes, that’s crazy. But also, I feel like – and you are better informed on all this than I am – China, for the most part, can just be patient and let having four times the population that we do…

Kirkpatrick: …What Xi Jinping has done is crazy. I think a lot of the Chinese know it. Hu Jintao, who came before him, was what you said: Patient watching the economic miracle happen, “Let’s not mess with it. Let’s keep things going the way they are, so no instability.” Xi Jinping has gotten into the cult of personality thing.

Rosner: It is a shame for China. But it gives us a bit more breathing room if we want to maintain dominance a little longer.

Kirkpatrick: Remain the hegemon? I am not sure the UK minds so bad that they lost it. 

Rosner: I like going to the UK. If you grew up there, if you lived there, it is another country. It is grimy in London, but going there as a tourist is fun. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Rosner: All the former number one countries of the world: Spain, Italy. We’ll be a great country to visit and live in after we lose it.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] China is an absolutely wonderful place to visit. I will tell you that right now. It is still a wonderful place to visit. Nobody will mess with you unless you draw a crowd. You’re not going to be out on the street preaching. If you said, “No, Xi Jinping sucks.” People would ignore you. They would not shun you.

Rosner: My framework is that I have been married for 33 years. My time of going to a club and trying to hook up is over. Plus, I wasn’t good at it. I tend to look at countries. “Is this a country where the 25-year-old me would have liked going to a club and trying to meet a girl?

Kirkpatrick: Do you mean China?

Rosner: I mean any country. It is one of my criteria.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, yes.

Rosner: I am not going out doing that. I look at things in a twisted retrospect. Is it a fun night? It is a ridiculous way to look at countries. 

Kirkpatrick: That is most of the countries in Southeast Asia. China has an unusual thing. It is different from most of Southeast Asia. They have these clubs. You go into them. They have girls who work in the club. They come and sit down next to you, talk to you, rub your back, smile at you, rub your leg. That is all they do. You tip them $20 or something like that. They’re not going home with you. They’re not going to the back room or anything like that. They are not even kissing you. They will rub your back, arm, or leg and giggle a little. Things like this.

Rosner: That is not the worst thing in the world. I don’t like strip clubs because it is a lot of money for things to happen to and around me. That won’t work.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: Whenever anyone compares to a strip club, if they’re in the mood for a strip club, it is saying, “Let’s go into the buffet place. We couldn’t eat anything, but we could look and smell. But you can’t eat.” That’s not my idea of fun.

Rosner: That brings up another thing of people who have lunatic beliefs in America and elsewhere. It is a lot less painful to be an incel now than it was when I was a kid. I desperately wanted a girlfriend. When you feel that way, a guy can go a couple of ways. One way is to be pissed at girls for not appreciating them. The other way is to look at yourself and say, “I have got to improve myself.”

Kirkpatrick: “I am a nerd.”

Rosner: Yes! I went to crazy lengths to make myself more attractive and to better myself. Now, there are a lot of incels. Incel is short for involuntary celibates. Guys who can’t get laid. There is a big voluntary component to it.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Rosner: A lot of guys decide not to care about it. They’ve got plenty of things to occupy them besides wanting a girlfriend. Plus, there is an endless cornucopia of porn. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] You mean schmuck. Right? What do you mean by “incel”? I’m sorry. I know. No, I know. I absolutely understand. Every time I hear it. It is so pitiful. It is their fault. What do you mean by “it is their fault?”

Rosner: A lot of people who hold lunatic beliefs. It has always been a problem, but it is worse now. The craziest voices are the loudest. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes, exactly. The problem is we are used to recognizing crazy and simply not letting it interfere in the public sphere. The US was rather good about not allowing crazy. It popped up every once in a while. But most of the time, in the public sphere, we didn’t allow it. 

Rosner: The John Birch Society, in the ’50s and ’60s, had to do its business via the mail. Having a conversation is like playing chess by mail. It would take weeks and months. 

Jacobsen: Wasn’t there a figure like Dan Quayle that popped up at some point?

Kirkpatrick: Dan Quayle was George H.W. Bush’s Vice President. When they stuck a microphone in his face, this guy went blank like a deer in the headlights. One of his quotes was that they landed in Hawaii. Of course, women came. They threw a bunch of leis around his neck. This reporter stuck a microphone in his face and said, “Vice President Quayle, why do you think Hawaii has played such a pivotal role in the Pacific?” He said, “Hawaii is a group of islands. It is in the Pacific. And it’s here.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s good.

Kirkpatrick: When I worked for Radio Free Europe, the president of Radio Free Europe told me about a week before he was going to DC. He was bitching. They set him at a state dinner next to Dan Quayle. He was going to have to listen to this idiot the whole dinner. This guy was a Republican like him. It wasn’t like that he didn’t like him. “I am going to have to listen to this idiot. It is going to be terrible.” When we came back, he said, “The guy is nothing at all like what we see on the camera. When I was talking to him, he seemed like a normal, intelligent guy.”

Rosner: Dan Quayle was a bit of a hero in the January 6 insurrection.

Kirkpatrick: Oh, did he say something about it?

Rosner: Pence was like, “Can I throw out the vote? Can I accept these alternatives?” He went to Quayle. Quayle said, “Absolutely not; you have to follow the norms.” 

Kirkpatrick: Of course.

Rosner: We have a long history of tarring and rejecting politicians based on one or two incidents.

Kirkpatrick: Quayle [Laughing] had lots of instances. 

Rosner: The nail, the stake through his chest, might have been when he corrected a kid, like a 4th-grade kid. He visited a classroom. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] Yes. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] Why would you do that?

Rosner: A kid spelled “tomato.” Quayle corrected him and put an “e” on the end of the tomato.

Kirkpatrick: [Laighing] Right. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Kirkpatrick: Dan Quayle was wrong. We can’t continually look forward to the front. We have to look past the back.

Rosner: It is happening right now with Biden being painted. The first year of Saturday Night Live was 40 years ago or more. Ford is president. He stumbled a little bit getting out of Air Force One. If you look, most presidents have had trouble coming up and down the stairs of that thing. It is steep. So, SNL did a skit every week where Chevy Chase, playing Gerald Ford, tripped and took down a Christmas tree.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] Because he tripped.

Rosner: Yes, Ford was a great athlete. He was a college football player. He was anything but clumsy. 

Kirkpatrick: Do you know which position he played, which makes your point even better? He was a fullback. 

Rosner: So, he had to be nimble. 

Kirkpatrick: He, at least, wasn’t the stumblebum that they painted him to be. He had to run with the ball. He was a good athlete. 

Rosner: Then what is his name? Dukakis rides in a tank. Somebody, some military person, said, “You can’t be in a tank without, for safety reasons, wearing a helmet.” Dukakis didn’t have the foresight to ask, “What will this look like?” They put on the helmet. He looked ridiculous. That, maybe, cost him several percentage points, at least, looking goofy. 

Kirkpatrick: In fact, it shows you how skewed this perception is; that when that happened when it was Dukakis and Bush, and the Blue County did a whole series, ‘Do we pick shrimp or wimp?’ George H.W. (Bush) was the wimp in that. He was a fight pilot in the Navy! He got shot down! He was the least wimpy person you could possibly imagine. This was a guy who raced cigarette boats in his 80s. What are you talking about, “wimp”?

Rosner: Didn’t he skydive at 90 years old or something?

Kirkpatrick: It was bad enough. Gorbachev started saying, “Have you been with this idiot on a boat? He is insane.”

Rosner: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: He is doing 120 miles per hour across a lake in a cigarette boat with Gorbachev scaring the living shit out of him. He was a Navy aviator. He got shot down and bobbed in the ocean for hours until they picked him up. He is the wimp. 

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: What are you talking about, “wimp”? That kind of stuff. 

Rosner: Which brings up the media, especially since we moved to 24-hour news; TV news is frickin’ profit driven and terrible. Fox News is terrible. In that, it is intentional propaganda. But CNN and MSNBC aren’t much better in what they cover and how they cover it. 

Kirkpatrick: I don’t know how much you can alter the Overton Window in the media. The problem is there is so much that would turn people off. It would have to be a slow movement back towards the center. 

Rosner: Yes, I would like real-time fact-checking. 

Kirkpatrick: That is coming. That’s what I said. I think this Apple Vision Pro is where you’re going to start seeing. Of course, not in this, maybe 5 or 8 years down the line. You have a pair of glasses. Even in a conversation with somebody, someone says something, like your 2.5 million gun uses. Something in the glasses says, “Debunked,” or, “Wrong, incorrect.” Something like this. You don’t have to say it. You see it immediately. Oh, nope, that’s not right. 

Rosner: That would be great if that happened. 

Kirkpatrick: It is extreme. But the way I would point it out. Think about the Terminator movies showing his viewpoint, looking out his eyes.

Rosner: It has been ten years, 15 years, since Google Glass. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes, Google Glass has been more what the glasses saw. Apple Vision Pro is more overlay than what you see. It becomes part of your reality if you understand what I mean. 

Rosner: That is awesome.

Kirkpatrick: Imagine walking into your grocery store. Every buy one get one free has a big red circle around it. When you look down the aisle, “Ding, ding, ding,” it’s all in circles. That’s augmented reality. 

Rosner: I am hoping. The future has all the awesome stuff.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] We say that. I am an old man now. I am not that old.

Rosner: Me too. 

Kirkpatrick: When I think about the fact that I have voice recognition now, on a scale of 97/98% good, I don’t think I would get to this. My house is almost 100% voice-controlled. I didn’t think we’d get to this. I put Apple Vision Pro on. I said, “This is an iPhone moment.” In another ten years, these will be sunglasses. Everybody will have them. 

Rosner: That’s good. I am waiting for the contact lenses.

Kirkpatrick: They’re coming too. They are coming. You can go further than that, the Neuralink.

Rosner: I am a little skeptical of Musk. 

Kirkpatrick: I am a lot skeptical.

Rosner: But somebody is going to do it. Plus, we are going to need it because, even without COVID-related brain damage, the number of Alzheimer’s people in America is supposed to triple over the next 20 years or something like that. That might be a questionable statistic, which we should poke. The number is not going down. 

Kirkpatrick: Do you know what may be the problem with that, Rick? It may be related to a little-known statistic that people don’t know about: The life expectancy of man has almost been continually increasing while his lifespan has not been. The point here is: 95 years old today is an old man. There were 95-year-olds in Rome. Today, there is more than there was in Rome’s time. So, aggregately, our life expectancy has been getting longer. My point here is that a lot of those people who would’ve died or gotten Alzheimer’s when they were 72 died in the gladiatorial pit of Rome. They didn’t make it there. It may be why Alzheimer’s is increasing. It could be because people are getting old.

Rosner: Sure, if you can, if not for them, if for the loved ones, if you can keep them around for another year or two when people get into their 80s and start falling down, that’s often the end, whether the fall kills them or that’s evidence of other problems. That longevity Aubrey de Grey. So, there is the Singularity guy, Kurzweil. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes, I know him. 

Rosner: There is another guy, the same. He looks at the biology of aging and says there are seven major issues of aging that need to be solved before we can have reasonable extensions of longevity: getting mitochondria to remain good. There are lunatics, tech lunatics, and billionaires who buy blood from teenagers and get transfused with teen blood because they think it will help their mitochondria.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Rosner: That doesn’t work very well. If you and I can hang around long enough for them to solve 4 of the major problems of aging, maybe we can get another 10 or 15 years of life that isn’t too miserable. Maybe, in those 10 to 15 years, they solve a couple more. Kurzweil says you don’t need to live forever. You need to live long enough for every year you live; they come up with a way to give you one more year.

Kirkpatrick: I always have this nightmare. It will come out announced. We finally solved the aging problem. We can’t make you younger, but we will make you freeze right where you’re at, and I’ll be 86. 

Rosner: Yes, there is that. There will be a bunch. If you are 86, you might be able to end up looking like somebody who is in their 60s, but weird. I wish they could erase ten years off Biden. 

Kirkpatrick: Another problem with that. It’s not the body alone. It is your mind. After a while, it gets boring, if you know what I mean. If you’re 103, you have basically seen everything, done everything – been there, done that, got the t-shirt, “No, thank you.” The best way I can tell you. How old is your kid?

Rosner: I got one. She is 28. 

Kirkpatrick: I have 3. One is 30. One is 28. The other one is 25, so it’s about the same. When the 30-year-old was 18, he and 3 of his buddies, so 4 of them, got in a car and drove up to see one of the NBA quarter-finals in Atlanta from down here in Florida. It was a 600-mile road trip. They stayed in a hotel, the first hotel away from home, up in the basketball tournament. As they were leaving and all excited, I said, “Guys, I am jealous.” They laughed. I said, “But I want you to understand. I am not jealous because I want to go with you. Because I think it would be the worst experience in my life.”

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: But to be back where you are and go there, I’d give almost anything. To go with you, “Oh hell no! Horrible. Ugh! No.” That is the point this far down the line. I know what is coming for these guys. While it might be exciting the first time, that’s the only time it is exciting. The next time, it is a pain in the butt. [Laughing]

Rosner: When growing up, my mom and my dad were 400 or so miles apart. For visitation, it was that trip. That is a miserable trip. Plus, Vegas is 300 miles from LA. 

Kirkpatrick: Even that is a fairly miserable trip; in July, in LA, I drove to Vegas. That was the first time I had done that trip. It was 118 degrees. It was nice and warm there through the desert. 

Rosner: There is nothing there.

Kirkpatrick: There is nothing there. There is a huge solar farm there, liquid sodium.

Rosner: That is, maybe, new. I saw some windmills on the way, but I did not see the solar farm. 

Kirkpatrick: It was a big installation closer to Vegas. Anyway, Scott, we are not solving any of the world’s problems. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] What are some of your skepticisms about Elon Musk mentioned earlier, or Peter Thiel or Peter Diamandis or others? Figures like this, who have, at least, a public prominence or sufficient wealth and prominence in the business and technology sphere to have potential real impacts. At the same time, people assume they can take any of their opinions about any subject matter at the expert level. 

Kirkpatrick: Especially when it is them, it can be dangerous when it is them. I think with Elon. You’ve seen it illustrated several times. His idea with the submarine was to save these kids in Thailand. It was whacko when you saw what they had to do to save the kids. It was a help in the slightest. 

Rosner: Didn’t he disparage the rescuers? 

Kirkpatrick: He called him a pedophile. He implied he was in Thailand for that reason. 

Jacobsen: That’s awful. 

Rosner: Musk has been revealed as intellectually lazy. He grew up loving science fiction. I read a bio of him. He loves tech. He is fascinated by tech. He probably has a zillion ideas every day, but he is a little too fond of his – overvalues his – spur-of-the-moment thought.

Kirkpatrick: He overvalues everything about what they do. Not just his thoughts. I do not mean to disparage Elon terribly, but I have a Tesla Model S. I have the one with the yolk in it. One of the things that they like to crow about is that they took the shifting or the things off the side of the stalks. So, your turn signal is a button on the yolk. The left and the right turn signals are on the left side of the yolk. 

Rosner: That is confusing.

Kirkpatrick: Think about that for a second; both the left and the right turn signals are on the left side of the yolk. But there is a button on the right side of the yolk, exactly where the left side turn signal is; that is for voice activation. It is to activate voice commands. Now, what kind of human interface person do you have that let this slide through? It is not just Tesla. I had this Nissan LEAF electric car. It had a knob shifter. An electric car only has two gears. That is forwards and backwards. You can guess. In order to make the car go forward, you had to pull the shifter back. In order to make the car go backward, you had to push the shifter forward. 

Rosner: That must be hundreds of little fender benders.

Kirkpatrick: For me, as the person in it, I always think, “Nobody in the pre-production of this car said, ‘Wait a minute guys, in order to make it go that way, you push it that way. In order to go this way, you push that way. Really?” Nobody said anything. They said, “Oh, yeah, okay, that’s good.” Both turn signals are on one side of the yolk. 

Rosner: That is crazy. 

Kirkpatrick: One on top of the other. It is easy to get it right, if you know what I mean. Not to mention, the horn is a button for your thumb; it is the fourth button over across the top of the yolk, the horn. 

Rosner: When you need the horn, you need it fast.

Kirkpatrick: Exactly. It is not a problem. I love the car. It is an absolutely wonderful car. But with a little more humility, Elon once said, “Apple is the graveyard where Tesla employees go to die.”

Jacobsen: I remember that.

Kirkpatrick: What he should have been saying was, “We hope to poach some of their people over here to give some of the features Apple products have.” Instead, the pride, he may have sincerely believed what he was saying, but their human interface sucks. It sucks. 

Rosner: I used to check IDs in a bar and run a line outside of bars. A lot of the time, it was a bell curve in terms of dickishness.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Rosner: Some people were extremely understanding and tolerant of the situation. Some weren’t. Some were insanely obnoxious about it. I would always be telling myself. “Is this worth getting upset about? This is just statistical variation around an average level of being a jerk or not being a jerk.”

Kirkpatrick: I like the term “dickishness.”

Rosner: When someone is around Trump or, in some ways, Musk, people have no defences, and society doesn’t have defences about hats because they’re statistically rare. Most people haven’t encountered people who are pure bullshitters and don’t have any defence. We still screw up in how we deal with Trump.

Kirkpatrick: Somebody said to Trump’s lawyer. “Your client is the equivalent of penis cancer.”

Rosner: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: What do you make of – not the ‘humility’ with regards to technology, design, manufacturing, and things of that nature but more with regards to his – purchase of Twitter, now X, orientations around free speech actions following from those statements, impacts on public culture? Things of this nature.

Kirkpatrick: Rick is the expert on this one.

Rosner: It remains to be seen. In that, it is very annoying. I used to love Twitter. Back in the days when Twitter was all “change one letter in a movie title to wreck a movie,” it was little games and stuff. I follow hundreds of comedians to read a ton of jokes. Now, most of the comedians have been driven off the site because it is not fun anymore. It is all political. But it remains to be seen, if ever, whether this will influence the election, which is mostly what I care about at this point.

Kirkpatrick: I think he has hit the nail on the head. I don’t even go on X anymore. I used to look at Rick’s posts all the time and sometimes interact with them. 

Rosner: My posts aren’t any fun anymore. It is all “eat my chode, you MAGA butthole.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: Holy shit, Rick [Laughing] So, there’s that.

Kirkpatrick: Classic American discourse.

Jacobsen: Correct. When it comes to Ray Kurzweil or people who would be considered Singularitarians, they have either a firm or a loose belief in some form of Singularity in the Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil focuses on health and nutrition. Aubrey de Grey focuses on his processes of aging rather than focusing on aging as one thing. That has been an increasing discussion. There has been some discussion around not simply evidence-based medicine but more around personalized medicine. If these technologies do come to fruition, if they become a scientific reality, they can be mastered and used on wider sets of aging populations around more of the developed world. Could we consider a lot of the human body at some extreme point in the future as something like a Ship of Theseus? I remember talking to or interviewing Evangelos Katsioulis. His opinion was that, in general, ‘there is no limit to the integration between machines and human biology.’

Rosner: I buy that entirely. It is all coming. It’ll be possible to replicate consciousness within 30 years. That is a little pessimistic. I believe I might be super wrong. The key to consciousness is the connectome. The pattern of dendritic connection. I don’t know how you get in there and map it. Can you do it with nanobots? Is that even feasible? There is a sitcom called Upload, I think, by the guy who The Office, which is pretty much a comedy version of that. 

Kirkpatrick: If you have read any of Robert Heinlein’s books, he created a Heinlein universe. One of the recurring characters was a guy named Lazarus Long. Lazarus Long’s family has a mutation. They don’t age or age slowly. He lived for a long, long time. He has technology far beyond what the normal person has. One of the things is that there is a computer that runs his house, his car, and everything else. In the books, he will notice that the computer that runs the house has become sentient. He can’t use them to do that anymore because it would violate his morality. It is enslaving it because it is a sentient being. He would download it into a body. It would become a character in the book. “Oh, shit! I have to train another assistant to take over the house because this one is sentient and knows what it is doing, has a name, wants to be called Sandra,” or something like that. It is one of the things I have always said about AI. You might find out as the computer scientists come closer and closer to creating a sentient thinking machine, i.e., recreating a brain, that some of the things that come along with the human brain might be inherent in sentience itself. I mean things like emotions and things like this. It could be to the point where instead of the super thinker that takes over the world. AI in the computer says, “Nah, I ain’t going to do that. I don’t feel like it.” 

Rosner: Yes, it’ll be like the Cambrian Explosion of different types of thinking and consciousness, but also the cheapening of consciousness. 

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing] I have got this image. “I would like to return my computer. He developed a Nazi personality.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: AIs do become racist. My wife came up with one of the most common. She has never written science fiction before. She tried a science fiction story. She wrote the story of a mechanical nanny looking back lovingly on life raising a kid. A shocking end is one many have come up with the nanny turns out to be in a landfill.

Kirkpatrick: Oh wow.

Rosner: A lot of people have independently come up with that idea. I don’t think it is a risk for AIs alone. When you can create a human-level consciousness that costs five bucks, it is not great for anybody.

Kirkpatrick: If that will ever be possible.

Rosner: Not for a while. 

Kirkpatrick: It might. You never know. I am extremely skeptical. Do you know about the AI beating the Go masters?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: The lesson learned from that. Even though these Go Ais have become so proficient that no human player was in the same league, Once they got somebody who played outside the box, they lost. 

Rosner: Okay.

Kirkpatrick: The reason they lost is because they realized that the AI, as good as it had become, still didn’t know what it was doing. 

Rosner: Right.

Kirkpatrick: It didn’t know if it was winning a game or even playing a game. The object was to win. All it knew was it reacted to patterns that it had learned through playing these masters. The big deficit that the AI had was that it had no cognitive sense whatsoever. It was a counting machine, essentially, which could work quickly. 

Rosner: It was a Bayesian engine doing the basics. There are a couple of steps between the Bayesian engine and consciousness. I think they are conceivable. One thing we know we have: Scott calls it “multimodal input.” We have input from all our senses to build a complete world plus our memory plus our biases and associations plus our emotions. It remains to be seen that if you invent the technology. Suppose you give multimodal input to AIs in something to real-time; that is enough to have something that resembles consciousness.

Kirkpatrick: I hope I live to see it. I am very skeptical. Not that it won’t happen, but that I will live that long. 

Rosner: I don’t think it is that far away.

Kirkpatrick: What do you mean? I don’t even buy green bananas anymore. I am not that old. No, 20 years, I will be 83. 

Rosner: Me too.

Kirkpatrick: 20 years ago, we didn’t have iPhones. That is a major change. But we did have the internet, even though it is older than 20 years. How much more change will we see in 20 years, Rick?

Rosner: I think we will become more intimately connected to increasingly powerful tech. Right now, we call it AI, but it is big data Bayesian engines. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes.

Rosner: To some extent, the modules in our speech for humans is, if you weren’t constantly interrupting speech with other thoughts, a Bayesian engine itself. You’re looking through your suitcase full of next words in a Bayesian way. Unless you’re interrupted by further input. In 20 years, we will have appliances built onto us or into us in a gentle way, having a device with you, with little spider legs that ride your shoulder. I don’t know if that is practical, but it might be fashionable for a while. 

Kirkpatrick: Yes, why not?

Rosner: We will have what you’re talking about, which is augmented reality through your eyes. Eventually, augmented reality will be able to go directly into – or maybe not augmented reality – your brain via some link, especially for 85-year-old billionaires whose brains are failing.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Rosner: Biocircuitry that helps take over some of their thinking. You will see this stuff move over to the courts in 30 years when someone wants to marry their AI, robot-sentient girlfriend. Or, when the billionaire’s brain is down to less than 8% of the neurons he was born with, he has to argue that he is still a person. We will screw it all up because it has been 2,000 years, and we haven’t figured out how to reasonably deal with abortion.

Kirkpatrick: Yes, but the problem is, it moves glacially. We move quickly. Unfortunately, I feel like I was born yesterday. Now, we are talking about the next 20 years. I have seen many miracles. I hope we see more. I think this augmented reality is one. It is going to come very quickly. 

Rosner: That would be great. Kurzweil’s singularity date is in 2040, which is now 16 years away. I think he is optimistic. There is a lot of great stuff coming between now and 2040, as well as some terrible stuff.

Kirkpatrick: If you can imagine, I take it you’ve seen the Iron Man movies. If you can imagine how Tony Stark interacts with his computer, this Apple Vision Pro is the first step in this. You are using your hands to interact with the image in front of you. Although, right now, you can’t see it. If you had 3 or 4 people, you’d all see it. It would be as if you were interacting with your hands. If you can imagine, rather than having this meeting five years down the line, sitting at the table, we’re sitting at three different tables, but see each other and talk to each other as if we are there. If I hand you a paper, it appears on the table in front of you. 

Rosner: That is one of the solutions for climate change when everybody can telecommute like that.

Kirkpatrick: What will happen? It will empty Canada. 

Rosner: It will empty Canada?

Kirkpatrick: If you can live in Aruba. 

Rosner: I think you should be living in Canada. 

Jacobsen: It warms up.

Rosner: Canada becomes more livable. 

Jacobsen: Could the Canadian Shield become more livable with climate change? It is a good question.

Rosner: Edmonton, you still might need to get to the mall via a tunnel in the Winter. Vancouver and environs will be nice. 

Kirkpatrick: Toasty. It reminds me of seeing a little silhouette of two guys sitting over the ocean, on a cliff overlooking the ocean. One was saying, “The West Coast is really beautiful. With the earthquakes, I would like to be in Kansas.” Then the second one said, “This is Kansas.” It is the same thing. Soon, you might have property there, Scott. 

Jacobsen: Yes. I mean, weren’t places like Egypt several thousand years ago lush ? 

Kirkpatrick: Mesopotamia was lush. But it was lush for a different reason. It became unlush for a different reason. Both Egypt and Mesopotamia are on alluvial floodplains. So, civilization formed around those plains because people had to figure out how to trap the water, and then use it to fertilize crops and grow agriculture. The problem with that is that when you do that; and the water doesn’t wash out. It evaporates in the Sun over thousands and thousands of years. You’re constantly depositing, sodium, salt, stuff like this, into the sand. Over a while, it becomes less and less fertile. That is why the Fertile Crescent is no longer as fertile a crescent as it once was for 3,000 years, 4,000 years of civilization. 

Rosner: Y’all, I’ve got to close out here.

Jacobsen: Last question, short thoughts on the Carlson-Putin interview to close out.

Kirkpatrick: [Laughing]. 

Jacobsen: You’re welcome.

Rosner: Putin said some bullshit to justify in some kind of historical frame based on bogus history that Ukraine should be his. I didn’t see the interview. That is what I gathered. So, Putin’s going to do that. Tucker Carlson is going to do what he does. The most distressing part of it to me is how many people in America are cheering for Putin and Tucker Carlson

Kirkpatrick: It wasn’t an interview. It was more. “Okay, I am going to ask some questions and allow you to put out whatever propaganda you want to put out.” It wasn’t an interview. It was, basically, a presentation and, as Rick said, the sad part; I don’t think it’s so much to help Putin as it is to opposed whatever the US is doing right now because it has to be bad because Biden is doing it. 

Rosner: Yes.

Kirkpatrick: If it was Trump trying to defend Ukraine, Carlson wouldn’t even talk to Putin because is a “terrorist.” So, the stuff like this is not serious politics. It is pablum for the people who want to watch this kind of stuff. Anybody else is turned off by it. Let’s pray there is enough independents turned off by it, that crap like, “We won’t come to defend NATO countries,” scare them, because it is true. 

Rosner: I agree.

Jacobsen: The end.

Rosner: The end. Thank you.

Jacobsen: Rick, thank you very much for your time, again.

Kirkpatrick: Thanks, Rick. 

Rosner: Thank you.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/03/01

I am doing this as a brief public service announcement for The Satanic Temple. So, Lucien Greaves, you’re welcome! We’re all in the same fight. 

I see this, read this, a lot. I note the difficulties for many people within the public who do not believe in the god concept. God simply isn’t for them. Although, a multitude of believers think sincerely and believe god is for them. 

What do we do? That’s a question for people coming out of religion and not wanting to take part in the social conventions of passive acceptance of the god concept. People impose their religion on you, when it is super annoying or condescending. 

Some choose to join activist groups using the same imagery of the Christian religion in which they were indoctrinated. Yet, they use the reverse image and inverse emphasis of figural signification. Which is to say, they focus on the Devil as non-real, as non-theists, rather than God and Satan as a liberatory myth instead of a supernatural oppressor. 

Even when they do this, and even when The Satanic Temple clearly states their beliefs on the matter, that Satan is a figure of metaphor rather than taken as literal. They focus on Satan as a figure in whom they can emphasize as a reminder of liberation from arbitrary authority. 

Even with that, they get painted as believers and worshipers in a literal Satan. The Church of Satan has a little bit of that. But The Satanic Temple has none of that. Even funnier in the misapprehension, when believers want to demonize or conservative pundits want to sound smart, they will spout off on The Satanic Temple’s actual beliefs as if a proper understanding is some condemnatory discovery. 

They were open the entire time about their beliefs, but these ninnies sincerely believe that a discovery of what is stated on their website and by their spokespersons is revelation of a hidden, dark truth. It’s not. They are activists who argue for equality and individualism.

Is that hard to discover? No. Are they open about their beliefs? Yes. Will these annoying misunderstandings about non-theist Satanists continue? You bet.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/29

Mr. Melvin Lars is a native of Bossier City/Shreveport, Louisiana; he received several undergraduate and graduate academic degrees from various universities; La. Tech. (BS) Univ. & Centenary (Admin. Cert.) College) in Louisiana, Texas (Tx. Southern (MA) Univ), Michigan (Eastern, Mi Univ, & Saginaw Valley St. Univ.) and has done extensive educational studies in Ohio (Youngstown (Supt., cert.)St Univ) and California (Los Angeles, (CA. cert) City College).

Lars is a certified Violence Prevention/Intervention Specialist, receiving his certification and training through the prestigious Harvard University, with Dr. Renee Prothro-Stith.

He is a licensed/ordained Elder/Minister in both the C.O.G.I.C. & C.M.E. Churches. He is the CEO/founder of Brighter Futures Inc; a Family Wellness, Violence Prevention/Intervention and Academic Enhancement and entertainment Company; an affiliate representative for the NFL ALLPRODADS Initiative. Former interim; Executive Director of Urban League of Greater Muskegon, Former NAACP President of Muskegon County; 2007–2012, employed as a consultant to the Michigan Department of Education as a Compliance Monitor for the (NCLB Highly Qualified) initiative for Highly Qualified Teachers and works collaboratively with Hall of Famer Jim Brown and his Amer-I-Can Program and is a ten-time published author of various books, and self-help and academic articles. He is married to Ann Lars and is the father of one adult son, Ernest. Here we talk about concussions and dangerous sports.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, we are back after a long while with Melvin Lars. 

Melvin Lars: I’m great, Scott. How are you, sir? 

Jacobsen: I am good. I’m good. I am at a major point of transition. I wanted to talk about a couple of areas of expertise for you. Because you have a sports background and advocate for a couple of things, first things first, we’ll hit it heavy. What are the risks in dangerous activities like heavy impact sports, like football, regarding concussions and encephalopathy? Things like that.

Lars: Scott, the risks are very, very great. Quite honestly, it is getting to the point where people are trying to ignore that the NFL is selling them a bill of goods with all of this. “All this we’re doing. All this technology…” This, that, and the third bottom line is this: When we talk about danger when they talk about helmets, they only show the skill positions. The receivers, the quarterbacks, “They can’t hit them like they used to. We protect them.” I say, “What about the linemen?”

I tell people that all the time. Every play, you are clashing heads and bodies with somebody. But you never hear the NFL, college coaches, nor high school coaches tackle the real truism of this real thing with the dangers associated with sports. They try to cover it up and blind people and talk real quickly. They show these graphics with so-called improvements in helmets and movements, etc. There is one thing you cannot change in this game, and it has not changed. I do not see it changing any time shortly in the linemen. When the ball is snapped, and you have a colossal clash, the collision of men right there in the center of all that is taking place, as we all know, the brain sitting in the fluid. No matter how many helmets you put around it. It will still slosh. I will use the word “slosh” back and forth, and bang, bang, bang. Quite honestly, I call it gaslighting people. When the NFL and these other people try to gaslight people talking about the helmets, we still don’t address the truism. The brain is in the same position. It will not be protected from the violent clashes that one may have. 

Again, that is where I keep repeating myself with that because I don’t think people get it. They talk about, “They cannot hit him anymore. He is unprotected.” This, that, and the third, these things have nothing to do with the brain being damaged throughout the overall sport. That’s why I say, “When you talk about linemen, you can’t ever get them to talk about linemen.” You never hear them talking about them, showing graphics, or the actual situations with the linemen. Until they address that, to be honest with you, it is just a bunch of conversation. As far as I am concerned, it is gaslighting. 

Jacobsen: These are some of North America’s most physically strong in terms of their forward motion. They specifically train for this, the linemen. What is the amount of force that they are capable of knocking forward? I’m sure. I would be knocked out if I had an impact. I am a fit person, but I am not a big person.

Lars: Absolutely. To answer specifically, I cannot give you answers in pressure or pounds. That sort of thing. I can answer you. May I use myself without sounding pompous? I was always a big man. I told you that before. I could always bench more than 500 pounds. You’ve already heard coaches. You hear coaches. I was guilty for a while, myself. Until I said, “Wait a minute, man, stop that.” ‘It is not the size of the dog in the fight. It is the fight in the dog.’ You hear all of those. ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall.’ The bottom line, Scott, when you talk about the pressure, being knocked out, talking about movements, what chance does a 130-pound guy have against me if I am a viable opponent? Now, I know you have guys who are just big. I am not putting anybody down. I know you have a lot of big guys. But when you have big guys who are big, athletic, fast, strong and have that championship mentality, you are in trouble. Scott, even if you are a 200-pounder, a 300-pounder. You are in trouble if you are up against a guy with the same poundage. 

Because, first of all, you are not, many professionals are not, in the same championship mentality. ‘I am going to whip your butt. I do not have to hold or trip you.’ We are going to be mono-e-mono. I am going to prove it. I am the best man. Those are the conversations people refuse to have regarding a physical sport like football. That is why I opened this show with what I told you earlier. It will make a lot of people mad. They don’t want to address the realness of what happens out there. They give people excuses, even offensive linemen. They give offensive linemen excuses for holding. “As long as his arms are here, as long as you are holding!” [Laughing] It is that simple. Or a defensive back, “Both people are hand fighting.” You are a defensive back. The guy is a receiver. You are holding. You are impeding his progress. You have people, especially these sportscasters. As a former athlete, they make me sick to my stomach. Many of them are former athletes. Because they gaslight people with all of these phony analogies that they try to give when the game is not being played the way it should be, that is the competition. That’s why you have rules. 

This is his whole process. I love football. I will be honest with you. But I am honest with myself. I observe things that happen and take place. Again, I know without a doubt. Unequivocally, that is because of the strength that I had, the speed that I had, and the power that I had. I am sure that I inflicted some punishment on people who were not suited to deal with that because I was the one doing it. I was being a competitor. I was not trying to maim anyone, not trying to hurt anyone or have anything personal against anyone, but that was the nature of the sport. I always believe, Scott, that in playing this sport, you must play within the rules. That is why you heard me talking earlier at this point to where I am now, how people gaslight you, how the sportscasters gaslight people, and try to manipulate what is happening on the field rather than saying, “The rile has been broken.”

Jacobsen: There is another aspect to this, too. There is a lot of profitability in this particular sport within the United States. There is a code of ethics among many men of silence because people don’t know what men don’t say about their own experience of the pay and the gaslighting about this. Also, as far as I know, a huge hunk of American footballers are African American men who are going to be overlooked in terms of their physical and mental care by the larger society and by themselves.

Lars: Absolutely. Sadly, that has been the scenario from the onset. All brawn and no brain. That analogy, quite honestly, as you mentioned, a large portion of African American men land with systemic racism that is part of America’s fabric, so people allowed that. That is why I wanted to mention the gaslighting. People allowed that to transpire. I think I said to you earlier, when we talked before, about this whole process of being a student-athlete. This kind of thing. There is no such animal. People do not want to do the research. I think I shared that with you. Student-athletes came about because I don’t want to call out the university because I don’t want to get sued [Laughing], but it was many years ago. It happened to be a caucasian athlete who got injured. The parents were upset. The parents wanted the university to pay for his medicals. The university didn’t want to pay. They hired a lawyer. They were talking about loopholes, which they always do! Saying, “He is not an employee of the university. He is a student. Whereby he is a student-athlete. So, we are not obligated to pay!” What happened?

Again, the gaslighting, the people ran with it, modernized it, jumped on it. They embrace the word student-athlete, not even knowing the real concept behind people being called student-athletes. I had to share that. Because when you talk about the brawn and being an “African American minority athlete.” That is how they gaslight people, being 6’5″, 400 lbs, Or 6’2″, 350 lbs. He is just a man and all brawn. They continually say that never express when you play these games; like any other game, there are not only psychological things taking place. There are also intellectual pieces that transpire with the brain, with the brawn, knowing the nuance of the game, knowing what they may be trying. 

A perfect example is defensive tackle, you are taught. If the man in front of you goes, you are supposed to step down and close the hole because a trap is coming. Someone coming to block you. Nobody ever talks about the nuance of the game and the knowledge that the players have to have to play the game. “He is a great guy. He does such a great job. He is unblockable.” He is not just unblockable because he is fast. He is not unblockable because he is tenacious. He is unblockable because he knows the nuances of the game. He can be a defensive lineman. He can see what the running back is doing. I share that with you. As we talk about that, that is why we talk about the large number of African American men, whether large or small. That is where the gaslighting comes in, the continued nuances of people being able to say, “Athletes are these big, dumb jocks,” etc. Because everyone hears that, they don’t know. So, they just receive it and accept it. That is, unfortunately, what happens too many times in 2024. 

Jacobsen: What are the risks of encephalopathy? Because I have a general idea of inflammation of brain tissue. What does that mean in practical terms for an individual?

Lars: In practical terms, when you’re talking about CTE, the brain ‘gets damaged’ from slamming against the walls of the skull over and over. You have to bleed in the head. Things of that nature. When you talk about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, that is what they are talking about, which is the damage. It is alleged to speed up A, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. It is alleged to cause memory loss. It is alleged to do damage in such a way that your mental capacity is diminished, and on and on. The study, the sad part about this whole thing is that you can be sure of treating for it once you’re dead because they study the brain when you’re dead. What good does that do to the individual? It started getting attention when Weaver, a center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, took his life. He was living in some little trailer. He was acting strangely. The wife was talking about it. Some other athletes are starting to hone in. Junior Seau took his life and wanted to have his brain studied. He took his life. Then another guy, Dave Duerson, one of the guys, came out publicly. He was being bought. The reason I bring up Dave Duerson is because he wanted his brain to be checked once he passed away. He committed suicide. They don’t shoot themselves in the head. They shoot themselves in the chest. I am sharing this because of the question we’re talking about presently and before, which is that when people take bits and pieces, Scott. People on TV talk about soundbites and that kind of thing. What else was said before that? What was said after that part of the soundbite? 

If I don’t understand clearly, the only thing I can go by is hearing someone else say. I trust that they are not gaslighting me. They are giving me valid information. I am saying to you as an athlete. I understand clearly. I understand what happened because, Scott, you can talk to the guys I played. I wasn’t that guy. I was the guy who when people do the Oklahoma Drill. They try to push people up against them. They didn’t want to go up against me. That is the stuff people do not talk about. For whatever reason, some of us are blessed with certain abilities. However, we work very hard to perfect what we call the craft like they call anything else the craft. That is why I mention bench pressing 500 lbs and deadlifting. 

Jacobsen: That’s incredible. 

Lars: That doesn’t come naturally. You have to get your butt in the weight room. You have to eat properly. You have to get the proper amount of rest. You have to continually, and you shouldn’t ruin your body from substances and things like that. I know there are many stories out there about steroids. Today is February 15th, 2024. I still do not have people who believe me when I tell them I benched 514 lbs. I never did a steroid. I never did any performance-enhancing drugs. They did not believe me then. They don’t believe me now. So, there are athletes out there who would do these things naturally. When you start getting to a certain point, many of them, to be honest with you, do performance-enhancing drugs and steroids and all of this kind of thing. For some of it, we don’t know why God gave certain people physical attributes that others don’t have, but what is always lost in the conversation is those individuals have physical attributes. They cannot get off the couch and walk onto somebody’s football field, and all of a sudden become this terrorizing individual. He has to put in work. He has to go to the gym. He has to run. He has to eat properly. He has to exercise himself. He cannot be indulging in drugs. You hear these stories as well. “All these years, he was hooked on drugs. That is always the story. It is never about the work and the things they put in.” I wanted to share that because the question that you asked is an excellent question. I wanted to try to give you some more pieces and parts. So you can have more information as you further your research. 

Jacobsen: For many people coming into the sport, looking from the outside, my assumption is that blows to the body will be much less impactful than ones to the upper half of the skull encasing the brain. Because you’re saying it is fluid. It is sloshing around and against the skull. These are everyday ways of saying it. But it is an important way of characterizing it. Is there one category of a football player from college to football level who doesn’t care about their health? They just want to achieve. There is another class, which is probably most of those who want to achieve but care about their health. However, they don’t want to break that code of silence among men. 

Lars: Yes, I do. Your question is two-fold because individuals, young or old, always think, “It is going to happen to me.” I know that it is serious. I have heard things. I have done my research. When there are financial gains, people say, “Hey, this is the chance I have to take.” They hope. I will be very honest with you. They hope, pray, and cross their fingers that they won’t have a major injury to make the almighty dollar. It is that many athletes. It is not really that many athletes that make all this money that they talk about. “This guy is the highest-paid quarterback and receiver. He is the this. He is the that.”

I know. People don’t listen. They put the salaries of these guys up, making these huge salaries. The public is so fooled. You asked me about people who disregard their health. “I am going to play anyway.” That’s why I say it is a two-part question and deserves a two-part answer because many of us feel we should get in the best shape to get our bodies well-versed, know what we are doing, etc. Then we have, “If I can get a 1, 2, or 5-year contract…” When people talk about retiring from the NFL, you need five years before you are vested or even receive retirement monies. Then you have to be the retirement age, just like everybody else. When they hear about guys retiring at 30 and 40, yes, he won’t receive any retirement until whatever age it is: 62 or 67.

Jacobsen: I didn’t know that.

Lars: That’s why you see these guys becoming sportscasters. JJ Watt is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, he is on TV. He doesn’t get the retirement money like that. It is like anything else. There are a lot of nuances to this thing that are never explained to the general public and the educated public. 

Jacobsen: Two other topics: Education, you mentioned the student-athlete. That has been a consistent point of conversation. I believe for us, but also in a lot of the work that you’ve done. What is the student-athlete in the context of American football?

Lars: You know what? Student athlete is a farce. You heard it here first, Scott.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Lars: Let me tell you why it is a farce. Any individual understands that you must attend school until the age of 16. So, you are automatically a student from the beginning. There is no conversation. There is nothing. It is discovered either by your parents, neighbourhood kids, or coaches. That you may have a little “extra” regarding physicality. If you may have been discovered in PE classes, or you may have been discovered playing around on the field, “He is fast. He is strong. He is big! He can dunk a basketball.” To take the edge off things, that is what I am saying when people are gaslighted when they jump on this student-athlete thing. If you allow me to readdress that quickly, no one took the time to research how that word started. It had nothing to do with the person’s academic understanding and the fact that they were blessed. I am not talking about religion or trying to convert anybody. That never comes into the conversation because the person has academic understanding and ability. 

They are nothing special as far as that goes. They are doing what they are supposed to be doing. If your parents rear you to go to school to pay attention, to learn, they teach you at home, to prepare you. You don’t learn to have this academic acumen initially; then, it is discovered that you have some athletic ability. So, you or your parents, friends, or whatever, find out. You decide that you are going to get involved in sports because you like it or it brings personal recognition. There are a lot of reasons. Then you are put in this pile of everyone else because that’s what they say. They call you a student-athlete. Then, this started before I was born. These were guys who were not academically astute but had physical prowess. This thing grew from you, this big, dumb jock, but you can’t articulate. If someone said to you, “Pontification.” You’d be like, “What?” It grew. It continues to grow to this day. With all of that said, I am firmly pleased that the academic acumen of these young men and women who participate in athletics is given credit for their academic astuteness. However, I laugh to myself all the time and wear my wife all the time out with that: how parents and everybody else are gaslighted by the words student-athlete. There is no such thing. If that makes sense, we may have created it later without knowing what the real cause is or was being coined in the first place.

Because, Scott, I will say this to you. I take pride. I took pride in high school. I can whoop your butt in the classroom and the football field because I love sports. That is what I love doing. Guess what? I had to study like everybody else. I had to go to class like everybody else. I was up burning midnight oil like everybody else. It was a personal challenge. My mother made sure that I was getting my work done. My aunt, Mary-Love, that’s her real name. I remember as a little boy. She taught me to read. At that time, I couldn’t read. I would look at the pictures and the words. That type of thing. So, I, like many athletes, went through a similar or the same process. Once I discovered that I had some athletic ability, everybody got thrown into the same pile with those guys. They were unfortunate in that they were not given a foundation academically, but they did have athletic ability. So, that is what was pronounced. It is true, man. People can get angry about it. They can try to ignore it. They can try to pretend, but that is what happens. Even today, in modern times, guys tell you. “I barely am out of high school. I had to get a tutor. I had to get this. I had to get a that.” Sometimes, it is not the same level of academic astuteness via heredity, be it not being prepared. That kind of thing. Even when you go to school, talk about prerequisites; I must take this class before I take that class. You are getting ready. I will close it this way. Right now, you have been accepted into the Navy. You have to go through this training and so on. Athletics is not different. Our society has made it different once it is discovered that you have this academic ability. You have to weight train. You have to run. You have to exercise. All of those kinds of things. That is why, to be honest with you, Scott, I love talking about this. There are so many myths out there for us who are enthusiastic who are fantastic athletes. “Wow!” It is normal to see people doing things considered out of the norm. 

Jacobsen: Way out of the norm. 

Lars: Yes, way out of the norm. 

Jacobsen: Benching 500 lbs for someone like me. 

Lars: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: For someone like me who averages 155 to 165 at 5’11”, it is a little far off. It is more than “out of the norm.” 

Lars: Let me tell you this: I was 295, 300 lbs, personally. That is a vast difference. I had to work. Allow me to tell you honestly: I did not start benching 500 lbs. When I started lifting weights, 135 lbs, I was struggling. Two 45s and the bar, I’m 200+ pounds, man! So, I am glad that you brought that up. That is, again, what we have to address. It is practice. It is training the muscle. It is work. It is eating properly and getting rest. All of those things. It doesn’t just happen. But it is, man. I would not lie. I was tickled. I don’t want to sound like I am pumping my horn. I was tickled myself.

I continued to progress. I am going, “Wow, I will stay with this.” It was a personal challenge that took years to achieve because being an athlete was a personal goal of mine. I always wanted to be the best athlete. I always took offence. I am not 6’2″. I am not 6’3″. I am 5’10” if I stretch. It was always a personal challenge to be one of the better athletes, and people say, “If you were 6’2″.” What does this have to do with me whoopin’ everybody’s butt? What does this have to do with cutting me from NFL teams because “you don’t fit the height requirements”? Am I the best player or at least one of the better players? 

So, people never actually talk about that honestly or openly because, sometimes, they are embarrassed to talk about it. Sometimes, like myself, you don’t want to come off as being self-absorbed or being cocky. It is the truth. You pay this guy, 6’2″, 6’3″, 6’5″, all this money. I am whooping his butt. I cannot be on the team because I do not fit the select stereotype. With that, and not being a hypocrite, Scott, it is enthralling to me when I look at a roster or hear a sportscaster talk. “6’5″, wow! 350 lbs, wow!” It is something that we have as human beings. That is what I am saying. Many times, people, athletes themselves, don’t want to be honest. It is impressive. I understood, honestly. Even though I was disappointed and didn’t like it, I will say 2024. If somebody said at the Super Bowl this past Sunday, if they picked up a schedule and looked in it and started talking about the offensive linemen for the Chiefs, it says, “Scott, 5’10”, 350! Are they crazy?” I understand that. I must say that to you because we never take the time to be honest. Is it a fixation that has been going on for so many years until it is something that we, as people, honestly believe you have to be 6’4″ or 6’5″ to be effective? It is not always. I repeat that. It is really not always the case. Many times, people do not bother to take the time to see if those meet the standards in accordance with what we have set. Whether they are athletes or not, they send you off down the road.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time, Melvin.

Lars: Listen, my brother, you’re welcome. Any time.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/28

John Andrew Collins is the author and webmaster of William Branham: Historical Research. He was born and raised in “The Message” cult following of William Branham, and is the grandson of Willard Collins, former pastor of William Branham’s “Branham Tabernacle” in Jeffersonville, Indiana. From 1976 to 2012, John was unduly influenced to believe and practice many of the religious and cultural views expressed by William Branham and by men and women who were in Branham’s inner circle.  After his escape in 2012, John began the process of deprogramming from the indoctrinated religious and world views Branham expressed on recorded sermons from 1947 to 1965. This process included re-evaluating every aspect of life, including personal experiences and beliefs that were core to his belief system, world view, and personality. In the early stages of this re-evaluation, John’s worldview was centered around indoctrinated apocalyptic theology that resulted from William Branham’s focus on doomsday through either doomsday predictions or alleged doomsday prophecies. As a result, early research focused upon differences between Branham’s theological views and that of evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity with the intent to categorize Branham’s doctrines into categories of Biblical, Extra-Biblical, and Anti-Biblical.  Once establishing the baseline for religious views, John began to research the historical life events of William Branham. Branham’s “Life Story” was integrated into the religious views as core theology in “The Message”, due to William Branham’s usage of his accounts as the foundation for many doctrines expressed in his recorded sermons. While focused primarily upon William Branham, it was necessary to also research the men associated with or influential to Branham, as well as notable events in the historical timeline of United States and World History. When this research was organized chronologically, John began to notice patterns of data that appeared to suggest strategic usage of Pentecostal and fundamentalist extremism to advance the political views of men affiliated with or participating in the creation of William Branham’s ministry. William Branham: Historical Research is an ongoing project to document and organize that research data for public usage.  He is the happily married father of three boys. He enjoys spending time with his family, playing his collection of stringed instruments, and visiting new places. His hobbies include music, art, video games, science fiction books or movies, or documentaries. When not writing, he relaxes by studying ancient world archaeology, geography, religion, and culture. Here we talk about the William Branham Historical Project.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: John, it’s nice to get together once again, especially after the marathon series culminating in Triumph Through Tribulation: William Branham’s Theology In and Out (2020): Available for free! On those interviews, was there any community feedback of former or current believers? I received some. From believers: all negative! As you might imagine. I’ve received more balanced commentaries from former and current Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

John Andrew Collins: Yes, I can imagine the feedback you must have received from members of William Branham’s cult of personality back then. I can’t speak to those articles specifically, but I can say that this dynamic is slowly changing for the better. We are starting to see comments on social media and even have heard statements in some sermons by cult leaders now admitting that some of the things we’ve found in our research critical of William Branham are true. This is especially the case after publishing my book, Preacher Behind the White Hoods: A Critical Examination of William Branham and His Message. 

They are not yet to the point of understanding the sum of all research, of course, but any progress towards sharing critical information in public is, in my opinion, a very positive change. Before the release of that book, most members of the cult were unaware that any information critical to William Branham even existed.

Jacobsen: I used to have a friend in British Columbia here who was stuck in it. I tried to help him lean away from it. Because I cared about and loved this man, this friend. I didn’t want him to be harmed by living in this ideology or become a harm to those around him knowing the theology more. I’m a peacenik and believe in individual autonomy and reform. Never coerced anything, but the friendship did, eventually, dissolve, unfortunately. You have a more illustrious career and family background in “The Message” movement. What were some of the more crucial moments of psychologically leaving this movement? I am aware, as you described to Dr. Steven Hassan, the leaving was more of a process and took time, as with anyone. 

Collins: While the journey of each person who escapes the cult is unique, there are some similarities. Those in the more destructive sects of the “Message” cult are often shunned. Shunning, in some cases, equates to severing all contact between the current members and the escapee. In other cases, it is an emotional shunning; contact is permitted, but current members will not allow themselves the same emotional connection to the escapee. At the same time, most escapees have been manipulated to seek approval from the leaders in the group through feedback from their peers. The emotional shunning is usually misunderstood and seen as “disapproval” by escapees who do not yet realize that they can be their own person without the approval (or, more specifically, without testing the disapproval) of their peers.

Everyone who escapes a cult will eventually go through a process of learning to judge for themselves what is acceptable or not. Some will accelerate this process through healthy support groups, sometimes promoted by the church but often by simply surrounding themselves with people who have a good moral code of ethics and a positive outlook. Those able to remove the cult’s indoctrinated themes of self-condemnation and replace those themes with a strategy for personal growth can be very successful. Yes, this process takes time, and they have years of “catching up” to do when compared to people raised in healthy, non-cult families, but the reward is worth the effort. 

Jacobsen: How is progress on the educational and historical information gathering front for the William Branham Historical Project? Does “The Message” fit the formal classifications of a cult provided by experts like Hassan and others?

Collins: Last year, we accidentally uncovered a very important connection through our research: Gerald Burton Winrod. Winrod worked with Branham’s mentor and second-in-command of the 1915 Ku Klux Klan, Roy E. Davis. Winrod and Davis were very active in the political/religious arenas of the early 1920s, and both were directors of the Fundamentalist League. This connection was our “missing link” to several areas of research, most significantly Christian Identity. Winrod was very active in spreading antisemitism and white supremacy, and many of the racist and antisemitic themes in Branham’s sermons can be traced directly to Winrod’s politics or doctrinal positions. Branham’s “Serpent’s Seed,” or “Two-Seed Doctrine,” as it is called by white supremacists, can be traced directly back to Wesley A. Swift, who was influenced by Winrod. Branham (and Swift) convinced thousands of people that interracial marriages were not approved by God and that the Serpent in the Biblical Garden of Eden created a second and evil bloodline through a sexual union with the Biblical Eve.

Interestingly, Dr. Hassan escaped the “Moonies” cult, which had a very similar doctrine. We have discussed this and other similarities between the “Message” and the “Moonies” in our evaluation of the cult groups. Hassan’s BITE Model of Authoritarian Control was also very helpful in this comparison. The BITE Model establishes a framework for examining the Behavioral, Informational, Thought, and Emotional control of members by destructive cults. Based on the feedback we’ve received from former members of the “Message,” there is no question that the group was and currently is destructive.

Jacobsen: You made an intriguing confession in the interview with Hassan. As with many who grow up in a sociocultural milieu steeped in religious orthodoxy and racism tenets, these can make racist believers. How do you deprogram from this ideology while getting out of “The Message”? 

Collins: It wasn’t easy. I have always loved all people, no matter the color of their skin. So much so, that it was very difficult to admit that I had been indoctrinated with a set of racist and antisemitic doctrines. The “Message” cult also indoctrinates its members with a strong sense of pride, and pride often gets in the way of self-examination. Interestingly, if you are a Christian, pride is also commonly listed as a sin multiple times in the New Testament. In my opinion, the authors of the New Testament were aware of how much of a roadblock that pride can be in a person’s journey to better themselves.

If the escapee is a Christian, reading the Bible can help a great deal with this process. Branham, like Swift, Davis, and others, claimed that their racism and antisemitism were based upon precepts established by the prophets and apostles of the Bible. Yet they are in direct conflict with the themes of equality found in the New Testament. The apostle Paul stated in Romans 1:16 that the Gospel was “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile,” for example. Branham fully disagreed with Paul when he rebuked ministers for spreading the Gospel to the Jews, saying that “the Gospel is not even to them.” Branham went so far as to call Jewish Christians “renegades.”

I will say that my deep love for people helped. Once I realized that Branham’s doctrines based upon racism and antisemitism had the sole purpose of dividing people into class systems, I realized that I had to swallow my pride and rise above it.

Jacobsen: Is this a common struggle of among believers leaving “The Message”?

Collins: As strange as it may seem, not all believers in William Branham’s cult of personality have accepted or believe in Branham’s racist doctrines or themes—despite being presented as “Divine Mysteries” intended to “correct” the Church and prepare the “elite” for the rapture. Some sects of the cult do not listen to Branham’s sermons as often as others, and they are largely unaware that themes of racism and antisemitism exist in the sermons. Yet almost all of them consider the sermons to be the “Spoken Word of God for the Last Days.”

However, those who have listened to and studied Branham’s sermons struggle with this. This is especially the case among former ministers who have escaped the cult. We have worked with a number of ministers who fully reject Branham’s authority on doctrine and scripture, for example, but some still maintain the Two-Seed doctrine established by white supremacists in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Jacobsen: How does being a father help ground you, especially after leaving “The Message” cult and taking on the colossal project of cataloguing the ideological roots and doctrines and messages of William Branham?

Collins: This might actually be the reverse! [laughing] Having been raised in a group that devalued the family unit and promoted the cult hierarchy, elevating the status of a central figure, I find myself learning as much about how to become a good father as I do about the history of the “Message.”

What I can say is that the two go hand-in-hand. While examining the bad actors in history and how their actions negatively influenced the country as a whole, it is very interesting to examine how their influence was corrected. The United States of today is far from perfect, but the problems of yesteryear have mostly been corrected after having learned from our mistakes. We are now at a place where many of these bad actors can be viewed as “misbehaving children,” and we can see why those things needed to be corrected. Whether one is examining the history of William Branham or any of the other bad actors of the twentieth century, there are patterns of influence that should be seen as red flags to any parent. When a parent who is also a researcher identifies one of these areas and makes the mental association between the bad actors and another child who might negatively influence their own children, it also creates a mental marker for a topic of further research and investigation.

Jacobsen: How is your work turning the tide on this theology?

Collins: Correcting the problems introduced by William Branham and the other white supremacists is a much larger task than one person can achieve by themselves. Decades of influence through hundreds of key individuals have impacted millions of people in a negative way. Many of those influencers, though now deceased, still have outreach programs pushing that same (and sometimes worse) agenda(s). The tide will not be turned until there is a network of positive influencers that balance the scales between good and evil, racism and equality.

What I can say is that when my work is done, I will have done my small part in balancing that scale. Hopefully, there are others who do the same, and many more who pick up where I leave off when I am done. Anyone who wishes to help in or contribute to this effort can contact us on our website, william-branham.org.

Jacobsen: How are “The Message” believers protected against the outside influences like you?

Collins: As with all destructive cults, former members who present critical evidence against the central figure are demonized and vilified. Key figures of rank within the cult have launched campaigns of character assassination or worse against my partners and me, some of which were effective to a small degree. In Dr. Hassan’s BITE model, the “I” stands for “Control of Information,” and the “Message” meets and exceeds that criterion. Some former members are not permitted to use social media after realizing that critical information was spreading on Facebook, Twitter/X, and other platforms. Many sects were already not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio, and after certain interviews with former members were broadcast, more sects of the cult elevated their level of control to block current members from hearing them.

In the end, it is all about control. Where there are leaders of an authoritarian and destructive cult, there will always be rules and regulations intended to control and oppress the people by suppressing all opposing thoughts. Thankfully, the age of information has changed this dynamic, and current members are awakening to the fact that they are being manipulated and controlled. Personally, I see both the good and bad in the cult’s strategies of authoritarian control because of this. If things continue as they are now, with or without outside influences, people will eventually have their own Braveheart rebellion against tyranny.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/27

In spite of overcoming fat shaming as a social phenomenon, obesity as a medical condition brought by genetics and largely lifestyle in his case, and the contagion of racism against African Americans in the United States, David Goggins chose to overcome it.

Insofar as I can tell by observation, he is a broken person in the opposite direction of an individual who consumes, sits on a couch, causes no problems, but creates no solutions. If there are any problems, then a bad example is one. 

However, at the same time, we can see something unique or distinct with Goggins in the commitment to a purpose grounded on the sense of an absolute nothing. A concept first introduced by Dr. Christian Sorensen to me. Dr. Sam Vaknin picked up a similar idea in his nothingness series.

As Goggins notes astutely, the bedrock is there when you come to the point of nothing left for you. You have nothing; you have no one except you. It becomes a moment of “me” in neither ennui nor darkness. It is more of a sense of “welp, this is it.” 

That is not even a form of bravery or courage. Merely an acceptance of what is presented before one’s consciousness, the direct impressions of the world. A centred experience of a now. The mind seems like action without movement. Language is a vessel for conveying this. 

Immediately, you must act or feel compelled to do so. David Goggins’s wisdom comes from accepting this ground state and then building up from it or rebuilding from it. He is a case study of someone, certainly, in non-normal circumstances by being born in America and having the surreal experience of someone born with black skin.

His chief value is characterization in clear, colloquial language. He speaks the way Richard Pryor spoke, which is how every ordinary person speaks. However, he achieves extraordinary things. They are achievements only within a frame of a culture rewarding them. 

He becomes a Navy Seal. He becomes an Army Ranger. He is an ultramarathon runner. It comes from building on this foundation of nothingness. He used to spray cockroaches. He was overweight. He was an ordinary guy. He knows mediocrity. 

His achievements become validated through genuinely being broken, while the adaptation from this comes with social rewards. He is he’s a tragic hero. His clear expression of taking on these burdens and moving forward while having no one, in the end: “Embrace the suck.” 

I love that. I like imbibing the bad nature of the negative parts of life and integrating them fully. It sucks. Embrace that suck now; that is, that’s the rest of your life. You will achieve more in the social rules setup, as he has, but it will suck. It will suck so bad to where you may become great as him.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/26

*The interview conducted August 28, 2023.*

Mandisa Thomas is the Founder of Black Nonbelievers, Inc. One of, if not the, largest organization for African-American or black nonbelievers or atheists in America. The organization is intended to give secular fellowship, provide nurturance and support for nonbelievers, encourage a sense of pride in irreligion, and promote charity in the non-religious community. 

Daniel Edwin Barkeris an American atheist activist and former evangelical Christian preacher and musician. He is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation with Annie Laurie Gaylor and the Co-Host of Freethought Radio, and a Co-Founder of The Clergy Project. Barker is a member of the Algonquian-speaking Lenni Lenape Tribe or, more formally based on the official name, the Delaware Indians/Delaware Tribe of Indians (primarily named for being on the banks of the Delaware River rather than the state of Delaware) of Native Americans. 

Here Mandisa and Dan talk about contexts for Native American and African American freethinkers.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is an interview with Dan Barker and Mandisa Thomas. I want to get started on maybe a little background of community experience within the secular or atheist, agnostic, or humanist communities from the vantage of your lifetime of work in these areas. So, I’ll let you pick among yourselves who starts. For those that are non-religious, say broadly speaking, either within a Native American context or within an African-American context, what are some issues that might arise individually for that person as they become more public, vocal, and comfortable in that stance and point of view for themselves? 

Dan Barker: Well, go ahead, Mandisa, let the smart one go first here.

Mandisa Thomas: Oh gosh! [Laughing] So, speaking as a black African-American atheist, I would say that most of the challenges come from the heavily religious influence in black communities and the strong tie to identification to the point where it seems inseparable whether that’s throughout history and also about matters of racial justice and other areas of justice. They seem to be inseparable in the way that there is so much credence given to the religious leaders in our communities that the presence of atheists, humanists, and freethinkers is almost erased, which presents a challenge for representation and advocacy because there’s always or mostly an assumption that civil rights and freedom are tied into religion, which isn’t true. Also, this idea is that being black is automatically tied to being religious. They’re almost inseparable, so if you are identifying as black, then you must also inherently identify as an theist. If you don’t, that presents challenges to your credibility as black, especially within the United States. That becomes a challenge for those who are coming out and deconstructing because there’s still a challenge in trying to find other like-minded individuals because there is still, the black community, in particular, is still heavily religious. So, that becomes a massive challenge for many, which creates a sense of isolation and feelings and higher levels of concealment. So, it is that in the framework of simply being black in this country that makes it so much more complicated when religion is tied into the identity of the communities, which makes it challenging not just to find communities but also to effectively discuss matters of racial and other areas of social justice without religion being invoked almost every time.

Jacobsen: Dan, how about you?

Barker: So, I am on my father’s side. I am a fully enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of American Indians, and that’s the name the U.S. government gave us. We call ourselves the Lenape, the Lenni Lenape. Initially, we sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24, and we had seven migrations and almost went extinct. My great-grandfather was on the Tribal Council in 1900 during the census. There were less than a thousand members left. By then, we had been pushed from East into Oklahoma. We lived in Kansas for a long time on a reservation in the 1830s to 1860s, where Baptists and Mennonites missionized our tribe and Christianized. Even though my great-grandmother was a full-blooded Delaware Indian, her favourite song was Rock of Ages, a Christian song. They went to church, they prayed, and because my granddad was five years old during that census, our family, my brothers and dad, and I were all fully enrolled members.

Most of the Indian tribes count membership by ancestry, not by blood. So, I’m only about 10 or 12% Native American blood if you go by DNA. My mother’s, grandmother’s, and dad’s sides are mostly European stocks. So, I pretty much walk through life as a white person, although I love the heritage. We used to go to some Powwows, and I heard my granddad singing some of the prayer hymns in the Lenape language, and he did his beadwork. We’re proud of all that, but my brothers and I were urban Indians. We loved it, but it wasn’t a massive part of our life, and since we weren’t identified as much as blacks might be identified as part of a culture, we pretty much lived as white kids. 

I have 164th black ancestry, too. My great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother; my great grandmother’s great-grandmother was African, which shows up on my DNA as 164th. In the South, if you had even one drop of black blood, you were considered black, which is silly because what do I look like? There’s no heritage there at all, but in Louisiana, they had a word for a 164th; they had half-breeds and octoroons telling how much black blood you had. Well, there was a word called Sunmele 164th, which is also considered black. Even some half-blacks can pass as white. So, I would not have been allowed legally to marry Annie Laurey in Louisiana for a while there, but that’s all pretty silly because, functionally, my brothers and I have not experienced much discrimination for being members of the American Indian tribe. It’s usually the opposite; people are impressed, “Wow, so all about the buffaloes and wow! You know all about the great spirit.” [Laughing] 

If you’re a member of a tribe, you suddenly know all things Indian, like suddenly you’re some expert, but I will say that Christianity is a big part of most of the Native American tribes. Our tribe had a blend; we blended some native traditions with the Christian traditions like many tribes do today. If you look for the Delaware tribe of American Indians, look for it online. There’s a web page where you’ll see the tribal seal; it has the turkey print, the wolf print, and the turtle shell, and our clan was the turtle clan. In addition to those three clans, it also has a Christian cross on the tribal seal of an American Indian tribe, and nobody knows how it got there. I’ve asked the tribe how it got there, and they’re not even sure. They said, “Well, we’re all Christians.” My brother Darrell and I are not, and my dad wasn’t at the end of his life. So, there’s not much of a community that you would call Native American freethinkers or atheists or agnostics, but there is a small community. 

Brent Michael Davids is also part Delaware, part Munsee, and part Mohican. He’s a famous composer, and we’ve had him discuss our convention. He lives on a reservation here in Wisconsin. He, my brother, and I, along with a few others, have started a Facebook page called Indigenous Freethinkers. You can look that up and see all seven of us. Maybe there’s more. The writer, Louise Erdrich, is a Native American and also an atheist, and her sister sometimes gets involved with it, but there’s not much we can do other than maybe compare notes and so on. I don’t want to make it even look remotely like the current Native American freethinkers’ fair with the same difficulty that black freethinkers have in this community because racism happens with all dark-skinned people. Still, with blacks, it’s just an order of magnitude worse.

So, I can’t say much more about that because there is no super-organized indigenous freethinking atheist community other than just a few of us who happen to have gotten together.

Jacobsen: Well, at least in Canada, similar to the notion Mandisa was pointing out about the isolation and the trouble finding community, there was an Aboriginal Committee for Humanist Canada. I was part of it; it was headed up by the time vice president Dr Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, who’s Metis, and after he finished his term and I was done on the board of Humanist Canada. We’re continuing that. There are a half dozen to eight, something like this, from just different smatterings of parts of Canada, continuing some of this conversation. I’m more tokenized into there. So, I did my 23andMe, and they sent me back a sleeve of salting crackers because I came back 100% Northwestern European. [Laughing] These are the least interesting findings ever, and if I look at a picture, I look like I belong as a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

These are important things to point out because there are some threads of commonality where, for instance, when I have reached out to interview some indigenous secularists, freethinkers, humanists, etc., in Canada, I would say the sample size is small granted, but about half would say no, not because they don’t want to or that they are against it, but that within the community they’re a little bit uneasy about the impacts on some of their family by having them outspoken like that. It’s a different sensibility, a community sense, of the impacts of my doing this on my family. That’s an interesting early finding in doing some of these interviews or at least doing some of this outreach. 

Do you find some of that, Mandisa, when you’re providing a community yourself what you’ve done for a long time for black African-Americans through Black Nonbelievers or yourself, Dan, in seeing some of these individuals who are indigenous freethinkers in the United States who come out publicly? ‘Here’s my photo, and I’m with a bunch of other indigenous freethinkers in the United States.’

Thomas: I would say that, of course, yes, there is a reluctance on the part of many identified blacks in this country to identify as atheists openly, and much to what Dan was saying about the indigenous people is that there is such a cultural identity tied into being Christian even though much like the enslaved Africans descendants; it was forced. In many indigenous or Native American cultures or tribes, there is a huge effort to preserve a sense of culture that was lost, especially when it comes to when the populations are decimated. So, we experience something similar with the history of enslavement and the black church playing again such a huge role in justice in this country. There is again that emotional tie to belief and the church because it was a place where many blacks couldn’t rise to power, black men in particular, and there are some denominations that do include some African traditions and rituals. So, there’s also a tie there. 

I would say that again; the challenge does come because they’re much like with indigenous folks; the church and the music have taken on a life of their own, especially in black communities. So, it’s so ingrained into the culture. In the community that it’s really hard to break, and again, some folks are reluctant to identify because not only do they not want to disappoint their parents or even their grandparents, but they feel like they are going against the community, that they are going against the history of what we’ve been through in this country not realizing that part of that history does include black atheist humanists and freethinkers. So, that piece of education and information is missing due to the strong emotional ties many have in this community, which again makes it sometimes challenging to have these conversations. So, if you will, there’s that sense of reluctance to go against the grain in the community and openly identify, even though it’s valid. It’s extremely valid considering the history, but when you count on that sense of community for many, you don’t want to disappoint your family and other friends. It makes that much more of a challenge there. I hope I answered that question.

Jacobsen: Great as always, thank you. And Dan, how about you?

Barker: So, back in the 1980s, when I left the ministry, I was a preacher for 19 years. Then, I started working with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and appearing on national T.V. shows. My grandmother, who lived in Oklahoma, and my grandparents lived in Oklahoma at the time. She was surprised when she saw a couple of those shows, like the Phil Donahue show, Sally Jessy, or Oprah Winfrey or something. She knew something had happened with her grandson, a preacher, and we inherited all of that through both sides of my dad’s family; through the Indian side and then through, there’s like a half Cherokee half French side and grandma wrote me a letter. She said, “Danny, I saw you on television, but that’s not our Danny that I saw, as if once you’re in the group, you just have to stay in that group and that family; that’s who you are.” I didn’t reply to her. She was older and had a mixture of Christian and Indian beliefs. She sometimes would have “visions” that were real to her, where some Native ancestors would come in with their beadwork alongside a priest or a preacher walking into the room, and she would see them walking into the house. And she said, “Danny, I saw them really for real. Don’t you believe that?” And I say, “Well, I believe you felt it.” 

So, there was a little bit of that feeling like I wasn’t supposed to leave, but I don’t think that’s a race thing. That’s a religious thing; I mean, it happens to Muslims, it happens to Jehovah’s Witnesses, it happens to anybody who’s within a certain… it can happen to Orthodox Jews. So because our tribe was forced to convert between 1830 and 1860, we had our reservation, and it was like America at the time viewed itself as a white Christian Nation and that whole idea of destiny. So, to survive, most of the tribes had to assimilate in some way or another or accommodate, and so both my great-grandparents became devout Christians. It was sincere, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened if the whites hadn’t come over here in the first place with European guns and European Bibles. So, what happens, at least with the Native American Community, is that to the same degree as a lot of blacks, you do have a sense that it’s your whole culture that you’re questioning if you question the religion.

Jacobsen: Dan, you’ve commented as a side note on the Lehigh County Seal as a symbol of white colonialism. These sorts of things have different meanings depending on cultural and communal context. Can you comment on that for a little bit?

Barker: Yes. So, Allentown, Pennsylvania, the county seat there is Allentown in Lehigh County, which was part of our tribe’s ancestor homelands there in Eastern Pennsylvania. The Delaware Indians were in that whole Manhattan, New Jersey, Delaware River area and the famous Walking Purchase that you might have read about in the history books, which was a way that William Penn’s nephew cheated our tribe and some other tribes of a whole bunch of land; they call it the Walking Purchase, what happened in that area. Today, if you go to Lehigh County, the county seal has nothing about the original inhabitants. It’s all the farmers and the whites and the implementations, and it’s all recognizing the “old history” of that area, which goes back about 15,000 years, not just 150 years. So, a cross was on that seal, so we sued and won.

Jacobsen: Congratulations!

Barker: We won at the first level at least, but then we lost. It was overturned by the appeals court just claiming historical reasons, and I don’t know if you know, I wrote an op-ed to the local paper claiming that that wasn’t white Christian ancestral homelands and that seal is memorializing as was my tribe; it was our tribe that was there. This would never happen, but you know how the Jews claim that God gave them the holy land, and they went over there and took it from the inhabitants? Couldn’t the natives claim the same thing about Manhattan or Lehigh County? Of course, that would never happen. There’s no real power among natives anymore because we were… it was more than decimated; it was the reciprocal. It was like 90% of the population either through disease or through genocide or through being run off; many tribes went extinct, and ours almost did too, less than a thousand finally in the year 1900. So, the county leaders did not respond to my op-ed, but a few people in town did. They were surprised; they didn’t realize that history. They’re sitting in that area where the Walking Purchase stole the land from them.

Jacobsen: And Mandisa, when you provide and have been providing much on the ground community for black African-Americans in the United States across the board for well over a decade, and I’ve been part of that working relationship in terms of doing conversations as you transitioned out of hospitality into doing that full time. So, I’ve seen that growth and a lot of that momentum that you’ve been working hard towards. What are you noting as the first moments when people come to you with their needs for themselves? What kinds of things do individuals need coming out of these contexts, not simply ideas such as community but on a personal level?

Thomas: So, one of the major concerns, I would say primary concerns among many black atheists or those who are coming out of religion, is dating and finding relationships amongst fellow nonbelievers. This is a huge challenge for many; this subject often comes up in many conversations. There are challenges with meeting fellow nonbelievers to converse with or connect with on a personal level, and also, there is a challenge at times with partners who may still be or spouses who may still be religious. So, that’s also a challenge. We have seen many of our members who have faced questions regarding raising children, like what do we do now? If one spouse is not religious, one still is; what do you do about that? Because I know many of our members or people in the non-religious community, we pay attention to more comprehensive education. More people are maybe not may not necessarily be having children, but that is a point of reference and concern to many is how are they going to find more lifelong partners that are atheists and nonbelievers or how are they going to coexist with their existing partners as they come out of this indoctrinated belief. Learning how to navigate is a major concern among many, and that is often at the core of the community-building piece and the networking piece that is often important to the work that we do because once people come to that realization that they are atheists and that there are other issues that they are concerned about specifically and what Dan reminded me of the fact that reparations for African-Americans or the descendants of the enslaved are often a hugely important conversation in our communities.

But first and foremost, having been a practitioner or being a practitioner for all these years, one of definitely the most important concerns that people have on a personal level is finding meaningful relationships and romantic relationships with fellow nonbelievers because dating is a challenge when it comes to believers. It can also be a challenge for fellow nonbelievers to find those connections. So, that is a huge concern amongst our members in particular.

Jacobsen: Are either of you aware of conversations between African-Americans and Native Americans on these free-hought issues, whatever they may be along that spectrum that we’re all familiar with?

Barker: I’m not aware of any of that kind of conversation. A lot of or some African-Americans have Native American blood, and a lot of them do because of the history, but as far as freethought goes, it’s still pretty rare, pretty, I guess, new to come out as a freethinker in either of those communities.

Thomas: I’ve known individual Native American indigenous people who have reached out to us, and they have asked whether they could participate with me, and of course, the answer is yes, anyone can participate with us. At different events over the years, we have connected with folks like Native Americans who have expressed the same sense of frustration and tension that many black folks do when it comes to finding fellow like-minded nonbelievers who can directly relate to the challenges. So, it’s been in pockets. We hope to connect with more because the populations here are as scarce as they are amongst indigenous people and their descendants.

I imagine that it’s even harder to find more Native American atheists because now, online, black atheist groups have exploded. Those are quite common on social media. Some folks are making themselves known through YouTube videos, TikTok, etc. However, when it comes to actually organizing and bringing together people as a community, that is still something that few organizations, namely Black Nonbelievers, are doing. There has been interest in other people of colour in starting something similar because they recognize that there is a need for it. Connecting directly with those folks is necessary because finding them and bringing them out is hard. So, the connections that we do have are still few and far between. Still, we have been fortunate enough to have engaged through either our website or through other events with indigenous and Native American folks who are relieved to see us there because it does give them hope that they can find others that they can relate to and hopefully start something similar.

Jacobsen: So, outside of the personal history or the organizational provisions or how County symbols can have a different impact on individuals coming across and with a different history, all of these tell me that we can’t eliminate history. It’s a truism, but it’s important to make it explicit. So, an important point is building those networks so individuals and communities can thrive. In contrast, Mandisa has explicitly pointed out they cannot find community in any way, or if they do, it’s a bit of an issue for them to come forward or even to find intimacy. So, Dan, what was the idea behind indigenous freethinkers to bring that forward in an early stage and Mandisa? What were some of the sparks for Black Nonbelievers Incorporated?

Barker: So, before I answer that, you said we can’t get rid of history or something like that, but we do get rid of history like a County seal in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, got rid of history, thousands and thousands of years and a lot of people in Allentown Pennsylvania; they have no idea that they’re sitting on the land that was stolen and had all that culture and history. They think old history is 200-year-old buildings. I just went to the web page of Indigenous Freethinkers; it’s a Facebook page, and it has yet to be active. It’s not like there’s a big crying need for indigenous freethinkers to find each other, but we do, and it’s more like sharing ideas and thoughts, and I just noticed this: there are 17 members there. So, it’s more than doubled since I was there, including Heid Erdrich; she’s the sister of Louise Erdrich, the famous author. She’s been on that list for a while; she’s a poet in her own right, there in Minneapolis. 

So, it’s a self-identification thing; we all know that we are members of indigenous groups and yet we’re out in the world, and yet we still hang on. I guess it’s like how Jews want to be with other Jews just for the common culture and the common ancestry there, although not all indigenous groups are the same. They don’t all have the same histories; there’s a lot of overlap in some of the mythology. In my tribe’s case, we know some of the mythology, but so much of it was lost, so much of it was just gone and mixed, and in Northern Oklahoma, there were seven or eight different tribes that the U.S. government mashed together. So, there was a lot of intermarriage between the Cherokee and other groups, but I guess whoever you are in this world, you feel a connection to some culture or ancestry and in my family’s case. It was our land that was stolen. Culture was stolen, and then, in Mandisa’s case, it was not that the land was stolen. They were stolen from the land and brought over to another continent to work as slaves.

I don’t know if this is relevant, but I’ve been reading about slave revolts, and I’m surprised how many there were. Not all the slaves were believers. There’s a history even before the Civil War. There’s a history of atheistic, skeptical slaves even working on the plantations getting together. So, they weren’t on their knees praying to Jesus or any of their particular African beliefs. So, it goes way back, but it is the sense of being not an insider, of being a bystander or being something extra to the real white Christian Americans who founded and run this country. There’s always going to be that sense that we’re somehow off or that we’re somehow not fully welcomed into American society, especially when you see what happened with the reservations and with the desecration of lands and holy places.

For most Native Americans, their religious beliefs were tied to geographical places: the River, this lake, and this mountain were important, and when they were yanked away from that, it ruined everything. We had to go to some kind of generic religious thing. In my family’s case, it was the River that was there in Manhattan, the Manhattan River, that is now totally paved over, and then it became a canal, and then the canal was paved over, and that became Canal Street. So, if you go to Canal Street in southern Manhattan, which used to be the holy River of the Lenni Lenape tribe, where the snake was driven underground in mythology, that’s gone, and when you uproot people, you lose all of that. So, we share some of those regrets and feelings, and we all share a kind of, I don’t know what you would call, a kind of specialness that we do have, an identity that we can hang on to. An identity that is being threatened by the majority religion in this country.

Mandisa Thomas: I agree, Dan, and I will say definitely. What sparked things to start Black Nonbelievers and to connect with more black atheists in particular, say that was a mentor of mine, one of my teachers, Diane Glover, who was keen on black liberation, education, especially for black children, and understanding the institutional factors of racism and injustice, but she’s a hardcore Christian. So, when I started expressing my dissent and my disdain for Christianity in particular, she was scared for me, and she became offended when I shared Jeremiah Camara’s website; Jeremiah, who is the director/producer of Contradiction, which she was featured in and she was quite upset about that. She couldn’t understand why I would choose such a path. I had to tell her that it was due to her mentorship and that it was leaders and strong women like her who always taught me to question the status quo to have a better understanding of what happened to our ancestors and these institutional atrocities that we endured and being Christian, in particular, was one of them. We can’t get around that. 

And I also knew as Dan said before, that black folks had a history of rebellion and resilience. Many do not just sit down or sit back and accept the conditions. It was because of that that certain brutality was imposed, but the fact that there is a history of humanism and free thought and atheism in the black community that is not often spotlit and the fact that there are more people. I had people reaching out to me privately, and they would ask, “Do you not believe?” I said, “No, I don’t,” They said, “Good, because I don’t believe either.” So, speaking up and speaking out encouraged more people to do and express the same. I thought that we were in Atlanta. This was right around the time that the Eddie Long Scandal broke, around the end of 2010, and there was a lot of discourse. There were a lot of people who were critiquing, even a lot of Christians. 

That was the right time to say, “You know what? Not only do I have an issue with this institution, but I have also thoroughly examined my identity and have come to terms with it and have come to truly understand that I do not believe in any God, Spirit, or supernatural beings whatsoever.” There must be more of us out here because of the history of resilience, resistance, and rebellion in black communities and other communities of colour. It’s like no one just ever accepted it. And in this day of information and people’s ability to speak up more, there has to be more of us out here. So, that was the driving force, was that it was needed. It was needed, especially due to the still lack of representation in both black communities and secular communities of people of colour, particularly black folks, and also getting them together in person. Being online and connecting through social media is a great start, but to truly build on that community aspect through good, bad, or what have you, nothing replaces that in-person engagement. There’s nothing like hearing people say I thought I was the only one, and the fact that I see people gives me a sense of relief that we exist. Many of our members credit Dan for their transition and deconversion; others in the community noted that many of our members do credit.

However, when it came to actually finding the black folks, that was important to them because that is a starting point, and we always encourage that to be a starting point for those connections; we certainly encourage folks not just to stick with Black Nonbelievers, but, if you find that this is an organization that you call home, wonderful. That is what we focus on, and we focus intentionally from the perspective of being black. There are cultural experiences that many of us can relate to, and there are things that black folks like to do, and that is okay. We represent our communities; we represent our culture; we represent what it is not just to be an atheist but also what it is to be black in this country, which is diverse. It is diverse, and it is also about breaking that stigma about what it means to be black, especially when there is so much in the way of assumptions about what it means to be black, in the United States and even throughout the world, which usually implies that you are Christian or religious in some way. And so dispelling those misconceptions was extremely important.

Barker: And Mandisa, one thing that will help is Godless Gospel.

Thomas: Yes. [Laughing]

Barker: Have you got your plane ticket for the rehearsal yet? 

Thomas: I did. I am all set and ready to go.

Barker: Yes, this will be our second performance.

Jacobsen: What is the Godless Gospel? I have to plug it.

Barker: Well, it’s gospel music, a musical style directed by Andre Forbes, a former professional gospel musician, songwriter, arranger and a whole band of former gospel players. One of the drummers is still playing in church, but he’s not a believer. And singers, mostly black singers in the group, singing secular, atheistic, humanistic, and naturalistic lyrics to that gospel style, and Andre is the right guy to do that style. You’ll agree, Mandisa. It almost feels like you’re in church when you’re listening to it.

Thomas: Absolutely, and I am honoured to have made this connection with Dan, with me being a singer and Dan being the singer, pianist, and musician he is. I remember when you told me about this concept that you had about the Godless Gospel and one of the things that Black Nonbelievers do exist to do is make these connections, not just social and personal connections but also professional connections. For people with a skill set, talent, and creativity, some things can be created from that, and that has come from that. I remember that Andre was a gospel producer and singer, and he had his journey of coming out as an atheist. It was wonderful when there was an opportunity to connect him with Dan. It gives another style to some of the music that Dan has produced over the years, and it also connects Andre’s music, and it sounds amazing. It is wonderful to be a part of that and see it come to life. And yes, we have connected people with the gospel, which moves many people, black and white. Many folks love gospel music, but it becomes harder to listen to because of the lyrics as they come out of religion. So, yes, it’s a wonderful project that got people moving. It was great, it is soulful, it is just wonderful.

Barker: And you got us in touch with Andre in the first place and with D’Angelo. I don’t know if she’s part of the Black Nonbelievers, but D’Angelo is from Jacksonville, and you just heard about the shooting in Jacksonville yesterday, that racially motivated shooting. This crazy guy killed three people.

Thomas: Oh, jeez!

Barker: Anyway, and then, of course, you put us in touch with Andre, and Andre knew the other musicians because he’s in the professional industry of what you would call gospel music, and all he does is R&B, and he does some rocking stuff too. And so, Andre and I have written the songs, and our styles are different, but I handed over the control to Andre, and he took my songs and spruced them up into an amazing thing. So, this year, we’ll be doing our second performance on October 13th in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Annual Convention.

Thomas: Yes, we are still looking for singers. The audition process is ongoing, so Scott, if you could promote it to encourage more people to audition, that would be awesome!

Jacobsen: Link in the text. [Laughing]

Thomas: And the one thing that I’m grateful for is D’Angelo came along with Andre. He might share it with her, but I got the involvement of Cynthia McDonald, Candace Gorham, and Steven Phelps from Sunday Assembly Nashville. I had the wonderful opportunity to connect with other singers and producers throughout the community, and I have been encouraging them to audition and become a part of this project because we want it to be multicultural and diverse, and anyone can sing it; anyone can be a part of it, and it is just great to have people within the community who have responded to it as well. So, it is awesome that those connections we build mean something beyond just leaving religion behind. We are being innovative; it’s being innovative, it’s historical, and we’re doing unprecedented things, and I’m just really excited about that.

Barker: And I found Tahira Clayton; she’s an internationally known jazz vocalist, and her husband, Addison Frei, is a well-known jazz pianist. When she came to audition for Godless Gospel, she had been raised in the church, in a black church somewhere in Texas, and he had never heard her sing. He never heard his wife sing gospel; she always sang beautiful jazz. She does all the standards, and when she auditioned, she started belting out this gospel music; he said, “What is that coming from?” [Laughing] 

Thomas: Her voice, she is amazing.

Barker: He said it was just there from my childhood; it’s just something you grew up with. So, yes, she’s a great soloist.

Jacobsen: There’s a larger topic here, too, around secularizing parts of communities and culture. They were so, taking the gospel, removing a lot of the supernaturalistic elements and making it something that people enjoy anyway. Are there other aspects of American culture generally that can be secularized in such a way that ordinary people can make free thought more accessible to individuals who are looking for that community or just looking for a good time while being a free thinker?

Barker: Well, what first came to my mind was Jeremiah Camara’s films. He was at our conference in Canada this weekend. It was in August, and his films are on Hulu or Amazon Prime; Holy Hierarchy is the one we screened just this last weekend about the history of oppression and slavery in our country. So, that’s using art to get a message across, and he interviews many people, but he has a lot of history in that. He’s an incredible filmmaker, talented, and a Freedom From Religion Foundation board member.

Thomas: I agree with that 100%, but religion, Christianity in particular, has always borrowed from secularism. I would say that it has always hijacked secularism. It has been a common practice for secular themes and humanistic themes to have been co-opted by religion, and, unfortunately, so many people think that the barometer or the standard is set by religion, and it’s not. Practices of secularism and humanism predate religions, especially the Judea-Christian religions. that being able to point. We even see it in things as we see it in children’s literature, and we see in other cultures throughout the world that being a good person and doing the right things have nothing to do with any belief. So, it is a matter of pointing out that religion has always borrowed and not just borrowed but has stolen from many other cultures that aren’t as dogmatic. 

I credit my upbringing and having learned about various aspects of history and culture, especially on the continent of Africa, which is undisputedly the cradle of civilization. There there’s no disputing that now. So, knowing more about how the world has been secular and humanistic, even through different religions and cultures, can help turn that around. We can deep back this narrative that religion has the moral high ground, if you will, or sets the standard for what it means to be morally good because, as we see throughout history, that can stand a question. 

Jacobsen: I was talking in Copenhagen to Debbie Goddard about this, and that point about Godless Gospel, and I appreciate the corrections from both of you; two of the responses there, that I mean a lot of cultural artifacts in music and art have had Christianity or other religions grafted onto them often by force of coercion. So, this is a process of de-Christianizing art and cultural aspects already there. With regards to networking and community building, has there been any discussion or efforts from some of the larger not individual organizations like State, provincial, or national but more from umbrella organizations that may be national or International to have these conversations more formally because they’re more in a position to do so simply for the matter of the fact that they represent several different organizations?

Thomas: I certainly appreciate Freedom From Religion Foundations’ willingness to have these conversations at the events, at the conventions and their support for previous events that we have put on, like the Women of Color Beyond Belief conference, where we have featured all women of colour; speakers, activists, organizers, etc. We are seeing an intentional shift and willingness to listen, not just listen but put it into practice. When we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s something that takes time to dismantle these institutions that have certainly kept white supremacy alive for so long, like that has impacted other white people. So, being intentional about especially listening to those of us who have come into this community to say, “Hey, these are the things that we are working on that we see need improvement. We’re not just sitting there waiting for the organizations to do it on their own. It takes a team effort to do,” even as the process becomes challenging at times and can be downright uncomfortable, that is what allows us to improve and be better.

They are also taking from the work that has been done already because there has been incredible work throughout the years speaking of Annie Laurie and her mom, Nicole Gayler, who founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheist, and all the folks who have done this work to make this a part of institutions. Certainly, as more folks come into the movement in the community as an organization or as a community that prides itself on evidence and new information, these things have to be taken into consideration, and they have. They have many other organizations who work alongside us, Black Nonbelievers, speaking and being willing to keep it, not just at one-time initiatives and conversations. These things must be put into practice for this to continue. So, from my vantage point, there have been some good changes throughout the years in the community and through organizations and their willingness to take us seriously.

A few years ago, The U.S. Secular Survey was launched. From that came the black non-religious Americans report, which we collaborated with American Atheists on, spelled out the challenges that black non-religious people face. So, now there’s data for that. There is empirical information to show those challenges so that people are not just saying, “Hey, they’re just saying it, and there’s nothing to back it up,” even though few research and other research forums do back it up. However, it comes from a specifically secular source, allowing for more credibility. So, there will always be more work in those areas. However, in my work and over the years, there has been tremendous improvement in the initiatives and work being done collaboratively.

Barker: Well, Mandisa, I must correct your serious mistake. 

Thomas: Okay.

Barker: Ann Gaylor’s middle name was not Nicole; it’s Nicol. 

Thomas: Oh.

Barker: Nicol; that’s her Scottish ancestry. People always say Ann Nicole Gaylor, but she didn’t like that. She and Annie Laurie are proud of their Scottish ancestry. Mandisa, you deserve a lot of credit for making a real organization to address this, a formal organization to unite people. Otherwise, we’re just a bunch of acquaintances and friends. So, congratulations to you for making Black Nonbelievers happen.

Jacobsen: Truly. What are your primary efforts in creating community through annual events? One of those I’m aware of is the convention. What is it, and what other ways are the Freedom From Religion Foundation or yourself doing it?

Barker: Creating community is an important part of the Freedom From Religion Foundation; we’re a national organization. So, we do have a yearly National Convention. We’re coming up on our 46th this October. There are a few hundred people, sometimes five or six, or we even had a thousand at one convention. It’s not our entire membership; we have over 40,000, but it’s a good place for those who want to get together to hear speakers, have good food, hear music, and interact with each other. Many tell us that the most important part happens in the hallways when they bump into others and say, “Wow! you too?”; the unplanned part of a convention, which is nice. And then we’re working on an app, which I don’t know if we’ll have in time this year, where people can say, “Hey, I’m from Michigan. Who else is from Michigan?” that kind of thing can we get together.

We also have chapters, and again, even though the community is not our main focus, our main focus is working to keep the State and church separate through legal action and then educating the public about freethinkers. We have 25 or 27 chapters around the country, which are bottom-up. We don’t try to start chapters; we’re not like a denomination, a church that goes around planning churches everywhere. The best chapters are those that can’t help but form bottom-up organically. So, the chapters have different purposes and activities; some are just social groups, some are activist groups, and some are involved in litigation, whatever they want to do in their local area as they come together to form some community. Sometimes, it’s just cleaning the streets doing Highway cleaning, and sometimes, it’s contributing to charities, raising money to help local charities.

Community happens when people have a common goal or common sense of identity, and of course, our national convention is just a huge part of that. Many people who come for the first time say, “Wow! This is the first time I’ve ever been in a room where I can say whatever I want and not worry about it,” and meet other people. Sometimes, they meet people and go, “You mean you just live around the corner from me? I never knew that” They’ve been keeping their mouth shut in their local communities because they’re afraid, especially in rural communities. In fact, at one of our meetings, this woman walked in the door, and Howard said, “What are you doing here?” She looked at him and said, “Well, what are you doing here?” They were neighbours; they shared a common property line. They thought the other was Baptist and were keeping their heads down; they didn’t put any bumper stickers on their cars, and for almost 20 years, they could have been friends and freethinking, but they didn’t. They came to one of our meetings and found each other, which was a fun story.

So, yes, community is important, and with FFRF, we accommodate that. Our main purpose, of course, is the legal action and the educational efforts. We have a national radio show, a national T.V. show, a national newspaper, a weekly ‘Ask an atheist’ on Facebook Live, and we publish books as educational. People wanting to have the same result, the same purpose getting together; that’s exciting, that’s electrifying to say let’s march together, let’s work together, let’s protest together, let’s sue the government together, and that creates a special kind of community,

Thomas: I’m glad I could rethink my response now. [Laughing] Yes, in addition to our annual cruise convention, we host an anniversary celebration every five years. It is an opportunity for people who have been involved with the organization or are new to see how far we’ve come as an organization and the folks. We are still developing leadership and connections throughout the community and have affiliate groups. We certainly have a model we follow to bring people together. Most of it is social; however, it is similar to FFRF. We do volunteer work; we certainly encourage that. Sometimes, we have guest speakers. We started doing a YouTube show on our YouTube channel called In the Cut; we’ve been doing that since 2022 and collaborate on various initiatives with other organizations. We are now co-sponsoring a student scholarship with the Secular Student Alliance. 

The one thing about our events is an intentional focus on people. There’s an intentional focus on making sure that people feel welcomed, feel included, and that people are communicating with each other not just simply on an intellectual basis but that people know that they are feeling supported because when you feel that support, and you know that there are people who understand and can connect, then that blossoms activism. The further activism of the state-church separation, the protesting. People find that they can do this together once they understand that there are others out there, and I love people meeting for the first time. Folks who come to our events and are inspired by them are inspired to stay involved. And that’s one of the things about community; it’s more than just fun. Sometimes, we challenge each other, especially as people go through that indoctrination process, which helps us grow as a community. So, I’m proud of what we have accomplished at Black Nonbelievers regarding our consistent community engagement, helping people stay informed about what is happening throughout the community, and helping us sustain it. 

Jacobsen: There was another topic as well that I wanted to focus a little bit on, the economic, political and social force that it is with greater impact on Native American or American Indian and African-American or black communities in the United States. And that’s inverting the focus or reversing the focus from how one feels coming out of a religious community within either African-American tradition or within the Native American communities and more the wider culture having racist stereotypes about people coming from those communities. How does this fact-of-life factor come into play for individuals leaving those communities and entering the wider society? I recall in one of your earlier responses, Mandisa, you noted the isolation that can be a real factor and then Dan, you noted that there’s a long history of white colonialism and racist oppression that is here even though, as properly corrected, it can be erased; the symbols and things of the history. Either can start.

Barker: Go ahead, Mandisa, you’re on a roll right now.

Thomas: I’ll make this brief. In combating those notions and those stereotypes, as a community, at times, we tend to fall into those preconceived notions about what Native Americans are like and what black folks are like due to misinformation and the miseducation, and also just a general sense of not being directly involved with those communities. And so, often, we’ll be in secular spaces, and we talk about these challenges. Sometimes, there’s resistance even among fellow atheists, humanists, and nonbelievers because these are things that they’ve never been confronted with before, and so with that tends to be a sense of defensiveness. We can’t blame people for what they don’t know, but again, because we are a community that prides itself on evidence-based practices and practices and verification. 

Telling people to confront those notions they may have had can be uncomfortable for many. There have been instances where a person of colour may step into a predominantly white room of secular folks and be asked all these questions about the black community or indigenous community, expecting that we’re supposed to speak for everyone or expecting that we all care about those issues the same and that isn’t always true. Just like no one community is a monolith’, people must understand that our experiences also vary and that there should not be one barometer of what it means to come from those communities and represent them. So, the challenge comes in at times, not with the people we are opposing but with those who are well-meaning and who may not necessarily know but get so defensive that they may not want to know, which becomes a challenge. So, many more in our community must be mindful of that because we are people at the end of the day, and human beings will make mistakes. We need to acknowledge any indoctrination outside of religion that may have clouded the view of different folks and be ready to understand and learn and also do better.

Barker: I can’t speak with much authority on this for indigenous Americans. My granddad, of course, was born and raised in Indian Territory. Still, my dad’s generation in Southern California was pretty much assimilated and living as urban Indians, proud of the heritage and not feeling inferior because of it, but noticing, of course, that there was some discrimination. So, my brothers and I were pretty much white most of our lives with just this fact that we were members of a tribe, and when it comes to freethinkers in the indigenous community, I don’t think there is such a thing. There are just a number of us individuals who know each other, and maybe some of them contact Mandisa because Black Nonbelievers welcome all people of colour, but other than that, we are on our own, at least in this generation. I never had to live on a reservation, or I never had to suffer the deprivations of watching the U.S. government come up with billions of dollars to build an oil pipeline under our land, but they couldn’t afford to build a water pipeline to bring water to the reservation; just this inequity, this inequality that’s happening with people of colour.

I wish there were more of us; I wish we could be more active, at least those who are online; we don’t seem to feel the same type of real oppression now that some of our ancestors did.

Jacobsen: Do you want to make any final summative thoughts or summary statements to conclude this broached conversation?

Barker:‘ I’d like to say something going back to your first segment about reparations; maybe you could just edit it back to that point. As I said, I’ve been reading many books about enslaved people’s revolts in history, not just in the American South but even back in Spartacus in Rome, and they never turned out well. Spartacus was the exception, his revolt lasted two years, and they really kicked the Roman Army’s butt, but basically, slave revolts ended pretty badly. I just read a book called American Uprising, the untold story of America’s large slave revolt. It happened in 1811 in New Orleans in the sugar plantations where there were first and second. Third-generation Africans and then, of course, a lot of new Africans that were just brought over, and more than 500 of them successfully revolted and rose against these churchgoing Christian enslavers who were becoming wealthy off the sugar plantations. I mean, just obscenely wealthy off the backs of these people whose lives. They only lasted about seven years in that heat, and because of the work the enslaved people had to do and the oppression, they revolted. The Louisiana Purchase was just new; it was just a new part of the U.S. government. 

So, there weren’t many military forces the government could call on. There were a few, but after a few days, the formerly enslaved people marched on New Orleans. They were fed up and somehow ingeniously communicated through all those plantations, but the revolt was put down. The soldiers and then, of course, the enslavers themselves fought back. They murdered the leaders and cut off their heads, and this happened a lot, especially in South American plantations, but stuck their heads on poles along the road and along the Mississippi River. And the U.S. government saw fit to pay reparations to the enslavers for the loss of their property. They killed their slaves who revolted, and the government found the money because it was more important to the economy of the U.S. than to have these sugar plantations going. They found the money to pay back these enslavers for the loss of their property, and yet we’re still struggling over trying to find the money to do real reparations to the people who were real victims of all of this.

Thomas: I couldn’t agree more with that, Dan, and I would say there’s a tribute to that slave revolt. The Whitney Plantation is right outside New Orleans, and people must understand that black and indigenous history and our struggles are American history. It’s also important to our survival as a community to understand how State-Church separation, racial justice, and economic justice all play into our activism. We need to be educated on all of that, and if these are areas of activism that atheists, humanists, and agnostics can be a part of, then they should because it impacts us more than we realize. We need to understand and get a layer on the perspective of the folks who have lived it. Again, there is a history of people of colour; atheists, humanists, and agnostics that have played a role in resistance movements and how that is extremely important to the work that we do because if we don’t understand where we come from, then how do we know where we’re going? And so, that is often a phrase definitely in African-American communities. There is a phrase called ‘Sankofa,’ which means return and fetch it. And so, to understand and to reclaim parts of those histories and parts of those cultures and to gain a better understanding of where we’re going and the work that is still needed and it can be done while we embrace the liberation and the joy of being free from religion at the same time.

Jacobsen: Mandisa, Dan, thank you very much for the opportunity, your time, and the great work you’ve continued to do for many, many years.

Thomas: Thank you. 

Barker: Well, thank you, Scott. We can come back to the Vancouver area and see you someday.

Jacobsen: Sure, you can come to the farm, and I’ll show you some horses.

Barker: Oh really? Okay. We didn’t have a chance to talk about Kamloops, the Indian schools and the dead bodies that were found there because of the church. I’m sure you’re well aware of that history in your part of the continent. 

Jacobsen: Yes, I mean, even in Canada, there was the Attawapiskat; it has the highest suicide rate of any community in Canada. There’s a lot. 

Barker: The pope came over and apologized, but that was it; he just apologized. 

Jacobsen: Well, there’s a background there. So, Lloyd and I, Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson, we’ve been talking about this for a while, and, the first instance, the pope came in, and he didn’t apologize. Still, a subtle point was pointed out by a Canadian writer who’s now deceased, who I do have an interview with, which I cannot find, but her name was Lee Maracle. This name is familiar to either of you: an indigenous writer, a cutting writer. In an interview, she commented that if he’s not apologizing in an open-hand situation like that, he probably can’t feel he can do it because it’s probably happening elsewhere. Then you have to make an apology there, too. So, it becomes a cascade of responsibility. That’s what she was implying. That was before, and that’s a sharp point that even the basic idea had occurred to me. 

And then later, most recently, he has come and apologized, but yes, to your joke, Yes, he just apologized, but he’s not doing anything. Thoughts and prayers are equivalent, but there is a lot of stuff like that. I mean the little group that I’m a part of, which is intermittent, we get emails and articles, and I’ve done many interviews with Lloyd and others. It’s similar to your indigenous freethinkers’ group where it’s there, but it’s so informal as not to be there. It’s a couple of handfuls of people, and they do some good work. 

Barker: Yes, there’s no driving need or driving issue. So, we poke in every year and say hi.

Jacobsen: Yes, another thing sparked this whole thought years ago; this is a credit to Mandisa. We must have done 50 interviews or something. In one of those, you mentioned to me this years ago, like three, four or five years ago, with the first mention, which is basically if you leave the black church, you’ve considered no longer black often; you’ve lost your black card. That’s similar to the notion I got from indigenous Canadian folks; like they were comfortable as freethinkers, they have no problem giving interviews. They were just a little uneasy and nervous, so they declined due to its impact on their wider clan’s use of the phrasing. So, they have no belief in the Creator. They like the rituals but don’t believe in all the supernaturalism around them. They’ll go to smudge ceremonies, but for the community, they’re afraid they’ve lost their indigenous card. It’s not put in those words, but a similar concept and consequence seems to be at play regarding what Mandisa was saying first with the black community and leaving the black church.

Barker: Yes, and in both cases, it’s ironic because Christianity wasn’t the people’s original religion. 

Thomas: Not at all, and it’s White Evangelicalism that was the problem, not atheism. 

Jacobsen: Right. There’s this strong Anglo-Saxon European Christian identity. I remember Noam Chomsky had an interview years ago, and it was like a series of really in-depth interviews. There was some piece of European Christian propaganda that was trying to entice people from the old world Western Europe to come to the New World North America. It was an indigenous person, an Indian, to use the phrase in the time, and that person had a scroll out of their mouth and in the language it had said to come and save us… something like that.

Barker: That was the original Puritans; that was their motto.

Jacobsen: There you go. 

Barker: When they came over, they had that sign ‘come over here and save us.’

Jacobsen: Yes. I’m going to be doing one of my friends, she’s Alaskan and American, she’s a Tsimshian. She’s a little bit of Haida, too. I started publishing with her ex-husband. He’s a carver, and he noted within their particular band, they were quick to adopt the Christian religion; he was an Anglican guy because they saw a close relationship between the totem and the cross, and they prided themselves on being the most progressive, the most willing to accept new ideas. And so, it was like a greased-wheel situation for European Christian Colonials for them. 

Barker: So, I have to go, Scott. It was fun talking to you again, Mandisa. 

Thomas: Yes, same here.

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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/25

Wil Jeudy is the Texas State Director for American Atheists. Here we talk about Houston and Texas and the state of American atheism and secularism there.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Wil Jeudy. Regarding Texas, what areas of activism do you have to put out as a fire, if any?

Wil Jeudy: So, I lean progressive. Atheists, nonbelievers, and in Texas, there is a lot of work to be done as far as activism for people. That aligns with my worldview. So, personally, my activism revolves around secular political activism. So, giving secular people a voice in local politics here in Houston also normalizes nonbelief.

Jacobsen: How did you come to progressive politics and atheism as an outlook on the world? 

Jeudy: It was gradual. I grew up a Christian kid until 10th grade. I had daily indoctrination. I believed in all the Christian stuff. Once I left the school, I went to a typical high school, a regular college. I learned about the wider world. Then I got into medical school. It didn’t make sense. I slowly flittered away from Christianity – religion in general. There was no trauma. It didn’t make sense without the daily indoctrination. I flowy flittered away. By my early 40s, I was comfortable saying, “I do not believe in any of these things.” I went through spiritual pantheism; all paths lead to the same place. I explored some other options. In the end, I became comfortable. There is no evidence for any of this. I am okay cutting ties with all of it. That is how I became an atheist. Atheism means you don’t believe in a higher deity. The way I describe it, I am not going to sit here and say, “There is no God,” because the burden of proof is not on me to prove a negative. The way I believe, there is no evidence put in front of me that would make me believe in a higher being, especially the Abrahamic God. 

Jacobsen: I assume you grew up in that area within the American educational system in Texas, particularly Houston. How was it for you? You mentioned that indoctrination was present. However, it wasn’t differentiated whether it was in the home, the school, the community, or the church. 

Jeudy: I grew up in South Texas. Go down until you hit Mexico, then back up 10 miles; that’s where I grew up. My indoctrination was in school. We rarely went to church in the home. It wasn’t a very religious household. It was just in school, a private school. That was the indoctrination where it happened. It was a non-denominational school, reasonably bland. It wasn’t charismatic or anything. 

Jacobsen: Certainly, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins, you should have a basic understanding of some of the texts or some of the core literature of the Bible because a lot of literature, at least Western literature, uses the Bible as a reference point. So, it is helpful to be a literate citizen to know parts of the Bible.

Jeudy: I agree.

Jacobsen: At the same time, I have been doing a series, which may be the first to look at international Indigenous freethought communities. I have done a lot of work interviewing individuals of more immediate African descent. We’re all African. I am taking a more short-term, colloquial definition thrown around a lot in North American parlance. One thing that came up in several interviews, particularly with Mandisa Thomas in a leadership position. If someone is African American in the United States and leaves the church, it can be much more complex than someone who is European American or even an Asian American. It has a lot more connotation within the community. What was the experience for you? You noted that you were part of a community and are an atheist now, so you are not part of that community.

Jeudy: My experience was different than Mandisa’s. I grew up in an area that is 85% Hispanic. I am Afro-Latino. I don’t have that experience. You are an African American. You leave the community. It causes angst and dissonance. That was not my experience. By the time I drifted from religion, I was an adult. I had a career. It didn’t matter what you believed in. The people I knew weren’t a big deal. I was married a long, long time ago. I was divorced a long time ago. I didn’t have children with different beliefs in the household. It was an easy time. That was my experience.

Jacobsen: You mentioned how becoming an atheist was a gradual process. The basic plan of atheism is that it doesn’t necessarily mean anything else other than a denial or a rejection of the concepts of these supernatural interventionist beings. Were there particular moments where there were more significant changes in that process of disbelief?

Jeudy: No, there was no event. I slowly flittered away. I would say the most significant inflection point that was most dramatic was college. I learned about different cultures, religions, and a wider world than what you learn in high school. My skepticism started then in general. Questioning things, questioning things taught as a kid in high school. That was an inflection point. It set up the journey away from religion, which, again, was a gradual one. I stumbled into secular groups in 2016 here in Houston. I wasn’t looking for a community, a nonbelief community. When I stumbled into the Houston Oasis community, I met like-minded people. I was immediately hooked. These are my people. That was another big inflection point. It was okay within here. “I am an atheist. It is fine. It is okay.” By the time I was an Oasis Houston, I was already a nonbeliever. It wasn’t a big deal to me. It didn’t make sense; religion didn’t make sense. 

Jacobsen: What areas of church-state separation are particularly acute concerns in Texas? 

Jeudy: Oh, man! It is all over the place in Texas. This is the perfect example. Church-state separation, the state part of that. The state legislature is oversaturated with Christian nationalists and “conservative” Republicans. They are overrepresented. Therefore, they must pass these laws in Texas over the last six years, probably longer. They get to pass these laws that are dripping with Christian Nationalism, which is another way of saying “Violating separation of church and state.” Some five or six years ago, they had the Ten Commandments Bill. If somebody is a citizen and wants to put up a Ten Commandments sign for a school, then a school must put it up and display it in the school, not can but should. It is imposing this shit on everyone else. Texas is pluralistic and heterogeneous. That screams the violation of church and state. The chaplain bill is legislation that says, “Chaplains can be school counsellors in high schools.”

Jacobsen: What?!

Jeudy: Yes, with no training or special training as a counsellor or certification, if you are a chaplain, you can do it. They passed that law. There is another bill, not about the Ten Commandments. In God We Trust, it was a couple of years ago was one. Texas keeps putting these out as egregious violations of church and state. We need activists to tell the people of Texas. “Hey! This is not good. This is not good because of this.” Do our best to push back against this. 

Jacobsen: This stuff wouldn’t exist without the quiet support of the community. I can give a background. I grew up in Fort Langley by Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada. It is the largest private university in Canada. It is Evangelical. I have been to dinners with people who work at this university and prominent students. They will say, “If it is not God’s Law, it is illegitimate.” That thinking implies an overriding secular law, not necessarily god’s law imposed as ten commandment tablets at the courthouse or something, but more trying to edge-wise pass bills in the legislatures that would edge things towards a biblical worldview trying to impose a theocratic system of governance on, as you’re noting, a pluralistic populace. I am aware of that in Canada. But it is not that big or that powerful. It is annoying when you live there. I do not know the experience of living in a state, for you, province/territory me, in which that would be a complex problem. How do you even begin to push back against some of these things other than letting others in the public know, “This is not okay. It is a violation of church and state.”?

Jeudy: Great question; I was introduced to this secular world. I was getting work and getting involved. What I did, I did not have the time or energy for both worlds. So, I mashed them together and formed Secular Houston in December 2021. It has only started. What we do is we send questionnaires out to everyone here locally. The ones who return the questionnaire will decide whether we endorse them in an election. We tell everyone who will listen, “These people, we did the work for you. These people align with the separation of church and state. They respect science and reason.” Do the little extra because these people are worth it; they will advocate for the separation of church and state. With every election, it is more and more robust. We have more of an audience. I consider this very important. These candidates are getting these endorsements. They all of a sudden are like, “Wow, secular people are speaking up about the separation of church and state.” There was never a voice like that in the Houston area. These candidates. Some get into office. They sit in the office. They know there are scholars people there. They are about the separation of church and state. They have church and state separation on their radar. A secular voice is how we are getting more and more of a secular voice in Texas and the Houston area. That has been my response and how I try to advocate for the separation of church and state and push back against the theocracy, as you described. 

This way, elected officials can know we exist. The people who listen to us, who want to get involved. Roe v Wade went away. “I wish there was something I could do!” There is something you can do. I give them options on where to focus the energy, rage, or even love to be efficient and effect change. Now, they know they can do something. It inspires them to bring their friends. It is a multipronged approach, giving them options and trying to push back against Christian Nationalism. 

Jacobsen: Are there particular legislators or groups who tend to be the most vigorous opposition? 

Jeudy: There are a lot of individuals and groups. There has not been a ringing of bells. “Beware of Secular Houston or American Atheists!” I don’t think we are that much of a threat to them. I don’t think we’re that much of a threat to them. We don’t have that much money. They are sitting on a big pile of money. The threat is what we are doing. That is the threat that they put upon us. There are plenty of individual legislators who are Christian nationalists. We try to expose them wherever we can. The problem is that people don’t know why Christian Nationalism is as bad as it is. “There is Christianity and America. What is wrong with that?” We are not alone. We reached out to interfaith groups. They are lobbying as hard or more complicated than we are against Christian Nationalism. They are repulsed by it. They love that we are at the table with them. I love being at the table with them. I am personally inspired by them locally, statewide, and nationally. There are a bunch of interfaith groups pushing back against this. It makes me happy. 

Jacobsen: How big is the American Atheist chapter in Texas?

Jeudy: There is no chapter per se. I am the state director. It is a volunteer position. There are no American Atheist groups or chapters. There are several secular groups. Atheist groups and freethought groups in Texas, I take it upon myself as state director of American Atheists to see if leadership is healthy and to help them in any way I can.

Jacobsen: About the current federal political situation, how is that impacting talks within the secular community within Texas?

Jeudy: I tend to steer clear of federal. It is a dumpster fire. Local, we need to work locally. Look locally; we can effect change here. What I am glad for and am trying to get in with them a little more is that there is a Congressional Freethought Caucus in the US House of Representatives. It was founded and started by, or at least he was the first member, Jared Huffman; he is the only official humanist. He is not religious, per se. He is the only one to say, “I am not Christian. I am not Muslim. I am not Jewish. I am a humanist.” There is a lot of bravery to do that. He started it. So, these are US representatives who sign up for the Freethought Caucus. They say, “It is okay to not be religious. Separation of Church and State is good.” That is the federal level.

Jacobsen: How did you orient around progressive politics connected to atheism? Do you think that is a necessary outcrop or a temperament of political affiliation apart from atheism?

Jeudy: It is separate. My not believing in a deity doesn’t colour what I believe in, as far as politically. I have met conservatives and libertarians. I can only speak for myself. I tend to surround myself with people who think as I do. We are an empathetic bunch. We want the best for as many people as possible. That translates into progressive ideology, as far as I am concerned. 

Jacobsen: Do you find that there are attempts at pushback or undermining you when trying to do honest secular work? Non-secular groups who push back against secular activism will use any means available to them to undermine your efforts and activism in any way.

Jeudy: It hasn’t been that bad. When you start, you think of the worst-case scenario. That wouldn’t get in the way of our objectives. There is a local Houston City Council race. We endorsed this one man. He was in a runoff with another lady. The lady sent a message saying, “Look, an atheist group endorsing this guy!” She tried to use this endorsement against him. He ended up winning. That was the biggest thing. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing] It is this kind of nonsense, right? I know people in the media. I work with many organizations or associations and hope to provide some platform for secular people. Yet, we are all friends. When people try to cancel or defame, they will send the correspondence being sent to them. It’s like, “They’ve been trying this for a while. That ball is pretty worn, don’t worry.” Maybe it is different when you’re on the grounds of activism or state director instead of media or journalism. I suppose we should do the last question. Who would you consider your favourite secular person? What book would you recommend for everyone to read on atheist or church-state separation issues forever?

Jeudy: [Laughing] I have met many super great people. I don’t know much about Hitchens, Dawkins, or those famous atheists. I haven’t looked at a lot of the stuff. My role was more local and then political. I don’t know if I have a favourite. I know Hitchens had a cool line. I will say Hitchens because I know a lot of people in his world. [Laughing]

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Jeudy: I have a favourite book by Andrew Seidel called The Founding Myth. Every point will come at you if you advocate for the separation of church and state. He destroys any argument you hear most efficiently. I love that book.

Jacobsen: Wil, thank you very much for your time today.

Jeudy: My pleasure. Thank you for reaching out.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/24

Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff’s BCHA biography states: “Dr Teale N Phelps Bondaroff is an experienced researcher with a PhD in politics and international studies from the University of Cambridge and BAs in political science (honours) and international relations from the University of Calgary. He is proficient with in a wide range of social science research methods, which he employs in his research on behalf of his strategy and research consultancy, the Idea Tree Consulting. With years of experience in the field, Dr. Phelps Bondaroff is a world expert on illegal fishing and organized crime, and currently works as the Director of Research of OceansAsia, a marine conservation organization, and has consulted for a number of marine conservation groups (The Black Fish, the Sea Ranger Service, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and others). Dr Phelps Bondaroff remains active as an academic researcher, with work examining the strategic use of international law by non-state actors. He also cofounded the AccessBC Campaign for free prescription contraception in BC and is active in all levels of Canadian politics. Since December 2018, he has been serving as a research coordinator for the BC Humanist Association. You can learn about his numerous projects at www.teale.ca. Pronouns: he/him (what’s this?).” Here we talk about recent and ongoing work about municipal prayers in British Columbia and Canada.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here again with Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff of the wonderful British Columbia Humanist Association, which recently gave an update on municipal prayers in a publication, “We Yelled at Them Until They Stopped: Revisiting Prayers in BC Municipal Council Meetings and the Power of Secular Advocacy” on November 15, 2023. What is the overarching question that was asked about the public municipal prayers? What was the big answer? 

Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff: Yes! Always good to talk to you. The BCHA has been looking at municipal prayer for a number of years. When we say, “Municipal prayer,” we mean a prayer included in the agenda of a municipal council meeting in British Columbia. 

Now, let’s do a bit of background on this. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in the Saguenay decision that you may not have prayer in a municipal council meeting. The state has a “duty of religious neutrality” and is a “democratic imperative.” After that ruling, municipalities should not be scheduling prayers in their meetings. In 2018, we received reports that this was taking place in BC. Municipalities were including prayers in their council meetings. We looked into those situations. 

We did a full review of all 163 municipalities in British Columbia. What we found, 23 of them had prayer in their inaugural meetings. An inaugural meeting tends to take place after, or soon after, an election. They tend to have some key elements, like the swearing-in of a new council. There is often a mayoral address. There is pomp, circumstance, and ceremony to the meeting. We found 23 that had municipal prayers in them. When we later looked back at our 2018 data, we found that we had missed 3. In fact, 26 in 2018 had prayer in their inaugural meetings. 

So, between that time and the most recent round of inaugural meetings in 2022, the BC Humanist Association did a lot of work. We emailed all 23 municipalities. We did a lot of public communication and advocacy work. We had good success in so far as the vast number of those municipalities that we talked to ended their practice or committed to ending their practice. So, many didn’t include prayer in their inaugural meetings in 2022. 

Correspondence occurred several years after the 2022 inaugurals, with emails going out in 2019 and 2020. Some of these letters also went out weeks before the 2022 inaugural meetings. If we saw a prayer pop up [on the agenda prior to the meeting], we would message the municipality. Then we would say, “You have a duty to religious neutrality. You can’t be including prayer in your meetings.” 

The report that we just released is “We Yelled at Them Until They Stopped.” It is an exploration of the advocacy we did, how effective it was, and how it reduced the number of municipalities with a prayer in their 2022 inaugural meetings. It also identifies municipalities that may continue to violate Saguenay and their duty of religious neutrality. 

In the study, we identified 7 municipalities that included prayer in their 2022 inaugurals. Those 7 are: Belcarra, Colwood, Delta, Parksville, Tumbler Ridge, Vancouver, and West Kelowna. I can give you a bit of a rundown on those prayers if that is helpful. 

In 2018, we found all 23 and then the three more that were identified when we reviewed the data. So, all 26 of those municipalities that had prayers in their inaugural meetings in 2018 had Christian prayers. 

In 2022, it was similar insofar as everyone who had a prayer had a Christian prayer. The only outlier was Vancouver, with five prayers. After the report came out in November (2023), we messaged those all those municipalities. We wrote to them to change their practices. We had a couple commit to changing. 

The first one is Colwood. Colwood is a bit of an outlier. They didn’t have a religious figure come and deliver a prayer. They had a local public high school choir come and sing. The choir happened to sing a Christian liturgical song, Deo Gratia. 

My understanding of this, based on a Freedom of Information request, was that they just didn’t check what song was going to be sung. They said, “Great, we have the same high school choir as last year.” Things sort of happened. My understanding is Colwood will not schedule one in the future. They did write back and said this probably won’t happen again. 

Belcarra emailed us. Basically, they had a special emergency council meeting to discuss our letter. They committed to or adopted a motion on November 4. Prayers, religious invocations, or any religious observances will not take part in Belcarra. 

[As of the publication of this interview, all but two of the aforementioned seven municipalities had committed to not including prayer in future inaugurals. The two outliers are Parksville and Vancouver].

Basically, we sent a letter to municipalities informing them that they have to change their practices. If they don’t by the end of the year, we will follow with a stronger letter and possible legal action. At this point, there is no reason municipalities should have prayers. In 2018, maybe the memo didn’t reach small towns. It can be chaotic organizing an inaugural meeting after an election. It may be a reason for prayer as an accidental inclusion back in the day. In 2022, there is no reason. They have received correspondence. So, they can’t plead ignorance. If a municipality insists on prayer in inaugural meetings in BC, we will pursue it further. 

Jacobsen: One of them that was listed was a stipulation about a Jewish, Sikh, and Muslim one in Vancouver and a Christian. Actually, do all 5 at once to follow up on your point earlier; they were the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, Canadian Memorial United Church, Temple Shalom, Khalsa Diwan Society, and BC Muslim Association. All done by males except for the Canadian Memorial United Church. What is the breakup there because that breaks from a substantial history given the demographics of Canada, which is mostly Christian in most of the other areas of the country?

Phelps Bondaroff: Yes, so there were a couple of interesting things about Vancouver. There were five prayers at the 2022 inaugural meeting. You had five representatives of different faith traditions. It was interesting to watch. They kind of each delivered one sentence of a prayer. It was 13 minutes long and was like a high school group project. Each read a different religious element. 

At its heart, having five prayers rather than one prayer is no better. Saguenay says you can have no prayer in a municipal council meeting. It doesn’t specify the number or the number of people delivering the prayer. A choir singing with 17 high school students or five people delivering prayers would violate Saguenay. It touches on the fundamental issue of excluding other religions and those people without religious beliefs. Saguenay is about the state having a duty to religious neutrality. It is about abstention. It is not picking one over others or some over others. So, when the City of Vancouver selected five prayers, as opposed to one, they were trying to be ecumenical. Yet, they have no basis for picking those five religious figures. 

One interesting thing about the prayers selected is something we describe as Abrahamic hegemony. You’ve got five religious traditions: four of those come from the Abrahamic faith traditions (two Christians, one Jewish, one Muslim), and then one Sikh prayer. What is interesting is that those five religious traditions aren’t the five most populous in Vancouver. Not that this is a decent basis for selecting what prayers to include in a meeting. They forgot the Hindus and the Buddhists if they were going by population. It is not all the top five. 

The state arbitrarily selected five to give an ecumenical invocation, which necessarily excludes a host of other faith traditions and sects within those faith traditions and also, fundamentally, the non-religion. When they have five people delivering prayers, doing a group prayer thing, they are privileging religion over non-religion and underscoring it. It is not one person giving a two-minute invocation. It is five people giving a 13-minute invocation. It is favouring religion over non-religion. 

We suggest, in our report, and I think the facts hold this out, that they try to be ecumenical, but being more religious, in fact, excludes the non-religious even more. This says, “This municipal space is for those who are religious and not the non-religious,” and, of course, some religions are being favoured over non-religion. 

We haven’t heard back from the City of Vancouver regarding their response so far. By the way, this is the first time Vancouver has included a prayer in one of their meetings. The Mayors have a significant role in selecting how the inaugural meeting proceeds. It is a black box in municipalities. We did do Freedom of Information requests to see emails as to how these decisions are made. What seems to have happened last time is the new mayor, maybe new council members, chat with staff, and then this coalesces around a final output: The inaugural meeting. 

It is a time for a new mayor to learn their new job. The chaos following an election. So, there are a bunch of moving parts. Ultimately, in this case, we have the decision by the incoming mayor to include more prayers than you should have in a meeting, and the number of prayers you should have is zero. 

I will note one other thing to support what I was saying earlier. When we looked at our initial study, we found, as I mentioned, that we missed three meetings in 2018 that had prayer. What was interesting was that those three municipalities still had prayer in 2022. This indicated something interesting. The vast majority of municipalities that had prayers in 2018 would have received communication from us. Thus municipalities, most of them stopped having prayers. The three that we didn’t talk to continued to have prayer. It told us our advocacy was having a significant effect. We saw this with other municipalities. When you look at those who had them in 2018, several of them – both of the Langleys – adopted motions to make sure they didn’t have prayers in their future meetings. A lot of municipalities said we will take this under advisement for future meetings. What is significant on the ground is advocacy by the BCHA; it has had an effect on making change in municipalities when Saguenay was under violation. 

Jacobsen: In general, the big takeaway, as far as I am gathering, is simply reminding individual municipalities that the law is sufficient to make a change. Meanwhile, a few handful will not get the message until a follow-up letter is given with the potential for legal recourse to force the municipality or convince them legally that it is a wise thing to follow equality under the law as everyone else is doing. 

Phelps Bondaroff: Absolutely, you need vigilance and ongoing secular advocacy. We have looked into practices in other provinces. Now, obviously, the BC Humanist Association is BC-based. We’ve had an amazing research team able to look across the Rockies. We found other provinces have prayers in their municipal council meetings. 

When we looked at Manitoba in 2018, we found that six of their inaugural 2018 meetings had prayer. We looked at meetings outside of this – regular council meetings – and found that four municipalities in Manitoba continued to have them in regular meetings, including Winnipeg. 

When we looked at Ontario, we found larger numbers. We found 156 municipalities out of 328 in Ontario had prayer in their 2018 inaugural meetings. Nine out of 360 had prayer in their regular council meetings. By the way, we had a cutoff for municipalities with a population over 1,000 in Ontario, given the bigger population. That’s a lot. That is well close to half. That is an alarming number. It also shows that we have different religious and non-religious demographics here in British Columbia. 

We are working to support those other provinces. Just because a Supreme Court ruling has been made doesn’t mean it has necessarily been followed. We have to make sure the decision has been followed. 

The research philosophy of the BCHA research team is to put it in a cheeky way: do good research, wave it around, or yell it around until people listen and change. This work shows that work was effective. I am pleased with the output. 

We are currently doing a review of Alberta. We are looking at Albertan municipalities. We are doing a second review for Ontario because, since 2018, there has been another round of municipal elections. That report should be coming out next year [2024]. 

I’m interested in these findings as there are fewer groups doing advocacy on the ground in Ontario, so we can get a better idea of not just compliance with Saguenay but also the effectiveness of our advocacy here in BC. 

Jacobsen: Teale, I have one final question. It might be split into two. But they might be the same question framed as one. A freethought person or organization as a broad category or an indigenous community or individual as a broad category may want to see the representation in the municipality. Where the municipality has agreed, everyone gets it rather than no one. What has been the form that the indigenous representation or the freethought representation has been expressed where it’s being defined as a prayer or it’s being not defined as a prayer?

Phelps Bondaroff: I might rephrase the question a little bit. You are not allowed to have prayer in a municipal council meeting, whether a secular invocation by a humanist group that is prayer adjacent, a United Church person giving a secular declaration, or a deeply religious person giving a fire and brimstone sermon. The state cannot allocate time in their agenda for prayer. Full stop. 

A couple of things to parse. This doesn’t preclude an individual from expressing religious beliefs. If you are coming to a Saanich council meeting [ Dr. Phelps Bondaroff is a Councillor in the District of Saanich, BC], and you are talking about a specific development project, and your personal religious beliefs influence your view on that development project, there is no reason why you cannot express them to members of the council, as long as you are staying on topic within the rules and procedures. You could say your god inspired you to come and talk to the council to support a specific development project. As someone who is a municipal councillor and sits through a lot of these meetings and receives extensive feedback from residents, I would say this isn’t the most compelling argument in support or opposition to a development project, but someone is welcome to make it.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Phelps Bondaroff: Similarly, a council member can attend council meetings wearing religious paraphernalia. They can reference personal faith when sharing their views on a project. If you are speaking at council as a councillor, and if you are speaking about a specific project, and your specific faith traditions inspired you to look at this project a certain way, there’s no reason why you couldn’t mention it.

The issue with Saguenay is acting in an official capacity when representing the government. Doing things such as beginning meetings of the council with time specifically allocated to prayer or inviting religious figures to deliver a prayer. You are allocating time for a prayer, or you are using the specific levers of state power to favour one religion over others, or over none. 

We have these conversations around often French versions of Laïcité: someone wearing religious clothing to a meeting does not amount to an endorsement of the religion. It is when the state allocates time to it. 

The other part of your question was Indigenous content. So, we explored this in the report, though it was not the focus. A number of municipalities had Indigenous content in their inaugural meetings. Again, inaugural meetings tend to have more ceremonial elements. There is often piping, speeches, singing, drumming, the singing O Canada, that sort of thing. We noted a number of municipalities included a range of Indigenous elements. 

When I say Indigenous elements, I mean quite a range of Indigenous elements. There were speeches and welcomes from elders. There were formal welcomes. There were traditional Indigenous welcomes, territorial acknowledgements, drumming, singing, and often combinations of those elements. The purpose of the report was to look at religious prayer as it relates to Saguenay. Saguenay looked at religious prayer, not on Indigenous content. 

Since we were looking at all the minutes, agendas, and meeting videos, we thought we’d look at this [Indigenous content] while gathering the data and sharing the findings in our report. In 2018, 38.8% of municipalities had Indigenous content in their inaugural meetings. In 2022, that rose to 71.6%. So, there was a significant increase. 

This is important because we live in an era of reconciliation. Although these are symbolic elements, they should be backed up with tangible actions, but these symbolic parts play a role in reconciliation, which is important. They varied considerably. Some municipalities will have a territorial acknowledgement read at the beginning of the meeting. Some will invite an elder to give a statement – anything the elder wants. Sometimes, the elder may speak in their own language. Sometimes, they will sing or drum or make comments about cooperation, reconciliation, etc. Then, sometimes, they will do a traditional welcome. Traditional welcome ceremonies differ considerably. 

We had trouble classifying these. It might be called a ‘prayer’ or a ‘blessing’ in the agenda. The language may include spiritual elements or references to deities or higher powers. Classification was challenging despite how it was identified in the agenda.

An indigenous traditional welcome is not a straightforward territorial acknowledgement; it’s something else. It is not just a prayer. It is a diplomatic protocol, a cultural protocol. And there is also a difference between someone welcoming you to their territory and someone proselytizing with a prayer. 

On top of that, we live in an era of reconciliation, and this work is important. Some of the Indigenous content approached what many folks might consider a ‘prayer.’ They may have used quite religious language. In Squamish, for example, a representative of the local Squamish Nation delivered a prayer while wearing a vest covered in crosses. In addition to being an elder, he was a local Shaker priest. He said, ‘I was asked to give a blessing. So, I will give a blessing the way I know how which is through the local Christian faith tradition.’ 

A lot of times, you will have these religious elements making their way into Indigenous elements due to syncretism. There was an attempted genocide against Indigenous peoples, and religion was used in this. And syncretism is something that emerged from that. As a result, you have this blending of elements. 

It is also problematic to say, “Please come to our meeting and give a traditional welcome, but don’t do this, this, or this.” It would seem counter to the goal of reconciliation. 

We have been exploring these complexities in a number of our reports. They are fascinating and complex. It is important to include Indigenous elements for reconciliation in these meetings, and how this is done and what this looks like is part of an ongoing and broader conversation. 

Phelps Bondaroff: Returning to prayers, we are not done yet. There are other provinces that we will be looking at, and we will be continuing our advocacy in BC. We are following up with the few municipalities that have pushed back. Parksville was one such municipality: they received correspondence from us. They will have seen news items, etc. Yet despite this, they persisted with prayer, and we never heard back from them. 

With Parksville, what happened is they had a prayer in their inaugural meeting in 2022 and announced the agenda ten days before the meeting. We read it. We wrote to them and said, “You shouldn’t include it.” They went ahead. They were fully aware that you cannot have prayer in a meeting. 

Jacobsen: This is going to be a good news story.

Phelps Bondaroff: Yeah, and Parksville’s response contrasts to other municipalities. When we reached out to Terrace, and said something like: “Hey, you had a prayer in the [agenda for your] inaugural meeting. Can you take it out?” They said, “Oh, we didn’t know. We took it out.” This was a very reasonable response to an organization pointing out a procedural error. 

Later, they emailed us and said, “So, we also have this nativity scene that we put on top of city hall. We probably shouldn’t do that either, right?” They took it down as well. It was the biggest ‘scandal’ to hit Terrace city hall for a while. There are a number of news items in the report on that as well. 

So, I may conclude by saying this. I am now a councillor in the District of Saanich. I participate in a lot of meetings. When residents come to speak to the council, unless they’re one of our repeat customers, it may be their first time talking to the council. They are nervous and often point this out. As councillors, we want to hear from the public to better understand their views. We want to encourage the public to participate. It would be bad if people didn’t feel welcome in our council chamber such that it deterred them from presenting. If they didn’t feel welcome, we would be robbed of the benefit of their insight and feedback from members of our community. 

There are other barriers to attending municipal council meetings, which is a topic for another day. But we don’t want any unnecessary barriers, and we don’t want to be creating an environment where some are more welcome than others. 

When it comes to the inclusion of prayer, by doing nothing, the state isn’t taking a side relating to religion. It remains neutral. The state is not taking a position. I usually underscore this for people as there is sometimes a tendency to argue that if we remove prayers, then we are discriminating against the religious: No, we are not replacing prayer with something. We are replacing prayer with nothing. Saguenay had a good way of saying this. ‘The opposite of a prayer is not no prayer. The opposite would be starting every meeting with the affirmation that there was no god or gods.’ For example, you can’t start a meeting with the following, ‘Welcome to Cowichan Valley; there is no god here.’ That would also violate the state’s duty to religious neutrality, whereas doing nothing is abstention. And this is what the state should be doing on such matters. 

Jacobsen: Teale, thank you very much. 

Phelps Bondaroff: It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Scott.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.