Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 123: Trolleyology For The Masses

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

This week we look at one liberal professor's attempt to teach ethics to the benighted, coalsmudged hillbillies of Appalachia. Support the Patreon here: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

I just love that they were chanting lock him up it's coming full circle to bite him in the ass the old lock him up at the world series they were chanting lock him up yeah they were just chanting lock him up to Trump this is so good another theory is this that like the managerial nature of this country is such that like trump has rocked the boat too far for like just any normie no matter what you consider yourself that people just want to return to this sense of you know normalcy or whatever and i think i mean really and truly i think that's what's at the crux what we're going to be talking about today with this article but uh yeah i just think that uh probably has less to do with

you know anything else than just that um well before we get into that i brought a really funny editor's note i wanted you to see this is this is hands down the funniest editor's note i've ever seen in the speaker in speak your piece yeah it's gonna be a good one it's hands down the funniest editor's note I've ever seen in Speak Your Peace. Is that legal? Yeah. It's going to be a good one, must be. It's hands down the funniest fucking editor's note in Speak Your Peace. So here's to Speak Your Peace.

How about Mitt Romney hiding behind the name Pierre Delecto to put out a bunch of garbage? That's par for the course for a politician. So you're familiar with Pierre Delecto, right? No. Mitt Romney had an alt Twitter account, and the name was Pierre Delecto. That was the username on it. Really? Yeah, it was, yeah.

I mean, Ashley Feinberg, who I think writes for the Huffington Post, or maybe she's moved on to somewhere else now, but she figured out that that's his alt account. Did some digging and figured out that that is his. And so then he owned up to it. He admitted it. Yeah, I am indeed pure delecto.

That's the best Ron Mexico. You know when Michael Vick was getting herpes treatment under the name Ron ron mexico yeah that's better than ron mexico yeah uh had some good ones i'm reading his memoirs that he would check into hotels with they were just like cartoonishly over the top but one was like uh peter i have to look at it whatever it was but it was like i don't know like you would know it was prince that checked in under that name peter rents peter r ints um so then the editor then the mountain eagle speaks as it so rarely does um but i will say

that more and more he's been speaking he's been speaking so fucking much lately um and by that if you've listened to the show enough you'll know that the editor who we're speaking of has a liberal bin. And so this is the most liberal response to a speaker piece I've ever seen. It's so fucking funny. After U.S. Senator Mitt Romney admitted to being Pierre Delecto, it was quickly pointed out that he isn't the first politician to hide behind the pseudonym. Among those in the public eye who have hidden behind an assumed name are James Madison, Publius, Alexander Hamilton, Fosian, Eric Holder, Henry Yearwood, Rex Tillerson, Wayne Tracker, Peter Navarro, Ron Vara, Anthony Weiner, Carlos Danger, and Donald Trump, John Miller, John Barron, David Dennison. Interestingly, Madison wrote the Federalist Papers under the fake name he was using while Hamilton hid behind his false name to criticize Thomas Jefferson.

And so what I like about this is basically, you had a softball here. You had a guy writing in, talking shit about one of the most despised people in american politics mitt romney and you and you all sighed yes basically yeah you come out and you say well hey it's not that beyond the pale alexander hamilton and james madison james madison wrote the whole federalist papers Go back almost 200 years. And I bet he was so fucking proud of that. He thought that was the greatest breaking journalism in this week's issue. Absolutely.

Of all month. Absolutely. I forgot about Carlos Danger being Anthony Weiner's. I did too. That's a little too on the nose. Right. I didn't know Donald Trump had three. I didn't either. I don't know about none of these.

I remember John Barron, because remember he would call in the newspapers, pretend to be this John Barron character? Oh, yeah. He would put on a fake voice and everything, and I think the New York Times even had audio of it. You can tell it's basically Trump. It's not so Queens-ish. Oh, shit. He has like an East Kentucky accent.

Well, there's your speak your pieces for this week. Pretty goddamn ridiculous. Which brings us to the next topic of import. Ethics. Ethics. Business ethics. So I want to read something to you both that was in, what was it, Politico? Yeah.

Politico, what was it called? What's your top Politico article that pops up? What is it? Politico? Yeah. Politico, what was it called? What's your top Politico article that pops up? What is it? Man in the Middle. What is that? I don't know. Inside War on Coal. Politics, Government, Congress. Okay.

Christian Evangelical Conservatives. Okay. Don't pay any mind to any of those articles you just saw politico has a column or a segment called how to fix politics um what this is like a whole you're joking oh they have their own logo no and not only that they have featured such esteemed writers in their how to fix politics segments um as charles coke that's one of them arnold schwarzenegger uh charlemagne the god uh jill lapore police regards is on there though all people who know how to fix politics all the people with the answers

that's right I love that the little logo has an elephant and a donkey on it how do they bring us all together is there anything more liberal than trying to fix the partisan divide you would think that Politico wouldn't want that.

It's like it's better for their bottom line to have people fighting. well, so Right. So as part of their segment, they had an entry a few weeks ago called, What Teaching Ethics

in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America's Partisan Divide. Subtitle, There's a Language for Talking About Hot Button Issues, and We're Not Learning It. Damn. By Evan Mandery. Letter from North Carolina. So this made the rounds. I'm going to switch to this computer now.

Yeah, that's right. We've got two computers here. How did this perform in the app study circles? You know, I didn't see it. I didn't. You know, one of us should really bite the bullet and join that stupid. Let's serve. Let's serve just for content.

I got out once. I can't go back in. I know, same. Tom, have you ever been on it? Is this Apple now? Yeah. I haven't been on it, but I refuse to go back. Come on, Tom.

We're going for the first time. We both left dramatically, so we can't go back. That's right. This won't be as dramatic for you. How do you leave dramatically? By just exiting. It's just dramatic. Just a small exit. Any exit of that It's just dramatic. Just a small act.

Okay, any exit of that listserv is dramatic. You haven't exited, so you don't have to return. You can just join it. Real calm, cool life. I remember when Dave Cooper said the racist and sexist things. I mean, there's been several like AppleNet dust-ups that were like that rippled down to me that had never been on there, and that was one of them.

Was there a particular dust-up that y'all just said no mas to? Mine was something with Dave Cooper, I'm pretty sure. But someone who's now dead, so I won't drag their name, used a line, literally,

when people were talking about racial justice organizing, they said, let's keep our eye on the prize. Oh, damn. Which, obviously, is a quote from the Civil Rights Movement. It's pretty rough well um i don't know how this article fared in that world but it did it did make the rounds on twitter and in the other

app appalachian whatever world before we get started do you mind if i go pee real fast every time um all right okay so let's get to the topic at hand um war on drugs really the war on drugs uh the drug here being philosophy um politico what teaching ethics in Appalachia taught me about Bridging America's partisan divide So um Alright None of them good And this is just not the default hater setting This is really

Really dumb Oh there's a few things I want to get out of the way before we start The first is that it's totally acceptable To not have any commentary on this at all This might be the first thing that we've read on here that i just don't even know if i have anything to say about it because it kind of speaks for itself it is banal in such a way that yeah that it doesn't even like you know how like we've said that like joe biden's running for president in 2004. Yeah. Yeah. This guy is trying to fix politics in 2004. You know? Yeah.

But he thinks he stumbled upon the secret equation. Oh, yeah. And political. He thinks he's done it. He thinks he's done it by echoing the political sentiments of a kid that grew up quail hunting. And by the southern pursuit that everybody does in the South. Yeah, and who said he would be a Trump supporter if he was old enough to vote. Which brings me to my next point.

Every kid in this article, and so I really had to go through and sort of try to excise as much out of this article as I could that put any kind of blame on these kids because these are kids right um and so it's not going to get no and so it's hard it's like it's hard to actually he made it really difficult because he chose as his sort of like protagonists these kids whose ideas are still forming and who don't quite know what they believe in yet and so while we read this it's important to realize who the target here is it's not it's not the kids in the piece even though a lot of them have a lot of dumb ideas but look you're a kid that's part of it the target is this dumbass and his friends yeah evan mandary go ahead i'm sorry i'll have

this comment for life no what were you gonna say i was just going to say i'm just amazed that this guy who's taught at all these prestigious places and everything and this just sort of fortifies my whole uh disillusionment with academia this guy seems to have been convinced by a quail hunting kid whose brain is still growing. Yes. Yes, that is very accurate. Okay, so let's dive in, shall we? Yeah. On the first day of my Justice in America seminar at Appalachian State University, I

offer a deal to a student named Forrest Myers. I explain that I'm a tough grader and that the class average will be around a B-. I'll give you an A, I say. All you have to do is designate someone to get an F. The other students laugh nervously while Forrest considers the deal. I've asked this question at the beginning of every semester for over 20 years, mostly to liberal Northeasterners at Harvard and the City University of New York. It's a good starting point because it tends to show commonality. The beginning of ethical thinking is to accept that other people's interests matter. In all my years of teaching,

I've never had anyone take me up on my offer but i've come here seeking this difference not similarity by here he means boo north carolina the south affalachia good old ashville the 2016 that's that's funny that he's like picked a place to work based on a social experiment he wanted to conduct that's very weird don't you think well it's also weird because like later in the piece i think he says like i expected a lot of my students to have conservative views that reflected the area in which we're teaching it's like do you not know what a fucking university is like anybody can go to a university like great like most of those kids aren't going to be from the surrounding area well i guess oh actually statistically most of them probably will be but a lot of them are

also probably going to be from like i don't know fucking washington i almost went to app state growing up in new mexico so like anybody can fucking go to college anybody go to app state yeah and the other thing too i think is like uh you know how he points out that he's like appalachian state founded by former conservative generals like every fucking institution in this country wasn't founded by some slave on an asshole from massachusetts to fucking texas or even harvard i mean like right that's the weird thing yeah you're right he does profile app state as like being founded by a Confederate general. It's like, remember, like, Georgetown and Harvard and all these universities?

Well, Harvard was founded by, like, Cotton Mather or some shit. Yeah, I don't know, but it was definitely, like, built with slave labor and administered and run with slave labor. People that thought that black people were literal demons. Right, right. So I've come here seeking difference, not similarity. The 2016 election exposed a national rift so deep that it feels as if even reasonable conversation is impossible. I'm a liberal New Yorker, but I know that plenty of people on both sides of the political spectrum worry that this divide poses an existential threat to the American democratic project. On the most controversial issues, race and immigration, we've lost the capacity for compromise because we presume the most sinister motives about our opponents.

I've arrived here in the fall of 2018 hoping to find a wider range of views. in the fall of 2018, hoping to find a wider range of views, not to change anyone's opinions, but rather to see whether there remain principles and a shared language of ethics that bind us together. Shared language of ethics that bind people together. Here's the thing about these, like, the liberals' commitment to both sides-ism is, like, like, we shouldn't want to find commonality with people that belong to a genocidal racist death cult.

That's all conservatism is, and all of it has been. Like, have an analysis of who your opponent is. And liberals can't because they have to have conservatives to exist. You know what I'm saying? Leftists, we don't have to have conservatives to exist. In fact, I would prefer prefer if they didn't exist in fact if you hold conservative views i'd go so far as to say that you will be targeted and persecuted or at least prejudice right or at least marginalized something to be afraid of at some point right right well we're going to get into that because this article is a it really helps you peel back the layers of where that worldview and approach comes from.

Yeah. So he says, I'm curious, is everyone else in the class about how Forrest is going to answer? I swear to God, I think I know this kid, Forrest. Also, I promise you, nobody else in the class is curious how he's going to answer they're all thinking about like fucking jacking off and playing fortnight whatever else they're doing i'd rather get the grade on my own merit forrest says and i don't want to have anyone mad at me because i gave them an f the offer is losing streak intact i extend it to every student in the class raise your hand i say and you'll get an A.

All you have to do is point to someone who will get an F. No hands go up. With a young woman named Sienna Lafon, I sweeten the offer. I'll give everyone in the class an A, including her. She simply has to pick one student to get an F. Sienna says she won't do it. Why not, I ask. Because it's not fair, she replies do it. Why not, I ask. Because it's not fair,

she replies. What's going on, I ask. If someone accepts the deal, the class as a whole will be better off. And the language will develop during the semester. It's a utilitarian no-brainer. The class GPA will rise from 2.7 to near 4.0.

Still, no one bites. A student named Jackson finally says, I think we should just earn what we get. These answers... Really putting your neck out there, Jackson. These answers, with the exception of some southern accents, sound almost identical to ones that I hear from my typical class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Of course, we're still in the realm of hypotheticals. It'll be several weeks until we get to late-term abortions, gun bans, and the death penalty. Donald Trump's name has yet to be spoken. The conversations will no doubt become more fraught as things get more real. Okay, so finding a place to teach ethics in the South was more difficult than I had imagined. My initial idea was to go to the most remote school that would

have me, but most don't even offer an ethics course. It's remote. Those motherfuckers, like, tried to go to some, like, rural Bible college in West Virginia somewhere and they just, they're like what they were not hiring yeah and also okay I I'm trying to decide right now if right now is the

place to talk about the um what would the word be the methodological okay Carpetbagging? Okay, well, there's that. But also the methodological problems with ethics courses and with this approach to a sort of epistemology. Because, like, what he's saying is, you know, there's not a whole lot of ethics courses taught in the South. And he doesn't, he's not making any kind of conclusion there but i kind of wonder if he wants you to draw the conclusion like oh look they're not teaching ethics in the south um what does that say what does that mean and so when we get to the trolley question which these people have a massive raging hard-on for well we'll talk about them the philosophy department of a community college in rural Tennessee was interested until the administration balked at my qualifications. They'd have accepted a degree in religion, but not one in law.

When I stumbled upon Appalachian State, the school immediately seemed like a good fit, open to me and the kind of conversation I wanted to foster. Boone feels like any other college town, but Boone is a little blue island in a sea of red. You'd have to drive about 30 miles to find another polling district that voted for Hillary Clinton, and there are only a total of five within a 75-mile radius. Ah, yes, Hillary Clinton, that well-known bastion of leftist thought and subversion. of leftist thought and subversion. In the aftermath of the 2016 election,

I read widely and somewhat unsatisfyingly to try and understand the root causes of polarization. J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy moved me, and it's impossible to read George Packer's The Unwinding, which takes place largely in North Carolina after the Great Recession, without being unsettled. You said Hillbilly Elegy moved him? Hillbilly Elegy moved him. Hillbilly Algae moved him. Fuck me up.

He was moved, bro. Inspired. Yeah, no. Okay, so this is the part I was talking about earlier. Coming in, I assumed some of my students would reflect the conservatism of the surrounding region and others the liberalism generally prevalent among college students. What I didn't know is whether my students, and young people generally, are predestined to sort themselves into those mutually loathing tribes, or if a shared conversation about

foundational ethical beliefs could alter the views of people with whom they disagree. Dude, this is an interesting, I mean, I hadn't really thought about this the first time I read this, but now I'm thinking about it. It's interesting to look at how liberals think people form political views and ideas. To them, I don't think class is mentioned in this entire

article, except when he goes into his little thing about the Trump loving kid. And even then, that kid's parents are like accountants or something. Yeah, his dad was like a Wake Forest educated lawyer and his mom was from California or something. Yeah, for these people, the way that you form political views really does come down to the inputs you're receiving in the school system. And by that I mean, if you're getting a rigidly foundational teaching in Western philosophy, to them, that is like, if you're not getting that, you're conservative.

If you are getting that, you're going to be enlightened and liberal. Right. Yeah, that's right. It's like the people like, I think of Bill Richardson, who like is just one of those old liberals that just just live and die by the liberal arts education. Are you speaking of former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson? Weisberg architect Bill Richardson. Weisberg architect Bill Richardson. Got it. To be clear. And so, as I mentioned that, this next paragraph actually sums it up.

My syllabus... This next paragraph actually sums it up. My syllabus. So again, just to reiterate, these people have, class doesn't factor into their analysis on how people come to, or anything else for that matter. Whether it's gender or race or anything, really. Although they will concede that. They'll concede that, that like, oh, people have white privilege and that patriarchy exists. But you will never get them to admit that class might have something to do with something with all this right yeah so my syllabus pairs readings in classical philosophy john stewart mill emmanuel kant

aristotle john rawls with modern policy dilemmas including abortion affirmative action and hate speech when this is my favorite line of the whole article I think But inevitably All journeys of ethical discovery Begin with the trolley problem If that ain't true I don't know what is Oh fuck

Like they love the trolley Problem they fucking Love it How long has the trolley problem. They fucking love it. How long has the trolley problem been around? I don't fucking know, dude. Probably a couple, about 100 years. It was probably cooked up in the 1940s in a philosophy department at MIT. Yeah, I mean, this is basically, remember when you were talking about the the mandarin it's basically yeah yeah yeah

it's the mandarin it's that one when was that that was like episode it was like in the episodes 20 or 30 a deep cut it's a deep deep trouble is cut but yeah go back and listen to that because it's the same basic principle yeah it's the same basic concept. Yeah. It's the same basic concept. That was at the Ohio State. It was. That was at Ohio State. Also in an academic setting. Shock. Also an Appalachian school.

Also an Appalachian school, correct. A trolley is barreling down the tracks to which five people have been tied, I explained during our second meeting. You can flip a switch and divert the trolley, but you'd kill someone else who's been tied to the sidetrack. I asked a young woman named Kirsten Davis what she would do. I probably would flip the switch because I know less people would be killed, she says. Almost all of her fellow students concur, albeit reluctantly.

The notable exception is Jackson. You killed the one person, he says without hesitation. Jackson is wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a Carhartt shirt. His baseball cap. He's got a ponytail. His baseball cap, which he got. I just want to pull off here for a second and say, again, just if I could just gently, you know, just sort of rib Jackson here a little bit.

I knew so many Jacksons in college. There's that one conservative contrarian in all of your classes. Yeah. And this guy's him. This guy's him. He's just a country boy. He's just a country boy who drives an an eighty thousand dollar truck with a lift kit yes for his job

and the way that the professor fetishizes him in this story is fucking fascinating it's bizarre it is so truly bizarre he changed his worldview based on this fucking conservative in his class. I mean, just upended everything he thought was right. Right, right. These are the dumbest people alive. Not Jackson, although that's probably true too. But, like, these kinds of liberals.

Well, Jackson says this later in the story, but the reason he went to App State was because he knew he'd meet a lot of liberals in his class. And he wanted to be the guy that, like, and like challenged his thinking was challenged but what he means by that and again I'm what you mean by that is App State's only place to fucking take I went to Morehead State for the same reason it ain't because I had designs on being anything. Well, what I was going to say is that there are some, there are a lot of young conservatives, more of them on the sort of libertarian end of the spectrum. And the way this article gets into libertarianism is also fascinating, but who have almost this sort of like pathology or need to be a contrarian in

these types of situations. you know what i'm saying like and it has a sort of like intellectual foundation to it too um and it's hilarious because if you've ever been in a college classroom in a liberal arts college classroom you've known a jackson or two yeah um so jackson's wearing cowboy jeans, boots, uh, cowboy boots, jeans, Carhartt shirt, baseball cap, um, which he got on a trip to Yellowstone. Um, it's clear that Jackson will be a force. The distinction he's drawing is smart. No one had to get an F in my first example, but more importantly, it's clear that he likes this kind of intellectual jousting. I return to Kirsten and change the facts.

It's her mom who's tied to the tracks. I'm going to save my mom, obviously, Kirsten replies, but I would feel bad. Utilitarianism can take you to dark places. It certainly has no room to accommodate youthful sentimentality. Now, I say, the trolley is loaded with nuclear weapons. Five million people will die in a fiery inferno, including innocent babies, unless Kirsten throws the switch. Oh, my God. I probably would save my mom, to be honest, she says.

Most of the students nod their heads in agreement, voting for mothers over cities. But Jackson once again stands out. He says he'd kill his mom or even a baby if it meant saving more lives. I mean, someone has to die either way, and I'm fine putting my life, even if I had to spend the rest of my life in prison, to save the five versus the one. Let me go back to the opener here, and let me just say that what socialism is, is we should give Jackson the F so we could all get A's. That's what you do. that's what you do like if anybody out here if you're in an ethics class and you got some good professor like this pick up the worst guy in your class it's usually the guy necktie on carhartt trying to just be the country boy contrarian guy as an eighty thousand dollar

truck with a lift kit that again he doesn't use for any sort of work purposes or anything yeah it's all that motherfucker and say give us all a's and then just there we go absolutely and it's fucked that he only gives that option at the beginning of the class before they all get to know each other give this option a month in somebody's going down and it's fucking jackson good point that's a really good point and and maybe this is a good point to sort of dig in a little bit into the methodology methodology of the trolley problem because here's what fucking kit here's what pisses me off so much about this bro proposing the trolley problem to a class of 18 year olds is not real life

like you learn literally nothing about somebody by their answer on the trolley problem. And you know why? Because in a room with other students, every student is going to be virtue signaling or triangulating their response to how they think other people are going to be responding and how they're going to be perceived. You might be able to get a more accurate reading if you did it individually, one--one maybe in your office but even then or it's just a test question or it's just a test question but even then like the answer to the trolley problem tells me nothing about who you are as a person because that's not how real life works when you're in that situation which 99.9999% of us will never be in none of us will ever have to choose between killing our mom or five million people getting nuked to death like

yes you're like your answer to that hypothetically says nothing about you as a person like even the way that you act in that scenario, if you did have to do that, says nothing about you as a person. Because, like, that's an impossible choice. You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't know. Like, their hard-on-for-the-trolley problem is a huge issue I have with this. dedication to Western philosophy that like prioritizes empiricism

and rationality and all this where it's just like I don't know that's just like a sort of like flawed in my opinion method of trying to understand a person also what I would say too if that was ever raised

in a classroom I was in I would just go on like a 30 minute filibuster about our crumbling infrastructure choices in the first place if we just had you know adequate infrastructure filibuster well dude he's grandstanding in his class we need more like uh leftists. What's the guy's name? Jackson? Jacksons. The contrarians that are just there to just ask the more important questions. This is an interesting point because socialists, anybody to the left of Hillary Clinton does not factor in this story at all.

Not once. Not even lip service or anything so it's like maybe if you ask the socialists the trolley problem they would probably say i would fix things to where people don't have to make those kind of decisions in the first place right so we apologize messy but the world doesn't have to be messy we choose to make it messy to keep people in power exactly exactly none of the suffering that we have but the only thing we should be at the mercy of in this society is like viruses and like germs and even we can combat those you know with the right investments and whatever yeah imagine living in a society society where the worst thing that might happen to you in your life is like... You get eaten by a bear. Yeah.

That's pretty bad. I was going to say, yeah, you die. You die. Your natural causes. After 85 years. Okay, I haven't known Jackson for long, but I believe that he would sacrifice himself for the greater good, and I can see that his classmates believe it too. Even if they don't share his willingness to throw the switch on a family member, they see him

as principled, not cruel. It's a type of selflessness and consistency that seems lacking in contemporary discourse. This paragraph makes me want to grind my teeth. No, it's not. No, the fuck it's not. Just get to what I'm saying this guy's

there is no philosophy behind this like when they ask what he reads he reads chris cowell if anything he's more of a sociopath than any of them exactly what it is what it is is he learned early on at a certain point that he needed to be different from everybody else and the only way that can be expressed is by being a huge asshole right yeah that's it but not there's other ways to do that well how what what lifts the collective what would be best for all of us but his is like nope we all should just you know we all should just get what we deserve according to our merits and our like what we're willing to put in and it's like actually even deeper than that tom if you listen to what he's saying he said he would sacrifice his mother or his child

and what that indicates to me is this sort of like savior complex it's almost like yeah it's almost like he's not sacrificing himself for the greater good he's doing it in high and the hypothetical that's not the same thing as real life if jackson has half a brain he will be like you know like who was the guy that read that bat shit like the whites are dying out speech oh josh holly josh holly yeah like yeah like these guys that like that liberals also that liberals also have sort of umized, you know what I mean? By not being more aggressive about the conservative question. Yeah, I don't know. I hate them all.

Well, it's a weird – that sentence. It's a type of selflessness and consistency that seems lacking in contemporary discourse in which people are too willing to prioritize what's politically expedient over fundamental values there's two things i want to say about that the first is that that's a great example of how um it's a great example of how weirdly we have how he's fetishized this kid you know what i mean like he's he's hey that's why he moved here right he's found the kid that he's that he's been looking for his great white well that will explain the divisiveness and and everything else wrong with american society can you imagine can you imagine being having the best education on earth and this is the best you can do

oh i know that's what's phenomenal that. It's hard to do your critique. Oh, I know. That's what's fascinating to me about this. It's like this guy teaches at John Jay College, philosophy. Harvard. Like all these places. This is what Western philosophy will do to your brains. Which is why Politico printed his ass. Yeah.

In the How to Fix politics yeah segment under charles coke um the second thing the second thing about that's funny that's funny to me is um in which people are too willing to prioritize what's politically expedient over fundamental values i'm pretty sure if you ask this guy who he voted for in 2016 election he could tell you hillary um and if you ask them to explain why not bernie he would probably say something like electability which to me that that is politically expedient over fundamental values but yeah whatever he said it's what feels wrong for example about liberal intolerance of dissenting speech especially on campus or the rush to punish alleged sexual predators without due process and it's what feels equally wrong about conservatives who claim to revere life

and yet can display such brazen cruelty to immigrants and prisoners, etc., etc. The near unanimity with which this— Is my man a little bit concerned with cancel culture? I would say I'd be willing to venture yes. It's about to get good. We got a high on it. I just don't know about that. Like, alleged sexual predators without due process.

That kind of stuff. I put the highlight in here to indicate a segment that I want to skip over, kind of, and give you a summary of. That's why it's red. Right. Their unanimity with which the students responded to the trolley question is notable. So this is we've finally arrived at what is

the beginnings of his thesis which is that conservatives and liberals across the board respond to the trolley question with near unanimity. With near, you know, pretty much the same answer. Right.

Except for one political group. You want to take a guess what that political group is, Tanya? Libertarian. I like that answer, Tanya. That's the Tanya. Get a hold of yourself, Tom. My bad. I didn't mean to steal your time.

There's a little bit of a delay. My bad. I didn't mean to steal your time. There's a little bit of a delay. So he tells us about how there's an entire field of discipline in the academy called trolleyology. Oh my god. Which occupies its own niche in social psychology research. Bolsonaro is like rounding up all the Marxists out of the academy in Brazil. When we have our day, we're rounding up all the marks to sell the academy in brazil if when we have our day we're rounding up all the trolley putting them on a trolley a list gets released trolleyologists we'll put all the trolleyologists on a big like

on like on a big trolley and then we will make them make the trolley choices. Oh my God. So the trolleyology professor is a guy named Jesse Graham at University of Utah, and he says that overall liberals and conservatives are similar. Libertarians, however, are a different story. He says, we don't talk much about them, not members of the political party with that name,

but rather people who believe in limited government. There are a lot of the latter. Estimates range between 77% and 22%, 7% and 22%, and they merit greater discussion. Do they? Yes. Graham explains...

No, go ahead. Here's my thing it's like is there possibly another group of you know sort of on the left end of things that actually have a dog in the race that's pulling better than bill weld no i mean really like why well this is the thing if this guy was a libertarian in writing this i'd be like okay well that's what you believe in you're a dumbass but whatever but that's he's not he's a liberal writing this which makes him an even bigger dumbass that he's giving them this much credence yeah this paired very nicely with the speak your piece yes yes speaking as they so rarely do and they they think that this is some type of that they've uh go ahead there there's some white hats they think they've come in on capes yes just level the playing field here. Let's get back to the basics. Okay.

So Graham, the trolleyology professor, explains that the libertarian cognitive style. This is such a funny word. He explains that the libertarian cognitive style is cerebral rather than emotional. Libertarians are far and away the most likely to say, yeah the guy off they just see it as a math problem he tells me they have no squeamishness about having to kill the person it's coldly calculating but also arguably rigorously ethical i like he like cast this like it's a superpower or something that libertarians have. They can lift above the scrum and see it for what it is. As Graham tells me this, I can't help but think that efforts to unpack

what separates red states from blue states haven't been careful to differentiate between conservatives and libertarians. Venn diagrams of voters generally categorize voters as Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives. But as is becoming increasingly apparent, the cool-headed libertarian in my classroom who's willing to sacrifice his mother for the greater good doesn't fit neatly into any of these circles. It occurs to me that if America is going to come together, it's going to have to reckon with Jackson Cooter.

I'll go ahead and tell you right now, it'll be bet cold day in hell for i reckon with jackson fucking honestly the more i think about this trilogy bullshit is it just i guess it goes back to you talking about them having no that there's class doesn't come up here at all but it's just so it's insane to me that this man is so flippant and just a fucking maniac that he doesn't take into consideration that there are plenty of people making life or death that are forced to make life and death decisions in their lives all the time every day yeah poor people this world over are making all kinds of decisions that wreck their life like about whether their family members will get medicine or whatever just it's fucking insane oh yeah well like for him it's a parlor debate, right?

Just in the same way that as he goes through this and gets into gun control, and especially the segment on abortion, because that's the part that pissed me off the most in this article. The section on abortion is hands down the worst section in this, because essentially what he's getting at and correct

me if i'm wrong tom you may be this better than i am because i can't get into it because this is a long article it's like 5 000 words um but essentially what he's saying on the section on abortion is that no one is currently trying to come to a compromise on abortion and so in his mind the fucking compromise in his mind I think what he means by that is that late-term abortion is a step too far, but early-term abortion is okay. So what they need to come together on is maybe an abortion at maybe 24 weeks

or something like that. You know what I mean? That's kind of what I understand him to be saying. Like, give a little, get a little, thanks. Yes, like, in his mind, it really is a spectrum, and you meet in the middle, literally, at, like, 24 weeks, and you're like, this is compromise. Why aren't you people compromising with your abusers?

Seriously. Why aren't you trying to meet them halfway? It's Stockholm Syndrome. So he gets into the thing about gun gun control he says if one looks and listens carefully a consensus reveals itself across a whole diversity of fields on the importance and untapped power of listening the names and nuances of these approaches to careful listening differ but they share two basic qualities the first is to listen with an open mind nyu psychologist carol gillian gilligan who began the radical listening project in 2017 oh my god oh i've been on a listening project here

and there love that love that the radical listening project only ask open-ended questions is that what they do i don't i can't remember but there are a whole there are whole books about how to listen just shut the fuck up how about that god um university of michigan professor donna kawicz practices an approach known as intergroup dialogue and calls it generous listening. So we have radical listening and generous listening. The second quality is that all these approaches, in one way or another, ask the listener to inhabit another person. The aim is, this is one of my favorite paragraphs in here, the aim is to create a space in which you can admit let in another person's voice.

It's a way of stimulating empathy. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. Atticus Finch tells Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, where the fuck did that come from? We weren't going to make it

through this without echoing To Kill a Mockingbird. The only thing that surprises me about what didn't shake out in here, like I thought that opening gambit about like pick the person that gets an F was going to be some rebuke of socialism. Right. That's the only thing that actually it wasn't that, you know, that wouldn't have surprised me if it would have been. There's the thing, Tom.

This guy is so removed from any class concerns at all that I don't think socialism is a thing he even acknowledges exists. I think he just sees liberals and conservatives and libertarians. Like, that's the way his brain, like, cordons off the populace. Well, there are, the majority of liberals think that they're as far left as you can get i know it's rare is the few that are like yeah i can't get on board with some of this out there stuff you know what i mean um i thought this is a hilarious line an emerging body of research shows that finch or harpy harper lee was right like many people it's like when trump said that many people are learning about

frederick douglas it's like many people folks are saying atticus finch was right he might have been right about um yeah curious things start to happen to people when they listen generously. At the most superficial level, one hears things that he or she might not like. But one also hears the sincerity of people's convictions, the authenticity of their experiences, and the nuance of their narratives. Being open is transformative because, almost inevitably, one finds that the stories they've been told about what people believe oversimplify reality. finds that the stories they've been told about what people believe oversimplify reality. It's like, it's the notion that you should listen to someone who's telling you that you deserve to have a boot on your neck is the most sucker shit I can possibly imagine. And the fact that someone is out there teaching kids that, that you should be listening to

people who tell you it's okay that you don't have rights or that it's okay that you're being marginalized and increasingly having the boot put to your neck? It's not only, I mean, I don't know. It's immoral, but it's just incredible to think about. I don't know.

The section on abortion, though, contains, I think, the best line in this though because it opens up if you teach ethics for long enough you develop a physician's sensitivity to areas that can be probed for tenderness wow probed for tenderness

this motherfucker oh yeah no by this he's talking about abortion because like for a lot of these ethics professors, abortion... But what a choice of words. Yeah, probed for tinnitus. Oh, my God. Well, for them, abortion is the big ethical quandary, right?

It's like... Because like... And I forgot to pull it out here. Because one of the students in his class is basically saying, like, well um it's it comes down to a woman's right to choose but then he goes in and editorializes afterwards and it's like yeah but can't you once i pointed out to the student that the baby might be helpless um and incapable of choosing on its own if it wants to live or die she quickly backed down on that and

it's like that's the the question here isn't about a child or a child's right to life because like if you believe in science like this guy he says he's a philosophy professor whatever he would understand that a baby is not life it's an organ of a woman's body that can be removed it's not life it's like an appendix that will soon one day be a person but not now exactly kind of a parasite that sucks up your vitamins and stuff to me and truly though if this really was an ethical dilemma it's like okay well then weigh the two is it really more important for you to preserve a life than to deprive a woman of her choice because that is the choices here you like these trolley problems well you have two choices it's either you you take away a woman's shoes or

you preserve something that is might not even be life scientifically. But we fucking know conservatives don't care about children's lives. Oh, that's the thing. There's no debate. That's why he's so stupid, though. They don't care about life. He's completely conceding that to them by saying, oh, we can compromise on this. We can come to a point of consensus.

Okay, well, let's pass universal health care and all these things for children. Compromise. He says, I left my experience at App State with a richer understanding of Southern conservatives and libertarians, but more significantly with great optimism, even exuberance about the untapped potential of experiences that teach people how to talk productively about their differences. Even after a career spent moderating conversations on controversial issues, I learned how to listen better and was changed by the stories I heard. Imagine if, instead of requiring a swim test for college students or a gym for middle schoolers,

we required students to sit in a room with a diverse group of people and listen to the stories of their life. Radical listening. If I wanted to prepare my children to live as citizens in a democratic society, nothing would be more valuable than to teach them to listen. Listen to your abusers, folks.

They have a lot of good things to say. They have a lot of good things to say to you. They have your best interests at heart. Yeah, your bosses, they know what they're talking about. Just the dumbest shit, man. So, like, what started out as this thing that kind of, like, fetishized Appalachia and like he was searching for the true um nugget of truth about

divisiveness in America quickly just became this I don't know peon to capitulation you know what I mean just this radical manifesto for capitulation and um I not actually fighting for anything, but just sitting down and listening to people. It's fucking absurd.

this time we're in has produced, taken people that are supposed to be sort of these intellectual giants or even just like brave people and just rendered them like basically patrons of the sort of managerial overclass, you know, it's like uh like isn't like uh um what's uh what's their name sulkwicks that did the the um bad protest at columbia did you see this thing this past week and like emma's like a libertarian now i saw that yeah yeah it's just like i just wonder like what i don't know yeah i don't know i'm not you know and i don't want to say that in a way that trivializes what she went through but like also i just i don't know

i don't know how you arrive at there's at there being some substance to some of this stuff because you don't have a stake in it i mean like i i from what i i read that article that profile of her and she seems very wealthy she seems like she came from a very rich family it's not discounting what happened to her at columbia because that was horrendous but at the same time if you're very wealthy what does wealth allow you to do it allows you to escape all the fucking nightmares that everybody else has to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. It's the nitro boost in your

fucking privilege pack or whatever the fuck. Yeah. Anyway. I think that that's the thing here. I think that that's the case with this guy. Like, I think that he's so far removed from any real world struggles or concerns.

Yeah. This guy lives on a fucking cloud. Yeah. I don't know. It's pretty incredible. Yeah. Bleak. Yeah.

Well, so what teaching ethics in Appalachia taught him about bridging America's partisan divide? You can skip it. You can skip it. Oh, father. Skipped. Skipped. you can skip it you can skip it skipped I used to smoke weed with this guy in high school named Colin Cooper and if he was mad at you and you were

standing next to him he would pass you over and pass the blunt to the guy next to you he'd be like skipped he'd go skipped skipped skipped so skip that one alright anything else before we go we're over in an hour let's pack this one in

any final thoughts closing words I think this is not to call into question the Appalachian-ness or the hollerness of Boone, North Carolina, but I think it's interesting. This guy was like, I'm going to go to Appalachia and then picked Boone. I lived in Boone. It's nothing like the vast majority.

Like, oh, you're a motherfucker. Yeah. Yeah. Teach ethics at UPAC, bitch. Teach ethics at Southeast pot bitch teach that teach ethics at southeast community technical college um yeah absolutely insane all right uh well i guess we'll uh see you next time anything to plug we have anything to plug? Do we have anything to plug, Tanya? I don't know. I don't think so. Alright, y'all. We'll see you next time.

Bye.