Sense and Censorability

I, V, M. And make them down so that the listeners go wait. That's it. Unfortunately for us, the listeners usually do that about our intellect.

We have to rather than the topic at hand. And in case you didn't know it already, I am Tony and joining me is a man who stops everything inside his head. So that he doesn't have to keep anything on top except for that season when hats were in fashion. But he's generally known to lift everything these days, including the quality of the show or shows whenever he happens to be on it.

Say hi, Chuck. Oh, hi. I was definitely one of us talking about that. Yeah.

And also joining us. Yeah, I really thought it was a possible day of hats. Yeah. Yeah.

You were many hats. Oh, like, yeah. I thought you were going to be a subconsciously going for that. For me, there was something to control the thoughts that entered my mind from exiting my mouth.

Unfortunately, we have no such filter. Yeah. Early reference topic. Yeah.

Also joining us, the person with an angelic smile and washboard abs, which he likes to remind us of subtly by placing a ironing board behind his background. So, you know, in case you're thinking about it, not even still not eating ice cream. And with two years of not eating ice cream, you've turned into third pakoda, visually as well as intellectually. Welcome, Maris.

Hi. You know, I feel some carnival like that. So, you know, we used to run these experiments. Like when people were walking from one room to the other room, he placed some object and then these are random board association games in the room.

Oh, yeah. I can. So now that we sit here, whenever I finish recording a simplified episode, I have this urge to do one thing. Yeah, I have to have the idea and I'm realizing on this episode.

So the show can't see this. But Marin has this very cool ironing board behind it. I still think that it's not an ironing board. Marin is just being modest and he is actually a surfer.

And then he actually goes to the nearest water body and flips a few as the Australians would say. Speaking of surfboards, did you know that there was a surfing in surfing? There is a small but significant surfing scene in India. Yes, of course.

Yeah. Go get an hour in a place close to Virar nearby. So my son met recently. Yeah.

And he spoke highly of the experience, except that the waves aren't really that big. I mean, they much bigger in Boca and who would be in other places. Here they were far lower in amplitude. That's what you're saying.

But yeah, I was surprised. They were like literally dozens of people there going at surfing is so difficult and I've tried it. It's incredibly hard. I've actually seen surfboards.

You won't be there inside worthy for them. Wow. So a friend and I once decided to go and see all the faults in my city, like, obviously, I am and all that and we went inside worthy for a little bit of pass that little little village to get there. And inside there was a gym.

I did not have actual functioning gym. And there was a room with surfboards. I did not know there. They were actually surfing.

I don't know whether that Mahin Kriq or whatever it is is conducive for. Yeah. And I mean, I'm not taking that. This is not from historical time.

Right. This is like a model. Yeah, but it was born in 2016. Although there will be so awesome.

Yeah. There will be so many. Yeah. Yeah.

I did it's surfing in 1726. I mean, if I'm sure we did at some point of time, I mean, some outside forward, some that keep still what's at forward. So really like that. So like fake news will be all things like this.

The main things were written for each other for anybody else probably. But now I feel like we are deviating from the topic. I was just a bit stopped only. Which was like a stupid topic only on.

Yeah. We should go, I mean, oh my god. So that's very appropriate because. We can't have to say nothing.

Right. So someone's been censoring Tony just the same as people have been trying to censor authors of yours, which is our grouse of the day. Yeah. And then what the topic is on.

But let's welcome our fellow surfers, our listeners into the conversation and talk about So what the hell we actually want to talk about? Which is that last time when we recorded Nari, we asked the question and left it as a cliffhanger. Of course, Chaka's no idea what he was talking about because he didn't listen to the last episode. So Chaka, to bring you into the conversation first, let's first address an important cliffhanger that Nari and left us on.

When you were all together, Nari, we wanted a cat right update. What is the current situation with your cat getting it? All right. So the cat, the rat has mysteriously disappeared.

And cat is still not exhibiting the enthusiasm with which other members of his species. So whenever he goes to the... So we have a garden on our terrace, which is where the rats are resident, rats are allegedly resident, because no one has actually seen them other than my mom. And so we took out cat there and it sort of tippy-toed around and instantly turned around and bolted for the door.

I don't know whether that's because it was... They were rats or because they weren't any rats, or this guy is a pacifist, he doesn't believe in conflict. I don't know what... People say...

They don't like conflict, they don't like... They're like... You know what has happened here? You know what has happened here, right?

You know what has happened here? Is that basically you left the YouTube thing on Autoplay. And after the cat-rat video, it automatically played content from what you were watching or listening to, which is probably some philosophy from back in the day, the cat has like, internally all of that thought, what is the point there even? So...

But speaking of content... Yeah, but speaking of content and stuff like that, I think today we are wanting to talk about what we left on last time, which is around, you know, general tendency to censor stuff and bolder eyes, I believe is the one that I... To sort of... Yeah, bolder eyes.

Bolder eyes, about right there. Yeah, basically in the context of old authors' works, now being sort of cast anew, this includes like, Wudaov's, Anid Blight and Roldal, a Gata Christie, a bunch of different authors' works are sort of being sanitized right now. So I thought we'll have quite interesting takes around the world, especially because content moderation has been sort of like a pet topic of ours. We keep coming back to it every other year.

We've spoken about how Facebook does it, how difficult it is going to be for Twitter to do it. Elon Musk free speech absolutist has come in and basically fired his like greatest sort of content moderator. If you want to check it out, there is a great, American Life episode called episode number seven, 97, I forget the name, which is a great story with the Yohail Roth and also another frivolous metric, right? So yeah, leave this podcast, go to that one, no, no.

But anyway, what we wanted to talk about is nothing to do with Musk or the internet per se, but in general about our thoughts on, you know, what this is about, now why don't you kick us off? Yeah, so there have been several authors, very, very famous among them, Roldal, P.G. Woodhouse and Agatha Christie, who whose works have, because they wrote in an era when such words and such thoughts were permissible, are now found objectionable. So in the case of Woodhouse, for the life of me, I can't understand what it might be, except that he uses he and Agatha Christie, they do use the N word from time to time, to refer to black people in different sort of, you know, different contexts.

They aren't, those words aren't central to the theme of whatever they're saying, it's not as if they're spewing hate or anything like that, it's just a word drop. And what they are publishers, or the publishing companies that own their content have taken it upon themselves to do, is to scrub the canon clean of these words. And you can't just pluck a word out and then leave no word, so you have to put something else. And for many people that detracts from the flow or the purity of, you know, whatever the pros were.

So pros itself, whatever people write, they provide delight in two ways, right? So one is they convey an idea, so you delight in the idea. And the second is the cadence of the words themselves, the way it is set. For, I'll give you an example, here is a Bertie Wooster, Woodhouse character, talking about, you know, so he's in the stress, and he goes for a bath, and he discovers a toy duck in a soap dish.

So that is a distressing for him. And this is what he writes. The discovery of a toy duck in a soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years.

And I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you show the thing under the surface with a sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most care won. Ten minutes of this, and I was enabled to return to the big chamber, much more the old Mary Bertrami. So that entire big sentence, maybe 50 words, is saying that I went to the bar tub and there was a duck and I played with it.

So it's a little of the language, it's a flow, it is the way the process construct which is delightful. Now, if for some reason or the other, you found that the word juvenile visitor is objectionable, or you thought that the word toy duck is objectionable, if you pluck those out, then that entire, how many of that sentence is gone. So this is the argument for people who don't agree that sort of censorship or editing, they don't call it censorship, they just call it editing, so they believe that these things should not be edited. And I'm able to see the point from the other side as well.

So, but we'll go to that later. I just wanted to sound you guys out, what do you think? Do you think that if something is obnoxious in literature, do you think it should be excised out or do you think that people should just avoid it? You'll be fine with it, obnoxious.

It feels like everyone's talking about two things right now. Picklebone and podcast. So what happens when someone who's lived her whole life on the court decides to bring those two worlds together? I'm Sanya Merzam and I'm bringing you a brand new podcast, serving it up with Sanya.

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That's me, Monday to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'm with our kids. We chat with celebs, you'll never meet traffic jams on the streets and people from all professions. Every Monday I go live with the show, ask me anything, AMA, you follow the questions, I'd also better than a Mumbai Litchat, right? I even host a panel discussion called Cocking Bull where we dive into current affairs and wonder why anyone even cares at all.

And Friday releases are always surprise episodes for you all. So tune into Sanya's says on YouTube and all our new streaming platforms. I think it's about the intent of your own stomach skin. And I suppose this is the argument that you might make for the other side, like if the hotels were to use, for instance, this is going back to the end of the night I can use it myself.

It may not be from a position of malice or anything of that sort of thing. Then I see the merits of keeping it in. That means that you can't ignore the fact that the meaning of the world and the symbolism of the world has changed since Buddha was either. So maybe one day of thinking about it is, and the Sathavana for the Bambi Shostok, is if Buddha was to write that today, what would he use?

Because it's not instrumental of the story by itself. Of course, if it is instrumental to the story, then it will be because it's the idea of the notebook itself is something that should be headed with either at least a warning sticker at the very least, I'm not sure, but the outright censorship is the answer. Or do you just blink it out? Or do you put in what Netflix had once proposed in one point of time, which is to put warning labels rather than, rather than they would say that rather than destroy your statue, keep a statue up and just explain the context as to why this person was important at one point of time before working so badly.

So again, I have been thinking about this in two lives for mostly, I guess for this topic, and honestly it's something that I have always been confident in, I get a very long, very long time. First time I actually thought about this topic was far from, as far from high literature, as you can get into this, I'm already saying it's a decade back. And at that point of time, my gut reaction to songs being censored or taken off the air was, yeah, I mean, that's a good idea. If people, if there are lyrics about even increasing aggressive attitudes towards women, let's put it mildly, India, those are not to be added up here.

And then I even thought about many of my favorite songs that my favorite artists and in many ways, they were completely the same kind of messy, but in much class, in some language. So then, there's something I've always been thinking about, I mean, where do you draw the line with respect to the sort of you actually have to create it at various levels? And I think movies have actually done a better job of grading for various audiences rather than other forms of art, including literature and music in music. You either have a voting explicit content label out front or nothing at all.

You have to see how much that actually differs people. On Spotify, you do have explicit mockless lyrics. We have a little more labeled ex-toulex. So that's kind of interesting.

But that leads me to other questions. Like, okay, maybe you have that explicit label that's put over there because they got a swear word in the lyrics. But what if the content itself was, you know, it is possible to make a completely anti-semitic song without using any cuss words. So then you put an explicit label towards that because there's nothing per se explicit over it, explicitly explicit.

So just random thoughts in my head. I don't think I had to answer the question that you had hosted, but just putting out a few signs of. No, I don't think I had to say what's the question. It's the most interesting one.

Leave it as an exercise for the listener. God and fitter has each episode of simplified concludes without any answers. But just to sort of tease out a few different things there. One is, Marin, you spoke of who would also as an example, right?

And there is a sort of outline effect whenever you use what as an example because he relies on heavily on word music, like the plot is an incident. Every plot is pretty much the same. It's just like using it as a medium to channel what he wants. But just to go back to books, Chuck, before we come to the rest of what you said.

So I mean, when I heard this is a one-line headline, I was like, I mean, what the hell? What is the point of changing these things? No, it is ridiculous. But let me read out some of the changes that have been made.

This is in any Blighton 5 on Precious Right. So one of the favorite adjectives that any Blighton has is the word queer. And now they've replaced it with any of peculiar odds, strange, funny, weird, and amazing because obviously queer has a different sort of context to where we stand right now. So isn't she queer not wanting to welcome us as strange to?

Isn't she odd not wanting to welcome us? The other thing that is there is around skin color. So someone who's referred to as a brown-faced fissure boy has changed to a sun-tent fissure boy. And stuff like that basically.

And until Quentin in 1942 said of his daughter, where's George? She wants spanking. Now it has changed too. She wants a good talking too.

So I mean, if you sort of get into what the changes actually are, they're not unreasonable per se. I'm not sure if the author existed today, they would have objected to it. Because at the end of the day, I'm guessing all of these books had editors at that point in time as well who would have been advising them to say, why not change this to X or this kind of fly or there is some sort of layer there. So I mean, back to being muddled.

But I mean, have you? So here's my two cents. So first of all, who asked them? Who changed?

Who asked anyone to be the guardian of world sensibility? The sensibility of everyone in the world. So that's very presenters. The second is, why can it not be viewed as a repository of culture, a given person, a snapshot of what people were like.

Queer had multiple meanings. Queer has only one meaning now. But back in the day, it was. And in fact, when we were a kid, when I was not a kid, I was a kid, Queer was a standard usage event in India.

Yeah. Except for Malia Lee's layer, these words are tricky. Man, like every time I say queer, I have to think many times and unlearned conditioning. Because anything with a QU, when we grow up in Kerala, it's a very specific Q.

So, queen would be pronounced Q in tune. Queer would be Q. Ques would be Q. So, yeah, I'm sure Malia Lee is the word queer with the word.

No, I get what he's saying. Sorry, Jackie, what I mean? It seems to me, like, technologically, if it's feasible, it seems like the solution is key, optional, close, but at the current context, I don't know if it's possible. The books may be easier to format.

I say people are definitely possible with interactive forms of media. Let's take the example of the use only. You know, you retain the original skin color and whatever and add a footnote. Like how some websites have something highlighted and then you can already get it like something, which I say this was what the author did.

The author did it, the reading of the word or the phrase is more often to something else, so on and so forth. It is not for like to use this particular word. Or whatever the case may be. I see the American doing something like that if it's technologically feasible to.

Because I feel like if you don't do that, if it's something else, it kind of respects the history of the word itself. And people are eventually going to find out. People are eventually going to know that there's this history behind each of these words, in any case. I mean, that's the way I can look at it.

It's maybe not easy to do in a book format. But if I were a publisher, if I were to make a compromise solution, I think bookwords, which is what the meaning of the word is right now. I think it would also be a fairly easy long-term strategy to do. Because otherwise, the meaning of words are going to be changing.

I think 20 years, maybe half the words that you're using on this part are going to evolve change because they've been, whatever, a pro-leader of the meaning has been changed by radius, you never know. So just adding that context, I think, would help. And definitely it will help overcome things like what the author was racist and what that was like, whatever. I mean, that's just not since I think of it.

And they could have connected the words that also evolve and need society to evolve the way it is. Yeah. No, but I mean, giving context has sort of allied meaning to it, right? Which is basically saying, you know, I'm trying to associate with what the author had said and like it was said in a particular point.

You're already coloring the reader's view before even if you had a chance to consume the literature, right? I mean, I find that even it's problematic still, right? Because you're sort of coming into the prejudice to say, yeah, no, as in problematic in the sense, you're coloring the view as opposed to changing who you are to all, which I may not have noticed. Now you're saying that any blighted use to racist words, please forgive her.

Before I even start reading the book, right? I mean, I'm not really sure if that's a better solution. Right. So this is what comes in the Woodhouse update, right?

Keep in mind that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language themes and characterizations that you may find outdated, okay? Chuck your solutions to stop there. But these days have gone on and said, in this edition, we've tried to change the words that we consider unacceptable to today's readers and they've gone on and changed the words as well. Right.

So I mean, it's one of those things, right? You can't say it one way or the other basically. Yeah, you can't answer. And I wasn't intending on just like who the essentialist gamer that comes before the book on movie starts in the movie.

So my thing was more footnotes, you know, during the written, it's about, now I can argue that that might break the flow of reading. I completely agree, right? Like you enjoy the prose and you probably haven't even thought quite so quickly. It's already got here, you're already, like, especially when you're reading Woodhouse, you transported your mind already back to the 1920s and 30s.

And if you see the word, you're not setting your problem thinking of odd rather than, then it's trying to meaning, for example. So, I mean, again, there's this book, okay, so you're writing, you add footnotes along the way, or do you add appendix at the end? Do you say that now that you've read the book and enjoyed it in the very often intended? Here's a section that you should sort of like, don't forget these before you don't like wash your hands on the way out kind of thing.

So, again, no perfect solution for any other sense. Certainly not when you're considered it across or across art forms. Like, for example, you can still get away with interrupting, say, a book, for instance, because you are still you, everyone thinks that they won't taste any might be used to referring to book, but not in any case. How do you do this when you're using, for instance?

Suppose somebody had UCN, who would say, I'm going jazz up this guy, and then stop the solve over there and then say, hey, by the way, then he said, any was it different? It's like no perfect solution to any or any of these games. But it's good that the date is kind of happening right now. I think the worry is OK to wear this and stop.

Like, today it's about three or four different boards. I think that's the thing that we have. Like, OK, are they going to sanitize out this entire thing? There is eventually going to be, like, are we going to find, like, if you take any buttons, say, famous, five or six or seven?

Is it going to be sacrilegious? Now that there are seven kids running away and going to a small island, that will give you two ideas to run away from home. So, I feel it's going to inherently affect a plot or something that's where it starts to become even more problematic. And maybe people see it as a slippery slope change of what today plot tomorrow, who's?

Do you think that, you know, they were famous five, they were the three investigators, somebody wrote that, there was famous five, there were a secret seven. Shouldn't have been a naughty nine and egregious 11 and a trauma. So, why not even number? Why not even numbers?

This is description. Very odd. It's queer. It's queer.

It's queer. It's queer. It used to be queer. It used to be queer.

It's queer in this podcast. It's queer in this podcast. It's queer. Yeah.

It's queer. It's like, it's very odd. Five find out a secret seven. And then, what's next 13, right?

Nine. Nine is not prime. As far as I know. Oh, nine is not?

No, it's not. It's not the meaning of the word prime. It is only as one of my sons told me one, though. It's the only prime number divisible by three.

So, no, he was making... I said this is a prime number. I think nine is something like that. And he knew, right?

So, instead of saying, he told me that it's the only prime number divisible by three. On a side note, you know that Amazon will never be broken up because it is prime. Okay. But, Chuck, like you said, none of this is, you know, crystal-tier.

Which is why over the last five, six years have been on this podcast. Trying to build them for Mark Zuckerberg. That is my idea. Oh!

Wait, guys, is this a board of civilizations? Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Mark Zuckerberg.

We love Mark Zuckerberg. You made an interesting point, right? Which is to say, like, who asked them to. Exactly.

Yeah, agency point is important. Yeah. So, this is the thing. So, I haven't passed this particular issue well enough, but in general, excessive protest about seemingly insignificant sort of, you know, right?

of how do you call it? What are the word transgression or whatever? It's a seemingly Instagram so queer versus art. No LGBTQ person is going to be greatly or traumatized because I need Brighton said queer in her books.

They are facing issues today. They are facing issues today, discrimination at work, discrimination in society, all kinds of insults, injury, whatever they have faced. They don't get, they're not welcome in neighborhoods, things like that. And what is the proxy for dealing with those problems?

Those are the hard problems. So you go to a 1930s author and change her words. That sort of about what is it? Yeah, so it is to my mind.

Yeah, this is the equivalent of changing place names in India, very popular. Every time a politician wants to get some brownie points, he goes and changes some place name. My thing is you should wear it as a badge of shame because you have to, you know, people have to respect whoever it is that you want to name it after so much that they will voluntarily go and call it that rather than some unknown, nameless, faceless British colonial overload that is named after. So the force of your work, you should do that.

That's a pretty good point. It's like an year, no, but you just speak for any community we are not a part of. But it's sort of like a cop-out. That's a nice way of putting it.

There are much bigger battles to fight for each of these. He said, okay, he said he's the biggest supporter of the US. So much of this is, so he had to behave to what I did. I got this change so far, post-selling model for him.

There is another observation that, you know, if you remember the Me Too thing, right? So when the Me Too movement had started, a lot of the most vociferous Me Too supporters, the male at least, they turned out to be big offenders themselves. So oftentimes, this is also dis-in-universe. So people who are really the most, the biggest offenders protest the loudest.

Yeah, so just on the agency point, right, just sort of flipping the lens, right? Let's say you're sort of heading up a publishing company and you have to publish these authors, but in real life, you're actually a champion for equality and equity and all of the good things. Now, do you let a book pass by your sort of thing if you find certain things outdated and can be changed without actually harming the book itself? So I'm trying to think from the other side.

I mean, you have to self-it might be a meaningless thing, but in my life, I want to be an actor. Current author, current author, if I were to write a book, and I were to put very objectionable things in it. My editor would say that this is very insensitive to a particular, it might not look like that. And that's this thing about offense, right?

So you and I are not offended at all at an end world because nowhere in our conceivable imagination can anyone call us the end world. We are not, we haven't experienced everything that goes along with it. But there was this boy named Emet Till in the 50s or 60s, I don't remember. I was who was pounded to death just because he allegedly whistled or something at a white woman.

And it later that white woman even later confessed many, many years later on at that, that that boy never even did that. So that was that is the baggage they are carrying. And if they are offended with the end world, yes, you can understand. But rest of us, I don't think so.

Yeah, I think so. So my point was this, that when we sweeping the dismiss offense against the end world and all, we should also remember that it could be really painful for some other people. Yeah, so that was my point. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and that was a good segue into the second part of this conversation. I think like one of the most brought up courts in all of these things is the, I think, misquote from Voltaire, which goes, I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the depth your right to say it. But there's a, like, I think a better quote, which people have pointed out by James Baldwin, which says, we can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist. So, I mean, beautiful words.

Yeah. So I mean, so the second part that I want to discuss was around basically, the, there is this movie, which is apparently called the Kerala story, which is a work of propaganda and fiction, right? And basically, if you look at the Wikipedia article, it says the premise is based in the conspiracy theory called love jihadi, which in itself doesn't exist but is used commonly across the board to say that apparently, like, you know, Muslim men, because they're very sexy, are you're in Hindu women into marriage and all. And this is taking it one step further to say 32,000 women Hindu women from India, you know, we take into ISIS or something like that through sexy means, I don't know, seduction, whatever.

But I mean, basically, they put out this number 32,000 in the trailer and obviously people fact checked it and then the director said, oh, it's not 32,000, it's three, like, like, a de-escalation. Yeah, it's three. So the de-escalation was to that degree. And then he said the actual number doesn't matter.

Then they went out to use 50,000 as well. But basically, what happened is a lot of, I feel a lot of unnecessary noise was created around it, causing more attention to this movie than necessary. It is a trashy piece of work, it would have died at natural death. But the question here being, in this age of hate speech in propaganda where there are sort of real ramifications to people's existence, and I mean, I don't think we need to mean words to say the Muslim community and, you know, Muslim people in general are, you know, facing the harshest time in India and it's abominable, right?

And anything that furthers that need some kind of, you know, stop age of protection because nothing happens on a certain, right? Everything builds up to something like that. And I think this, there's another quote from the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, which said, the power of media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences.

Right? So, I mean, I've obviously painted one picture, but, you know, what is, like, this is again one thing where you can't say one way or the other, right? Because can a movie be made? Absolutely, it should be made.

But given the context that we exist in, what is, you know, what is... Very difficult question. Very difficult question. That's true.

So, all freedom of expression absolutists like me really can't deal with this, right? So, this is clearly an exhortation to violence or whatever, even though it may not clearly say so. And it promotes hatred and things like that. And they are, they are, they are things we can do without.

I mean, we have enough trouble in this country and in this world, actually, without having to deal with this more, right? So, we have, we have a broken capitalist system, rich people are getting richer, poor people are getting poorer, all those kind of things. There's no, you know, for, even in a bulwarks of capitalism, like America, it's horrible, man. I mean, if you're a poor person in America, you might as well sort of jump off a cliff because you have no access to, you know, to medical, the same, you have so many people become homeless, because you have no access to housing, you have nothing.

And we, those are the problems that humanity needs to solve. And you're not going to solve them by fermenting hatred. So, what you said about media, we meet people who are in charge of media being having that extra burden on their shoulders, this is true, because they are deciding not just for us, they are deciding for the future generations too. So, yeah, I, I, no, so just to lay out the spectrum, right?

I mean, one is, I mean, I'm going to call it out and say there are other things that we need to focus our attention, right? This is happening here, right? So, and there are like completely drastic different takes that various state governments have taken on it. Where's Bengal has gone ahead and banned the movie and asked, you know, the Kerala government, why aren't you doing the same thing?

This movie has no right to exist. I think, Madi Pradesh and some other state have made the movie tax-free because obviously, it suits their sort of evil agenda to further hate against a particular community. And then the courts are caught in between all of this to say, I mean, this is one issue where I genuinely feel like the courts can't do anything, right? Because you're going to set up a price identity saying, saying, you know, this movie is not acceptable for a whole host of other things where, you know, people use it for different sort of things.

So, it is here and now we have to deal with it, but we really don't know how. I think that's the sort of conundrum that we're faced with. I mean, I can't go to the top of the answer for this. No, no, I think this one doesn't have a solution.

No, this doesn't look like you. I don't have an answer for the context that you've painted right now, but I'm kind of looking at this as a silly as it might seem to say, sort of training for humanity in some sense. It's just like how we are now subject to far less WhatsApp consciaracies because somehow we have all gotten a little smarter because of this, like even like Uncle's fact check themselves and all that. And you have to believe that all the misinformation and the backlash and the media and the media saying that there is a lot of misinformation for a whole media everything on WhatsApp themselves doing information campaigns and things like that all had a role in us becoming a little more cynical about our media and maybe even the three of us as ex-savvy as we were fed for these things at one point of mind and we were much younger and these media so much other like I did it off the shit that came on email and the internet at one point of mind.

We can look at it and laugh now and say things like, oh, we'll be able to see all the people that go by, but I'm going to do things like that. Maybe sort of, when I think of a conundrum, like this, I kind of try to dissociate myself into the month and years happening in the end of the human culture is like that they say that at last one second of the entire history of humanity or the world into the universe into one day. And if you zoom out, this becomes, I suppose, one day of training ourselves to be cynical about the media that we see. Again, it doesn't solve this particular movie and this particular problem in 2020, but maybe one day of putting it in it is the species will train itself to say, okay, don't believe all the media that you're seeing and everything that has happened from 2010 to 2000 onwards is kind of the one that I've ever seen.

It won't make sense. I'm just talking through my hat, but that's one way I think about it. The more things like this, there are, they're not saying that there should be more things like that, but even people are going to be like, okay, it's a book of quote unquote art at the end of the day. Let's judge it for that.

And then let's see, let's look at the same sort of critical lens that we would end up in a vinjals or whatever. Whatever that's in place, it was a trash movie or whatever, like really the judge of it let's look at reality or art and then these are also simply going forward. I don't know, I mean, I'm just saying a lot of things right now. But no, no, I'm just saying.

I'm going to be speech-y. It's like everyone's talking about two things right now. Pickleball and podcast. So what happens when someone who's lived her whole life on the court decides to bring those two girls together?

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Yeah, I mean, obviously, we all need to get on with our lives. The only way to do that is to rationalize it in some degree to say, you know, this has happened so that something else can happen, right? And I mean, as I've sort of grown older, I've got most in equal to say, yeah, find the arch of his free bench towards justice and all. But what about all the people who had to lose their lives, their livelihood property or whatever, right?

I mean, there is no reparation for any of them. It's just a sort of way for us to move on with our lives without losing faith in the system or the world, as it were. Leaving that aside, like one of the reasons why this is interesting is because a lot of the things that we've discussed on content moderation on this podcast have had the premise that it is the internet. It is the wild west.

It is uncontrollable and there is really no one to do this. Except this is not a product of the internet, right? This says existed as a sort of mainstream movie, which is pushing propaganda. And there are enough sort of, you know, data points in history to see where all this is going to eat, right?

And on the contrary to what you said, Chuck, I think there is an increase in what's the controversies and the like. We are just immune to it because you know, we will self-reliate out the face of it. And if it were like not effective, people just stop doing it, right? And the broken capitalist system then that refers to makes it clear, right?

If it didn't work, it stopped doing it. It really works. So again, I mean, just a collection of thoughts with no real sort of resolution at the end of it. But what night, if you were the quote or like, let's give you a judge's hat because why not?

How would you deal with something like this? If a petition came to you saying, what is what are the sort of... I used to be pretty much a free speech absolutors. So, you know, I subscribe to Chuck's view that we should let it, you know, come out and fester and die.

But in this particular case, this one case hates viewing. I'm not sure that that is the best way to go about it. I think that yes, there are things that need to be, if it is patently untrue, if it is wild, baseless speculative thing, which could lead some people to hate other people, if it is actually rooted in truth also, it's a difficult question. But at least it's something which is true.

But where it is wild and baseless, and it's an exhortation to violence, I think that we cannot be allowed. We do need to have some standards, man. We cannot, people are gullible and your masses have a momentum of people can get lynched and hurt before people see sense. And a lot of innocent lives could be hurt.

It's a tinder box. It's an explosive, a keg of explosives. It's, you know, you can't really cannot let that happen. So yeah, I mean, it's difficult to see what is the way because this is what happens, right?

So if you start, and we have a big strong tradition of banning things and censoring things. So it's not that we don't know. But if you ban one thing, then you ban another and then soon you're banning everything else. And then, you know, we are where Kim Jong Un is.

But we do need to have some something I really don't know I'm conflicted because I used to be, I genuinely used to be a free speech absolutist. I used to say that, oh, I'm free speech, but no, I'm not so sure now. I'll just refer to, I mean, basically we speak from a lot of privilege, and I'll just refer to what I said earlier in this episode was to say that a lot of unnecessary attention was given to this. You should have just let it, it's a terrible movie, you would die.

But I mean, I'm not directly affected by it. Like to say it was a movie that is affecting or like calling people who I identify as part of community and they painted in bad light. How is that a fair thing to say? I was basically saying that, you know, let it pass, it'll die so naturally.

That is a position of privilege, right? To say let them say whatever they want to do, you just have a related slide. But I guess the protest or the reaction against it is fair because, you know, not enough people are speaking up against it. So all sort of free speech absolutism, I would like to believe stems from a position of privilege, right?

And that is not a specific problem. Yeah, that's a great one. So, so true. It's so, so true.

It's so true. It's so, so, so, so, so, yeah. And we are so blind to our own privilege. You know, you, it's completely invisible when you've been, when it's your privilege, it's completely invisible.

And yeah, most of us, I mean, we don't, you know, we have the grace, some of us have the grace to maybe pause and consider it maybe, but a lot of people will just brush you aside. I mean, what are you talking about? You don't even consider that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure we've basically been in a sense of connoisseur episode, but I don't think there was any other sort of outcome here logically, because just to sort of lay out the objective things that a court or a system can be with is that if you set a particular judgment in this case, it becomes a precedence for anything that follows, right? Forget the slippery slope of North Korea, it would become sort of, let us say you're having a movie that talks about, I don't know, certain sort of events that have happened and a particular group feels offended by it. And then they go to the court saying this is, you know, citing this particular judgment and taking it out, right? So the courts really can't do anything.

These movies are being produced and being watched and people are, you know, shouting at people saying you've turned off the easy because you're a particular kind of person and stuff like that. So it's, I don't think there's a lot of issues in the courts. I don't think it's a problem of the internet. I think it's a problem of the times we live in and it's something that we have to deal with going forward to say that the world is not all full of roses.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, it is what it is. We are living in a time when bad things can be weaponized with enormous amplitude and with very minimal effort.

So we are witnessing that, we can only hope that those things are not weaponized so much as to wipe us all out. That's the only thing. Yeah, I mean, we say so much about, I mean, we eat so much at least about how technology is going to solve problems like this and it's going to, and I hate speech on Twitter and all that. It's just a matter of activism, sketching up to scrub it about that.

And I am not completely convinced about that. I think I'm doing the underlying because it is, is tweeted that, you know, there's just going to be a way for whatever thoughts to emotion various in whichever form it is on, whichever platform it is online or offline. And that obviously is something that's going to take generations of change. I feel that maybe that's why words change their meaning and maybe by itself to go back to how we started this conversation.

It is a way for certain groups to clean, to stay tame over certain words. So yeah, bus to clean up. Ready for a and coming from a bunch of goofs like us to think, you know, and it's one of the yes Prime Minister things that Jim Hacker actually has a couple of ideas and he tells them to Sir Humphrey and Sir Humphrey is complaining about those Sir Arnold who was his predecessor. And Arnold says two ideas, two ideas.

I don't, I can't remember whether the last time I've met a private, I've met a politician with two ideas that is it. And actually there are neither of them or his idea. They were like, he's part of it from somewhere else. Yeah, so yeah, we've got a couple of ideas and it's, I don't know when the last time that a bunch of simplified over said a couple of ideas, but these strange times we live in.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, one random absolutely completely different, basically I feel is going on and there have been fights between five session verbal altercations between obviously, I don't know what for this fight. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, basically about speaking up against people who abuse you, right?

This is very random anecdote. Like I'm switching context completely, but it's just a very funny story that happened to a friend of mine who studied in BHU and apparently there was a fight between second year mechanical and third year electrical engineering over a dirty spoon in the mess. Right? And everyone's up.

Yeah, I mean, you know what, engineering students are like very little for them to gang up and get on the streets with hockey sticks and cycle chains and whatever. And there's a lot of, and they're already in, ready to fight and lots of shouting is happening, lots of, and then the warden walks in. Okay. And one group promptly starts abusing the warden, obviously not the warden, but it's mom because that's a, that's not a very very, very, very, yeah, yeah, there's this group shouting, you know, warden key, whatever, marquee, whatever, whatever.

Right? And then this guy goes to him and says, sir, look, they're abusing your mother. You know, these guys are horrible at this and all. So the warden's like trying to protect the piece.

And he's like, what is your issue with it? He's abusing my mother. No, I'm okay with it. And then this guy's like, what kind of an idiot are you?

Anytime you start shouting, what keep basically the guy who asked him, I'm using the other day. So, yeah. I mean, if there's one lesson from there, maybe there's a comedy that needs to get you. With the mechanical engineering students, the mechanical engineering students, whether you like it in their friendship, or yeah, I don't know.

I don't know if there's a lesson to be taken there, taken out from there to solve it that is spoken about this. But maybe it's best not getting the message. Yeah. I remember when we were in the first or second year, there were two guys who were really bitterly fighting in class.

I don't know what it was. It was something they had carried over from the, from before the class. And they couldn't hold it. And usually, you know, such kind of behavior would mean, you know, suspension, expulsion, whatever it was, the Hall of to the principal's office and think that guy who was, it was a thermodynamics.

So I don't remember what class it was. But what he did was he told his toy, he drew one integral sign, he put minus infinity plus infinity, he wrote some jumble of e and x and the say, and he wrote the first guy to solve this, among the two of you, is the winner. So don't fight. Just come and solve this.

Both of them shut it off. That's why we call it a situation. Yeah, he's going to be able to see that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have the plus t-section of this party.

Yeah. Yeah. So it was a great episode guys. And stay safe, stay uncensored and stay simplified.

Unless of course I didn't have this. Yeah. Condition the player. Thank you.

Yeah. Bye.