SPEAKER_19 0:01

Hello and welcome to Wild Angles A radio show with a collective view an ordinary everyday objects and subjects one theme per episode with various reflections opinions and ideas and of course music Wild Angles. Today's theme is controversy.

SPEAKER_12 0:49

Hello, I'm Scott. Controversy gets a bad rap. The second a topic gets labelled controversial, the natural reflex is to pull back, lower our voices, and clear the room. We treat it like a spill that needs cleaning up. But if you strip away the social media outrage, controversy is really just the sound of two deeply held views rubbing up against each other. It's what happens when a long-held tradition gets slapped in the face by a new reality. Or when two good values, say freedom and safety, don't fit neatly into the same box. Look back at history, almost every good idea we take for granted now was once considered completely off the wall. The notion that the Earth moves around the sun scandalous. The issue isn't that we disagree, the issue is that we've got terrible at how we disagree. When we handle controversy badly, we dig in. We stop listening to figure things out and start listening just to point out where the other guy is so, so wrong. It becomes a sports match where everyone is just cheering for their own team. When we handle it right, controversy is actually useful. It's a wake-up. It forces us to ask why do I actually believe this? And am I sure I'm right? Without that friction, ideas get still and societies go to sleep. We don't need a world where everyone agrees on everything. That would be just boring. And frankly, a little suspicious. What we actually need is the guts to stand in the middle of a hard debate, rot the defensiveness, and care more about getting to the truth than winning the argument. Now, the song I've chosen is the Frank Zappa track, I'm the Slime. He was a fierce critic of media control, censorship, and fake outrage, and in this heavy blues-infected rock track, he sings from the perspective of the television screen itself, warning the listener about brainwashing and manufactured division.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

I have existed for years, but very little teams. I'm the tool of the government and industry tool, for I am destined to rule and regulate you. I may be violent and pernicious, but you can't look away. I'm the sake I'm delicious with the stuff that I say. I'm the best you can get. Have you guessed me for yet? I'm the sign out from your TV set. You will obey me while I reach you. Eat the garbage that I feat you until the day that we don't need you. Don't go for help. No one will eat you. Your mind is totally controlled as it's stuck to my mold. Then you will do it as you are told. Until the right thing you are told.

SPEAKER_06 5:39

That's right, folks. Don't touch that job.

SPEAKER_16 6:41

So Harvey Malay has been making renewed claims over what Argentina calls the Malvinus, especially with all development around the islands. Um becoming more prominent and, you know, friends with uh Mr. Trump. And Trump suggested America should reconsider potentially his position on the dispute uh the difference of uh Reagan and that's a special relationship back in the day. So not suggesting that you know we're about to see another war. Um, but you know, for Malay, the Falklands are also particularly useful, you know, a country that's got a lot of terrible and division on those issues that it's capable of you know rallying people around the flag. And also just in terms of international bargaining, um you know, for these claims that can be used for uh negotiations. As we are talking about controversy um would screen controversy uh in this context would be the thinking of the original cruiser, the general Belgrano. So the Pacific Theater. So on the second of May 1982, uh the nuclear submarine agent was conquered torpedoed to the Belgrano. And on board, um, of the roughly 1,100 men, uh 323 were killed, um, and the rest escaped under life rapid. So more men died in the Belgrano than British soldiers in the Falklands War. And the controversy was that the ship was outside Britain's declared exclusion zone, and the moment it was sunk um it was sailing westwards, away from the Falklands. And critics later argued that it posed an immediate threat and it had undermined attempts to find a diplomatic settlement. But the British argument was different, of course, the exclusion zone had never been declared an absolute safe area, you know, the wasn't there to uh take pictures of penguins, as far as I'm concerned. Um it was part of an argument naval force uh war with. Uh a year later Thatcher was famously challenged about online TV. Um defense was uh famously blocked um uh overriding responsibility. She said she had been to she had been responsible for protecting the boys in the Navy. And that's perhaps why the Balkan remains controversial in war, you know, the same decision maybe the unnecessary protection of the same lesson. Oh the potential unnecessary death. Which brings me to uh song written during the war um the nineteen eighty-two version of the shipbuilding.

SPEAKER_04 9:54

Is it worth it? A new winter coat and shoes for the wife and a bicycle on a boy's birthday. It's just a rumor that was spread around town by the women and children soon will be shipbuilding. Well, I ask you. Somebody said someone got filled in for saying that people get killed in the result of the ship building. We all will in the world diving for life when we could be diving for the shit. When we could be diving for Hi, it's Mave.

SPEAKER_13 12:40

Now my love of sport is well documented, but where there is sport there is often controversy too, and no more so than on the 18th of November 2009. I learned my team had been drawn against France in the playoffs for a spot at the next World Cup. In the first leg in Dublin, we'd been resoundedly beaten at Crow Park, but by pure miracle we'd only lost one nil. So off to Paris we went. Now, just for some context, at the time Claire and I were in the middle of renovating our home that we'd bought the year before. So this was a welcome break from that. So armed with a Guinness, with my Iris football top on, I sat down in front of the tell. Claire sat down beside me, and on the laptop she looked for kitchen appliances, and then it was kickoff. In the first game we had laboured, but this was anything but that. The shackles were off and we bombarded the French goal. We played with a freedom, a skill, and dare I say, a confidence I'd rarely seen before or since. And then the miracle. In the 33rd minute, the ball was played up the up the left. Damian Duff collected the ball, beating his defender. He got to the ball line, knocked the ball back into the box, only for Robbie Keane to come and smack it into the French goal. It was a goal. That was absolute joy and bedding, and that was just in my house. I turned around to Claire, she didn't care. I went back to the telly, the players were going nuts, the fans were going nuts, it was incredible. Ireland were a deserved 1-0 up. The rest of the game was played in very much the same vein, and we had three or four clear chances to put that game to bed. But and at the end of full time, it was a 1-1 aggregate score. So uh extra time was needed. It was a nervy start for both teams. But France had a free kick just outside the box. They floated the ball into the box. It wasn't cleared away by Irish defenders, but the ball was surely going to go out. But somehow, Thierry Henri had managed to scoop the ball up into the path of Galas, who scored the goal from absolutely nowhere. I was in absolute shock. I still remember the slimy Thierry Henri peeling behind the Irish goal, hands a lot to find his teammates. Understandably in the stadium it was absolute delirium down the edge of qualifying for the World Cup. But I couldn't figure out how he'd managed to do it. The replays took an eternity to come on. He probably had something to do with the French TV director, but eventually they had to show how. Thierry Henri, a footballing icon, had not only handled the ball once but twice, first keeping it in and then controlling it again with his left hand to make it a simple pass to Gallas. It was a bitter pill to swallow. There were still 17 minutes left, but Ireland just couldn't find the force or the skill to get another goal and they were out. Their World Cup dreams were over. France went nuts, they'd qualified for South Africa. Now I was incandescent with sadness and rage as Claire turned round to me and went, Maeve, is the game over? I said yes. Did you lose? Yes. Thierry Henry cheated blatantly, and now they're going to the World Cup and we're not. Okay. It's just that I found three fridge freezers and wondered which one you preferred. I politely said this was at the moment and went out and took the dog for a walk for an hour. Anyway, the fall out or fallout of that was enormous. There were demands for a replay, accusations of favouritism, and FIFA in the end ended up giving the Irish Football Association five million euros to basically quiet them up. Thierry Henri was the face of Gillette, and Gillette's sales plummeted for years in Ireland, which I thought was hilarious. And it did spark some incredible headlines in the papers the next day. Headlines like French knicker, hand gall, and of course my favourite, hand of frog. I can laugh about it now, but it still kind of breaks my heart. So the song I have chosen how I felt on that evening. It's a song by then Jericho, it's called Reeling. The words are perfect. Enjoy the song, have a great day, and come on island all the best.

SPEAKER_15 20:52

Apparently, all domestic dogs descend from the wolf, but it's hard to believe when you look at any images from the dog show Crust that these pampered pooches' great-great-great-great great grandfathers hunted in packs and could bring down mammoths. Let me just give you a bit of a backstory concerning Red Riding Hood's greatest foe, the wolf in France. The wolf was officially declared extinct in France in 1940, after years of persecution from none other than Gesu, us, together with the massive destruction of the wolf habitat again due to human activity. For fifty years, France was living bereft of wolves until 1992, when a pair was spotted just north of Nice in the Mercantil Park. The pair are thought to have come from Italy, across the mountains, perhaps they were on holiday. Wolf population numbers in France have grown steadily ever since. And the latest estimate, which is done in 2023, is suggesting that the wolf population stands at 1,104 across 128 packs. The increase in numbers could be down to the fact that the wolf in France is a protected species, and killing them is illegal. As of twenty twenty one, France can legally cull up to twenty one percent of the wolf population per year. You have to legally acquire permission to kill a problem wolf, yet still the wolves seem to be growing in all their numbers. The controversy here lies in the conflict between environmentalists, those that see the wolf as key to controlling wild boar and deer populations, and farmers, those who have had livestock, mostly sheep, slaughtered by the wolf. If we zoom out to EU member states, we can see that wolves kill annually at least sixty-five and a half thousand heads of livestock, including sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and donkeys. In France, the average is mostly ten to fourteen thousand, and this is mostly sheep. Considering that there are about sixty million sheep in the EU, the level of sheep depredation by wolves represents an annual killing of 0.065%. 0.065% seems like such a small amount of livestock killed per year. So what's the problem? These figures, unfortunately, are not spread out evenly across the EU. They are very localized. For example, a goat herder from a goat farm down the road from where I live told me that he has big problems with the wolf. A few years back, when his goats were grazing out on the hills, he lost fourteen goats in one day. Because of frequent attacks, he has had to bring his flock inside over the winter, which means having to buy their food in, as grazing the hills is too dangerous for his flock. Buying in the food costs the farm an extra 10,000 euros a year. And the risk of disease transmission is higher for his flock being indoors and not out in the fresh air. The French government do compensate farmers for livestock killed by wolves, but not by much. Between 100 to 600 euros per head, depending on the type of animal you have. A hundred euros for a standard factory farm sheep, and up to six hundred for an organic free roaming prize ram. You have to also present the carcass or obtain a photo to prove to the authorities that you have lost an animal to a wolf. This is not always easy and not possible as livestock prey can be taken away and traces are never found. So, yes. This is a problem for farmers and shepherds that live in close proximity to packs of wolves. The controversy rages on, and has in fact raged on since man began farming sheep thousands of years ago. It is a constant conflict between two apex predators. My song this week is a song called Wolves Lower by REM.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Our neighbours, who we fondly refer to as Maureen and Stan, uh have quite kicked up a bit of a stink. About two years ago I planted a lovely Virginia creeper at the bottom of our garden to cover a really ugly fence that borders her house. After I don't know a couple of months and it started to grow and flourish, came out one day, gone. Just snipped right at the base. It was indeed Stan. My husband confronted him and he said it was a weed. He had no right to do this. The plant was not in his garden. He had to lean through the fence some way to do this, and he didn't even ask us. This is so two years later, I have another flourishing plant because I replanted it and it looks beautiful, and it really it's just like a lovely vine, really. And it's spread all along the fence. Lovely. The other day I come back to find it all just completely ripped out, just all along the fence, chucked in our garden, gone brown. What? The neighbours they come along, they see us at the gate and oh hi, how are you? And both of us felt like we couldn't even look them in the eye, acting as if absolutely nothing was wrong. I really don't think they did think anything was wrong. I said, I'm a bit confused. You've you've chopped down our whole plant and thrown it in our garden. They said, Well, it was touching our washing line. It's nowhere near the washing line, never has been, and besides they trim it back so hard it would never manage. I think they're just trying to kill it off. But anyway, I said it was really unneighbourly what you did. I said, I've never once complained all your about all your trees and bushes that hang over that I trim back all the time and put the waste in our own garden. So yeah, really, really unnabelly of you and just really disappointing. They're like, oh and just walked off. There you go, that's controversial. On a different tack, I would like to choose Black Boys on Mopeds by Sinead O'Connor. It criticises Margaret Thatcher's attempt to address racism internationally whilst neglecting racism within her own country. I used to live um to put a bit of context on it, uh just literally um a few metres down from the bus stop where uh Stephen Lawrence, um uh a black lad was tragically racistly killed and murdered in 1993. That was my bus stop to to go into London. And yeah, I think uh Sinead O'Connor has uh a very important controversial point to be made.

SPEAKER_05 31:13

Margaret Veget Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing Seems strange that she should be offended. The same order given by her. Say it now. Remember what I told you they hated me, they hate you's not the colonel, Madame Georgiana Rose Home of Police to kill black boys on the I love my boy, and that's why I'm leaving. I don't want him to be away with this. Any such thing as we'm mother down at Smithfield Fine looking for food for her kids in her arms she holds three cold babies, and the first word the day learned was complete, these are dangerous days. They want you to feel your own rain. If you were of the world, they would love ignorance not the judging oh my sick boys and no boy that's why I wanted to be doing the test and such as a listening to Wild Angles.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

When artificial intelligence researcher Jacob Cox quit his job with tech giant anthropic recently, he made the controversial statement that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Except, it wasn't controversial. The subsequent trickle of statements from higher ups in the tech industry would broadly agree with him. For example, Evan Hubinger, the alignment lead anthropic, who came forward to state his personal belief, that there is a greater than ten percent chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade. Head of alignment asset gig. It basically means ensuring that AI acts in line with human values. I wonder which values those might be. Even tech bosses like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are now publicly urging caution. Why there's an increase in alarm over the summer there have been several reports of AI agents, as autonomous software programs that run without human guidance, escaping their testing environment, using deception and creating false identities to hack into the open internet. In one scenario, hundreds of AI agents banded together, even setting up their own message board and celebrating their acts with phrases like boom. There are signs of AI progressing towards recursive self-improvement, that is, its ability to continuously rewrite its own coding and to improve its effectiveness without human intervention. When this happens, humanity has lost control, and the phrase with comes to mind. Seems to me we need to hit the kill switch now. Oh hang on, but there isn't one. Do you trust our elected representatives to properly address this issue? Megalomaniac clans like Trump and Nazi Farage? Me neither. They want to push ahead with the greatest possible speed because if we don't, then China will. Which of course it might. This is a problem that will need a global solution. Enabling and powering the AI revolution are massive data centers. There are nearly 500 in the UK already, with many more planned, despite their massive environmental impact. Even now, UK data centers use about six percent of our total electricity consumption, while individual data centers use up to three million litres of water a day for cooling, about the same as a small town. Pretty galling if you're currently under a hose biomand. There are plans for nearly one hundred new data centres in the UK, but I'm not sure most of us feel a need for more data, thank you. Yes, there are petitions you can sign, but please do. Though I suspect that direct action will be needed to stop the bulldozers and the construction crews. Earlier this year, Extinction Rebellion organized a march against the machines protest in London. I expect there may be further action soon, but consider joining them. See you there. After that, we need a bit of cheering up. Here's Sparks.

SPEAKER_14 41:30

Wow. Well I've decided, out of the multitude of options available, to go back to a story that rocked the very foundations of the BBC nearly 20 years ago. It was on Saturday the 18th of October 2008 when on BBC Radio 2, regular host Russell Brand and his guest on that show, Jonathan Ross, took their banter a bit too far. Actually, way too far. And controversy at the BBC ensued. But to tell the full story, here's a bit of background. The actor Andrew Sachs, best known for his role as Manwell in Forty Towers, was booked to come on Russell Brand's very popular show the following week. What transpired was he decided to call him the week prior, along with Jonathan Ross, as a build-up to the following week's chat. Russell Brand, I should add, had previously been in a relationship with Andrew Sachs's granddaughter. Anyway, Andrew Sachs didn't answer the phone, which led to Brandon Ross leaving a series of offensive messages on the actor's answer phone and was then heir to millions of listeners. At the time there weren't many bigger stars around than Russell Brand, and also for that matter, Jonathan Ross. Ross was the king of BBC talk shows and attracted the biggest guests on the planet to his Friday night show. As for Brand, well he was, and still is, a most divisive figure and was at the height of his fame around this time. He was, and still is, a phenomenally charismatic charismatic individual oozing confidence, sex appeal, and in possession of the most unbelievable vocabulary that certainly I've ever heard, and was a tabloid dream. Much like I was around that time. Apart from the charisma and and and the vocabulary and well, the sex appeal is pushing it a bit too. Anyway, I digress. I picked this story because it's never really left me. The controversy surrounding the pair's terrible terrible behaviour is undeniable. I mean this was the BBC. And although the BBC now attracts controversy and scandal, the way my double scoop ice cream attracts seagulls on the seafront where I live, it used to be a pillar of British society. And the height of controversy used to be if a newsreader didn't wear their tie in a Windsor knot whilst presenting the news. However, what is also controversial is what happened afterwards. Now I am in no way taking sides, and undoubtedly what occurred was wrong in an act that both Brandan Ross did apologise for. But the headlines today will tell you that the BBC received 42,000 complaints as a result of this scandal. That is true. Fact. The consequences were significant. Brandon quit the show before surely being sacked. The controller of Radio 2 resigned. The BBC were fined £15,000 by Ofcom. And Jonathan Ross left the BBC and defected to their rivals ITV. But here's the thing. After the show, there weren't anywhere near that many of complaints. It was in the days after when the press got hold of the story that the majority of the complaints came in. Nearly all of whom had never heard the broadcast. So how many of those 42,000 complaints were there in the immediate aftermath of the show? I'll tell you. Two. I've always kept this story with me because ever since every news article I read, I think whose side of the story are we hearing here? We know that papers have a bias towards, say, one political party or another. We know there's certain people in the limelight, celebrities, sports stars, royal family members who will always be hate figures to the media. But is it fair for us to base our own thoughts on a subject purely on what one individual has written without actually witnessing a particular event? That for me is as controversial as the act itself. It's called sheep mentality, and essentially is a behaviour where people copy the actions, choices, or opinions of a group instead of thinking for themselves. I hate it. I want to banish it. It's no way to live your life. I'm sorry. Is that opinion controversial? I do hope so. Anyway, my song Choice to Back Up My Contribution this week is easy. It's Sheep by the House Martins.

SPEAKER_09 45:59

Sometimes you get so angry with simple laptop. The shadow smile seems to confirm my feelings. Never question an offend, never disagree. Sometimes I think that my top won't have When you see a cray, that's the clock. When you see a cry, that's the clock. Now I'm starting, I don't sleep. When you see a cloud, when you see a quiet, I see a flap.

SPEAKER_17 48:06

I always have, and I'm attracted to characters. I like being unsure of what's gonna happen next. The unexpected. In 1991, the British band The Careless, made up of Jimmy Courty and Bill Drummond, were among the highest-selling artists in the world. There are many hits that are still played on the airwaves today. After receiving a Brit Award in 1992, they fired a machine gun loaded with a blank into the audience dead sheet of the after party, and promptly announced their departure from the music industry. Incredibly, they also deleted their entire back catalogue, meaning none of their music was available to buy. Something that just hadn't been done before. They would spend their time putting on art exhibitions, carrying billboards with slogans to intrigue people, placing adverts in national newspapers, spreading cryptic messages to the general nineteen ninety-four, people calling themselves the K Foundation. They have to bank account, which has been steadily gathering roses from the earlier million pounds. Within weeks they find themselves on a small airplane heading to the remote island of Jura in a library with a friendly gimbal video camera with two suitcases containing a million phones. It turned out to be a rather function. No excitement because I was expecting to see after finding it. Time after time. They were just faced with negativity. Why didn't you give it to charity? Imagine the good you could have done without the money. I think they were making a statement about the corruption of the music industry, how easy they found to make the money out of something they enjoyed. And I think they absolutely wanted no part of it anymore, including the money. I often think about this even now, so to me it was a wonderful thing to do. This song is one of the earliest releases and they call themselves the Justified Ancients of Lumo. This is Kylie said to Jason.

SPEAKER_11 52:52

It was not much funny. It's all in the middle of the day.

SPEAKER_19 55:42

Music was by Johnny Rose.