Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's got to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. The sun never sets
Speaker 1: on the British Empire because God doesn't trust the British
Speaker 1: in the dark. Welcome to It could happen here a
Speaker 1: podcast at hold. So the only good American tradition is
Speaker 1: rebellion against the British. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and
Speaker 1: today we're gonna be talking about the happenings in their
Speaker 1: perfidious Albion. Joining me live from one of the most
Speaker 1: accursed states currently in existence is Sophie from Mars, the
Speaker 1: co host of Red Planet a week you Leftist Brown Table,
Speaker 1: who does many other wonderful things that involve anarchism and
Speaker 1: organizing and stuff. Sophie, how how are you? How are
Speaker 1: you hanging in there in this sort of incusingly failed
Speaker 1: state in the very good. That was a very good introduction.
Speaker 1: I do think that Britain is largely out of God's
Speaker 1: sight and by consequence, outside of his love. So I
Speaker 1: think he summed it up pretty well. I mean, I'm okay.
Speaker 1: I had an experience to minor hate crime today, so
Speaker 1: it's another normal day of being a trans person in
Speaker 1: the UK. Some guy tried to film me on his
Speaker 1: phone and I was like, hey, I can see that
Speaker 1: you're filming me, and he didn't like argue you and
Speaker 1: be like no I wasn't, so I know that he was.
Speaker 1: It was very cool. Yeah, yeah, Turf Turf Island continues
Speaker 1: to be incredibly normal. And by incredible normal, I mean this. Look.
Speaker 1: Look at the at the end of World War Two,
Speaker 1: lots of states were divided into pieces. The UK should
Speaker 1: have been one of them. I hold, but on it now,
Speaker 1: Oh that's true. I mean trans people, we are working
Speaker 1: on destroying of the Union. Yeah, this is this is
Speaker 1: all bad. It created incredible stuff coming. I really thought
Speaker 1: it was going to be Brexit, that that final we destroyed.
Speaker 1: He had a kingdom and of trans people that finally
Speaker 1: did it. Truly incredible stuff. So you want to ask
Speaker 1: me what it's like to be British, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I well, I mean, should we both do like
Speaker 1: accents for this one? Should we should we both feel like,
Speaker 1: oh my governor, let's rumphy, So what eo pie and
Speaker 1: smashed peas? Oh okay? So I okay. You know, I
Speaker 1: spent some time looking at like sort of British export
Speaker 1: charts and like as much stuff in the British economy,
Speaker 1: and none of them at any point had Britain's chief export,
Speaker 1: which is jokes about Britain. No I no, no, no,
Speaker 1: wondering your economies and shamboos. Export is like white supremacist
Speaker 1: war crimes. That's true. But the thing is like they're
Speaker 1: they're they're the UKs of like ability to export white
Speaker 1: supremacist war crimes is at an all time low. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like it. It's really funny. I was in Armenia,
Speaker 1: like fairly recently for sagery, and I went to a
Speaker 1: talk by someone who like used to work in DC
Speaker 1: and I worked with the Armenian government, and they were
Speaker 1: talking about like how what kind of external support they
Speaker 1: could expect for like the conflict without as a baishan,
Speaker 1: and someone brought up Britain and he was just like,
Speaker 1: Britain's not really a player on the international stage any Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not that funny, but it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a sign of what the UK actually is now, which
Speaker 1: is since you also at eleven, the British were like
Speaker 1: one of the first people who decided they were going
Speaker 1: to bomb Godoffy. But the problem is the British, the
Speaker 1: British like air Force was capable of dropping of doing
Speaker 1: like maybe like three or four bombing runs before they
Speaker 1: just straight up ran out of fuel. And the whole
Speaker 1: thing was like they like they had to draw the
Speaker 1: U West in because the British no longer like had
Speaker 1: they had like actual build chair capability to do imperialism anymore.
Speaker 1: So I think things are think think things are not
Speaker 1: great in the in the sort of white supremacy factory.
Speaker 1: We really we have reached like a really bizarre point
Speaker 1: where our ruling class is divided. Like um, the whole
Speaker 1: story of like the Dullest Brothers and the creation of
Speaker 1: the CIA is like we are going through that inner
Speaker 1: of us at this point. But we've had one of
Speaker 1: the most interventionist histories of any country ever and now
Speaker 1: our ruling class is divided between we should carry on
Speaker 1: doing interventionism because it benefits us to be the worst,
Speaker 1: most ghoulish, vampiric country conceivable, and we shouldn't do that
Speaker 1: because it costs money. And why are we spending money
Speaker 1: on brown people? Yeah, which just two terrible possessions, baffling out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's fun, it's it's it's it's a good time
Speaker 1: in the UK. So, you know, speaking of speaking of
Speaker 1: it being a good time with the UK, I so
Speaker 1: I saw, I've seen this before and I didn't like,
Speaker 1: I didn't quite believe it. And I look at the
Speaker 1: numbers and we were talking about this a bit before
Speaker 1: we got on, but it looks like the UK right
Speaker 1: now is pet projected economic performance is worse than Rusha's,
Speaker 1: which is incredible because that is a country that is
Speaker 1: like under just unbelievably debilitating sanctions and is also like
Speaker 1: losing a war. And the UK's economy is more fucked
Speaker 1: than a country that he's being shot with missiles. Like wow,
Speaker 1: I mean we are we we are also losing a war,
Speaker 1: but it's it's a war of ideas, that's true. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think we should probably when when When
Speaker 1: When when we last left the United Kingdom on this show.
Speaker 1: I think it was I think Liz Trust had just
Speaker 1: been overthrown and we were now on UK is no
Speaker 1: one what their second consecutive unelected prime minister? So no, no, Mia,
Speaker 1: Mia a second consecutive Oh no, right, because I never no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no. They elected Boris Johnson. Right, So this is
Speaker 1: this is a good place to stop. This is a
Speaker 1: really good place to stop. Since Tony Blair, we haven't
Speaker 1: had a Prime minister who we elected to into power
Speaker 1: like no, sorry, since David Cameron. We did actually elect
Speaker 1: David Cameron, but kind but only kind of like kind
Speaker 1: of maybe so like we had we had Blair, who
Speaker 1: is terrible and is worth getting into for a whole
Speaker 1: discussion in a minute. And then we had Brown who
Speaker 1: was his chancellor so kind of like vice president who
Speaker 1: stepped in and then he lost to Cameron. Only Cameron
Speaker 1: like had a coalition. That's why I say it's like
Speaker 1: it's kind of yeah, he had the Lib Dem thing,
Speaker 1: and the Lib Dems decided to literally go back and
Speaker 1: everything that's ever done and the main so the main
Speaker 1: thing that was happening with the Lib Dems was they
Speaker 1: promised to protect student loan prices from going up, and
Speaker 1: like they had got massive support from young people and
Speaker 1: anyone who can see why it's good to be able
Speaker 1: to offer young people an education, especially because like Blair
Speaker 1: had this big famous speech where he was like education, education, education,
Speaker 1: that's my excellent Tony Blair impression. Um he um. And
Speaker 1: and that's also worth getting into as a it's a
Speaker 1: very multifaceted level of parasitic fuckery his whole education thing.
Speaker 1: But because he had focused on education, loads of people
Speaker 1: were really passionate about it. And then the Lib Dems
Speaker 1: were like, we're going to stop them from making university
Speaker 1: fees nine thousand pounds a year, and that was what
Speaker 1: got the Lib Dems an enormous amount of the vote,
Speaker 1: and then they made a coalition with the Tories and
Speaker 1: then immediately went back on it and made it. And
Speaker 1: that's why my student loans are ridiculous. Even though I
Speaker 1: dropped out, My student loans are higher than my partners
Speaker 1: and I dropped out in my second year and she
Speaker 1: dropped out after doing like six years of the same
Speaker 1: degree because she had the lower fee, but I am.
Speaker 1: So then there was Cameron again, but without the lib
Speaker 1: Dems because everyone's sick of them, a no onimal level
Speaker 1: of them. Ever, again, the lib Dems are just a
Speaker 1: funny side story. There are lots of like funny and
Speaker 1: cringe side stories in British electoral politics, where like it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that much because they'll never get into power,
Speaker 1: but like the succession of absolute like clowns who've been
Speaker 1: in charge of this party or that party just is
Speaker 1: really funny. Like the lib Dems have had a homophobe,
Speaker 1: but they had Nick Klagg. Then they had a homophobe
Speaker 1: who said that being gay was a sin, and they
Speaker 1: had someone called Joe what she called Swanson, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think that's sw Swinson something like this, and
Speaker 1: she started talking this incredible like neoliberal like if you've
Speaker 1: ever seen the thick of it, like shed She sounded
Speaker 1: like a character from the thick of it. She was
Speaker 1: talking about like people having skills, wallets and shit like this.
Speaker 1: She also, I think killed a squirrel. There was a
Speaker 1: whole thing about that. Boy. Then you know, analogously, there's
Speaker 1: like the Communist Party of Great Britain, which I hope
Speaker 1: to get into elated because that is a fascinating story.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the Tory party is the one that matters
Speaker 1: the most for now. So we had Cameron, then who
Speaker 1: do we have Theresa May? Because Cameron bet big on
Speaker 1: us not voting for Brexit, and then Nigel Farage and
Speaker 1: Boris Johnson et cetera came in and were like save
Speaker 1: the NHS migrants blah blah blah, and then we voted
Speaker 1: for Brexit. So then we had Theresa May by default
Speaker 1: because Cameron had left. So this is what I mean that,
Speaker 1: like the Tory potty has this ongoing strategy of just
Speaker 1: like swapping someone in and then like calling a general
Speaker 1: election really soon afterwards, and the incumbent's gonna win. So
Speaker 1: it's like, I don't consider that to be like someone
Speaker 1: winning an election if they're already in through rap fockery.
Speaker 1: Although I feel I feel like it's it's still slow.
Speaker 1: At least there was an election for them, which is
Speaker 1: more of what's happening now. Yeah, it's it's definitely devolved,
Speaker 1: like it's definitely gotten worse, but like I think we're
Speaker 1: on like the seventh by my account, But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like Cameron, then then May, then Boris Johnson
Speaker 1: and then sorry, yes bars Johnson and then Liz Trust
Speaker 1: and now it's uh Sunac, because like, can I get
Speaker 1: them the wrong way around anyway? Nonac literally didn't have
Speaker 1: an opposition in the Tory Party leadership election, like he
Speaker 1: won by default. It's that That's how dire it's gotten.
Speaker 1: Like they wanted Boris Johnson to come back and try again,
Speaker 1: and he decided he wasn't going to bother and because
Speaker 1: of that, there was no one to run against Sunac,
Speaker 1: so he just won by default. Stuff. Yeah and okay,
Speaker 1: so and Sunac's the fascinating character as well, because like
Speaker 1: he is incredibly green and I don't mean environmentalists, I
Speaker 1: mean like he knows fucking nothing and he's currently going
Speaker 1: through this like there's there was a measurable phenomenon with
Speaker 1: David Cameron where he was really naive and he went
Speaker 1: through the neoliberal thing of being like I'm going to
Speaker 1: cut the red tape. Oh no, that's not working. I
Speaker 1: need massively authoritarian policies. Oh no, that's not working. Maybe
Speaker 1: this is a flawed ideology and just like just towards
Speaker 1: the end of his term he was like, maybe this
Speaker 1: isn't working, and then they get rid of him. Sunac
Speaker 1: is currently like very firmly in the stage of like
Speaker 1: trying to do as much libertarianism as possible and realizing
Speaker 1: that the state can only do libertarianism if they also
Speaker 1: as authoritarian as possible. Yeah, and I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I was going to get this in a bit, but
Speaker 1: I think that there's a couple of things have been
Speaker 1: happening simultaneously. One is that like, okay, so we had
Speaker 1: there there there there was. There was the incredibly brief
Speaker 1: phenomenon of trusts an omics of like there are the
Speaker 1: British is attempt to like like actually really sort of
Speaker 1: I don't even know it's like because because British politics
Speaker 1: is always neoliberal, but like, dude, dude, do do a
Speaker 1: kind of neoliberalism that like no, no nobody has seen
Speaker 1: since Like I saw people conscribing it as like trying
Speaker 1: to do reagan Omics about the dollar. But I think
Speaker 1: it's actually stupider than that, because like eight, there are
Speaker 1: there aren't places where you could conceivably pull off reagan
Speaker 1: Omics about the dollar, right, but like you have to
Speaker 1: have like kind of an economy, which is the thing
Speaker 1: the UK no longer has after they shot themselves in
Speaker 1: the foot, Like one thousand times with Bregsit. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: let's trust published like a plan for what she was
Speaker 1: gonna do in terms of economic reforms, and it crashed
Speaker 1: the pound unbelievably, like just just like people not even
Speaker 1: the plan, like not even the policies being implemented. People
Speaker 1: sold the plan and the pound like hobbed in value overnight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And like I there is stuff that I have seen,
Speaker 1: like like in the wake of trusts anomics and in
Speaker 1: the wake of like sort of rec stuartrac attempting to
Speaker 1: piece together like even sort of functional government that like
Speaker 1: I never thought I would see, Like I I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I had seen the IMF saying hold on,
Speaker 1: you have to stop doing lesterity before, but like I
Speaker 1: didn't think i'd see that for the about the UK. No,
Speaker 1: it's pretty impressive. Yeah. Like the other thing that I've
Speaker 1: seen that's just genuinely like I can't believe is I've
Speaker 1: seen mainstream newspaper outlets pretty things about the economy that
Speaker 1: you were just not allowed to say. Like I have
Speaker 1: seen mainstream newspapers admit that economic growth was actually better
Speaker 1: in the inflation racked in class war torn seventies, and
Speaker 1: it is now which is like that is like this
Speaker 1: single thing you were not allowed to say at all
Speaker 1: of economics because if if you, if, if you actually
Speaker 1: pull out the growth rate chart and point out that
Speaker 1: economic growth was actually better in the seventies and it
Speaker 1: wasn't any successive decade. I everyone immediately shoots you because
Speaker 1: that because you know you can prove and what you
Speaker 1: can prove in one chart that doesn't order in the
Speaker 1: media class in the UK. And you point out that,
Speaker 1: like the seventies was by any metric better than now,
Speaker 1: you are no longer invited to the eyes wide shot
Speaker 1: potties where you can like suck and fuck Boss Johnson,
Speaker 1: and that is like the highest privilege in British society.
Speaker 1: So you obviously want that. Yeah you can, you can,
Speaker 1: you can, you can no longer fuck the pig. I
Speaker 1: think things of this nature because bed Room quickly was
Speaker 1: interviewed and he it was like front page kiss Tama
Speaker 1: saying I would kiss a Tori, and I just shed it,
Speaker 1: being like, look, we already know David Cameron fucked a pig.
Speaker 1: Yeah god Sama saying he would kiss the Tory is
Speaker 1: just yeah, that's just a cherry on top. Yeah, So okay,
Speaker 1: I want to ask a little bit about what is
Speaker 1: going on in the in the in the British economy,
Speaker 1: because I have spent some time attempting to figure out
Speaker 1: what the fuck even is the British economy and as
Speaker 1: as as best I've been able to determine, it produces, okay,
Speaker 1: produces financial quote unquote financial services, which seems to be
Speaker 1: the UK sort of polite euphanism for doing money laundering
Speaker 1: for like both the regular bourdoisie and for this enormous
Speaker 1: class of like kleptocrats and petrol oligarchs who like get
Speaker 1: their money by extracting it directly from the state. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: it seems like that. It seems like you have that layer,
Speaker 1: you're the layer below them, who are just like somehow
Speaker 1: more landlords per capita than exists in like any other
Speaker 1: place that has ever existed. And then below that there's
Speaker 1: this quote unquote service economy thing. Yeah. I think you're
Speaker 1: getting it. I think you're pretty much getting it. I think, okay,
Speaker 1: there are two sides to British politics. This this economic
Speaker 1: one that you're pointing out, which is, like, let me
Speaker 1: put a pin in the economics right that the economy
Speaker 1: of the UK is unbelievable and if we'll get to
Speaker 1: it in a second. And then there's the like the
Speaker 1: the electoral politics that they try to like that is
Speaker 1: just a fast to try to like keep people from
Speaker 1: ever looking too closely at the economics, like ever looking
Speaker 1: with a sensible lens of the economics. The electoral politics
Speaker 1: is just like eternal war on a set of marginalized communities,
Speaker 1: young people, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, sex workers, trans people,
Speaker 1: black and minority ethic Britain's the GT community travelers enormously
Speaker 1: Like that was something that like a lot of people
Speaker 1: thought that like New Labor under Blair was like so
Speaker 1: progressive and was like ending races. It was a big
Speaker 1: like Obama adjacent moment for us and like, but they
Speaker 1: were horribly racist to travelers and that's escalated in recent
Speaker 1: years to like if people are familiar with the police
Speaker 1: Crimes Sentencing in Courts bill, like that got somewhat defanged,
Speaker 1: but like one of the worst parts of the bill
Speaker 1: still got through was just like ending the right to Rome,
Speaker 1: which is effectively just a genocide against travelers. YEA. When
Speaker 1: I mentioned sex workers, like a lot of British sex
Speaker 1: workers are pushing for any kind of legal reform that
Speaker 1: would be better. But like our most progressive politician like
Speaker 1: Jeremy Corbyn literally like still supports the Nordic model like
Speaker 1: it's um, it's a nightmare. Um. Socially, the political side
Speaker 1: of that, the social side of the politics in the
Speaker 1: UK is just war on as I say, like dividing
Speaker 1: up the entire population into marginalized groups forever eternally, like
Speaker 1: saving this idea of like the blue collar working class
Speaker 1: white man who also earns like eighty thousand pounds a year,
Speaker 1: and and that's the that's the ideal voter, even though
Speaker 1: that's no one. Um. And then there's the economics. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the and all of that is a smoke screen
Speaker 1: for the economics. So like you said, um, lowest level,
Speaker 1: there's the service economy, because we, like the rest of
Speaker 1: the Imperial Corps, exported all our industrial stuff to the
Speaker 1: imperial periphery. When our industrial sectors got unionized, we are
Speaker 1: now a service economy. So practically all jobs in the
Speaker 1: UK are poor people providing some kind of service for
Speaker 1: rich people. Um. Then like you say, there's the landlords
Speaker 1: above that we have we have a wild time with landlords,
Speaker 1: and that there is there is a plus sight to that,
Speaker 1: which is that that like our tenants unions are fantastic,
Speaker 1: Like we have we have such a boom in tenants unions.
Speaker 1: I've been interviewing activists and organizers for a couple of
Speaker 1: years now, and in the US, you guys are doing
Speaker 1: okay with tenants unions. You've got a bigger challenge because
Speaker 1: pop shop with guns to evict people. So that is like,
Speaker 1: that is a crazy time. But like we have such bigger,
Speaker 1: stronger tenants unions and like I think the possibility of
Speaker 1: something like a full scale rent strike happening in the
Speaker 1: UK is actually pretty like pretty feasible. Um, the US
Speaker 1: just don't like get that shit. Like I I had
Speaker 1: when back back, back, back back when, back when I
Speaker 1: was an incredibly naive youth. Most in the DSA we
Speaker 1: had an entire like massive battle in my chapter about
Speaker 1: whether about whether we should do tennis organizing, and I
Speaker 1: was on the side of, well, yeah, obviously we should,
Speaker 1: we should do. I'm like I had one of the
Speaker 1: fucking Chicago DSA leadership people like in in this meeting
Speaker 1: said to my face and I quote, how how does
Speaker 1: building tennis unions build working class power. What what these
Speaker 1: people are? Clowns absolute clowns. I just like every every
Speaker 1: every time they walk down the street, their giant noses
Speaker 1: go hog like a clown. I'm not I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: be in. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna engage in
Speaker 1: anti clowns flan here. I I do not. I think
Speaker 1: it's very unfair on clowns to get fathom to the DS.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's um I got. That's soling Paradise where
Speaker 1: she says like, I don't want to be the head
Speaker 1: of the local D say chapter, I just want to
Speaker 1: be on the Digimon the movie soundtrack. I'm like, fuck yes,
Speaker 1: okay speak speaking of the Digimon the Movie soundtrack, very nice,
Speaker 1: very nice. Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe we'll get sponsored
Speaker 1: by by by Digimon the movie. That was Maybe that
Speaker 1: hasn't add for Digimon the movie. Yeah, yeah, I hope
Speaker 1: it's it's gonna be fucking gold again or like we're
Speaker 1: please okay, just like once again, other we have talked
Speaker 1: about this on multiple shows. Now please stop dmning other
Speaker 1: Sophie about about about the stupid gold ads. We know
Speaker 1: they're there. Which way, Yeah, dope, buy gold. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: we're back. I hope you would. I hope, I hope
Speaker 1: you now went to digimond Uh. They got they they
Speaker 1: got little monsters to turn into things with giant guns
Speaker 1: bombed with digimon. The movie ADS has reshaped your brain
Speaker 1: to the high consciousness digimon consciousness. Um, let's talk about
Speaker 1: financial services. You mentioned this very briefly, but this is
Speaker 1: actually so like, Okay, most people in the UK working
Speaker 1: in like fucking Uber or like deliveru or some other
Speaker 1: nightmarish service sector job. Then there's the petty bourgeois who
Speaker 1: are so overwhelmingly landlords now and then and then there
Speaker 1: are mega landlords. We have a ton of like mega
Speaker 1: landlords who. Something really insidious about that, by the way,
Speaker 1: is that we have a lot of like housing associations
Speaker 1: that have claimed to be like for the good of
Speaker 1: the tenant and claimed to be like socially progressive trying
Speaker 1: to help people out, and they actually own like thousands
Speaker 1: of properties, and like there are people with like through
Speaker 1: the Tenants Union. My partner knows someone who it was
Speaker 1: like raining in her flat because the leaks were so bad.
Speaker 1: It was like rain indoors and she had like black
Speaker 1: mold and then off her lights are working and that
Speaker 1: was like that was a housing association. They are some
Speaker 1: of the worst landlords. And then above them, the UK
Speaker 1: is running one of the biggest money laundering operations in
Speaker 1: the world, maybe the biggest I think it's don't I
Speaker 1: don't know, like maybe maybe I don't. I don't even
Speaker 1: I don't even think like the Cayman Islands or like
Speaker 1: or the Bahamas have like that kind of like or
Speaker 1: Panama has that kind of through points. No, we're really
Speaker 1: familiar with like Switzerland and like you say, Panama and
Speaker 1: the Cayman Islands, and some people are somewhat familiar with
Speaker 1: island as being like tax havens. Yeah, but like none
Speaker 1: of these actually compare to Britain because Britain like sport
Speaker 1: all of these relationships with the entire world because it
Speaker 1: invaded them and now it has those like the British
Speaker 1: Empire ended in name and legal function, but did not
Speaker 1: end in terms of financial services. Like that is our
Speaker 1: that is our grip on power is like that we yeah,
Speaker 1: we just launder a bunch of rich people's money. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a great documentary called The Spider's Web which talks
Speaker 1: about this and like the head of her majesty is oh,
Speaker 1: I guess it's his majesty now the king just taking
Speaker 1: this opportunity to say fuck the king. Um HMRC. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the head of HMRC like literally just works for the
Speaker 1: money launderers, like the people who are just trying to
Speaker 1: bring through like billions of dollars to launder. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like when I say about like the rest of our
Speaker 1: politics being a smokescreen, it's because like this is everything
Speaker 1: for the British ruling class, Like it's all about them
Speaker 1: trying to lawn the money. And like I think that
Speaker 1: like the the recent rise in like far right populism
Speaker 1: or attempt at that in the UK, which by the way,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's going as well as they wish
Speaker 1: it was anymore. But like well because they did, because
Speaker 1: they did briggs In it turns out Bridge it was
Speaker 1: really bad idea. Yeah, Like I remember there was something
Speaker 1: for a while a while ago, I was in some
Speaker 1: forum thread where they were just put posting like Trump
Speaker 1: supporters realized they're going to die because of Trump. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a very similar phenomenon in the UK. Like you,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of and I don't really delight in
Speaker 1: it because it's just it's just like looking a lot
Speaker 1: of working class, working class people suffering. Um. But there
Speaker 1: is a very like, very obvious and noticeable trend of
Speaker 1: like people who voted for Brexit realizing that it's completely
Speaker 1: fucked everything about their life. Um. But when there was
Speaker 1: this attempt at like raising far right um like false
Speaker 1: class consciousness in a very Trumpian way, Um, that was
Speaker 1: all like a very big attempt at the smoke screen
Speaker 1: because like if there's have you ever seen Johnny English,
Speaker 1: there's this fucking Rowan Atkinson film where he like is
Speaker 1: a he winds up being like a spy. And the
Speaker 1: villain in that film is French of course, because you
Speaker 1: know the French so evil compared to Britain, I guess
Speaker 1: and so on. Um, and uh, that guy who's played
Speaker 1: by John Malkovich wants to get the British throne and
Speaker 1: then sell Britain to private investors to turn the entire
Speaker 1: island into a prison. And it created modern Britain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just outlining modern British politics. Yeah. So so like
Speaker 1: in terms of social policy, like it would suit the
Speaker 1: ruling class of Britain very very nicely. If Britain was
Speaker 1: just one big jail because like they are only inconvenience
Speaker 1: by having to cater to any kind of population. Like
Speaker 1: if the British population just all died, the Tories would
Speaker 1: be having such a good time, Like they would fucking
Speaker 1: love it if there was absolutely no one to govern
Speaker 1: over and Britain could just like on paper, have a
Speaker 1: population of sixty million and then they could use that
Speaker 1: for the money laundering. Yeah, but actually you go here
Speaker 1: and it's just a complete like ghost island, like that
Speaker 1: everyone is gone. Yeah, I mean it is that. It's
Speaker 1: just it is just for money laundering. Like I think
Speaker 1: the London Stock Exchange just the oldest stock exchange. I think,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but like obviously it's had a long
Speaker 1: time to develop and like it's yeah, the the U.
Speaker 1: There is more fiscal capital or marks would have called
Speaker 1: fictitious capital in the world now than there is like
Speaker 1: real capital or financial capital. Um. And yeah, a huge
Speaker 1: amount of it goes through the London Stock Exchange um
Speaker 1: and through like yeah, through through the services of of
Speaker 1: HMAC and through like the various schemes that it's really funny.
Speaker 1: I had to um, I had to this. I don't
Speaker 1: think this is like as insidious sounds. But I was
Speaker 1: filling up my tax return recently and there was a
Speaker 1: there was a question that MS like just straight basically
Speaker 1: asked like have you participated in one or more tax
Speaker 1: avoidance schemes? And I was like, this is a normal country.
Speaker 1: This is a this is a really normal, normal country,
Speaker 1: Like they just asked you. And like when when my
Speaker 1: partner I saw this, because she was filling out hers,
Speaker 1: she was like, is this just a trick question to
Speaker 1: get you to like dob yourself into the cops. And
Speaker 1: I was like, no, No, this is a this is
Speaker 1: a normal question in case you are a very very
Speaker 1: rich person who has engaged in a tax away and
Speaker 1: you want to just report that and then the hust
Speaker 1: will be like, cool, good job avoiding paying taxes. You
Speaker 1: know when I always sort of like running through my
Speaker 1: research for this, I remember to David Graver quote about
Speaker 1: the British economy where he said something to the effect
Speaker 1: of the United kingdoms chief product is the facility of
Speaker 1: its working class, which is what allows oligarchs to just
Speaker 1: like put their money there because they know that they're
Speaker 1: gonna have a butler or no one's ever going to
Speaker 1: steal it. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: other side of of the graver in the UK arc is,
Speaker 1: you know, towards the end of his life, like he
Speaker 1: starts writing a lot about the revolt of the carrying
Speaker 1: classes and about this sort of like he was talking
Speaker 1: about he was talking about stuff that was happening like
Speaker 1: Chosen eighteen nineteen. Yeah, a lot about like but the
Speaker 1: shot actually too, because there's a lot of uh and
Speaker 1: he was directly involved in some organizing and stuff the IMF.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, but you know it was interesting to me
Speaker 1: about this is like, oh, I don't want to let
Speaker 1: it go by without saying the IMF must be destroyed
Speaker 1: at all costs. Oh, yes, policy I have about the
Speaker 1: like yeah, the actually demonic, real demons exist and they
Speaker 1: called the International Monetary Fund. Yeah. I talked about this
Speaker 1: in my Neoliberalism episode. And this is another sort of
Speaker 1: grape barism thing, right, is the sort of being at
Speaker 1: tuned to the fact that all of this sort of
Speaker 1: like red tape cutting bullshit is actually just a smoke
Speaker 1: screen for an incredibly sort of unbelievably violent or impressive
Speaker 1: bureaucracy and the sort of the global wing of the
Speaker 1: violent or impressive bureaucracy is the IMF. Yeah, and well
Speaker 1: it's a really weird what I was saying before about
Speaker 1: like Cameron realizing that neoliberalism doesn't work towards the end
Speaker 1: of the time that he was in office, Like what
Speaker 1: I'm referring to is that he wrote a letter to
Speaker 1: his constituency, to his local council that he's supposed to represent,
Speaker 1: and he said that like they'd been complaining that they
Speaker 1: didn't have the money to do the things they needed
Speaker 1: to do, and he was like, well, you should just
Speaker 1: cut out the red tape, Like you should just clear
Speaker 1: out the back room bureaucracy. That's the thing that's costing
Speaker 1: you all the money. And I think with sometimes to
Speaker 1: reflect on this, where I think he gets that idea
Speaker 1: from is that he's seen how well it works for
Speaker 1: the for the ruling class. He's like, the more red
Speaker 1: tape we cut, the more we get rid of regulations,
Speaker 1: the more money we make. And so he's like, that
Speaker 1: is simple. Then minus red tape equals more money. And
Speaker 1: they replied to him like, what the fuck are you
Speaker 1: talking about. There is no back room bureaucracy. You cut
Speaker 1: our budget with austerity policies. That's why there's no money.
Speaker 1: And he was like, oh fuck, Like yeah, well, and
Speaker 1: I you know this, this this seems to have like
Speaker 1: escalated to levels the UK that are like sort of
Speaker 1: genuinely catastrophic. I mean, you know, one thing I've sort
Speaker 1: of been quietly going on is like the sort of
Speaker 1: quiet privatization of the NHS. Yeah, which is yeah, the
Speaker 1: aliens is the National Health Service or is trans people
Speaker 1: call it a no healthcare service. I haven't had that
Speaker 1: one before. That's very good. Yeah, but you know, okay,
Speaker 1: but I'm currently a good demonstration of that. Actually, I
Speaker 1: am currently trying to get onto the pilot scheme trans Plus,
Speaker 1: which basically gets you to the end of the waiting list.
Speaker 1: And if they if the pilot scheme goes well, hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll we'll be getting rid of the hopefully, like this
Speaker 1: is the good alternative, right And to get onto it,
Speaker 1: I need to get my referral, which my GP told
Speaker 1: me they did but didn't do. So to do that,
Speaker 1: I need to get my current QP to write the
Speaker 1: referral to the GIC and include a note that says
Speaker 1: this was meant to be done in August twenty twenty
Speaker 1: and to do that. I called up the GP office
Speaker 1: the other day and they said I was on the
Speaker 1: phone with the GP and I said, go to the
Speaker 1: GICs web site, click on if the section that says
Speaker 1: you know you're a GP and you're looking to refer
Speaker 1: a patient. And she was like, oh, I can't do
Speaker 1: that because of our computer systems. So what I'm going
Speaker 1: to need you to do is go to the website
Speaker 1: yourself and click on the thing that says you're a
Speaker 1: GP even though you're not, and download that form and
Speaker 1: then email it to our office and then call the
Speaker 1: office and then get them to make the referral. This
Speaker 1: is the good alternative. This is the good alternative compared
Speaker 1: to just waiting for like fifteen years and then killing myself.
Speaker 1: This is the good option for healthcare on for trans
Speaker 1: people in the UK right now. Yeah, it's a yeah
Speaker 1: like as as as as as as like shitty as
Speaker 1: American trans health care is a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: it is somehow well okay, unless you're in a place
Speaker 1: that has made it illegal now, which is fun. It's
Speaker 1: it's a lot less fucked than the UK's I really
Speaker 1: thought we were. We were like outdoing the GOP states.
Speaker 1: Like for for just a second there we were like
Speaker 1: inching ahead and how much our country hates trans people,
Speaker 1: and then like all these bands came out that were
Speaker 1: just like taking trans kids away from their parents or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, they clearly won. Yeah, but now anyway,
Speaker 1: we'll see. We'll see whether you know, whether like the
Speaker 1: Rowling Bill comes in in twenty twenty four or something
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, it's just like execute transgenders on site.
Speaker 1: What would not surprise me at all? The Oh god,
Speaker 1: it's fun being just the scapegoat for everything it's ever
Speaker 1: gone wrong. Ever. Hi, this is Mia in post. This
Speaker 1: episode was recorded just days before Briennaji, is sixteen year
Speaker 1: old trans girl, was stabbed to death in a town
Speaker 1: near Liverpool. Um, we haven't talked about it really on
Speaker 1: the show over the last few weeks because very little
Speaker 1: of what I and what I think the rest of
Speaker 1: the crew have had to say about Brienna GI's murder
Speaker 1: between sort of the racking sobs that you get another
Speaker 1: transperson taking from us is even remotely publishable. What I
Speaker 1: can say is that some of the wealthiest and most
Speaker 1: powerful people the institutions in the world are trying to
Speaker 1: exterminate us and the BBC, the New York Times, JK.
Speaker 1: Rowling in every major British political party, and the American
Speaker 1: ones to have blot in their fucking hands and should
Speaker 1: be treated accordingly. And on that pleak note. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: can go back to the rest of the episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is wild being a country that like supposedly like
Speaker 1: what the thing we probably have the to be the
Speaker 1: proudest of in our entire history is creating a system
Speaker 1: for socialized medicine where people have free, a point of
Speaker 1: use healthcare. And since it was created, the ruling class
Speaker 1: have tried as hard as possible to destroy it, and
Speaker 1: they're finally succeeding. I'm actually having friends are telling me
Speaker 1: recently that they're going to like hospitals, and the hospitals
Speaker 1: are telling them that they know they're privatized, and they
Speaker 1: like they can't they'll have to charge them because they're
Speaker 1: not like contracted to and chests walk anymore. So that's
Speaker 1: you know, that that's succeeding at that I we've probably
Speaker 1: wandered away from the point of what we're trying to say. I. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have resentful feelings to do with healthcare in the UK.
Speaker 1: I'm currently playing with my comfort knife. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think I I I think this is sort of
Speaker 1: circling around to the thing I wanted to talk about next,
Speaker 1: which is that, like, you know, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: we have this sort of like just just the sort
Speaker 1: of monumental collapse of anything that could like conceivably make
Speaker 1: the UK a society. But on the other hand, people
Speaker 1: whether like we live in a society, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: if you're in the UK sharing this, you are wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you live in an economy. Yeah, it's live in an economy.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty blue. It would be fucking great to
Speaker 1: live in a society I wish, But you know, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, Dave Dave David Graver's final final production
Speaker 1: has like now come true, which is that we are
Speaker 1: now actually like the UK is now sort of starting
Speaker 1: to see the full scale revolt of the carrying classes. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that has come in the form of walk. I
Speaker 1: I have no idea what this episode is going to
Speaker 1: come out. Sorry, everything's chaos right now, but as of
Speaker 1: time of recording, I guess tomorrow that something like half
Speaker 1: a million people are going on strike and lo one
Speaker 1: and behold who was going on People went on strike
Speaker 1: last week? Oh? Was it last week? Yeah? Yeah, am
Speaker 1: I have I Okay, I'm a dumbass, isn't well? Aren't
Speaker 1: there more tomorrow when the episode comes out. On the
Speaker 1: first of February, over half a million people went on
Speaker 1: strike and there massive demonstrations and matches across the country.
Speaker 1: It's the biggest strike and biggest matches that we've seen
Speaker 1: in like over a decade um. We haven't seen much
Speaker 1: as this size since protests against the Iraq War. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and well okay, so in Chalah there'll be more effective
Speaker 1: than the rock war protest. But yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it's interesting if you look at the people who
Speaker 1: are who are striking, it is it is people who
Speaker 1: do care labor. It's teachers, who's nurses, it's ambulance drivers,
Speaker 1: people in civil sts like train and bus drivers who
Speaker 1: are like still on strike, and various capacities. A point
Speaker 1: to pull you up on there, but it agrees with
Speaker 1: your point even more in terms of the rebellion of
Speaker 1: the caring classes. The current drive of the strikes from
Speaker 1: the RMT that's rail, maritime and transport workers pick up
Speaker 1: the RMT. My boys are incredible, Nick Lynch, shout out,
Speaker 1: love you to pieces. The current strikes are actually driven
Speaker 1: by the janitorial staff, who are like some of the
Speaker 1: worst treated and worst paid among all of the train
Speaker 1: and transport staff like bus drivers and train drivers and
Speaker 1: someone have joined in on it. And that, as you're saying,
Speaker 1: is like is still part of the like rebellion of
Speaker 1: the caring classes. But it's even more so because it's
Speaker 1: literally like the cleaners who were like, yeah, this is fucked,
Speaker 1: we need better wages. Yeah, And there's been one aye,
Speaker 1: And I think like we're like postal workers are also
Speaker 1: on strike, this other I'm pretty I'm pretty sure other
Speaker 1: people are also on strike. Two that I'm leaving out here. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's see. So ambulance strivers, civil servants, teaches, nus is
Speaker 1: uh training workers, Yeah, like the university that's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: university workers there are that there are, but I do
Speaker 1: not care about this. I have to assolid arity for them.
Speaker 1: Bought an agents on strike. Strike baby, never come back
Speaker 1: to work. You striking. We are starting the ambolition of
Speaker 1: work with you. Congratulations you are now you have now
Speaker 1: finally become the vanguard of the working class, it's which
Speaker 1: which it's what is what you fucking cops have always
Speaker 1: wanted you get to do it now. Yeah, well cops
Speaker 1: is an interesting thing as well, because like h on
Speaker 1: Red Planet every Sunday apm two eleven pm UK time,
Speaker 1: check it out. We um we have a running prediction
Speaker 1: to do with the with the police that like, as
Speaker 1: their job, as class warfare becomes more naked, the police's
Speaker 1: job is more and more obviously just what it's always been,
Speaker 1: to put down the working class. But as your job
Speaker 1: just becomes like smashing like bottled water stands that people
Speaker 1: put up in a heat way to help homeless people,
Speaker 1: and like trying to evict people and trying to like
Speaker 1: stop people who are striking for better pay. And also
Speaker 1: everyone around you constantly calls you a pig and like
Speaker 1: degrades you and is like are you enjoying what you're doing?
Speaker 1: Do you have a good life? Are you liking this job?
Speaker 1: We'll see like lots of police quitting. And actually this
Speaker 1: month the Telegraph, who can't really be trusted, but this
Speaker 1: does into a larger pattern. The Telegraph reported that more
Speaker 1: cops had quit than had been recruited in the last
Speaker 1: month and that's what an overall pattern that has been
Speaker 1: going on for a while. To be fair of that
Speaker 1: that I don't know. In the US, every single newspaper
Speaker 1: says that every weakness never true. So yes, I don't
Speaker 1: know actual figures. Like it does look like the I mean,
Speaker 1: cops quitting in the UK has been on the rise
Speaker 1: since like like early last year, um and enormously as well.
Speaker 1: And you can tell because like the Met has been
Speaker 1: putting out loads of recruitment ads, which like is really
Speaker 1: second No, I a little sorry about this. Actually they
Speaker 1: have this ad in wait is it nearly time for ads?
Speaker 1: Because I could add pivot. Yeah, I was in I
Speaker 1: was so. I was in peck Complex Cinema, which is
Speaker 1: Peckham Is is like a cheap community cinema. Um, it's
Speaker 1: like uh yeah, it's it's they deliberately keep it cheap
Speaker 1: so that people can enjoy it and it's an events
Speaker 1: space and whatever, and we were about to watch a movie.
Speaker 1: I forget what now, but like there was this ad
Speaker 1: for the for joining the Met police that was like
Speaker 1: this black guy talking about how he was really worried
Speaker 1: about his sister joining the police because she's a black
Speaker 1: woman and she's a Muslim, and he was worried she's
Speaker 1: gonna face all this discrimination, but actually she's having a
Speaker 1: great time and everyone loves her, so it was totally
Speaker 1: okay the whole time. And now I have this personal policy,
Speaker 1: which is if there is an ad for crypto, an
Speaker 1: ad for joining the Met, the Army, whatever, and no
Speaker 1: one else, and if no one is yelling at the
Speaker 1: screen because they are being subjected to fascist propaganda, that
Speaker 1: then then it's going to be me who's yelling. So
Speaker 1: I just started yelling because like because like two weeks
Speaker 1: earlier when I was watching this ad, like Chris Carver
Speaker 1: had been had been shot dead by Met police officers
Speaker 1: in South London, a black man, right, and they have
Speaker 1: a black man here telling us that actually the Met's
Speaker 1: really cool and doesn't do any racism. And I was
Speaker 1: just yelling and yelling about it. And I was yelling
Speaker 1: about like fucking if people aren't familiar with the case
Speaker 1: of like Sarah Everard who was kidnapped and assaulted and
Speaker 1: murdered by Wayne Cousins and Met police officer, like you know,
Speaker 1: I'm just I was just going off about all this
Speaker 1: stuff because I'm just like, I like I was just
Speaker 1: responding directly to the ad like, how are they running
Speaker 1: this shit as if we don't know all of this
Speaker 1: and just lift listing off everything that came into mind,
Speaker 1: because again it's my fault, it's my personal policy. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get any trouble for it. And someone
Speaker 1: should be yelling when you're subjected to propaganda. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: speaking of propaganda, here's an act joining the Washington State
Speaker 1: Highway Patrol. And we're back from your fascist propaganda session.
Speaker 1: I hope you didn't enjoy it. I hope you yelled
Speaker 1: the whole time. Yeah, And I guess I I guess
Speaker 1: the thing that is genuinely sort of different between the
Speaker 1: American and British polices that the British police like the
Speaker 1: American police is like every single American city is like
Speaker 1: at least well, okay, so it's they're they're technically only
Speaker 1: about forty percent police budget by volume, but that that
Speaker 1: that doesn't county about by googling forty percent police, well
Speaker 1: you will you will see a variety of things here,
Speaker 1: but like you know, tech, technically it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: technically only about forty percent of the city's budget. Byvolume,
Speaker 1: but that's because that doesn't count the amount of money
Speaker 1: police just steal. But in the UK they actually kind
Speaker 1: of like they were kind of stupid and they seem
Speaker 1: to actually have kind of done neoliberalism to the cops,
Speaker 1: which is very funny because it means that you get
Speaker 1: Jeremy Corbyn like running on hiring more cops and it's
Speaker 1: like yeah, sir, Like what no, it's yeah. Like it's
Speaker 1: like like you've been you've been protesting like apotheide and
Speaker 1: illegal wars and all of this stuff, like thirty five
Speaker 1: years and you're like, we should have more cops. What
Speaker 1: the fuck are you talking about? Man? I remember what
Speaker 1: I was. I was watching people who like used to
Speaker 1: be like autonomist in like fucking twenty eleven being like, no,
Speaker 1: we need more cops. Like they were literally beating you up.
Speaker 1: What the fuck is Oh my god that guy who
Speaker 1: fractured my skull. I need more of that. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's pretty fun. There is like an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: British brain going on where even I was like, most
Speaker 1: progressive politicians will support support ship like that, and like
Speaker 1: I said earlier, like the nautic model, right, like we yeah,
Speaker 1: there are there are limits to the British imagination? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we've been doing this shit a long time, we've
Speaker 1: really perfected the brain ones. Yeah, I mean I have okay,
Speaker 1: so my my my, my, my my my. Least progressive
Speaker 1: theory is that there there's there, there's something. There's something
Speaker 1: called large population island brain, which affects, it affects. The
Speaker 1: UK and Japan are the two sort of models of
Speaker 1: this where you like being being on an island and
Speaker 1: then also running an empire drives you, makes you like
Speaker 1: absolutely psychotic in like very very specific ways that are
Speaker 1: like both the same. It's like you you have a
Speaker 1: massive nonce culture, like the way you imperially similar parable
Speaker 1: public nonsense is thriving recently. Gary Glitter recently got out
Speaker 1: of president and then immediately went on as the far
Speaker 1: right TV network gb News and said that woke cancel,
Speaker 1: woke cancel culture is the biggest problem. Yeah, like it's it's, it's, it's.
Speaker 1: It is a very grim state of affairs. Yeah, is
Speaker 1: is what I will say about both the UK and Japan,
Speaker 1: although I guess to be fair, to be fair to Japan,
Speaker 1: they did just assassinate their ex prime minister and probably
Speaker 1: the most like history, like probably the most successful historical
Speaker 1: assassination not done by the CIA and like a hundred
Speaker 1: years or something like really incredible work on the part
Speaker 1: of the man with the electric blunderbuss. The UK, however,
Speaker 1: not not there yet. I mean, where's that? You know,
Speaker 1: where's our where's our homemade blunderbusses? Come on, come on,
Speaker 1: got step it up, guy. This is not full for
Speaker 1: leftist terrorism. I am not police. Please ignore what I
Speaker 1: just said. I will say this thing about the British too,
Speaker 1: Like one of the sort of British psychosis that I
Speaker 1: think about a lot is like the specter of knife crime,
Speaker 1: because it's like, okay, one hands, Like on the one hand,
Speaker 1: like yeah, like okay, so like people get stabbed and
Speaker 1: it sucks. On the other hand, like like having having
Speaker 1: having grown up in the US in a country where
Speaker 1: like all of our can gardeners are basically being trained
Speaker 1: to like storm met like do you like human wave
Speaker 1: attacks and mashooters? Just like how how are you guys?
Speaker 1: Like how are you guys? Like like how is this
Speaker 1: the thing that you guys are like like you have
Speaker 1: police brain about is knife crime? Like I think no,
Speaker 1: I think that like the knife crime thing is a
Speaker 1: very American perspective on British politics, Like we don't actually
Speaker 1: talk about it that much. Oh thank god. Okay, it's
Speaker 1: really like an American conservative talking point that like if
Speaker 1: you get rid of the guns, they'll just stab each other.
Speaker 1: So look at the UK, they don't have guns and
Speaker 1: they're just stabbing each other. Um, Like some conservatives still
Speaker 1: care about knife crime here. That was a big wave
Speaker 1: of caring about it when again it was like a
Speaker 1: few years labor were like doing their races, like the
Speaker 1: the the hush hush racist policies to try and like
Speaker 1: brutalize the working class, especially in black neighborhoods. Um. But
Speaker 1: like no, I mean, the cop brain is like in everything.
Speaker 1: It's just it's not it's not like it's every I
Speaker 1: think British brain is just an evolved form of cop brain.
Speaker 1: It's like when cop brain affects everything in life, then
Speaker 1: you then you are British. Yeah, and I get I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess. Also it's like it's you have caught brand
Speaker 1: and an also landlord brand at the same time. It's
Speaker 1: just like a truly sort of dastardly come but housing.
Speaker 1: That's true, I say it was my fucking well, I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess, Okay, I I think I have I am no,
Speaker 1: that's not true. I haven't gotten it yet, but I
Speaker 1: am vast approaching that the two weeks since my apartment
Speaker 1: was last flooded by sewage mark and I'm very excited
Speaker 1: about this. Love love love love love love, landlords love renting.
Speaker 1: It's we hear love landlords falling on me. Hey, at
Speaker 1: least not up god, Oh oh boy, that's a new
Speaker 1: Oh fun. Okay, this is this has been, This has
Speaker 1: been the the MEA's apartment is falling apart update. Well,
Speaker 1: should we talk more about the rebellion of the caring classes?
Speaker 1: Because I think that's a really I think that's a
Speaker 1: really pointed and worthwhile grape of prediction. I'm a big grapehead.
Speaker 1: I have a friend who I just get onto discord
Speaker 1: chat with and we as we put it grape out. Um.
Speaker 1: I like to say, I'm getting the grape from beyond
Speaker 1: the Grave of twenty four seven. But the but the
Speaker 1: rebellion of the caring classes is a really poignant thing
Speaker 1: to talk about because neoliberalism does not care about reproductive
Speaker 1: labor in the slightest and where like where older forms
Speaker 1: of capitalism had had that covered because women were basically
Speaker 1: fucking slaves. Um. They now the now like reproductive labor
Speaker 1: has to be done by professionals because everything must be marketized,
Speaker 1: and of course, being the most essential labor, it's the
Speaker 1: gonna be the one with the shittiest working conditions and
Speaker 1: the lowest pay. That's that's neoliberalism for you. If if
Speaker 1: every if it must happen, it must be dogshit um.
Speaker 1: And so like this is where we see the rebellion
Speaker 1: of the carrying classes now, especially with the with the
Speaker 1: set of the service sector economy, so like within the
Speaker 1: imperial core, everyone's being put into some kind of care
Speaker 1: job essentially, and they're treated like shit. And now they're
Speaker 1: starting to actually form unions and fight back, which is
Speaker 1: really fucking cool. Yeah. I want to briefly interject here
Speaker 1: with a thing everyone gets wrong about Margaret Thatcher, which
Speaker 1: is that every every everyone in their mom will will
Speaker 1: say that fucking quote about there is no society, there's
Speaker 1: only the individual. Except they never they never leave out
Speaker 1: the next part of that sentence, which they always leave
Speaker 1: out the part of it that they always leave out
Speaker 1: at the end is that the actual line goes. And
Speaker 1: it's slightly weird because it was it was it was
Speaker 1: in response to a question. But basically the line is
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals
Speaker 1: and the family. There are men and women and they're
Speaker 1: a families as well. Yeah, because yeah, and well and
Speaker 1: also yeah, yeah, to to be clear, to be clear,
Speaker 1: idea Margaret Thatcher not a friend of the trans is
Speaker 1: shockingly wow looking, I guess. But but but I think
Speaker 1: I think this family parts also very important, because yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: you know, like like neoliberalism has these it has these
Speaker 1: two conflicting tendencies, right, it has this one tendency that
Speaker 1: is like what it's it's trying it's trying to use
Speaker 1: the family to create labor in two different ways at
Speaker 1: the same time. One is it's it's treating it's treating
Speaker 1: each person in a family as an individual who can
Speaker 1: go produce value for people. But then secondarily, right, like
Speaker 1: you know, neoliberalism isn't in an ideology of incredible alienation
Speaker 1: and an incredible sort of atomization. Yeah, and also it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's an economy based on it's you know, it,
Speaker 1: but simultaneously it has to be able to do reproductive labor.
Speaker 1: And the way that it sort of like bridges the
Speaker 1: gap of this contradiction is with this sort of alliance
Speaker 1: it has with the religious right and was sort of
Speaker 1: like religious conservatism in general, because it can it can
Speaker 1: put up this false and this is where all the
Speaker 1: trade calf shit comes from. This is where all of
Speaker 1: the sort of like trad wife like, oh hey you can,
Speaker 1: you can. When she's saying there are individual men and
Speaker 1: women and there are families, there's an implicit thing there
Speaker 1: where she's saying families, like she she is leaving out
Speaker 1: children as people because children are properties are family and
Speaker 1: also like whatever reproductive labor has done to to make
Speaker 1: those children into a into individual men and women, that
Speaker 1: doesn't that's just part of the family, Like she's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of heavy lifting happening in there are families,
Speaker 1: right yeah, and and and I think the other part
Speaker 1: of us, right it is like this is this is
Speaker 1: the sort of like the sort of like new liberalism
Speaker 1: has this sud of populism that it generates that's about
Speaker 1: sort of like the family, and like the church like
Speaker 1: this this the sites of sort of like like this
Speaker 1: is how you resist sort of social alienation as you
Speaker 1: do these things. But like both liberalism has like a
Speaker 1: huge focus on consensus politics, where they they say, these
Speaker 1: are the resources that are available, and you will get
Speaker 1: a say in how they're distributed in your community. You
Speaker 1: can come together and engage in the electoral process and
Speaker 1: consensus politics and we all agreed on what and that's
Speaker 1: this is all just process to manufacture consent because actually
Speaker 1: there are infinite resources available because we lawn the money
Speaker 1: for the rest of the entire fucking world. And if
Speaker 1: this were like any other country that would have any
Speaker 1: kind of like uh trickle down to get into the
Speaker 1: Reaganomics effect for the rest of the population. But being Britain, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the country that invented concentration camps and workhouses. No,
Speaker 1: absolutely not not a not a red scent is going
Speaker 1: to be touched by the by the pause. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I mean that that kind of like I don't know
Speaker 1: that that I think like that that also sort of
Speaker 1: goes back to just like the containment of the working class.
Speaker 1: The British working class is like a political force and
Speaker 1: that's starting to commandow. But even then, like you know,
Speaker 1: this is is my what one of my one of
Speaker 1: the things that I say that guess people the most
Speaker 1: mad at me is that like there's like, okay, one
Speaker 1: in two days strikes are kind of like like, you know,
Speaker 1: every single year, India has the largest general strike in
Speaker 1: human history, and it's one day and it does nothing.
Speaker 1: And the only times it hasn't done nothing other times
Speaker 1: when people have actually like kept going on strike or
Speaker 1: like you know mar March to farmers protests to one
Speaker 1: two day strikes are a good practice to show that
Speaker 1: we could hold out for as long as possible. They
Speaker 1: shouldn't be like the whole thing, and you know, okay,
Speaker 1: And like I've talked about this before when when I've
Speaker 1: sort of like interviewed nurses on this show, and like
Speaker 1: like there are absolutely times is especially especially in well,
Speaker 1: I actually I don't know if this is if this
Speaker 1: works the same way in the British nursing sector, but
Speaker 1: like there's there's absolutely like there are absolutely technical reasons
Speaker 1: why you want to do a limited duration strike is
Speaker 1: especially in the nursing sector, that have to do with
Speaker 1: how like how the contracts work bringing in scabs. But
Speaker 1: like one in two days strikes are kind of like
Speaker 1: they're more symbolic than they are sort of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: an actual entrument of class war. And and I think
Speaker 1: part of something that you have to engage within the
Speaker 1: British process. And this is this is also true in
Speaker 1: the US, but our unions are like there's like two
Speaker 1: of them and they represent about seven people, so it
Speaker 1: winds up being less of a deal unless you're like
Speaker 1: a UC grad student on strike. But it is also
Speaker 1: that like in Britain, the trade unions are just like
Speaker 1: actively directly sort of like feeding into this incredibly dogshit
Speaker 1: like yeah, political machine, which is well, okay, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is an interesting question. This is an interesting like thing
Speaker 1: to think through because so if people are familiar, we
Speaker 1: had Thatcher bringing in the way of a neoliberalism, you know,
Speaker 1: along with everyone's favorite guy, Ronald Mommy Reagan, and she
Speaker 1: waged war on the minas especially, but the unions in
Speaker 1: general across the UK and crushed the unions. And for
Speaker 1: this she is forever remembered as a saint by the
Speaker 1: ruling class and by the conservatives. But this was, as
Speaker 1: I said earlier, like this was a part of a
Speaker 1: trend in the imperial core where the most strongly unionized
Speaker 1: sectors which were manufacturing and industrial and like mining were
Speaker 1: those unions had to be crushed so that that label
Speaker 1: and then that labor was outsourced to the imperial periphery, right,
Speaker 1: and now we're jobs in sectors where there are no unions,
Speaker 1: and there are these huge corporate unions in the UK,
Speaker 1: like Unison that like basically claimed to be able to
Speaker 1: represent any worker, which you know, if you're a fan
Speaker 1: of the IWW, you shout out to the wobbles, like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that sounds pretty cool. But then no,
Speaker 1: it's a massive yellow union. If people aren't familiar with
Speaker 1: the yellow unions, we should hopefully be having an episode
Speaker 1: of a Red Planet soon about just like making the
Speaker 1: distinction so that people can tell them apart really quickly.
Speaker 1: But like yellow unions first came into existence in ants,
Speaker 1: I think, and it was this pointedly, this pointed change
Speaker 1: from red unions who are actually fighting class warfare and
Speaker 1: actually trying to like stop the capitalist notion of work
Speaker 1: to a yellow union, which was like a corporate union.
Speaker 1: And generally speaking, it would originally be like the corporation
Speaker 1: who was having their unions, like their workers were rebelling.
Speaker 1: They would form a union that was employed by the
Speaker 1: corporation and then be like, look it's a union, guys,
Speaker 1: you can join that and you'll get better conditions. And
Speaker 1: it was a trap. But now we have, with the
Speaker 1: miracle of neoliberalism, we have those that just their own
Speaker 1: corporate entity and they're like, we can represent any worker
Speaker 1: because we are a massive union with an entrenched corporate
Speaker 1: structure who have like direct ties and constant political deals
Speaker 1: with the with the like political establishment, which like you know,
Speaker 1: our Labor Party should rename itself at this point, like
Speaker 1: it is actively anti union, especially the unions that are
Speaker 1: fighting for the actual working class, like the today, Like
Speaker 1: as of recording this, like an hour and a half ago,
Speaker 1: there is a Tory MP who used to be a
Speaker 1: Labor MP until twenty eighteen has just been made like
Speaker 1: the vice chair of the Tory Party and he's like
Speaker 1: obviously a dog shit guy, but it's a really good
Speaker 1: demonstration of how like the labor is now just the
Speaker 1: red Tories. Um Tory now comes in red um they
Speaker 1: these these massive unions. My point is like it is
Speaker 1: again a neoliberalization of everything, and it's a neoliberalization of
Speaker 1: unions where they get to just be a massive corporate
Speaker 1: structure competing in like a free market of unions. Like
Speaker 1: they're trying to like compete to offer workers the best thing,
Speaker 1: and like, oh, we're most likely to succeeded out of
Speaker 1: demands because we have the most workers behind us. But
Speaker 1: like practically everyone knows that what they're actually going to
Speaker 1: get for the workers who are with them is dog shit.
Speaker 1: Like my friend was talking to a nurse at one
Speaker 1: of these matches on the first affab and she was
Speaker 1: just saying, like she was with Unison and then they
Speaker 1: said that what they were like actually pushing for was
Speaker 1: was still like under inflation and still like it just
Speaker 1: just wouldn't be worthwhile at all. So she's changing to
Speaker 1: be with the Royal College of Nursing instead. Yeah, we had,
Speaker 1: we had enormous yellow unions in the UK. It's a
Speaker 1: really issue facing British labor organizing. Um, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk more about that in the Future of organizing in
Speaker 1: the UK in the next episode. For now, this has
Speaker 1: been it could Happen here. You can find us in
Speaker 1: the usual places on Twitter and Instagram, dust the British Empire,
Speaker 1: It's it could Happen Here A podcast where I think
Speaker 1: Turf Island is legitimately my only remaining British joker. I
Speaker 1: think I've gone through basically every other one. So yeah,
Speaker 1: welcome book up to us talking about Turf Islands. This
Speaker 1: is part two of our interview with Sophie from Mars
Speaker 1: and Yeah, we're going to talk about how to make
Speaker 1: the UK less shit. Yay. The US have gotten to
Speaker 1: a point like a like a level of unionization that
Speaker 1: decreases every year, to the point where like it's people
Speaker 1: think of just like being in any union as like
Speaker 1: a socialist position, and it's like, guys, I I I
Speaker 1: have really bad nimes wish about yeah, like like it's
Speaker 1: it's really not that yeah and yeah, but but but
Speaker 1: I think there's this there's also this sort of like
Speaker 1: I don't know, like one one one of the things
Speaker 1: you have to deal with when when you're dealing with
Speaker 1: the with like really very large unions, I don't do
Speaker 1: anything like this is the thing in China and that
Speaker 1: happens constantly is like, yeah, China technically as one of
Speaker 1: the world's large largest unions. It like the last time
Speaker 1: that union did anything was actually, weirdly, the less time
Speaker 1: that you didn't do anything. Was in was drink tienemen
Speaker 1: and then ever since then they have done literally jack shit.
Speaker 1: Like every room was like, oh my fucking god, hold on,
Speaker 1: oh no, But like yeah, you get these things that
Speaker 1: are like technically unions, but you know, they don't do anything.
Speaker 1: They cooperate with bosses. They also and this is something
Speaker 1: you also see in the US. Well you don't really
Speaker 1: use China. You don't see this in China because there's
Speaker 1: they have one un trade union they have they have
Speaker 1: a state trade union federation because she is. In the
Speaker 1: US a lot where you get these really shitty things
Speaker 1: where like so someone will be organizing union campaign and
Speaker 1: like another union will come will like swoop in and
Speaker 1: be like, ah, hey, look at these people, like well
Speaker 1: we'll give you like a better cut, and and they're
Speaker 1: doing this like basically because like the okay, there are
Speaker 1: there are there are unions that are like actually there
Speaker 1: are unions that are actually unions, which is to say
Speaker 1: like there are there are unions that are sort of
Speaker 1: instruments of the working class and organizational to us. And
Speaker 1: then there are unions that are like we're forming a
Speaker 1: union so we can increase our member roles. So we can,
Speaker 1: like you know, like we could be in so far
Speaker 1: is we're interested in expanding. We're interested in expanding because
Speaker 1: if we expand, more people will pay money into our bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: And that's a real like that that's a real issue.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, like it's interesting. It's interesting to
Speaker 1: me to see rather the sort of one day strikes
Speaker 1: that have been happening in the UK kind of like
Speaker 1: I don't know esco is not the right word, but well,
Speaker 1: I if we're gonna if we're discussing what should happen,
Speaker 1: what's gonna happen next? Um? And I mean again, you
Speaker 1: don't know when this podcast is gonna come out, so
Speaker 1: like it could could be who knows, it could Like
Speaker 1: I might offer some predictions here and you might be
Speaker 1: able to like just look at the UK use and
Speaker 1: directly be like Sophie was full of shit. Um. But
Speaker 1: like also we should talk about young people in a minute,
Speaker 1: because that's like pretty crucial to understanding UK politics. But um,
Speaker 1: but uh, the government right now, like I said before
Speaker 1: about Sunac, like he's trying to put in these massively
Speaker 1: authoritarian policies because he's realizing that like without them you
Speaker 1: can't do neoliberalism effectively. And one of them is, like,
Speaker 1: like I said about the pCFC bill, which was already
Speaker 1: in the works before soon that came in, but like
Speaker 1: now it's come you know, now it's come through, and
Speaker 1: they're doing like a second wave of trying to do it.
Speaker 1: They have the Online Safety Bill, which is not for
Speaker 1: anyone to be safe online. It's trying to like control
Speaker 1: freedom of the press basically like it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: most extreme proposal is basically that like people who are
Speaker 1: anti capitalist and who are reporting on the news should
Speaker 1: be arrested normal British momentum. And but one of these
Speaker 1: ones is he's trying to just ban strikes, like he's
Speaker 1: effectively trying to ban strikes. The technical mechanism of it
Speaker 1: is that they are bringing in a bill that will
Speaker 1: demand a minimum level of service for certain industries if
Speaker 1: the like, and it doesn't say what those minimum levels
Speaker 1: would be, but the MPs can decide on it later
Speaker 1: if they want, like set it to be whatever they want,
Speaker 1: and obviously they could a minimum to just be complete
Speaker 1: normal service. But even if they don't, like, setting a
Speaker 1: minimum service defeats the point of a strike, and I
Speaker 1: think that if we're talking about what what will happen next,
Speaker 1: we have this enough as enough movement right now. I'm
Speaker 1: not I have mixed feelings about it. I have some
Speaker 1: some suspicions. I am not the biggest fan of electoral politics,
Speaker 1: and I do feel like it has the whole knox
Speaker 1: of something that could like launch a political party at
Speaker 1: any minute, and then it'll it'll it'll completely recuperate all
Speaker 1: energy that it has and every other bit of energy
Speaker 1: that will die off. But I think that the response
Speaker 1: to legislation trying to ban strikes is probably going to
Speaker 1: be an escalation from these one and two day strikes
Speaker 1: into like holding out for as long as they possibly
Speaker 1: can to demand concessions from the government and then like
Speaker 1: once you're in that territory you're actually talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: do a voice for you're you're actually like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's as the as flobots would say, compassion as fast
Speaker 1: as as you can go time. Um where I think
Speaker 1: that the movement of union of unions and class consciousness
Speaker 1: that's currently what rising in the UK is not going
Speaker 1: to respond by like lying down and taking it when
Speaker 1: the government tries to ban strikes. I think that it's
Speaker 1: going to escalate. And speaking of escalation, is it time
Speaker 1: for ads? Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, they're gonna look, the
Speaker 1: Washington State Highway Patrol is going to escalate things right
Speaker 1: into your school very quickly. So here's here's an ad
Speaker 1: for an escalating, worsening crisis of cryptocurrency and by sophie
Speaker 1: coin the only currency which supports the working class. And
Speaker 1: we're back. God, this is this is reminding me of
Speaker 1: the lib coom oxidizable currency. David Harvey NFT thing. Oh
Speaker 1: he was so bad, incredibly funny. Not not my fault
Speaker 1: that you're okay, that is completely that is a completely
Speaker 1: unrelated aside. Oh yeah, well let us get back to Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can I can I talk about young people for a man?
Speaker 1: Because I do? Yeah. I think this is a really
Speaker 1: important thing. That's probably going to be me just like
Speaker 1: info dumping at you for a little bit, because I
Speaker 1: feel very passionately about I also think it's very important
Speaker 1: to understand the UK politics. It's that Britain hates young
Speaker 1: people so much, like it's inconceivable to people who live
Speaker 1: in other countries how much the media class, the political class,
Speaker 1: like the ruling class like hates the young so fucking
Speaker 1: much like if only under thirty fives could have voted
Speaker 1: in any of our recent elections, every borough in the
Speaker 1: UK would have been labor. That's less true now because
Speaker 1: our labor is run by the fucking head of the
Speaker 1: Crown Prosecution Service, but like when it was Corbyn, it
Speaker 1: would have all been labor. And then if if people
Speaker 1: I think like sixty could vote, it's like all conservative
Speaker 1: like there is they hate young people because they know
Speaker 1: that like social revolution will come from young people, and
Speaker 1: they know that young people have like just a vastly
Speaker 1: different understanding of the world. This is another Graverism, right,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna if we're gonna grape out like Graver
Speaker 1: said that, like that you could probably see that a
Speaker 1: revolution has taken place if one generation and the next
Speaker 1: generation effectively speak a different language, like if their understanding
Speaker 1: of the world is so is completely irreconcilable. And I
Speaker 1: think that one one interesting thing about Turf Island is
Speaker 1: that like trans rights are a really clear manifestation of that,
Speaker 1: where people under thirty five are entirely in supportive trans rights,
Speaker 1: they're entirely in supportive like self idea, you know, self
Speaker 1: determination of gender and like improving the healthcare situation and
Speaker 1: like informed consent healthcare and everything, and then people above
Speaker 1: that like practically entirely against it. And it's it's just
Speaker 1: like we have this, we have this absolutely wild generational
Speaker 1: divide in the UK, and they've been trying to reign that,
Speaker 1: like bring that under control with various policies for a
Speaker 1: long time. So Tony Blair must be destroyed at all courts. No,
Speaker 1: that's the IMF. Tony Blair multiple things at the same
Speaker 1: time should go to jail in a world where no
Speaker 1: one else goes to jail. No, yeah, that one, that
Speaker 1: one works. Um, Tony Blair. Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement had
Speaker 1: this speech where he was like education, education, education, and
Speaker 1: he was basically like, we are going to make it
Speaker 1: so everyone goes to university. And he also did a
Speaker 1: lot of other reforms to do with getting people into schools.
Speaker 1: It was very it was it was it was contemporary
Speaker 1: with and very comparable too, like bushes, no child left
Speaker 1: behind kind of stuff. Oh god. So he did a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff to try to like clamp down on
Speaker 1: youth and also create a pipeline for young people to
Speaker 1: get through high school and then go to university. Um
Speaker 1: he Also when I speaking of about clamping down on youth,
Speaker 1: uh Mia, are you familiar with the asbo oh, isn't
Speaker 1: the fucking sonic gun things? We're think a lot of
Speaker 1: different think a different deranged British thing. This is a
Speaker 1: this is a policy measure. It's just it's not it's
Speaker 1: not a weapon. It's um. I mean, it is a
Speaker 1: weapon of class offer, but it's um. It's the antisocial
Speaker 1: behavior order. And basically this is part of the UK's
Speaker 1: system of exclusions, right, Like we have a system set
Speaker 1: up where young people can be excluded from a career
Speaker 1: path and then like a path to just like being
Speaker 1: a functional human being in society uh at At Basically,
Speaker 1: any moment, right, if a teacher takes against you, they
Speaker 1: think you're rude, they think you're misbehaving, they can exclude you.
Speaker 1: Then that goes onto your educational record, and then you know,
Speaker 1: you might get a permanent exclusion, which is what we
Speaker 1: call being expelled from school now, right, and then that
Speaker 1: is like statistically sets people on a massive path towards
Speaker 1: ending up in like juvenile offense centers, like because they've
Speaker 1: been kicked out of a school, and other schools don't
Speaker 1: want to take a kid who's been kicked out of
Speaker 1: a school, right, and then then what are they doing
Speaker 1: with their time? Like there are no fucking youth centers,
Speaker 1: there are no community centers, like they've been all been
Speaker 1: completely destroyed by new neoliberalism. Um. So like we have
Speaker 1: the system of exclusions and and and as bo's are
Speaker 1: a big part of that, as both sends of anti
Speaker 1: social behavior order. And basically it's like it's not just
Speaker 1: like a warning, it's like it comes from It's like again,
Speaker 1: it's something that's going on to a permanent record, and
Speaker 1: if you then commit crimes, you're going to be punished
Speaker 1: more severely because you've been warned already. Um. It's like
Speaker 1: it's it was, it was. It was introduced and then
Speaker 1: like cheered on by the ghouls who run our country,
Speaker 1: like because it was going to deal with chavs, which
Speaker 1: was our term for young working class people, um, just
Speaker 1: our pejorative of being young and poor. Um. But it
Speaker 1: obviously also was there to target like young young black kids,
Speaker 1: young brown kids, young traveler kids, um and like and
Speaker 1: that was you know, that was Blair like clamping down
Speaker 1: on any kind of existence outside of the pipeline that
Speaker 1: he was setting up for just being in school. There
Speaker 1: was also this massive focus on like attendance came in
Speaker 1: around the same time that like schools would punish people
Speaker 1: for for having missed any time at all. Like when
Speaker 1: I was going to high school, we had like school
Speaker 1: assemblies where they would tell us about the importance of attendance,
Speaker 1: like over and over and over again, like probably a
Speaker 1: hundred times a term. They would tell people that, Like
Speaker 1: they would tell the kids that, like attendance is the
Speaker 1: most important thing, and like the difference in your grades
Speaker 1: will be enormous if you missed like a single lesson
Speaker 1: or a single week of school. And they would like
Speaker 1: give awards to kids who had perfect attendance that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and deranged as um and then like um, So that
Speaker 1: was Blair, And it's continued to to kind of intensify
Speaker 1: that same thing for a long time. But like very
Speaker 1: recently this is again Sunax authoritarian policies. We've brought in
Speaker 1: something called Prevent Now. Prevent is a multifaceted civilian surveillance
Speaker 1: program where basically people can be referred to prevent, which
Speaker 1: is capitalist, white supremacist, Western centric re education. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a re education program. It's it's if people are
Speaker 1: considered to be holding extremist views, expressing extremist opinions, then
Speaker 1: they can be referred to Prevent. Now, like a lot
Speaker 1: of the people in my kind of social circle will
Speaker 1: like meme about prevent because like all the language is
Speaker 1: about like making extremist content or whatever, and obviously that's
Speaker 1: what I do for a living. But like, but people
Speaker 1: would you know, make a tweet about how they think
Speaker 1: that like the Prime minister's a dickhead and then be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get referred to prevent. And then it
Speaker 1: was noticeable that like, actually know, none of us are
Speaker 1: being referred to prevent, right, So like this isn't this
Speaker 1: isn't for us. It's actually been put in place for
Speaker 1: two specific purposes. I do know someone who's been I
Speaker 1: do know someone who knows someone who's been referred to prevent.
Speaker 1: And the person they know who's referred to prevent is
Speaker 1: a is a child, right, is a teenager because she
Speaker 1: works with trans youth, and like, being referred to prevent
Speaker 1: is really there as a system to control Muslim populations
Speaker 1: and young people, Like that's what it's really there to
Speaker 1: target and trying to clamp down on young people expressing
Speaker 1: any kind you know, the Muslim side of that, it's
Speaker 1: it's that has its own entire discussion. You could have
Speaker 1: to do with Islamophobia and like terror and like there's
Speaker 1: a whole thing, like you know, the complete unwillingness of
Speaker 1: the US and UK and all the other states from
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that like extremist Islamic terror is right wing terror.
Speaker 1: So then you if you merge those categories, you would
Speaker 1: see that actually the far right is the biggest threat
Speaker 1: to everyone all whatever. This is a whole other thing.
Speaker 1: Young people in the UK are under constant, like bart,
Speaker 1: under this constant barrage of like media pressure, shaming, stigmatism,
Speaker 1: and it's because they they are expected to either get
Speaker 1: a degree and succeed and get your hundred k a
Speaker 1: year salary job in whatever, or you are a piece
Speaker 1: of shit and you will go to jail. And obviously
Speaker 1: the reality for most people is you're going to get
Speaker 1: your degree or drop out and then you're going to
Speaker 1: wind up working in some kind of service sector job actually, right,
Speaker 1: or if you're lucky, a fairly easy like office job
Speaker 1: where you can quiet quit and just doss off all day. Right,
Speaker 1: But like the attacks on young people serves a very
Speaker 1: specific function, and it's because they're aware of that rebellion
Speaker 1: of the caring classes, and they're aware of the social
Speaker 1: revolutionary potential of young people, and they're trying to stop it,
Speaker 1: like trying as hard as they can to stop it.
Speaker 1: And their mechanism for doing that is that there's this
Speaker 1: pipeline from birth until the end of your university degree
Speaker 1: and then hope and then allegedly you get a job,
Speaker 1: but you don't really or else, as I say, you
Speaker 1: probably wind up in jail. The university thing is also
Speaker 1: really really interesting because Grab again, fucking everyone take a shot.
Speaker 1: Grab pointed out that like revolution often comes out of
Speaker 1: cases where the population isn't looking at like someone else
Speaker 1: gets something, Like the population doesn't look at the ruling
Speaker 1: class getting everything and then getting nothing and think that's unjust.
Speaker 1: We should overthrow them. Right. This is how monarchy and
Speaker 1: kingdoms was able to perpetuate for such a long time.
Speaker 1: It's when they think that someone else who they consider
Speaker 1: comparable is getting something and they're not getting it. That's
Speaker 1: when they feel the injustice. And like, I think this
Speaker 1: education education, education speech and this moment and this policy
Speaker 1: set the neoliberalism and Blair and everyone since then has
Speaker 1: tried to kick into kick into action is going to
Speaker 1: turn out to be probably the biggest shooting themselves in
Speaker 1: the foot historically that we could measure, because they've basically
Speaker 1: made it that every person, like every young person in
Speaker 1: the UK must try to go to university. Not wanting
Speaker 1: to go to university is considered socially like backwards, and
Speaker 1: like then people go to university and then we all
Speaker 1: find that there are not jobs in the UK for
Speaker 1: everyone who's gotten a degree, because they basically set up
Speaker 1: the whole country to be a diploma mill. Like the
Speaker 1: whole entire country has this pipeline if everyone's going to
Speaker 1: get a degree and then and then what because there
Speaker 1: aren't fucking jobs, And that's going to create that sense
Speaker 1: that like we are not getting what we deserve. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that the the marketization and the like opening
Speaker 1: up all these universities to be like profit driven diploma
Speaker 1: mills is has radicalized an enormous number of young people,
Speaker 1: which which I think is really interesting because a lot
Speaker 1: of Tory policy and like you know, like like what
Speaker 1: one of the one of the things the Tories did
Speaker 1: right right after they came to power, like right after
Speaker 1: two hunsand and eight was immediate imediately went to war
Speaker 1: against sort of higher education, right, and immediately it started
Speaker 1: to doing increasing fees, and this is you know, this
Speaker 1: is what produces the l two thousand and ten like
Speaker 1: student movement. And it's really interesting to me that like
Speaker 1: it really kind of seems like, I don't know if
Speaker 1: for them, the cure was worse than the disease, because
Speaker 1: like you know, they they they they they survived two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, right, and there was a real moment
Speaker 1: where it looked like globally that the ruling class was
Speaker 1: not going to survive three thousand and eight and that
Speaker 1: like they were they were all about to come down
Speaker 1: and okay, so they survived that, but like, yeah, it
Speaker 1: really it really feels like they've sort of this is
Speaker 1: similar thing has happened in the US, right, which is
Speaker 1: like it turns out if if if if you turn
Speaker 1: an entire class of your population into just like basically
Speaker 1: like bait, basically basically the debt peons, those people get
Speaker 1: really really really pissed off. Yeah, it's like, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: so you don't have a bunch of highly educated people
Speaker 1: who are very very very angry at people who forced
Speaker 1: the Potaking is always pointing out have been through university,
Speaker 1: which is a culture where they're going to be exposed
Speaker 1: to way more leftist ideas. Yeah, I mean, like, like,
Speaker 1: I like this is something I think about a lot,
Speaker 1: which is like I I think I knew I knew
Speaker 1: one openly gay person in high school, Like there were
Speaker 1: zero trans people, and I got I got to like
Speaker 1: the first time I was at least one, well you know,
Speaker 1: look I I I had no idea, and a part
Speaker 1: of reason I no idea, like like that the first
Speaker 1: time I like met someone who was like openly trans
Speaker 1: was like literally the first time I walked onto campus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like like one of the first people I meet
Speaker 1: was like a trans guy who fucking rips. I hope
Speaker 1: I was having a good day. Yeah, and like like that,
Speaker 1: like you know, and I think there's this tendency in
Speaker 1: the US, particularly, there's this tendency to look at the
Speaker 1: university and look at like, yeah, like obvious obviously if
Speaker 1: if if if, if you're going to school in the US,
Speaker 1: and also if you're going to school in the UK,
Speaker 1: you are going to run into a Marxist professor who
Speaker 1: tries to break your strikes, right, Like that's that's that's
Speaker 1: the thing that's true. Like there are bunch of right
Speaker 1: wingers on campus. Like I went to the University of Chicago.
Speaker 1: I have seen my own fucking econ departments. Our movement,
Speaker 1: if that is largely toughs like our Kathleen Stoker whoever,
Speaker 1: if you're familiar, like yep, yep, yeah, our right wing
Speaker 1: professors are almost always toughs. Yeah. But like, like you know,
Speaker 1: and there's there's this real tendency to sort of like
Speaker 1: completely disregard the university as like a thing that can
Speaker 1: produce anything remotely leftist. And I and I think that's
Speaker 1: just wrong. Like there's there's there, like there there was
Speaker 1: a reason a whole bunch of the universities in the
Speaker 1: US we're redesigned after sixty eight, Like they're there there,
Speaker 1: there's there's a reason why, like one of them. If
Speaker 1: you're doing a military coup in a Latin American country,
Speaker 1: one of the first things you do was roll tanks
Speaker 1: onto college campuses. Yeah, if you tanks onto the college campuses.
Speaker 1: Those students are going to fight you until like all
Speaker 1: of them are fucking dead. Like yeah, that's a you know,
Speaker 1: like that that's like as as as as as much
Speaker 1: as you know, you can even look at hippie hippies
Speaker 1: and hot hats thing, right, Yeah, the media image the
Speaker 1: conservatives created, I think it was Nixon, Like the hippies
Speaker 1: and the blue collar working class are incompatible and cannot
Speaker 1: work together. And the hippies are old, university educated effect
Speaker 1: liberals and working class people are conservative reactionaries, and that's
Speaker 1: like largely stuck until you get actual class consciousness building.
Speaker 1: Like this is something we're seeing massively in the UK
Speaker 1: right now. It's like the union, the growing union movement
Speaker 1: like has so many university educated people involved in it
Speaker 1: because like as soon as you start developing class consciousness,
Speaker 1: that that notion you're talking about, like that the universities
Speaker 1: can't produce something leftis just like flies out the window massively. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's why the US there's like this
Speaker 1: massive effort to sort of like I'm just gonna call
Speaker 1: it a fucking PSI up because it is like there's
Speaker 1: this massive PSI up to get people to like not
Speaker 1: think that, like being a barista is like I think
Speaker 1: there produces value, and it's like I'm going to beat
Speaker 1: you to death with a copy of episode of these things.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like with serial killer. Wait wait wait
Speaker 1: if you're like if you're like, well, what's the different
Speaker 1: it's a serial killer and a cop who kills a
Speaker 1: bunch of people. The differences that the couple will never
Speaker 1: be found guilty. Right, Like once you start like, once
Speaker 1: you start looking at what you could call a SSIE up,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, the whole of capitalist media as a
Speaker 1: PSI up. Like yeah, but you know, I think the
Speaker 1: very specific thing here is like okay, if if if,
Speaker 1: if you look at who was in the UAW right now, right,
Speaker 1: the UAW is composed of two kinds of people. It
Speaker 1: is composed of people the remaining people who work in
Speaker 1: the auto industry, and it is composed of grad student unions,
Speaker 1: right Yeah, And I think I saw statistic recently. I
Speaker 1: think it's true of the way I wasn't able to
Speaker 1: verify it, which is that like thirty percent by volume
Speaker 1: of the UAWS total membership right now are from are
Speaker 1: from workers in the university of California system, like the
Speaker 1: you know, the the the the the actual class configuration
Speaker 1: that that that is happening right now. It is this
Speaker 1: very weird sort of alliance of industrial workers and then
Speaker 1: people and then people who've been like people people who
Speaker 1: are highly educated who've been like picked into really shitty
Speaker 1: service jobs. And that's a real like and that's the
Speaker 1: reason I I genuinely I think the reason you see
Speaker 1: so much of this sort of like like the right
Speaker 1: wing population around some of like the productive like working
Speaker 1: classic is specifically because this is this is a genuinely
Speaker 1: very powerful political lines. Even people like Lula, who like
Speaker 1: Lula like fucking hate it. Like you can you can
Speaker 1: go back and read like a million hilarious Lula quotes
Speaker 1: about like how much he hates fucking student radicals from
Speaker 1: like nineteen seventy three. He was just like a football
Speaker 1: fan guy, right, like he was just yeah, but like
Speaker 1: but even even even after becomes a labor leader like
Speaker 1: he he he has he spends a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: time like kicking all the student maoists out of his
Speaker 1: out of his like strikes and stuff, and like like
Speaker 1: he has this great line that was like this guy
Speaker 1: walks into the door. I looked at his hands and
Speaker 1: they were perfectly smooth, and I said, and I said
Speaker 1: to myself, this man is a Trotskyite. But like even
Speaker 1: you know, Lula, who was like he was like the
Speaker 1: like has left around the world. It's very like other
Speaker 1: Trotskyites in the room with you right now. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: I to to to to be fair, to be fair
Speaker 1: there he wasn't actually actually yeah, in the UK, it's
Speaker 1: much more like all the Maoists in the room with
Speaker 1: you right now. That's sh but like like you know,
Speaker 1: but like like even even Lula like basically had to
Speaker 1: abandon that completely because you know, like the it it
Speaker 1: turns out that like you can't actually like you know,
Speaker 1: as as as the sort of union's decayed in Brazil
Speaker 1: as they did everywhere else. I mean, brazilso has friendly
Speaker 1: loge unions, but like Brazil, bil the kind of industrial
Speaker 1: stuff that like existed in Brazil and like the eighties
Speaker 1: is gone, right yeah, and you know, it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: even even now, like yeah, he's his base has a
Speaker 1: bunch of like it has has is it has a
Speaker 1: bunch of just like university educated people working service jobs, right,
Speaker 1: and you know, like there's no there's no actual like
Speaker 1: they're there. There's no version of a functional leftist political
Speaker 1: coalition that doesn't have that. And it's obviously significant that
Speaker 1: two of the most prominent leftist theorists of the last
Speaker 1: like twenty years, David Graeber and Mark Fisher both walked
Speaker 1: in education. Yeah, right, like and Glacia was pointing out
Speaker 1: the whole like second shift stuff, kind of like we
Speaker 1: were talking about ut before with like reproductive labor, and
Speaker 1: he was talking about how like exhausted people are because
Speaker 1: they do their job and then that you know, and
Speaker 1: it's not it's it's not just women anymore. Like this,
Speaker 1: this this labor is expected of everyone. I mean, still
Speaker 1: disproportionately women and disproportionately women of color. But like, you know,
Speaker 1: he was telling a story about like his colleagues working
Speaker 1: in a high school that they that the only time
Speaker 1: they could find to organize or first complain about their
Speaker 1: working conditions and then organized was like when they went
Speaker 1: to the pub after work together. Right, yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: think it's also like I'm pretty sure it's a true,
Speaker 1: which I know it's true, agree, but like the like
Speaker 1: those those were both people from working class families who
Speaker 1: went into academia, which is a very sort of like
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's it's it's a very like
Speaker 1: I guess potent combination for how how you get people
Speaker 1: into radical politics. And I think I think this is yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: again going back to sort of like totally Blair shooting
Speaker 1: himself from the foot, which is like, okay, so you
Speaker 1: you're now you're you're now forcing a bunch of working
Speaker 1: class people into universities, yeah, and then saddling the student debt.
Speaker 1: And it's like I wonder, I wonder, what will understanding
Speaker 1: of the world around you at the cost of becoming
Speaker 1: a debt pon, which will make your understanding of the
Speaker 1: world around you a very radical one very quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like okay, like like the there there is
Speaker 1: a certain extent to which millennials gets sort of less
Speaker 1: radical overtime, but like if you look at the less
Speaker 1: radical overtime, it's like they go from autonomous to corbinites. No,
Speaker 1: and that's still not great if you're like yes, but
Speaker 1: like yeah, it's friends conservative as the age is like
Speaker 1: largely not affecting millennials and gen Z And like, I
Speaker 1: think that I mean, one of the most obvious things
Speaker 1: point to as the climate crisis, right, like previous generations
Speaker 1: when not growing up being like the world will not
Speaker 1: be here when I reach retirement age unless we act.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's impossible for people to sell out
Speaker 1: like that. There are still a limited number of sellout
Speaker 1: jobs you could take, right, But the problem is there's
Speaker 1: just there's there's not enough of them in order to
Speaker 1: like actually buy people off on mass and like any
Speaker 1: other thing, particularly was like you know, the I supposed
Speaker 1: to make you work conservative this property ownership, I'm like,
Speaker 1: who the fuck is going to buy a house? Like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, what, like I wonder under one circumstances, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, I am past the age when my parents
Speaker 1: bought a house. I am past the age when my
Speaker 1: grandparents bought a house. And I know, like one person
Speaker 1: who's bought a house my age, who's like working for
Speaker 1: a like a privatized rail company, and who's who's partner
Speaker 1: like works for the police, Like, oh boy, no one's
Speaker 1: getting houses. Yeah, I mean like my I was, I
Speaker 1: was ausally do my friends like a who has a house,
Speaker 1: Like I have a friend who bought a condo? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like but that's the thing like that, that's that that
Speaker 1: was that was another thing that was like they got
Speaker 1: health with their parents, and it's like health of your
Speaker 1: parents doesn't even get you a fucking house anymore, like
Speaker 1: a condo. I got, like I got like a little
Speaker 1: bit of money after my dad died, and it was
Speaker 1: enough to partially help for my my my surgery and
Speaker 1: then like fight off like rent debt for a few months,
Speaker 1: and that was all and it just disappeared, right, It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know what I mean. I mean, I think,
Speaker 1: I think, like like Britain's inflation is somebody is worse,
Speaker 1: way worse than the US is, which is truly stunning
Speaker 1: and makes me like want to cry because oh my god,
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's something else. It's
Speaker 1: truly so economically the UK is. And again we have
Speaker 1: to just keep on coming back to the fact that
Speaker 1: Britain is just a smoke screen, like the whole of
Speaker 1: British society barely barely exists and is just like a
Speaker 1: collection of reactionary buzzwords, and then like a ton of
Speaker 1: people who are increasingly angryer and angrier about it. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I had a really good conversation a little
Speaker 1: while ago with like an old woman who lives in
Speaker 1: my like neighborhood. We met through some like community project stuff,
Speaker 1: and she just came by while we were hanging out
Speaker 1: on the stoop and U, yeah, we were just talking
Speaker 1: about Boris Johnson. It was right after Boris Johnson had
Speaker 1: come in and she was in like she was basically
Speaker 1: getting revolution pilled, like she like she was not at
Speaker 1: all a political person for as long as I've known her.
Speaker 1: And then like it was just yet another of the
Speaker 1: like revolving door, like like the Tory Party is currently
Speaker 1: running the boss rush strategy that they just like keep
Speaker 1: on swapping out Tory prime ministers as fast as they
Speaker 1: can and like and and I said to her, like,
Speaker 1: when people realize that, by definition, no one will ever
Speaker 1: hold the office who respects what the office is allegedly for,
Speaker 1: like serves the people or whatever. When people realize that, like,
Speaker 1: it's not just that like coincidentally, all of our prime
Speaker 1: ministers went to Eton and all of those like when
Speaker 1: they were in when they were then in Oxford, they
Speaker 1: were in like the Bullingdon Boys Club. It's not a coincidence.
Speaker 1: It's like that's the pipeline is how you get there. Like,
Speaker 1: when people realize that and they realize that no one
Speaker 1: will ever hold the office of prime as to who
Speaker 1: is there to to serve the country, They're gonna realize
Speaker 1: that they have to take care of each other instead,
Speaker 1: and we have to build something that we have to
Speaker 1: we have to build society from the ground up. And
Speaker 1: she was like yeah, she was like, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's what's literally happening in our community right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's sort of encouraging because like I
Speaker 1: don't know, like just the absolute wreckage that was Corbinism
Speaker 1: of just like the complete shit show of how that
Speaker 1: entire project went. Yeah, Like I know it's caused some
Speaker 1: people to sort of like basically like you know, every
Speaker 1: every every every every successor generation of politics has like
Speaker 1: the person who used to be a Trotskyite who is
Speaker 1: now like a labor minister or is now like a
Speaker 1: fucking Tory minister. You're a pee boot judge and Kamala Harris,
Speaker 1: who are both raised by market academics. Yeah yeah, well
Speaker 1: I mean even like like Google, I am blink Goo Google,
Speaker 1: who build a Blasio's wife is Okay? She was she was,
Speaker 1: she was one of the founding members. They go, he'd
Speaker 1: be a river collective. Oh wow, yeah, like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of shit like that. Yeah, but like yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: but like it as much as this is a thing,
Speaker 1: I don't know, And insofar as it seems like the
Speaker 1: UK has the potential to be something that's not this,
Speaker 1: it's it seems like it's cool. It genuinely seems like
Speaker 1: it's going to be through labor and it's going to
Speaker 1: be through sort of street actions and organizing that's that's
Speaker 1: not taking places at the Labor Party. And I think hoping,
Speaker 1: like practically everyone I know who was invested in Corbyn
Speaker 1: is now like no party could possibly solve the problems
Speaker 1: of the UK because they watched like a guy, Oh
Speaker 1: here's a great movie recommendation, a very British coup. If
Speaker 1: people haven't seen this, and it's it's pretty obscure, so
Speaker 1: you probably haven't. But like it's it's just about a
Speaker 1: guy who is on the side of the working class
Speaker 1: becoming Prime Minister and then how the media likes like
Speaker 1: character assassinate him and have him removed from power, and
Speaker 1: like it's almost beat for beat what happened to Corbyn
Speaker 1: and it was made like the nineties. Um, but like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a guy comes along and floats like very
Speaker 1: mild social Democrat policies, and the entire media class says
Speaker 1: that he's going to like drag the country back to
Speaker 1: the seventies, and like there's there's like um like soldier
Speaker 1: like they're they're like units in the army doing target
Speaker 1: practice on pictures of him, and like people openly declaring
Speaker 1: that they will assassinate him if he comes into power
Speaker 1: and shit like this, and it's just like and then
Speaker 1: like people within the party work to sabotage his election.
Speaker 1: The election in twenty seventeen was lost by like two
Speaker 1: thousand votes, you know, and then it's pushed out and
Speaker 1: replaced by the worst imaginable neoliberal top top cop ghoul
Speaker 1: Kia Starma um. And like that spectacle has radicalized people
Speaker 1: so hard. Like I don't know, yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: I know anyone who who who who supported Corbyn who
Speaker 1: now thinks that our problems can be solved without mass
Speaker 1: rising or at least like without union power basically like
Speaker 1: kicking the shit out of the government. I don't like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't really the the UK is we are we
Speaker 1: are don't vote pilled, I think, yeah, which which I
Speaker 1: think is yeah, I don't know like it. It strikes
Speaker 1: me in my sort of like I don't know my
Speaker 1: cursory knowledge of British history that like the most effective
Speaker 1: sort of British left wing political movements in a long
Speaker 1: time was the poll tech stuff in the nineties, which
Speaker 1: was defeated like into almost entirely by accommodation of street
Speaker 1: movements and like non party organizing. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know that the UK's did a very weird
Speaker 1: position where it's like I don't know if there's a
Speaker 1: way it could have been different, but it's like it
Speaker 1: very much looked like the like like the sort of
Speaker 1: just like the incredibly furthest right, like just like absolute
Speaker 1: most shit parts of British society. We're going like far
Speaker 1: right parts of praciety, We're gonn the empower forever. But
Speaker 1: then somehow they managed to do the thing that social
Speaker 1: democratic governments always do, which is like they they managed
Speaker 1: to produce a series of of like changes in in
Speaker 1: the UK's class structure such that like they produced an
Speaker 1: entire like like they they like they you know, well
Speaker 1: I mean they they got their worst nightmare, which that
Speaker 1: they actually got into power and got to do all
Speaker 1: their policies. It turns out if you actually do all
Speaker 1: of their policies, the entire world implodes. And with with that,
Speaker 1: with that, with that, with with without some kind of
Speaker 1: functional opposition to make sure if they don't literally like
Speaker 1: press press to destroy the economy button. They were article
Speaker 1: that was like Sunak is going to raise energy bills
Speaker 1: like forty percent in April, and I just like, I
Speaker 1: just being like, they're just daring the working class to
Speaker 1: overthrow them at this point, Like, yeah, it's not that,
Speaker 1: but like I've seen the same take. Um. The leftist
Speaker 1: journalist Owen Jones said a little while like when lisz
Speaker 1: Trust was in he was like, I'm pretty sure she's
Speaker 1: actually an undercover Trutskit trying to initiate revolution by doing
Speaker 1: the worst policies possible. Like it really feels like that sometimes.
Speaker 1: But it is just like, as you say, the nightmare
Speaker 1: of their politics that like they can't they are just
Speaker 1: um incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing.
Speaker 1: And speaking of being incapable of conceiving of the harm
Speaker 1: that they're doing, here's an ad for Raytheon. I don't
Speaker 1: know something. So when I said before about like the
Speaker 1: generational divide and how reactionary like older people in the
Speaker 1: UK are, that applies to some of our like our
Speaker 1: older leftists as well. So there is this like offshoot
Speaker 1: of the of CPGB, the Communist Potty of Great Britain
Speaker 1: called CPGB mL the Communist Ploty of Great Britain Marxist Leninist.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, they are fascinating. So basically so basically there
Speaker 1: was let me just let me just let me just
Speaker 1: refresh my memory. But like there was, um, there was
Speaker 1: a split from the from from CPGB a couple decades ago,
Speaker 1: I think where people were just like where where basically
Speaker 1: it was it was to do with the politics of
Speaker 1: like supporting North Korea, and like there was some Maoists
Speaker 1: involved and shit like this. Um, there are some people
Speaker 1: who involved who have done some like wild stuff in
Speaker 1: leftist terms, Like there was someone who was involved with
Speaker 1: the Spanish Civil War and then like moved to China
Speaker 1: and took like positions in Mao's government during the Cultural Revolution,
Speaker 1: like a boy who is like now, I think the
Speaker 1: Honorary President of CPGBML. That's um Isabel Crook. But basically
Speaker 1: what happened was um when the when cpgb kind of
Speaker 1: split apart in the sixties, one of the splinter groups
Speaker 1: was called the Revolutionary Marxist Leninist League and then and
Speaker 1: then that immediately splintered as well, and they and then
Speaker 1: they had a thing called the Association of Communist Workers
Speaker 1: and that was founded by Harpell bra Now this is
Speaker 1: bear in mind the Bras for a second b R
Speaker 1: A R because this is really interesting. So basically Harpell
Speaker 1: bra Um, Yeah, he's he's old as dirt now he's
Speaker 1: still kicking around. He does some like um like vaud
Speaker 1: chats with like everyone's favorite real definitely real communist Caleb
Speaker 1: morpen Um and the Bras because of their role in
Speaker 1: this like splinter group and then the founding of CPGBML,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a dynastic family of communists. Like
Speaker 1: so Harpall Bra is the father of Joeti bra who's
Speaker 1: like a notorious tough communist and and like she isn't
Speaker 1: officially in charge of CpG BML, but like apparently nothing,
Speaker 1: nothing is allowed that goes against her. So it's like
Speaker 1: they've they've actually put a dynasty in place. Oh boy. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: But as I say, that's all, that's all part of
Speaker 1: the fact that like them, the older people in the
Speaker 1: UK are just like shockingly reactionary. It's good stuff. It's
Speaker 1: good stuff. Like they're trying to do like working class
Speaker 1: organizing around how much they hate trans people. It's really good.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. I mean that's the one thing I'll say
Speaker 1: about the US, which is that like, like we don't
Speaker 1: have as many like there are lib Turfs, but like
Speaker 1: the lib Turfs don't really sort of like like that
Speaker 1: they're they're they're kind of walled off from like toism
Speaker 1: is a very British thing I don't like. I yeah,
Speaker 1: like I've seen Americans worry about it a lot. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's going to take off with you guys,
Speaker 1: because we have a politics of British exceptionalism, which is
Speaker 1: directly contrasted to US politics. Like it's very similar to
Speaker 1: like how can like Canadian liberals work where like everything
Speaker 1: every place where we can be progressive. We try to
Speaker 1: pride ourselves on not being as bad as the US,
Speaker 1: and so like the specter of the GOP not only
Speaker 1: like does not only do toffs literally receive money from
Speaker 1: far right evangelical Christian groups from the US, but like
Speaker 1: the fact that the GP, the GOP is there, gives
Speaker 1: like supposed feminists in the UK this cover to pretend
Speaker 1: they're still progressives because like this, they support abortion until
Speaker 1: the candidate comes along who hates trans people, who also
Speaker 1: wants to know to make abortion illegal. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: think that. I don't know, I could be proven wrong
Speaker 1: about this, but I don't think that, like, uh, turfs
Speaker 1: get a foothold in the US in the same way
Speaker 1: because you're like reactionaries just function a bit a bit differently,
Speaker 1: And like the trying to like, um, divide the progressive
Speaker 1: left with turfs is a very conscious strategy that's kind
Speaker 1: of like been designed and constructed for the UK, Like
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, it's it's liberals who are like, we
Speaker 1: are so progressive because we're not the US, who are
Speaker 1: then amenable to tough talking points in the UK who
Speaker 1: are really really out of touch. And again there's like
Speaker 1: the general rational thing. But like I think that I
Speaker 1: think that tough Island will continue to be notoriously tough Island.
Speaker 1: Like I think that tough ism will continue to be
Speaker 1: a very very very British phenomenon. I have seen what
Speaker 1: you're talking about with like swafs in the US because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I will say, like the other cultry I
Speaker 1: think is particularly really bad with this in Mexico has
Speaker 1: an enormous turf problem, like in ways that are incredibly
Speaker 1: dangerous for about this on this podcast. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very bleak. Um. Yeah, I don't know. The US, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the US, the dangers mostly from the far right and
Speaker 1: also from people like who who are like libs but
Speaker 1: who are like really like like I don't know, like
Speaker 1: New New York Times collaborator types. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's the same thing here we have like I
Speaker 1: don't know if you know the comedian Rob Delaney, Um,
Speaker 1: he's American, but he moved to the UK and he
Speaker 1: has been, you know, fighting for a long time alongside
Speaker 1: like union movements. I think he's like mostly a liberal,
Speaker 1: Like he calls himself a socialist, but I don't think
Speaker 1: he's I don't think he would call himself a communist
Speaker 1: or anything like this. Um, But like he said that
Speaker 1: when he moved to the UK, he was like, you're
Speaker 1: always pointing to American media by being like, look how
Speaker 1: bad Fox News is, but truly every outlet of the
Speaker 1: UK media is Fox News, Like yeah, yeah, the UK
Speaker 1: media is like somehow more fucked than the American media,
Speaker 1: which really amazing. That has to do with that, that
Speaker 1: that that that ties in really strongly with out without
Speaker 1: a tradition of I was gonna say the lovable public
Speaker 1: nonsens again, No, that's not it. The bad thing, the
Speaker 1: evil thing, Tony Blair there it is, um Yeah, Tony
Speaker 1: Blair was so close with Rupert Murdoch that he literally
Speaker 1: fucked Rupertmodock's wife. He's literally like she's the godfather of
Speaker 1: Rupertmodock's kids or the other way around. I remember, like
Speaker 1: he is he is like that with Rupert. There's a
Speaker 1: famous picture of like Blair reading the Sun and fuck
Speaker 1: the Sun reading the Sun newspaper and like the headline
Speaker 1: is like we love Blair or whatever. Sidebar. Briefly, my
Speaker 1: uncle died in the Hillsborough disaster. If people aren't familiar
Speaker 1: with that, I explained the whole thing. But like the
Speaker 1: passion with which I want the Sun newspaper destroyed in
Speaker 1: the most literal sense possible, Yeah, fucking come and arrest me.
Speaker 1: I will I will stand up in court and say
Speaker 1: this is on behalf of my goddamn family. I am
Speaker 1: allowed to have this opinion. But but like the way
Speaker 1: that like new Labor was able to tie it all
Speaker 1: together as this, like the progressive newspapers and the reactionary newspapers,
Speaker 1: it's all working for the ruling class, and then like neoliberalism,
Speaker 1: you know, benefits them enormously. So like we have where
Speaker 1: before we had the kind of faintest illusion of their
Speaker 1: being like a left wing media and a right wing media.
Speaker 1: Now it's like there's the ruling class media, and then
Speaker 1: there are like tiny, tiny, tiny independent leftist media sources. Right,
Speaker 1: there's like yeah YouTubers like me. There's like Novara Media,
Speaker 1: there's Owen Joey. Yeah, they're like they're like Trotskyites, like
Speaker 1: making newspapers to fund their like well mostly to fund
Speaker 1: making more newspapers, to be honest, but like you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and they're they're just these tiny little
Speaker 1: crumbs and the rest of the media is just fucking
Speaker 1: dog shit to the point where like it's actually quite funny,
Speaker 1: Like it's gotten to the point where they're complacent because
Speaker 1: they're so not used to dealing with anything that represents
Speaker 1: the working class that they like. They recently had Mike Lynch,
Speaker 1: the head of the RMT union, on a bunch of
Speaker 1: different like UK talk shows where they were they were
Speaker 1: expecting to be able to like gotcha him with the
Speaker 1: most transparent bullshit m Yeah. Richard Madley said to him, like,
Speaker 1: what about the spirit of Christmas, your stripes ability to
Speaker 1: go home and see their family? And he was like,
Speaker 1: what about workers getting paid better? Dick head? And it
Speaker 1: was just like it was just like game over me really,
Speaker 1: like they are so not used to talking to anyone
Speaker 1: who cares about the working class that when someone like
Speaker 1: it just not even an especially radical just like a
Speaker 1: union leader comes on to their show, he just owns them,
Speaker 1: like he just butts that goddamn biscuits like it's it's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We we had this with the rail strike. We're like,
Speaker 1: I remember, how was it businesses that are it was
Speaker 1: it was one of the business press guys had had
Speaker 1: someone they were like they were talking to like a
Speaker 1: rail worker. Yeah, and you can see on air this
Speaker 1: guy realizing that these people have zero days off a
Speaker 1: year and going what the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, sort of
Speaker 1: like like even even the like business class guys were
Speaker 1: like wait, hold on, like what do you mean you
Speaker 1: have zero days off a year? Like what It's like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like a human empathy that like that they are
Speaker 1: not expecting to be a problem for them because like
Speaker 1: they're all parasitic fucking goals. And then like they come
Speaker 1: into contact but that they've been lied to about the
Speaker 1: lives that the working classes have to live. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then a working class class and comes on and just
Speaker 1: tells them like, oh no, it's like this, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we should do something about the Yeah. It's like yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's sort of like I don't know that that's
Speaker 1: that's sort of that sort of shield, Like it's kind
Speaker 1: of the kind of installation that gets built up just yeah,
Speaker 1: do you do you have anything else you want to say? Stuff?
Speaker 1: Fuck the police? Uh um, listen to Red Planet. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm plugging stuff. I'm going to say I'm spy from US.
Speaker 1: I make video essays on YouTube about politics, philosophy, sometimes
Speaker 1: about media. I did a little bit of about Yay
Speaker 1: going on info Wars and all his anti semitism and stuff.
Speaker 1: Pretty recently, I'm doing something about climate doumerism and how
Speaker 1: I believe that the world is not ending. It's just
Speaker 1: the collapse of the imperial core. And people are projecting
Speaker 1: the inability to get Starbucks and Deliverux as the apocalypse. Um,
Speaker 1: that should be out sometime soon ish. But what I
Speaker 1: really want you it could happen here. Listener to check
Speaker 1: out is Red Planet because I think you'll really like it.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a weekly leftist round table where we
Speaker 1: talked about how to make the world a better place. Um,
Speaker 1: it's every Sunday eight pm to eleven pm UK time.
Speaker 1: Please Google to figure out what that is for you.
Speaker 1: It's on Twitch dot tv slash red Planet Live, and
Speaker 1: we also have a podcast feed if you want to
Speaker 1: catch up on all the archive. Episodes should be available
Speaker 1: wherever podcasts are sold. Um, it's called Red Planet, and
Speaker 1: it's a good time. And we also, I mean we
Speaker 1: have a lot of we have some some some solid
Speaker 1: overlap where it could happen to year. Actually, we recently
Speaker 1: interviewed maya crime you as well, so you know, if
Speaker 1: you want to content, we had a good chat with
Speaker 1: that and I can't imagine you don't because she's delightful,
Speaker 1: wonder wonderful person, wonderful, wonderful little kitty cat. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: this has been It can happen here. You can find
Speaker 1: us in the places. You can wage a tonal war
Speaker 1: against the British imperialist ruling class. You can do this
Speaker 1: from your home. Yep, I've cool. I've been, Sophie. I've
Speaker 1: been playing with a Browning three six four switch blade,
Speaker 1: only in my house where it is legal to have it.
Speaker 1: And I apologize again to Daniel for all the clicking noises.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome. It could happen here once again,
Speaker 1: hosted by myself Andrew along with the rest of the crew,
Speaker 1: Mea and James. All right, and today I want to
Speaker 1: take a minute to talk about Ubuntu, and not the
Speaker 1: Linux software, but the African philosophy. Ubuntu is philosophical concepts
Speaker 1: for those who don't know, derived from some of the
Speaker 1: diverse and disposed indigenous traditions of the roughly three hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty million and band To speaking peoples of Africa. Bantu,
Speaker 1: coming from the Zulu wood for people, is a language
Speaker 1: family spoken by approximately four hundred distinct ethnic groups and
Speaker 1: splinter approximately four hundred and forty six eighty distinct languages
Speaker 1: slash dialects born as a result of the great band
Speaker 1: to migrations that I could in two major waves about
Speaker 1: three thousand and two thousand years ago across Central, East
Speaker 1: and South Africa. Contrary to the maxim I think. Therefore,
Speaker 1: I am Ubuntu, roughly translated from the Guni Bantu languages
Speaker 1: like Osa and Zulu, means humanity and more specifically humanity
Speaker 1: towards others. I am because you are. There are of course,
Speaker 1: various names to the concept from language to language and
Speaker 1: ethnic group to ethnic group, including Boto, Muntu, Mundu, Batu, Utu, etc.
Speaker 1: But Ubuntu is definitely the mo was prominent and internationally recognized.
Speaker 1: According to the African Journal of Social Work, Buntu is
Speaker 1: a collection of values and practices the people of Africa
Speaker 1: or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. Rather,
Speaker 1: nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups,
Speaker 1: they all point to one thing. An authentic individual human
Speaker 1: being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental,
Speaker 1: and spiritual world. This, of course, is not unique to Africa.
Speaker 1: What's any specific culture or any specific ethnic group. I
Speaker 1: think we're finally sort of mirroring ideas in a variety
Speaker 1: of contexts, because I think it really is something that's
Speaker 1: fundamentally human. But I think it is good to look
Speaker 1: at how these ideas have manifested in those more specific contexts.
Speaker 1: I mean, in the aura literature of South Africa with
Speaker 1: Buon Tursman existence. From as early as the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: the reported translations for the term have covered the field
Speaker 1: of human nature, humanness, humanity, virtue, goodness, and kindness, and
Speaker 1: so it's meant to be a sort of a parallel
Speaker 1: to the abstract idea of humanity as a philosophy or
Speaker 1: as a world view. Of Puntu really was popularized in
Speaker 1: the beginning of the nineteen fifties, most of them being
Speaker 1: the writings of Jordan Cushion Gabane published in the African
Speaker 1: Drum magazine. From then into the nineteen seventies, bunt began
Speaker 1: to be used as a specific form of African humanism, because,
Speaker 1: of course, in that sixties and seventies period you had
Speaker 1: a lot of afrocentric and pan African and black power
Speaker 1: ideas coming to prominence around the world. This is, of
Speaker 1: course all so coincided with the period of decolonization, or
Speaker 1: rather formal political independence was taken place in nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and this desire for these newly independent countries to pursue Africanization,
Speaker 1: to sort of let go of some of the symbolic
Speaker 1: aspects of colonial rule. Of course, that process has not
Speaker 1: really been completes and in many ways the post colonial
Speaker 1: status is equivalent to the colonial status. But in some
Speaker 1: ways some leaders were trying to pursue sort of a
Speaker 1: new African specific humanism as a philosophy for the Bushoning
Speaker 1: countries at the time. This is a part of the
Speaker 1: episode where we tell everyone to read Fano again. Of
Speaker 1: course read Fano and reads is there? But I found
Speaker 1: interested is that this this term Buntu's idea of Ubuntu
Speaker 1: particularly found it's It was basically picked up in Zimbabwe
Speaker 1: and in South Africa in a very specific context where
Speaker 1: there was a transition to majority rule. In nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: ubuntu Ism or hun who is um was presented as
Speaker 1: the political ideology of newly independent Zimbabwe. A guy named
Speaker 1: Stan lack Ajwt Sam Kange published treatise basically on hun
Speaker 1: who is Ambunduism or zimbabwe Indigenous political philosophy, and he
Speaker 1: was basically trying to outline what the three major maxims
Speaker 1: that she this philosophy should be. Of course, I would
Speaker 1: note that his interpretation being a statesman was notably hierarchical,
Speaker 1: but for the reasons I will go into a bit later,
Speaker 1: I don't believe that makes the core of unto necessarily hierarchical.
Speaker 1: But the three maxims that he had in mind for
Speaker 1: Untuism or who who is um was that to be
Speaker 1: human is to affirm one's humanity by recognizing humanity of others,
Speaker 1: and on that basis establish in respectful human relations with them.
Speaker 1: The second maxim means that if and when one is
Speaker 1: faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation
Speaker 1: of life of another human being, that one should up
Speaker 1: for the preservation of life. And then the third maxim
Speaker 1: says that the king owed his status, including all the
Speaker 1: powers associated with it, to the will of the people
Speaker 1: under him. As I think that's where you get most
Speaker 1: prominently the sense of hierarchy that would pervade Cittain interpretations
Speaker 1: of UBUNTU, This idea of a sort of a benevolent
Speaker 1: rulership that these benevolent statesmen and kings and prime ministers
Speaker 1: of presidents that they would they were just exercising the
Speaker 1: will of the people. And of course this is a
Speaker 1: mythology that is interpreting, reinterpreted across various different regimes. In
Speaker 1: South Africa, in the nineteen nineties, boon two as a
Speaker 1: concept was used as sort of a guiding ideal for
Speaker 1: the transition from a part time to majority rule. I
Speaker 1: think around this time is when the international community started
Speaker 1: to hear more about the term ubun two, particularly as
Speaker 1: it appears in the epilogue of the Interim Constitution of
Speaker 1: South Africa published nineteen ninety three. There's a need for understanding,
Speaker 1: but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not
Speaker 1: for retaliation. I need for uboon two, but not for
Speaker 1: victimization end quote. Of course, as we see in South
Speaker 1: Africa today, that didn't play out very well. The understanding
Speaker 1: has not reached that points, reparations has not fully been achieved. Um.
Speaker 1: And there's a I would say distinct lack of ubuntu. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they kind of brought in Bank of America instead, which
Speaker 1: it didn't go great. Right, Yeah, they do. It's very um,
Speaker 1: it's very big. In Kinya Rwanda, Ubu Muntu I think. Um,
Speaker 1: but like you'll see the phrase or that that were
Speaker 1: a lot around Rwanda, and like if you go to
Speaker 1: the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum, you'll see it a lot there, right,
Speaker 1: Like that is the country that has with some authoritarian issues,
Speaker 1: like has quite aside the differences which would previously allowed
Speaker 1: the genocide to happen. I guess that's fair to say. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's what the Tutsi and the Hutu. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: the tire you often get missed out. Um yeah, but
Speaker 1: yeah they Yeah, that's actually yeah, terrible terrible thing. If
Speaker 1: people ever go to Rwanda, would highly recommend going to Rwanda,
Speaker 1: Like the Kigali genos erb or a museum is an
Speaker 1: important thing. It's a very very well curated museum of Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you said, a terrible terrible thing that happened in
Speaker 1: South Africa. The transition to democracy and announcement Dal's presidency
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four, like I said, really brought the
Speaker 1: term to more well known outside the use and one
Speaker 1: of the people who was a main main proponent of
Speaker 1: that was Desmond Tutu, who was the chairman of the
Speaker 1: South Africa and Truth and Reconciliation Commission and also a preacher.
Speaker 1: He sort of advocated a Ubuntu theology that was really
Speaker 1: formative in the development of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Speaker 1: He sort of moved the idea of Untu from simply
Speaker 1: an African philosophy based on African values or community and
Speaker 1: kinship to Christian values and identity with the Creator God.
Speaker 1: It was a sort of a strategy in an attempt
Speaker 1: to recover from the pains and brokenness of apartheid, you know,
Speaker 1: anchoring Uuntu into these into the Christian ideals of forgiveness
Speaker 1: and reconciliation as gifts from God for peaceful communal coexistence.
Speaker 1: And I hopefully not being tweet offensive when I say
Speaker 1: this to me, that's a quintessential example of how Christian
Speaker 1: pacification hampers to colonization efforts, because I've seen often that
Speaker 1: Christian notion of forgiveness and reconciliation two ins the blame
Speaker 1: onto the victims for not forgiven and expects little to
Speaker 1: nothing from the offender Excepaian and apology offense, not even
Speaker 1: any restitution or reparations. And so for all the talk
Speaker 1: of Ubuntu theological Ubuntu and otherwise situations, South Africa is
Speaker 1: still very much whack. And I think that that idea
Speaker 1: that oh well this is is in the past, it's over,
Speaker 1: get over it kind of thing is problematic, and it's
Speaker 1: so then it needs to be resolved the things so
Speaker 1: that the colonization is going to take place. Right, So,
Speaker 1: putting aside the theological applications some one problematic theological applications,
Speaker 1: the UBUNTU wild view is echoed in some senses worldwide,
Speaker 1: you know, social ecology when vv or mutually all these
Speaker 1: concepts point to our interconnected us as people and really
Speaker 1: point to the interconnectness that we have as people that
Speaker 1: our systems I'm certainly not built to support. We say
Speaker 1: that we see that in capitalism, you know, and doesn't
Speaker 1: embrace the interconnectness of all people. It places us in
Speaker 1: opposition with another. It atomizes us, it individualizes us. It
Speaker 1: alienates us from people, from ourselves and from others, so
Speaker 1: we must compete and stuff for the sake of survival. Alienation,
Speaker 1: of course, in a capitalist contexts referring to our separation
Speaker 1: of our abilities from ourselves, making us into the mere
Speaker 1: tools for the use and benefit of our bosses. I know,
Speaker 1: the workplace is definitely not something that we have. Is
Speaker 1: that it is based on mutual aid or woundtu you know,
Speaker 1: rather than working together, working harmoniously, having access to the
Speaker 1: means of production and sharing in an equally place, in
Speaker 1: situation of a feud, of competition, of struggling constantly and
Speaker 1: being squeezed and wrung out for whatever our bosses can
Speaker 1: get from us. Yeah, it's when you said, like earlier,
Speaker 1: that one of the key tenants was right, Like recognizing
Speaker 1: humanity and other people affirms your own humanity. And I
Speaker 1: might be paraphrasing that, but like that's exactly what capitalism
Speaker 1: doesn't do. It just sees people as like a tool
Speaker 1: to create more capital, to create more more income. Like
Speaker 1: it doesn't recognize humanity. It sees you as a means,
Speaker 1: not an ends, right exactly, And I mean unlike in
Speaker 1: a communal system where your service to others, you know,
Speaker 1: it's mutual, it's reciprocal, it's voluntary. We find ourselves in
Speaker 1: a situation where we must give away our labor, our time,
Speaker 1: and really our whole lives just to survive. But that
Speaker 1: giving is not done out of the goodness of our
Speaker 1: hearts or or as part of a system, a sort
Speaker 1: of a network of supports, a safety nets or anything.
Speaker 1: It's just clawing towards survival, you know, disconnected from the
Speaker 1: well being of the whole. Yeah, very much. Everything around
Speaker 1: us has been you know, manufactured, it's been transport, has
Speaker 1: been assembled and sold by other people, right, people just
Speaker 1: like us, workers, just like us. M Those people have
Speaker 1: lives just like our words. They have all the same
Speaker 1: struggles that we do. But instead of relating to these people,
Speaker 1: instead of freely sharing the fruit to our labor, relating
Speaker 1: to the things that we have to buy, or we
Speaker 1: don't see the work in people behind them. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think another aspect of it is that which I find
Speaker 1: particularly strange about, you know, the hundhu is Am or
Speaker 1: Buntoism that some Kang was trying to advocate, is that
Speaker 1: I don't believe that UBUNTU or mutual lead, or any
Speaker 1: of the principles that are Bunto exposes is something that
Speaker 1: this stage is compatible with. M I don't think this
Speaker 1: STA is compatible with the acknowledgment of one's responsibility to
Speaker 1: their fellow humans and the world around them. You know,
Speaker 1: the state has built an exclusion on domination and deprivation
Speaker 1: and the hierarchical division of the state, generating this sort
Speaker 1: of inequality and decision making power and influencing about over
Speaker 1: own affairs. It's about depriving certain people and elevating others,
Speaker 1: whereas UBUNTU is supposed to be about the importance of
Speaker 1: the humanity of both the individual in the community and
Speaker 1: about how all people are connected in a way that
Speaker 1: is meant to support and add to and contribute and
Speaker 1: clean and service one another. If that makes sense. You
Speaker 1: don't like the idea of this sort of community where
Speaker 1: everyone is giving and sharing and taking and everybody has
Speaker 1: something to contribute to this human whole. I feel like
Speaker 1: there's something that's lost when that whole is disrupted by
Speaker 1: certain people being elevated to a start, to us of
Speaker 1: having more power over others. I mean, part of that
Speaker 1: humanity has to entail freedom to self organized, freedom to
Speaker 1: ls who, freedom to disassociate, decision making power, autonomy, you know, Otherwise,
Speaker 1: what kind of humanity is that? Really? How can people
Speaker 1: access their full humanity in themselves if they're being deprived
Speaker 1: by others on how can those others who are depriving
Speaker 1: people have access their full humanity when they're depriving others.
Speaker 1: If you get what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's perfectly right. Yeah, And I mean pretty much the
Speaker 1: same thing with the system I mean with the capitalism,
Speaker 1: with the state, I mean patriarchy, which also elevates some
Speaker 1: people above others and denies those marginalized others full access
Speaker 1: to humanity. All of us are restricted in some ways
Speaker 1: from understanding ourselves, in ourselves and through others by the
Speaker 1: ideology and system of patriarchy. And of course the schools
Speaker 1: are out saying, but what could be more incompatible with
Speaker 1: the Buntu than clunialism. You know, it doesn't simply deny
Speaker 1: the humanity of those that exploit. It also strips the
Speaker 1: humanity the exploiters. I mean, as a Missa my referenced
Speaker 1: earlier wrote in Discourse and Cluinalism, colonization works to decivilize
Speaker 1: the colonizer, to brutalize him in the sentence of the
Speaker 1: in a true sense of the wood, to degrade him
Speaker 1: and to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race, hatred,
Speaker 1: and more relativism. And we must show that each time
Speaker 1: a head is cut off or an eye put out
Speaker 1: in Vietnam and in France, they accept the fact each
Speaker 1: time a little girl is assaulted, and in France they
Speaker 1: accept the fact. Each time a Madagascar is tortured, and
Speaker 1: in France they accept the fact. Civilization acquires another deadweight,
Speaker 1: a universal regression takes place, a gang green sets in,
Speaker 1: a center of infection begins to spread. And that at
Speaker 1: the end of all these treatise treaties that have been violated,
Speaker 1: all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive
Speaker 1: expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have
Speaker 1: been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have
Speaker 1: been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride
Speaker 1: has been encouraged, all the boostfulness that has been displayed,
Speaker 1: a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe,
Speaker 1: and slowly, but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery. Powerful
Speaker 1: words as usual from that great Yeah, that's very good. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's a lot of potential in
Speaker 1: the interpretation of a boon too, right, which is both
Speaker 1: a flaw and a strength. And when I get into
Speaker 1: the criticism a bit more you'll see why. But regardless,
Speaker 1: of course, there's value to be clean from dios understandings
Speaker 1: there's power in finding our roots to secure our future.
Speaker 1: And whether a partnership and affinity group, an organization, a community,
Speaker 1: or beyond. This basic principle of recognizing the authentic individual
Speaker 1: human being as part of a larger and more significant relational,
Speaker 1: communal society, of environmental and spiritual world is vital process
Speaker 1: of social revolution, of confronting the powerful, to protests and
Speaker 1: occupations and reclamations and expropriations, in refusing to cooperate with
Speaker 1: the powers of being through strikes and boycotts and mutinies
Speaker 1: and other forms of interaction, and then building new institutions
Speaker 1: like cooperatives and popular assemblies and libraries of things. All
Speaker 1: of those things, all those aspects of social revolution allow
Speaker 1: us to assert ourselves, to recognize the mutual and ecality
Speaker 1: and connection of all people. You know, a police smithly
Speaker 1: boone two is open and available to others. Its a
Speaker 1: flaming to others. I feel threatened that others are able
Speaker 1: and good, and so by recognizing with the boons you know,
Speaker 1: recognize and it, you're part of a greater whole. That
Speaker 1: whole is diminished when others are humiliated, or diminished when
Speaker 1: others are tortured or oppressed, and so someone with boon
Speaker 1: to someone who recognizes the interconnectness of all humanity is
Speaker 1: someone who has to be engaged in some form of
Speaker 1: social revolution, who has to be engaged in trying to
Speaker 1: free people, help people free themselves so that they can
Speaker 1: engage in their own humanity and so add to your
Speaker 1: own humanity in turn. And when it comes to the commons,
Speaker 1: common ownership, you know, the reversal of the enclosure movement, socialization,
Speaker 1: what if you want to call it, that is also
Speaker 1: something that ultimately is about the bonds between people, about
Speaker 1: the distribution of the means of production and of the
Speaker 1: fruits of all of our labor so that all can enjoy,
Speaker 1: so it all can have a vested interest in our
Speaker 1: collective prosperity. When it comes to you know, community work,
Speaker 1: you know, unto is about this idea that we can
Speaker 1: work together, you know, in growing our food and distributing
Speaker 1: when we need. This idea that being a mother or
Speaker 1: being a father, being a parent, it's not just about
Speaker 1: being that to your own biological children, but rather in
Speaker 1: recognizing that we are all connected in that way. It's
Speaker 1: it's like a it's like an understanding that there should
Speaker 1: not be this idea of or funds right, this idea
Speaker 1: that we're all meant to look out for each other,
Speaker 1: that no person is meant to be cut off from
Speaker 1: the sort of care it is necessary for caring into
Speaker 1: a fully realized person. I mean, even in the realm
Speaker 1: of education, you see potential applications if we're gountu in
Speaker 1: recognizing that everyone has different skills and strengths, that people
Speaker 1: are not isolated, and that through mutual support they can
Speaker 1: help each other to complete themselves. As Ortry Tang argues,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there needs to be an education
Speaker 1: that recognizes the importance of community, society, and environmental well being,
Speaker 1: one that emphasizes the connection between all those things, one
Speaker 1: that involves interaction, participation, recognition, respect, and inclusion as core
Speaker 1: tenants of the learning process, of students learning from facilitators
Speaker 1: and the facilitators learning from students. Of recognizing that we
Speaker 1: hold both positions, and that those positions are held from
Speaker 1: the moment we're born to the moment we eventually pass
Speaker 1: on as rich as the potential of unto. Maybe I
Speaker 1: don't want to put it out as if it's some
Speaker 1: sort of like flawless and perfect philosophy. Right, it's not
Speaker 1: above critique. It's not immune, as I mentioned before, to
Speaker 1: hierarchical interpretations and applications. It's very much right for liberal sensibilities,
Speaker 1: as we've seen Departments of State speaking of Untu diplomacy
Speaker 1: and unto foreign policy and that sort of thing. Some
Speaker 1: Kang's idea that you know, part of UBUNTUO is that
Speaker 1: the king always a status including all the powers associated
Speaker 1: with it to build the people under him. I mean
Speaker 1: right now and for a while now, Boons has not
Speaker 1: had a single solid framework of what exactly entails, what
Speaker 1: it makes up, what it doesn't. There's still a lot
Speaker 1: of fuzziness and inconsistency within different people's interpretations of the
Speaker 1: definition of Untu. As one scholar in Yasha and Booti
Speaker 1: has noted, there's an interpretation, So an interpretation of a
Speaker 1: Buntu that sea is Africans has you know, naturally interdependence
Speaker 1: and harmony is seeking that humanity is given to a
Speaker 1: person buying through of the persons. But there's a sort
Speaker 1: of a trap in that because humanity is also pretty messy.
Speaker 1: The relationships between between people can also be very messy.
Speaker 1: It's not all sunshine and rainbows. You know, a broken
Speaker 1: relationship is as authentically human as a harmonious relationship. You know,
Speaker 1: a broken relationship can also be more ethical than a
Speaker 1: harmonious relationship. Booti points to, for example, the freedom that
Speaker 1: follows from a break from a pressure that follows from
Speaker 1: a break from a relationship of domination to want of freedom.
Speaker 1: And of course this idea that harmony's relationships are incapable
Speaker 1: of being oppressive is false. You know, a harmonious relationship
Speaker 1: can be quite oppressive. In the Dynamics team, people that
Speaker 1: are hidden under that veal of Honkey dory, you know. So,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of there's a lot too ubuntu,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of good to be cleaned, a lot
Speaker 1: of potential pitfalls to be avoided. So you know, take
Speaker 1: what's the value, leave what's not, engage critically, what's your plans,
Speaker 1: and have a good dye. Hi everyone, welcome to it
Speaker 1: could happen here. A podcast which Bipopular Demand today is
Speaker 1: about livestock as we will be going forward. It's me,
Speaker 1: It's Garrison, and we're talking about species of sheep. Don't
Speaker 1: not really, We're not talking about species of sheep, much
Speaker 1: to my disappointment. Not yet, but that will be coming.
Speaker 1: We're going to be getting into clined texuls mules that
Speaker 1: kind of think big sheep stuff. But now today we're
Speaker 1: actually joined by John, and John has been subjected to
Speaker 1: my weight introduction, but we're not We're not talking about
Speaker 1: sheep today. We're talking about active transport infrastructure and we're
Speaker 1: talking about how cities tend to build that in certain
Speaker 1: communities and not in others. So welcome to the show, John, Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. I'll say that my partner would
Speaker 1: have been overjoyed if the podcast was actually about species
Speaker 1: of sheep, So she's tired of hearing me talk about bikes,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, so, but here we are. Yeah, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me, John Stalin. I'm an assistant professor at University
Speaker 1: of North Carolina, Greensboro. Great. Yeah, So I think to
Speaker 1: start off with if if you could kind of outline
Speaker 1: what sort of like I guess, I guess people might
Speaker 1: not be familiar at all with bike infrastructure, certainly if
Speaker 1: they live in some parts of the US or like
Speaker 1: more rural areas, and sort of what it looks like
Speaker 1: and what cities have been doing in the last few
Speaker 1: years building bike infrastructure, and then how that relates to
Speaker 1: the I guess the income disparities within cities. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's a that's a big question, something that I
Speaker 1: tackled in my book, which came out in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: But then I haven't haven't kept up with it quite
Speaker 1: as much. I've been trying to start work working on
Speaker 1: other projects. But you know, I keep I keep tabs
Speaker 1: on things a little bit um. I mean, basically, if
Speaker 1: we're talking about the the standard rundown of infrastructure, the
Speaker 1: the I would say, the most common thing that people
Speaker 1: think about and probably the most common thing that's built
Speaker 1: in part because it's quite cheap, especially over they say
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, is the bike lane. You know,
Speaker 1: a bike lane is usually about three to five feet wide,
Speaker 1: and it's in to the far right of the roadway
Speaker 1: if you're in the United States or you know, if
Speaker 1: you're driving on the right tends to be where glass collects,
Speaker 1: tends to be where car doors are it. And so
Speaker 1: that nevertheless was you know, very common in places that
Speaker 1: we're building bicycle infrastructure. That's what was being built in
Speaker 1: I would say the last ten to fifteen years, there's
Speaker 1: been a push to do more what people might call
Speaker 1: Dutch style protected bike lanes. Either they're protected by a
Speaker 1: buffer of kind of plastic post that don't prevent an
Speaker 1: emergency vehicle from kind of getting where it needs to go,
Speaker 1: but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the
Speaker 1: bike lane. Really, so you'll see those and then you
Speaker 1: know parking protected bike lanes. So the protected bike lanes
Speaker 1: started became the big demand from bicycle infrastructure planning practitioners,
Speaker 1: especially in cities like Portland's, you know, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago,
Speaker 1: New York City, etcetera, etcetera. Something that was actually protected
Speaker 1: by a curb usually really usually it's still like some
Speaker 1: kind of a plastic curb right or cars right, and
Speaker 1: you're not seeing a lot of you know, concrete or
Speaker 1: brick curb work like you'll see in the Netherlands or
Speaker 1: something like that. And then, interestingly enough, another piece of
Speaker 1: infrastructure that there was a funny kind of maya culpa
Speaker 1: or not mea culpa, but a reevaluation of it was
Speaker 1: the sharrow, which is just a sort of a chevron
Speaker 1: symbol in the middle of a car lane intended to
Speaker 1: remind drivers that cyclists are allowed to be there, but
Speaker 1: sort of put cyclists in the location where they would
Speaker 1: sort of garner the most hatred. And there was a
Speaker 1: recent recent editorial from Dave Snyder, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
Speaker 1: It was a big, big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure.
Speaker 1: I interviewed him for my dissertation and he talked about
Speaker 1: how they don't work. That was a mistake. It was
Speaker 1: mistake kind of splitting the difference, making it seem like
Speaker 1: you didn't have to take any space away from cars
Speaker 1: in order to fit pikes into the roadway. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's kind of more than you wanted
Speaker 1: from that. No, No, that's great because I think a
Speaker 1: lot of folks might not have seen all these different things. Certainly,
Speaker 1: Like if you're like me and you wrote your bike
Speaker 1: every day, you know each of these different things, and
Speaker 1: some of them make you feel safer for some of
Speaker 1: them don't, and some of them are just kind of tokenistic.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of this kind of gets to
Speaker 1: a bigger discussion, which which is one waybe we can
Speaker 1: touch on, which is like who the city is for?
Speaker 1: When we're building cities in this country, certainly it seems
Speaker 1: like we've built them around cars. With a few exceptions
Speaker 1: like older cities and stuff, and increasingly, like if you
Speaker 1: ask for space that and you are not a car,
Speaker 1: then you know to include people wanting to live on
Speaker 1: the streets, right that cars have free places to go
Speaker 1: at night, but people don't. And so like this reallocation
Speaker 1: of space I think gets to a bigger question, which is, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe something you can speak to. Yeah, So I mean
Speaker 1: the question of I think you can think of who
Speaker 1: both in terms of the mode of transport, it's very
Speaker 1: car dominant society, right, and car car driving is even
Speaker 1: on the rise in places like Copenhagen. Right, there's kind
Speaker 1: of a lot of fretting among my supply advocates in
Speaker 1: Copenhagen about the rise of car usage. So there's the
Speaker 1: quite the sort of the mode of transport. But you know,
Speaker 1: cars aren't people, right, as you sort of pointed out
Speaker 1: just then and then so there's another layer to it
Speaker 1: that intersects with it, which is cities being increasingly sort
Speaker 1: of oriented towards attracting higher income residents, right, kind of
Speaker 1: creating an attractive urban environment. There's a there's a kind
Speaker 1: of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of
Speaker 1: high tech or creative or knowledge intensive types of jobs, right,
Speaker 1: your software programmers, you know, I think it was Chicago
Speaker 1: mayor Roman Manuel. I use this in lectures all the time.
Speaker 1: He said something like, um, you can't be for a
Speaker 1: high tech, a creative city economy and not be pro byte. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's this there's this idea that you know, maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit spurious, or it might be kind of
Speaker 1: loose causality, but there's this idea that the kinds of
Speaker 1: workers that you want in your city that are either
Speaker 1: going to take high paying jobs and increase the property
Speaker 1: tax base or themselves create new startups, entrepreneurial energy, arts,
Speaker 1: culture and uh and things like that, right that they
Speaker 1: are they are attracted by bicycle infrastructure or bicycling or
Speaker 1: bicycle culture in some respects. So there's that that kind
Speaker 1: of the the irony, of course, is that those workers
Speaker 1: you know, guilty I have a car, right, typically bring
Speaker 1: cars with them, right, And so yes, maybe they don't
Speaker 1: want to use them on a daily basis, like I
Speaker 1: don't use my car on a daily basis. I don't
Speaker 1: use my car to get to work, right, But they
Speaker 1: you know, are often kind of having it both wings,
Speaker 1: right in a lot of ways in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: buildings will be built with garages, right, and that's only
Speaker 1: recently starting to be eroded, right as just a you know,
Speaker 1: a one to one parking ratio and a transit connected building. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so when we're talking about it, the combination of
Speaker 1: these two things, right, like affluent areas or cities trying
Speaker 1: to attract affluent people and cities trying to build bike infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And something I've observed where I live, which is San Diego,
Speaker 1: is that we've built a lot of bike lanes, but
Speaker 1: only connecting privileged communities to places where people do high
Speaker 1: income work. And it seems like increasingly like riding your
Speaker 1: bike safely is a privilege that it's only afforded to
Speaker 1: a certain group of people. Is that something that's broader
Speaker 1: than just in my town, I'd say so. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think you see this in in where I did
Speaker 1: a lot of my research in the San Francisco Bay area,
Speaker 1: also did research in Philadelphia and Detroit and Austin as well.
Speaker 1: That's not in the book, but yeah, that's it's common,
Speaker 1: and there's a few different There's kind of a there's
Speaker 1: a degree of cumulative causality as we would say in
Speaker 1: economic geography, right, you have going back to say the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, you had bicycle advocates primarily recreational, primarily middle class,
Speaker 1: largely white, recreational cyclists, or and you start to seem
Speaker 1: participants in by squad becacy organizations also being kind of
Speaker 1: bicycle commuters. The kinds of jobs that were growing in
Speaker 1: urban centers in the nineteen nineties, in two thousands or
Speaker 1: you know, the first decade of this millennium, right, are
Speaker 1: the kinds of you know, if not high tech, the
Speaker 1: sort of professional technical type of employment right, growing in
Speaker 1: urban centers. And there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods
Speaker 1: that makes it feasible and desirable actually that you could
Speaker 1: you could, you know, find a fairly affordable house and
Speaker 1: be able to bike to work right two to three miles, right,
Speaker 1: rather than the commute in from the suburbs or the
Speaker 1: commute out from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: So I think that you get a lot of the
Speaker 1: initial energy around the bicycle movement if you look at
Speaker 1: critical mass, if you look at the San Francisco Bicycle
Speaker 1: Coalition and its early days Again, these are things I'm
Speaker 1: familiar with a lot of this sort of the political
Speaker 1: mobilization is around making those types of journeys easier, more doable. Right.
Speaker 1: You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are
Speaker 1: getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic
Speaker 1: innermost streetcar suburbs developed around one hundred years ago, fairly
Speaker 1: walkable themselves. They have a mix of commercial and residential.
Speaker 1: They aren't buy in large industrial neighborhoods, right, the industrial
Speaker 1: neighborhoods where you still have a lot of truck traffic,
Speaker 1: where in industry be got more industry or de industrialization
Speaker 1: really hollowed out the economic base where you have you know,
Speaker 1: large roadways, you have you know disinvestment and kind of
Speaker 1: a mix of small retail or um lower income population.
Speaker 1: Those were not um. Those were not areas where there
Speaker 1: were that were attracting the kinds of people who would
Speaker 1: be listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure. Right, there's
Speaker 1: still lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods. UM in a
Speaker 1: place like East Oakland or um uh North Philadelphia or
Speaker 1: something like that, right where there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who ride bicycles, but they don't they're not organized politically,
Speaker 1: uh under the sort of the block of of of cyclists. Um.
Speaker 1: And so there's this sort of paradox or in the
Speaker 1: way that I came around to this project was I
Speaker 1: was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia, and I
Speaker 1: was sort of one of those white hipsters on fixies.
Speaker 1: Right at the same time, I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: my day speaking Spanish, talking with and helping people fix
Speaker 1: their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as
Speaker 1: dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart because it's
Speaker 1: what they could afford, even though they knew that they
Speaker 1: were crapped, they just couldn't afford anything better, trying to
Speaker 1: get the most out of those bikes. And so there's
Speaker 1: this funny dichotomy. On the one hand, it's like you
Speaker 1: have the cool bike already creative scene that is sort
Speaker 1: of trying to be encouraged maybe, And on the other hand,
Speaker 1: a lot of the people who are actually making do
Speaker 1: on bicycles are not sort of part of that vision,
Speaker 1: I guess for the city. Right when I think about
Speaker 1: things in spatial terms as well, right, if you imagine
Speaker 1: going back to the journeys to work from a sort
Speaker 1: of close in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot
Speaker 1: of turnover, a lot of middle class you know, mostly white,
Speaker 1: but not necessarily exclusively white, in migrants, the types of
Speaker 1: journeys that a lot of you know, I'll take Durham
Speaker 1: for example, where I live now, which is not there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure. There's a little
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, but there's
Speaker 1: some job growth in the downtown area. There's certainly a
Speaker 1: lot of job growth in the sort of the suburbs.
Speaker 1: But in terms of the kinds of jobs that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, working class jobs that are being created at
Speaker 1: Amazon fulfillment centers, those are at the urban periphery, right,
Speaker 1: They're not places that even in a kind of a
Speaker 1: gentrifying neighborhood, even if bicycle infrastructure were created. This sort
Speaker 1: of the directionality of the feasible commute kind of runs
Speaker 1: against the feasible bicycle community, sort of runs against the
Speaker 1: very kind of spread out and scattered commutes in the
Speaker 1: sort of retail, wholesale, warehousing, manufacturing, etc. Etc. The sectors
Speaker 1: that are experiencing job sprawl rather than a sort of
Speaker 1: a concentrated, concentrated job growth in in the sort of
Speaker 1: the urban center, right, So that's another aspect to it
Speaker 1: as well. Bike advocacy is very interesting to me. Like
Speaker 1: I was a bike messenger, I was a bike racer
Speaker 1: like these, I've made my living riding a bike. I've
Speaker 1: also just ridden my bike to get to work. And
Speaker 1: bike advocacy really hasn't reflected a broad swath of cyclists
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Do you think that's why
Speaker 1: we don't see like better infrastructure in some of these
Speaker 1: like d industrializing areas for instance, And does that lead
Speaker 1: directly to it being dangerous, Like you would be to
Speaker 1: ask of their statistics to show that, like it's more
Speaker 1: dangerous to ride your bike. So I'll say a couple
Speaker 1: of things. The the the directionality or the causality is
Speaker 1: a little bit complicated. I would say, certainly there was
Speaker 1: some evidence that bicycle advocates weren't in the early days,
Speaker 1: and there was a big sort of cultural shift in
Speaker 1: bicycle advocacy in the nineteen nineties. Part of the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: You have a lot of cyclists who are actually opposed
Speaker 1: to bicycle infrastructure we still have. They are still a
Speaker 1: loud being a rish voice in San Diego. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: The vehicular cyclists, right, yeah, yeah, could you explain that? Sure?
Speaker 1: So vehicular cyclists. It was a philosophy expounded by John
Speaker 1: Forrester might have his book right here, Yeah, in the book,
Speaker 1: and it's not in the book Effective Cycling. Um. Where
Speaker 1: it was the idea was that cyclists should be riding
Speaker 1: like cars, right, which means riding fast, center of the lane,
Speaker 1: behaving exactly like a car. And they were very opposed
Speaker 1: to any infrastructure that would sort of create be created
Speaker 1: especially for bicyclists, on the basis which there was maybe
Speaker 1: some slight truth to this, that that cyclists would be
Speaker 1: banned from roads that didn't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure. There
Speaker 1: was a little bit of concern that was there was
Speaker 1: I think I remember reading about a little bit of
Speaker 1: actual talk among legislators and planners that bicyclists would be
Speaker 1: kept off of main roads. And I think their to
Speaker 1: their credit, they saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at
Speaker 1: that time as basically designed to get cyclists out of
Speaker 1: the way of motorists, right, and so it was mainly
Speaker 1: to advance the interests of motorists, right, but they were
Speaker 1: very hostile to um, they're very hostile to a sort
Speaker 1: of a Dutch style model, which like, you know, these
Speaker 1: were guys who like to ride fast and like you don't.
Speaker 1: You can't ride fast in the Netherlands. Yea, not everyone's
Speaker 1: physically able nor really wants to go forty miles an
Speaker 1: hour on a road next to cars, exactly, right. So
Speaker 1: it was very much around a strong, fit, confident cyclist
Speaker 1: who knew all the laws of the road, road really fast.
Speaker 1: Was very assertive. Um. It obviously lent itself towards a
Speaker 1: sort of a boomer type, right, a sort of adventurous type.
Speaker 1: And it was very much that we that bicycl advocates
Speaker 1: should advance the interests of cyclists, not try to grow
Speaker 1: the number of people cycling, right. And so the shift
Speaker 1: towards that maybe the critical mass moment is not the
Speaker 1: only thing, but this is that's sort of a good
Speaker 1: moment to kind of tag it to the nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two first critical mass era, but you know Earthday vehicle
Speaker 1: for a small planet, all this sort of growing interest
Speaker 1: in bicycling. Yeah, the shift towards more people should be
Speaker 1: doing this. Yeah, can you explain critical mass to people
Speaker 1: who haven't like participated, because I think it's quite a
Speaker 1: unique and interesting phenomenon. Sure, yeah, absolutely so. Critical mass
Speaker 1: began in San Francisco in I think the first critical
Speaker 1: mass was nineteen ninety two, and it was began sort
Speaker 1: of as like a group of people working, you know,
Speaker 1: broadly working office jobs who were sort of kind of
Speaker 1: culturally anarchistic or you know, had these sort of anarchist
Speaker 1: or situation as kind of ideas and who were kind
Speaker 1: of organizing months themselves to ride home as a group, right,
Speaker 1: And they started getting this idea of sort of having
Speaker 1: these monthly ride together um happenings, right, they called it.
Speaker 1: They didn't call them protests, and they weren't organized rides.
Speaker 1: They were uh, sort of rolling festivals, was the idea.
Speaker 1: I think the first the first name that they came
Speaker 1: up with, which mercifully didn't stick, was like the commute
Speaker 1: clot right. So it was also about kind of jamming
Speaker 1: up the regularity of the Friday evening commute, so it
Speaker 1: would be like the first Friday of every month at
Speaker 1: commute time. Right. Um. Some of these I think still
Speaker 1: happen in Portland, Oh, yeah, Yeah, it's it's the critical
Speaker 1: Mass still happens. Um. There's a you know, one of
Speaker 1: the chapters in my book, I sort of trace this
Speaker 1: arc of critical Mass through to the more kind of
Speaker 1: bike party oriented exactly the slow role type of model,
Speaker 1: which I think is interesting because it's a little bit
Speaker 1: it's consciously less confrontational. It's not held at a time
Speaker 1: that would clog up, um sure, clog up evening traffic. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's designed to attract kind of families, people who aren't
Speaker 1: trying to have confrontations with drivers or police. Right. One
Speaker 1: of the things that sort of really put um put
Speaker 1: bicycle infrastructure on the agenda in San Francisco was this
Speaker 1: mass arrest of Critical Mass in nineteen ninety seven, supposedly
Speaker 1: because the mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown at the time,
Speaker 1: got stuck in one in his limo and was like
Speaker 1: furious and so asked the police to crack down next time.
Speaker 1: It was a huge it was. It backfired massively politically,
Speaker 1: but it also created this opening for the the San
Speaker 1: Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which actually was an organization. Critical Mass
Speaker 1: was not an organization, right, It gave them this opportunity
Speaker 1: to say, well, what cyclists want is, you know, to
Speaker 1: actually build out the bike plan that supposedly exists, but
Speaker 1: nobody has been doing anything about it, right, So I
Speaker 1: mean that's probably maybe more than you wanted to know.
Speaker 1: But sort that that arc of critical mass as this
Speaker 1: sort of countercultural moment that created this opening for a
Speaker 1: more formal bicycle planning uh an advocacy organization or a
Speaker 1: set of organizations to emerge, right, Um, and maybe it's unfair.
Speaker 1: I think I probably do it in the book. It's
Speaker 1: a little bit unfair probably to call it a kind
Speaker 1: of depoliticization, but there was certainly a degree of kind
Speaker 1: of like explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city
Speaker 1: more broadly from a kind of left perspective that does
Speaker 1: disappear somewhat in the sort of the rhetoric of the
Speaker 1: bike movement. Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely lost some of
Speaker 1: that like radical edge where these types of these types
Speaker 1: of you know, when when when like a hundred or
Speaker 1: two hundred people on bikes takeover streets in Portland every
Speaker 1: once in a while, it is way more in the
Speaker 1: form of like a big party, it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's like a it's like a roving block party.
Speaker 1: It does not have that same level of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: almost like situationist creating a happening or creating a situation
Speaker 1: that that that affects the regular politics and affects the
Speaker 1: regular way that the city functions. Yeah, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: that being said, the sort of the successors, like bike
Speaker 1: Party in San Jose was a huge one, and this
Speaker 1: that bike party model kind of spread throughout California were
Speaker 1: often much bigger than Critical Mass, right, Um, a lot
Speaker 1: of times more diverse as well. Right, So there's there's
Speaker 1: a really interesting kind of politics around. Is the is
Speaker 1: the politics in the sort of explicit slogans or is
Speaker 1: the politics in sort of like showing people that there
Speaker 1: is a kind of collectivity that they might be part
Speaker 1: of simply by virtue of like moving through urban space
Speaker 1: in a different way. And for a lot of people
Speaker 1: it was their first time riding a bike in the
Speaker 1: city because they were so afraid of cars otherwise. Right,
Speaker 1: he had safety in numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely, Um,
Speaker 1: I know for a lot of people that was the case.
Speaker 1: Like I've done some critical masses, I mean the UK,
Speaker 1: we had reclaimed the streets as well, like a similar
Speaker 1: vibe I remember in the Earth, I guess the first
Speaker 1: decade of this century, like there would be critical mass
Speaker 1: rights before antig eight protests, like I remember in Octorado
Speaker 1: in Scotland and things not into before that, and like
Speaker 1: before rather G eight protests would be mass rights. And
Speaker 1: it's a very different scene to like bike advocacy now, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And you saw this a little bit with like the
Speaker 1: Occupy movement, the at least my experience of them, the
Speaker 1: sort of early wave of the Black Lives Matter movement
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen with the killing of Trayvon Martin, there
Speaker 1: were a lot the bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest
Speaker 1: mode for many people, and that's probably sort of some
Speaker 1: of the cultural political tools of critical mass that sort
Speaker 1: of surface here and there. But I think for the
Speaker 1: twentieth anniversary, Chris Carlson, who was one of the early organizers,
Speaker 1: called it talks about critical mass all over the world,
Speaker 1: and that San Francisco felt kind of like the hole
Speaker 1: in the middle of the donut, right, like it sort
Speaker 1: of created this reverberation, but then it actually withered to
Speaker 1: a degree in in the center and often the narrative is, well,
Speaker 1: you're you're getting like you're winning, right, so critical mass
Speaker 1: is no longer necessary because you're getting bike lanes, you're
Speaker 1: getting um you know, you're getting investment, you're getting attention
Speaker 1: from planners, etc. Etc. Right. Obviously, Yeah, the gains, whatever
Speaker 1: they are, are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed. And that
Speaker 1: kind of relates back to how we kind of started
Speaker 1: by talking about how, you know, some cities are putting
Speaker 1: more development into bike infrastructure, but how it's being developed
Speaker 1: is not actually serving people who like I have to
Speaker 1: use a bike to commute because they don't owe a
Speaker 1: car and they can't afford a car, Like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's getting used to people who actually already have a
Speaker 1: lot of resources. And like an interesting case and point
Speaker 1: in this is the belt Line in Atlanta, which like
Speaker 1: started off in the you know as an idea in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine with wanting to create like a giant
Speaker 1: loop using like public transit, having having rail going around
Speaker 1: the city, having bike having bike paths going all around
Speaker 1: the city, being able to like connect the city with
Speaker 1: these with these like spaces for like green space and
Speaker 1: affordable housing, and instead the project kind of manifested as
Speaker 1: this like like is this project that was had up
Speaker 1: by real estate companies to replace a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of like expensive
Speaker 1: restaurants and luxury condos and you know, putting putting the
Speaker 1: belt line and as a path to to create these
Speaker 1: like expensive, like gentrifying areas around the city. And it's
Speaker 1: how like these ideas can start off so good and
Speaker 1: that when they get like, you know, actually done, it's
Speaker 1: manifested in a way that is actually like not helpful
Speaker 1: to people who need this type of thing at all. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the belt Line. I don't know enough about it.
Speaker 1: I've read I've read a little bit of the sort
Speaker 1: of academic literature, and I've been there, and it is
Speaker 1: really kind of interesting how it is. This It is
Speaker 1: this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure right to
Speaker 1: sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it,
Speaker 1: right sort of old rail, old industrial infrastructure. And that's
Speaker 1: something that I don't think that you can you're ever
Speaker 1: you know, people there are studies here and there that
Speaker 1: try to demonstrate the kind of the economic value of
Speaker 1: bicycle infrastructure. The contribution to tax, tax receipts, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1: But it gets pretty hard to parse the causality, um,
Speaker 1: especially when you're you know, especially when compared to something
Speaker 1: that is really sort of overhauling the space, right, I
Speaker 1: don't you know the belt belt line is it's I
Speaker 1: think probably it's success from a sort of financial perspective
Speaker 1: has to do with it being a multi use path,
Speaker 1: right yea, rather than it being bicycle infrastructure, um, and
Speaker 1: sort of being being framed as this much broader type
Speaker 1: of thing, right rather than um, a bike lane on
Speaker 1: a street, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not great
Speaker 1: to write down, like at least on the weekend, because
Speaker 1: you'll just be slow, full of full of people. It's
Speaker 1: full of Like when I when I when I was
Speaker 1: visiting last year during the start of summer, I went
Speaker 1: with a friend to the area by Ponce City Market,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a great example of the gentrifying
Speaker 1: force of of the belt Line, but also like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's people who's trying, people who are trying to ride
Speaker 1: bikes around, but there's like kids on rollers, kids everywhere.
Speaker 1: There's it's it's it's pretty packed. It's getting it's it's
Speaker 1: getting pretty pretty warm um. But there's other parts that
Speaker 1: are like you know that are that are more isolated
Speaker 1: where it is much more of like a of like
Speaker 1: a commute path. But it's it's interesting. It's just like
Speaker 1: it like weaves in and out of these like retail
Speaker 1: and luxury apartment um, you know pop up exactly, and
Speaker 1: and all that stuff is is relative, is like relatively
Speaker 1: new for all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding
Speaker 1: the surrounding like the construction of the belt line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean the um, I think that you maybe
Speaker 1: see this just a little bit with like you know,
Speaker 1: the direction that I've taken this thinking about it is
Speaker 1: more the sort of the types of urban strategies that
Speaker 1: have begun to incorporate bicycle infrastructure, right, or active transportation
Speaker 1: more generally as the kind of big driving forces, rather
Speaker 1: than like is this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's
Speaker 1: usually it's often the other way around, right. Bicycle infrastructure
Speaker 1: sort of emerges as a result of gentrification, right or
Speaker 1: as a result of the in migration of people who
Speaker 1: are going to be listened to right because of their status,
Speaker 1: because of their income, because they have kind of existing
Speaker 1: capacities in organizing for these types of things, right, It's
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting is one of the one of
Speaker 1: the positions I've sort of come around to, right is
Speaker 1: thinking more about um not like should we do bicycle
Speaker 1: infrastructure because it might kind of create the perception of
Speaker 1: gentrification or cause gentrification or something like that, and instead,
Speaker 1: like you know what, one of the things that gentrification
Speaker 1: results from when you're thinking about amenities that sort of
Speaker 1: lead to the revalorization of urban space is that they
Speaker 1: are in some way special, right. And so if the
Speaker 1: question is the specialness of this particular place, you know, Garrison,
Speaker 1: as you said, what makes say, you know, the kinds
Speaker 1: of places where you can safely ride a bike are
Speaker 1: fairly unique, right, They're not well distributed, right, And so
Speaker 1: from my perspective, it's sort of the more routine they
Speaker 1: become as an as as you know, including them into
Speaker 1: urban space, the less special the places where they are
Speaker 1: built become. Right. And it's so routine that it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be worth mentioning, right, It's like mentioning that there is
Speaker 1: a sewer line, right, Like it's like mentioning that it
Speaker 1: has connection to city water, which okay, yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: at the at the urban edge where I live. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't live at the urban edge, but at the
Speaker 1: urban edge in the southeast. Um, you know there isn't
Speaker 1: always connection to the city water. Um. Yeah, like trying
Speaker 1: to get it normalized to the point where it's like
Speaker 1: obvious that it's something that is like a part of
Speaker 1: the city. It's like yeah, like right, of course, it's
Speaker 1: it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or a
Speaker 1: road or like a power line, which when fair. I
Speaker 1: don't have any sidewalks on my street, and most of
Speaker 1: the streets around me have a sidewalk on on one side.
Speaker 1: Only Portland. Portland also has very has very few sidewalks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have this. Yeah. I lived in Belgium for a
Speaker 1: while when I was racing. It like, I lived in
Speaker 1: a town that was very much just to look, lots
Speaker 1: of Belgium is shitty, gray coal mining towns. I left Belgium.
Speaker 1: But this is the thing, and like, yeah, they would
Speaker 1: never have beat you know. The bike infrastructure is unremarked.
Speaker 1: It was just a thing that everyone used to go
Speaker 1: to the shops to go to school. It wasn't right
Speaker 1: lest like selling point for a branch restaurant yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think it's this kind of thing where it's bigger
Speaker 1: than just the infrastructure. Right. A lot of the places
Speaker 1: where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right are these
Speaker 1: sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the densest areas,
Speaker 1: right where everything was in walking distance, but the area
Speaker 1: is kind of just beyond there, right where where there
Speaker 1: are you know, shops, places of employment, services, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1: All sort of within reasonable biking distance or maybe long
Speaker 1: walking distance, right, but too short to really merit a
Speaker 1: trip on a bus or a train, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: short enough that maybe some of us would feel a
Speaker 1: little bit silly getting in the car to go do it. Right,
Speaker 1: So that that kind of zone is also not terribly
Speaker 1: common in the United States, right. A lot of those
Speaker 1: places got destroyed to build highways, right, or got destroyed
Speaker 1: to build kind of suburban style shopping malls, and so
Speaker 1: that's part of their part of their specialness. But going
Speaker 1: back to the idea of you know, people in the
Speaker 1: places where people were really relying on bicycles, right, that
Speaker 1: there isn't necessarily infrastructure. It's partially a data issue. Going
Speaker 1: back to your data question, right, the way that we
Speaker 1: collect data on bicycling is people people bicycling to work. Right.
Speaker 1: If people aren't in the workforce or they happen to
Speaker 1: not have a job, that is not counted in the census, right,
Speaker 1: even if you bicycle to the train like I do.
Speaker 1: Like if I get to fill out the census, I'm
Speaker 1: going to fill out train, right, because that's the bulk
Speaker 1: of my journey when I commute. And so it skews
Speaker 1: your perception of where infrastructure might be needed if you're
Speaker 1: using data toward places that where people are commuting by bicycle, right,
Speaker 1: rather than you know, commuting is only a quarter to
Speaker 1: a third of all trips, right, rather than all the
Speaker 1: other trips that we don't know about. Right. And sometimes
Speaker 1: we measure them with passive measurement, like pressure sensors in
Speaker 1: the streets. Sometimes active measurement like people doing bicycle counts
Speaker 1: on particular days. Right, there's a whole history of that.
Speaker 1: Now we're using Strava. But then we're getting a small
Speaker 1: like we're getting a very rich data set about a
Speaker 1: small subset of cyclists and hoping that that extends to most,
Speaker 1: if not all cyclists. And then to your question started,
Speaker 1: I'll pause right to your question about the the the
Speaker 1: data question, right, how how deadly or how dangerous are
Speaker 1: various streets that don't have bike lanes. There is a
Speaker 1: big problem of the missing denominator. Right, We don't know
Speaker 1: how many people cycles, so we don't know the rates
Speaker 1: of injury on these particular roadways in the way in
Speaker 1: the same way that we do know car volumes and
Speaker 1: can have a better sense of the rates of injury
Speaker 1: based on collisions. Right, But you do see clusters of
Speaker 1: collisions in places where you know where they're large roads
Speaker 1: meeting where basically no very few if any traffic engineers
Speaker 1: would sign off on taking away some of that car
Speaker 1: capacity to create more safety for cycle. And of course
Speaker 1: those those kind of compound. Those factors kind of compound, Right.
Speaker 1: You maybe have an industrial area, it's a big interface
Speaker 1: with a large urban arterial or an off ramp to
Speaker 1: a highway. Right, these kind of all go together with
Speaker 1: um with potentially sort of lower lower income area are
Speaker 1: sort of a lower um less pressure to improve that
Speaker 1: that area. Yeah, So I'm thinking when I think about
Speaker 1: like how the bike movement missed an opportunity to be better,
Speaker 1: I always think about like this moment in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: when this man called Dijon Kizzie was killed by police
Speaker 1: in LA and the incident which led to the cops
Speaker 1: shooting him began because the cops tried to pull him
Speaker 1: over for running a stop sign on a bike, right,
Speaker 1: which is a thing that tenth of thousands of white
Speaker 1: dudes into Dex do every single day. In this kind
Speaker 1: of not a word was spoken by the bike movement,
Speaker 1: at least that I saw by bike folks, you know,
Speaker 1: in sort of solidarity or a position to what had happened. Right,
Speaker 1: It just it was just another thing that went mourned
Speaker 1: to buy thousands of people and ignored by others. So like,
Speaker 1: it made me think about it how we build Maybe
Speaker 1: it's wrong to think about how we build a better
Speaker 1: bike movement, and maybe it's better to think about how
Speaker 1: we make it unremarkable that you bike, right, we make
Speaker 1: it like not an identity thing. But how do we
Speaker 1: make cities where people are safe riding bikes I guess,
Speaker 1: regardless of whether they're wearing spandex or they're just trying
Speaker 1: to get to the shop ups. Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: a really kind of an important question. And in my research,
Speaker 1: a lot of people were grappling with that. There was
Speaker 1: an incident that mercifully didn't result in someone being killed
Speaker 1: or seriously injured. But you know, a guy was pulled
Speaker 1: off of his bike by a police beaten up in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, and there was a big march afterwards, and
Speaker 1: some of the some bisuple advocates did show up, but
Speaker 1: it was not framed as this is something that you
Speaker 1: know is affecting us as cyclists, right, this is or
Speaker 1: that affecting some of us as cyclists, right, and an
Speaker 1: injury to one as an injury at all. Right, that's
Speaker 1: not that's not it was not the kind of the
Speaker 1: frame that that people were using to mud from what
Speaker 1: I could tell, right, Um, and you had bicycle you know,
Speaker 1: black bicycle advocates in East Oakland who didn't really frame
Speaker 1: themselves as bieula advocates necessarily in the traditional um or
Speaker 1: the mold that is sort of determined by the sort
Speaker 1: of the hegemonically kind of white middle class advocacy organizations. Right,
Speaker 1: But they were very much bicycle advocates who you know, um,
Speaker 1: a lot of were a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: what they did was sort of like teaching people to
Speaker 1: ride correctly so that they would have fewer interactions with police,
Speaker 1: right or um kind of managing interactions with with police
Speaker 1: and you know, hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists
Speaker 1: that they weren't kind of subject to the kinds of
Speaker 1: interactions that you know where people police end up killing somebody. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: Now that I live in a place where very few
Speaker 1: people bicycle to work or for much of anything, right,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking a bit more holistically about uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's now kind of a buzz buzzword, but you know,
Speaker 1: a kind of a more car optional um city right
Speaker 1: where you don't need to have a car to do
Speaker 1: various things. You know, I'm I'm involved with bicycle advocates here,
Speaker 1: but like when I when I look around, I see
Speaker 1: like a bus stop that is a stick in a
Speaker 1: median right. There's no bench, there's no sidewalks to get
Speaker 1: to it, there's no crosswalks or anything like that. And
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that one of the bigger one
Speaker 1: of the bigger questions is to make a place that's
Speaker 1: safe for cyclists, safe for people walking, safe for people
Speaker 1: walking their bikes, or safe for people walking to transit.
Speaker 1: Right is reducing the kind of the space and the
Speaker 1: way that space and speed go together, right, that are
Speaker 1: devoted to cars, and a lot of that is like
Speaker 1: reducing the the the distances that people need to travel
Speaker 1: right for various things. Right. This gets into this sort
Speaker 1: of the fifteen minute city stuff, which is that it's
Speaker 1: been really wild to see it being turned into this
Speaker 1: like QAnon type, you know, Agenda twenty one, und black
Speaker 1: helicopters type of conspiracy theory, right, because I think of
Speaker 1: it as a very kind of milk toast type of
Speaker 1: policy framework that's honored in the breach, right, sort of
Speaker 1: like complete streets there's a carve out for unless the
Speaker 1: traffic engineer says it's not really feasible, and then we
Speaker 1: won't really question that judgment. We just won't do it, right. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I do think it's bigger than modes of
Speaker 1: transport are really bigger than people's individual decisions or even
Speaker 1: like what the sort of once you are in your
Speaker 1: mode of transport, what the sort of behavioral matrix is? Right,
Speaker 1: It's sort of like what what is your life consist of? Right? Um,
Speaker 1: what what do you do to like preserve your dignity
Speaker 1: with your coworkers? Right? All of these kinds of things
Speaker 1: that feed people towards towards driving, except in you know,
Speaker 1: very specific places that you know have become special in
Speaker 1: the United States. I mean there's a lot, there's a
Speaker 1: lot to say, right. It is really it's much bigger
Speaker 1: than than bicycling. Um, it's the sort of the built environment.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the things that what I
Speaker 1: land on in the book, maybe belatedly, right because these
Speaker 1: these these things take years, is is this the way
Speaker 1: that bicycling is still kind of this interstitial solution, Right.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like kind of picking up scraps here
Speaker 1: and there in the built environment. Right, It's like picking
Speaker 1: up some of the loose ends right in how cities
Speaker 1: are organized that makes them frustrating difficult to navigate, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think a lot of the energy,
Speaker 1: not exclusively certainly, And bicycle advocacy has become much more
Speaker 1: diverse in part through like listening to a lot of
Speaker 1: the voices of advocates of color and women advocates, and
Speaker 1: you know, um, kind of thinking beyond that sort of
Speaker 1: stereotypical you know, not just the middle aged man in
Speaker 1: micro but like the the sort of middle aged guy
Speaker 1: on us early. Right, you know that that maybe successor
Speaker 1: to the middle aged man in micro right, and certainly
Speaker 1: calling myself out, but the it's still very kind of
Speaker 1: an interstitial thing, right, Um. It's and the thing about
Speaker 1: the urban transportation systems in the United States is that
Speaker 1: they leave a lot of interstices, right, There's a lot
Speaker 1: of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars,
Speaker 1: and honestly poorly served by cars. You know, in Oakland
Speaker 1: you had people a lot of the sort of the
Speaker 1: maybe not anger but certainly annoyance at bicycle advocacy and
Speaker 1: bicycle infrastructure would and I think you see this in
Speaker 1: Portland too, where it's like we've been asking for sidewalks,
Speaker 1: We've been asking the city to to like fill these potholes,
Speaker 1: and instead there's these bike lanes that people who just
Speaker 1: got here are asking for, right, And so maybe that's
Speaker 1: a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know, people
Speaker 1: moving to a neighborhood. They they're like, why is it
Speaker 1: so torturous to get somewhere by bike? Rather than kind
Speaker 1: of maybe stopping and saying, all right, what what what
Speaker 1: have people been demanding here before I got here? Right? Um?
Speaker 1: And how can I sort of contribute to that as well?
Speaker 1: And sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially. Um,
Speaker 1: but it is this sort of it's a it's an
Speaker 1: interstitial um solution, right. And so from for me, you know,
Speaker 1: the bigger the bigger questions are sort of what what
Speaker 1: role will bicycles play when we start to really take
Speaker 1: seriously the kind of broader urban structure, So you don't
Speaker 1: have these sort of islands of bike ability inside a
Speaker 1: sea of automobility. Right, Um, do you have a situation
Speaker 1: where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take
Speaker 1: transit than it is to bike, right? I would call
Speaker 1: that a that a win, right? And I think you know,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a there's a degree to which we
Speaker 1: can get fixated on the particular mode of transport, I
Speaker 1: think because we all kind of like fell in love
Speaker 1: with bicycles and that was the sort of the the
Speaker 1: gateway drug into thinking about like transport and cities and
Speaker 1: how people move around and the sort of the history
Speaker 1: of urban planning. Right. So I mean these are all
Speaker 1: I don't know if I really kind of offered anything
Speaker 1: that sort of puts it all together nicely, right, Um,
Speaker 1: But the idea that it really does need to become
Speaker 1: normalized and if it actually sort of disappears in a
Speaker 1: process of being normalized and it stops being a signifier
Speaker 1: of environmental rectitude or something like that. And you know,
Speaker 1: if I could walk to a grocery store instead of
Speaker 1: having a bike to a grocery store, I would prefer that,
Speaker 1: honestly where I am right now, right, even though I
Speaker 1: love cycling, right and it's something that I'll never stop doing. Right.
Speaker 1: So I think kind of thinking more holistically about what
Speaker 1: kinds of cities we need to have to move beyond,
Speaker 1: move beyond automobility, both from a climate perspective and a
Speaker 1: social justice perspective and just almost like a thermodynamic perspective.
Speaker 1: So I mean that maybe that's the moving up to
Speaker 1: the level of physics is where one kind of place
Speaker 1: to end. Yeah, I think that's very good. Yeah. Is
Speaker 1: there anything you'd like to plug? Maybe people where people
Speaker 1: can find your book, where people can follow you online,
Speaker 1: and I think like that any sort of projects you're
Speaker 1: interested in, sure, Yeah, So, um My, you can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter. I'm at jo st e h l
Speaker 1: i N. My book is now, it's few years old.
Speaker 1: It's twenty nineteen with University of Minnesota Press. It's all.
Speaker 1: It's called Cyclescapes of the Unequal City, and my latest
Speaker 1: work I'm actually looking at, um the politics of highway removal.
Speaker 1: So maybe scaling up in terms of infrastructure, thinking about
Speaker 1: sort of bigger the kind of the great clanking gears
Speaker 1: of urbanism rather than you know, this little tiny stretch
Speaker 1: of pavement on the side that's that's full of glass
Speaker 1: and car doors and stuff like that. So, but of
Speaker 1: course they all kind of fit together through what are
Speaker 1: the what how does the fabric of the built environment
Speaker 1: have to change in order to grapple with climate change,
Speaker 1: inequality and sort of making a sort of a more
Speaker 1: human type of city. Yeah, I think it's great. I
Speaker 1: think it's a wonderful place. Tran, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for giving us some of your afternoon. John. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you taking the time, and it was
Speaker 1: a really fun conversation. Hi podcast fans, it's me. It's Jones.
Speaker 1: And it's just a tiny little pickup that I wanted
Speaker 1: to add to the end of this episode because I'm
Speaker 1: neglected to mention that Si Klista Zene did call out
Speaker 1: the police killing of Dijon Kizzy very explicitly and had
Speaker 1: an excellent peace on it, as they do on lots
Speaker 1: of other things. They are incredibly wonderful and you can
Speaker 1: find them at si KLISTA zene c y c l
Speaker 1: I s t A z i ne dot com. They
Speaker 1: are not representative of the rest of the bike media,
Speaker 1: so well worth looking at if you like bikes and
Speaker 1: not the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay,
Speaker 1: thanks bye, welcome too. It could happen here a podcast
Speaker 1: about things falling apart and sometimes putting things back together.
Speaker 1: And you know, today we're doing an episode that's kind
Speaker 1: of more on the intellectual and emotional end of a
Speaker 1: very specific set of things falling apart, and rather than
Speaker 1: clumsily try to introduce it myself, I'm going to bring
Speaker 1: on the person who who I think some of the
Speaker 1: thoughts that have kind of been going through my head,
Speaker 1: I know they've been going through the heads of a
Speaker 1: lot of the folks that we have here at cool
Speaker 1: Zone for quite some time now. Thoughtslime, you are a
Speaker 1: YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does a number of videos.
Speaker 1: Some of your recent ones are thoughts on ai art,
Speaker 1: A timeline of Elon's Twitter mistakes. You did a really
Speaker 1: fun video on the QAnon Queen of Canada, who is
Speaker 1: a pretty problematic character. Welcome to the show, Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me, Happy to be here. Do you want to
Speaker 1: just kind of start by reading us that thread? Because
Speaker 1: you posted this on Twitter the other day and I
Speaker 1: started chatting with it, and then we moved over to
Speaker 1: DMS and decided we should kind of do a little
Speaker 1: more formal thing. Yeah. So basically I said that I'm
Speaker 1: constantly considering making a Why I Left the Left video
Speaker 1: about how my views have not changed one iota, but
Speaker 1: I've become completely disillusioned about my role in communicating them.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason I shifted my focus to trying
Speaker 1: to be just entertaining is because deep down, I don't
Speaker 1: really see a lot of value in getting people on
Speaker 1: my side anymore. I don't think it does anything or
Speaker 1: means anything. But the best I can do is give
Speaker 1: you information and hopefully a laugh. I used to feel
Speaker 1: like I was participating in something bigger than I think
Speaker 1: A lot. Then I think I really am that I
Speaker 1: was helping in some small, in some small way towards
Speaker 1: a sort of shift towards more revolutionary mass consciousness. I
Speaker 1: think that was a bit of a childish fantasy. In retrospect,
Speaker 1: sometimes people will say, you made me an anarchist, and like, Buddy,
Speaker 1: I don't even think it matters that I myself am
Speaker 1: an anarchist, and I regret that that sort of we're
Speaker 1: fighting the good fight mentality has allowed some of the
Speaker 1: worst grifters on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's
Speaker 1: passions for their own weird, petty reasons. I think what
Speaker 1: I do has a lot of value, but I'm just
Speaker 1: saying that I think I perceive that value to be
Speaker 1: is a lot different than what I thought it was
Speaker 1: a few years ago. Is basically what I had to say, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I think does such a good job of nailing
Speaker 1: the problem that I've been kind of dealing with emotionally
Speaker 1: as well, which is it's it's not It'd be easy
Speaker 1: to sum it up as like I no longer believe in,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to transmit you know, leftist ideas or
Speaker 1: political analysis, or that I don't believe in the value
Speaker 1: of like trying to inform people about the world, because
Speaker 1: that's not how I feel. But there is there has
Speaker 1: been a shift, and I think probably the high point
Speaker 1: for the version of me that was optimistic about the
Speaker 1: ability to use mass media to build power and the
Speaker 1: ability to take effective action on the left. I think
Speaker 1: that kind of crescendoed I'm gonna, I'm gonna say June
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty, um, and it had a pretty sharp
Speaker 1: drop after that point. And I both think it's it's
Speaker 1: valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty was. For all of its flaws and
Speaker 1: all of the really messy fallout from it, we saw
Speaker 1: an ups an uprising of unprecedented scale. And part of
Speaker 1: why the crackdown in response has been so narly is
Speaker 1: that it scared the hell out of a lot of
Speaker 1: really unpleasant people. Um. And the media had a significant
Speaker 1: role to play in that, both in the fact that
Speaker 1: there were a lot of people who were who were
Speaker 1: kind of already organizing and radicalized when the ship started
Speaker 1: to hit the fan, and that as things happened, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the what was happening in the streets, what
Speaker 1: the police were doing, the different kind of marches and
Speaker 1: and different campaigns that were being started got spread to people.
Speaker 1: And I do think that you know, folks, you know,
Speaker 1: like you and me were a part of that. Although
Speaker 1: it never is far from my mind that the most
Speaker 1: influential piece of media that was that was recorded and
Speaker 1: disseminated during twenty twenty was the video of George Floyd
Speaker 1: being murdered, which was filmed by you know, someone who
Speaker 1: just happened to be nearby and had the courage to
Speaker 1: film it. Not a professional journalist, not a not an influencer,
Speaker 1: not a not somebody who was a professional political thinker,
Speaker 1: and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that that kind of gets to the heart
Speaker 1: of it, right, is that like we we express support
Speaker 1: for ideas, and thus people tend to treat us as
Speaker 1: though we are the progenitors of those ideas, or the
Speaker 1: the guardians of those ideas, or the leaders of a
Speaker 1: kind of decentralized proxy party of some kind. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's both, because I think, thankfully there's that. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's there's always going to be every everyone who makes
Speaker 1: popular media gets forms a little cult, and so there's
Speaker 1: always going to be a number of people who, you know,
Speaker 1: take any given person in the media more seriously than
Speaker 1: they deserve, and that that includes the both of us.
Speaker 1: And that's that's not attempting to be that's not attempting
Speaker 1: to be like Humble or anything. That is simply a
Speaker 1: fact of how mass media works. Um. I do think
Speaker 1: we've seen. I think there's been a mix of a
Speaker 1: healthy pushback against looking at people who are doing creating
Speaker 1: popular media as more than what they are and more
Speaker 1: than what that media is capable of being. I think
Speaker 1: there has been a pushback against that in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years. It's been healthy, and I think there's
Speaker 1: been a pushback that's been unhealthy. People have forgotten some
Speaker 1: of the lessons of like one. I think a good
Speaker 1: example would be there was a very justified backlash against
Speaker 1: and when I say streamers here, I'm referring to people
Speaker 1: who are actually in the streets streaming during riots and
Speaker 1: protests and whatnot, right and that, and the justified part
Speaker 1: of that backlash was due to the fact that past
Speaker 1: a certain point, particularly those video those streams were primarily
Speaker 1: being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on
Speaker 1: people and to just to know where folks were as
Speaker 1: an intelligence gathering method. And I think that the backlash,
Speaker 1: which was understandable, and there was a lot of ugly behavior,
Speaker 1: including people who kind of got in after the early
Speaker 1: portions of that in order to make shitloads of money
Speaker 1: by you know, streaming people getting the shit beat out
Speaker 1: of them by the cops, and that was I think
Speaker 1: very justified, a pretty aggressive social response to that, but
Speaker 1: I think it's also caused a lot of people to
Speaker 1: forget that. A huge part of why things kicked off
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty and why so many people got involved
Speaker 1: was Nico from Uniform Corn on the ground every night
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis doing one of the most impressive pieces of
Speaker 1: citizen journalism that I think we've seen in this country.
Speaker 1: And so I do think that some of what's frustrating
Speaker 1: here is that it's difficult for people. It's difficult for
Speaker 1: us as a community to take some of the proper
Speaker 1: lessons from these things that are happening from the push
Speaker 1: and pull of the conflict that we all find ourselves in,
Speaker 1: in part because the nature of the way people express
Speaker 1: their understanding of these lessons via social media is very
Speaker 1: geared towards flattening them and making it a very simple
Speaker 1: matter of this is bad or this is good, and
Speaker 1: not well in this period of time, this worked and
Speaker 1: then it didn't. You know, there's no real sense of
Speaker 1: proportionality in these discussions. It isn't just a matter of like, hey,
Speaker 1: you fucked up. You should probably take this down, or
Speaker 1: this could be dangerous if you leave this up, or
Speaker 1: if you continue to do this. It's more so like
Speaker 1: what are you a cop? What are you some kind
Speaker 1: of cop doing this? Yeah, you know, let's let's spread
Speaker 1: that rumor around and it I mean, yeah, the cop
Speaker 1: jacketing thing is is kind of one part of the problem.
Speaker 1: But I want to focus a little bit on what
Speaker 1: you were talking about in terms of what do you
Speaker 1: think as you're kind of looking at you know, and
Speaker 1: we're all kind of staring twenty twenty four as it approaches,
Speaker 1: what do you think is useful from media that that
Speaker 1: attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are that are
Speaker 1: left wing, that are anarchists inclined. What do you think
Speaker 1: is actually the value that can be added to attempts
Speaker 1: to achieve greater justice in our society. Well, I think
Speaker 1: the answer is twofold. I think firstly, anything that drives
Speaker 1: people to like real life organizing and taking action outside
Speaker 1: of online spaces is obviously useful. UM. Beyond that, though, like,
Speaker 1: I think there is some value to just exposing people
Speaker 1: to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But
Speaker 1: I think that, um, that a lot of that has
Speaker 1: been accomplished now. I feel like a lot of people
Speaker 1: are more familiar with with kind of the leftist the
Speaker 1: leftist idehology one on one type of content that people
Speaker 1: might expect in that way. So yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: those are the two value propositions. I wonder if you
Speaker 1: think a lot about because one thing that concerns me obviously, UM.
Speaker 1: Any community develops a language that is to some extent
Speaker 1: its own, UM, and that's that's a that's part of politics,
Speaker 1: you know, political analysis, if you're looking at things with
Speaker 1: a Marxist analysis, or if you're analyzing things you know
Speaker 1: based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy.
Speaker 1: There's terms that you're going to use that that other
Speaker 1: thinkers have created, that are the terms that people use
Speaker 1: to discuss those ideas. But it is sometimes kind of
Speaker 1: a thin line between that and the thing that colts
Speaker 1: do where they come up with a bunch of specific
Speaker 1: terms that no one else uses in order to separate
Speaker 1: a community from the rest from everyone else. And obviously
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any intentionality there. I don't think
Speaker 1: people who are talking about you know, the dialectic or
Speaker 1: whatever are attempting to separate their listeners from the mass
Speaker 1: of humanity. But I do think that happens sometimes. And
Speaker 1: when I listen sometimes to conversations on the left about justice,
Speaker 1: in particular about social justice, I wonder, like, well, how
Speaker 1: is somebody who isn't like reading all this shit going
Speaker 1: to interpret this? Is it just going to like sound
Speaker 1: like nonsense to them? And I think maybe like part
Speaker 1: of the purpose, the positive purpose of mass media that
Speaker 1: looks at things from the left is trying to communicate
Speaker 1: with folks who are not going to sit down or
Speaker 1: at least who have not yet sat down and done
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of reading on the history and the politics,
Speaker 1: but whose heart are in the right place, and who
Speaker 1: I would like to be able to engage in conversations
Speaker 1: with folks who maybe kind of get their heads a
Speaker 1: little bit too full of specific terminology. Sometimes I think
Speaker 1: it's it's a specific balancing act because on the other hand,
Speaker 1: like you also have to give your audience a little
Speaker 1: credit that they're absolutely but I think that like you
Speaker 1: have to be able to meet people where they're at.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, like, if someone has expressed
Speaker 1: this idea in a way that's already sufficient, like it's it's, uh,
Speaker 1: why do the work of like trying to re explain that,
Speaker 1: you know. But that being said, I think there is
Speaker 1: a tendency to just assume people already are on our
Speaker 1: side or understand ideas to the level of complexity that
Speaker 1: we might like and that people are on board with,
Speaker 1: like what even something as simple as what capitalism means.
Speaker 1: You know, all the time you see people online who
Speaker 1: will say that, Like a musician will post their band
Speaker 1: campage and people will be like, oh, I thought you
Speaker 1: were anti capitalist. You know. Yeah, it's it's like you know,
Speaker 1: but like you also can't get caught up in the
Speaker 1: kind of um weaponized ignorance that the people you know
Speaker 1: like you. You can't make someone understand something if they
Speaker 1: have a particular reason not to want to. So I
Speaker 1: absolutely agree that, like there's the danger of that that
Speaker 1: group in speak, uh, but it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: difficult problem to solve. I think the kind of approach
Speaker 1: I take to it most of the time is that
Speaker 1: I tend to write my scripts as the as though
Speaker 1: I am uh just the like like a child. Like
Speaker 1: I try to write as though I'm speaking to a
Speaker 1: five year old, you know, Yeah, I mean, and I
Speaker 1: think I also I think a lot about and this
Speaker 1: is something you know here at cool Zone I've brought
Speaker 1: we brought on a couple of years ago, people who
Speaker 1: you know, are now making podcasts for the team who
Speaker 1: when we brought them on had a lot less experience
Speaker 1: writing scripts and making media for mass consumption. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that I found it was kind of
Speaker 1: like my job to do repeatedly was to point out,
Speaker 1: like Okay, stop, go actually go back to that term
Speaker 1: because you you just you know, said a term that
Speaker 1: I think means a specific or you just referenced a
Speaker 1: thing from history that I think that people are interested
Speaker 1: in and should know about. But you do have to
Speaker 1: like go in and explain it and walk people through it.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of part of That's really one of
Speaker 1: the challenges I find, particularly with um with Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards right where we're talking sometimes about these complicated social
Speaker 1: movements and moments in history, and it's this kind of
Speaker 1: tug of war between you want to respect the intelligence
Speaker 1: of the audience and you want to give them enough
Speaker 1: detail that they have contexts and that that can maybe
Speaker 1: understand multiple sides of it. But also you can't get
Speaker 1: bogged down in every detail otherwise you're never going to
Speaker 1: finish the damn thing. And we can't all be Dan
Speaker 1: Carlin making ten hour long podcasts unfortunately. I do like
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which I'm quite jealous of his work,
Speaker 1: the way he set up his workload. But I would
Speaker 1: just never be able to think of that many boxing analogies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know very much about boxing. I
Speaker 1: would probably just like throw in a whole lot of
Speaker 1: balls mahoney analogy, Yeah, a lot of For me, it
Speaker 1: would be a lot of super punch out references. Like
Speaker 1: hell yes, stan Lee would always say to comic book
Speaker 1: writers that every comic is somebody's first comic, and so
Speaker 1: you kind of have to consider that, like every piece
Speaker 1: of messaging you do might this might be like the
Speaker 1: first time someone is stepping out of a completely different
Speaker 1: ideological bubble than you might expect, and so you know,
Speaker 1: it kind of has the messaging kind has to stand
Speaker 1: on its own. But I think that's also like a
Speaker 1: unique problem to mass media because it also means that,
Speaker 1: in a sense, it's much harder to like build on
Speaker 1: previous work. It's harder to go from your one on
Speaker 1: one content and then get to the more advanced subjects,
Speaker 1: because someone could just start at the more advanced part
Speaker 1: and get lost. I think that's a really apt way
Speaker 1: of describing what I also find as one of the
Speaker 1: central problems, because a ton of the episodes of Bastards,
Speaker 1: especially the stuff when we focus on fascists, builds on itself.
Speaker 1: Right you, your understanding of fascism in Romania will be
Speaker 1: influenced and is to some degree. You don't really you
Speaker 1: can't understand fascism in Romania without understanding fascism and vimar
Speaker 1: fascism in Italy, fascism in the United States during the
Speaker 1: same period, and vice versa. And so my hope is
Speaker 1: that the people who catch all of the episodes are
Speaker 1: building a really complex and durable understanding of the problem
Speaker 1: through it. But it's also the struggle of like, well,
Speaker 1: a lot of people who are just going to be like,
Speaker 1: oh shit, I know Hitler, but I maybe I'm not
Speaker 1: interested in hearing about romania, you know, and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to click on those episodes. And there's nothing against people.
Speaker 1: Like when I listen to podcasts, I find myself doing
Speaker 1: the same thing where it's like there's a million episodes
Speaker 1: of this show, I'm not going to listen. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't have the time to listen to all of them. Sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that touches on another problem, which is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the subjects that people like us tend to cover are
Speaker 1: biased towards what we think people will find interesting, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and beyond that, like what we ourselves find
Speaker 1: interesting to research, Yeah, and what in what you can
Speaker 1: And this is a thing that I try to point
Speaker 1: out on my subreddit sometimes when people are like I
Speaker 1: can't believe you haven't done this guy or that guy,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, that doing that research is going
Speaker 1: to fuck me up, and like, so I'm not going
Speaker 1: to do it yet. I'm gonna do this thing. That's funny.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read about the liver king this week. I
Speaker 1: need I need a break. So the liver king is
Speaker 1: who we're talking about. Yeah, everybody needs a liver king
Speaker 1: in their life at some point. Yeah, it's like, um,
Speaker 1: I read the Turner Diaries for one video. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I've been constant. People have been constantly like, oh, you
Speaker 1: should read Camp of the Saints, you should read Siege.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to.
Speaker 1: First of all, I don't even know if I want
Speaker 1: those things on my hard drive. Yeah. Yeah, Camp of
Speaker 1: the Saints is a little easier, but yeah, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: one of those a year and no more. That's like
Speaker 1: the most I would recommend from like a mental health standpoint.
Speaker 1: It's also like you don't need to read the full
Speaker 1: text of all of those. I mean, that's part of
Speaker 1: the thing is that like you can get a lot
Speaker 1: by checking in some exerpts and reading scholarly papers analyzing
Speaker 1: this stuff, and they're there always will be that, um,
Speaker 1: and I think to a significant standpoint, like it's more
Speaker 1: important to understand, you know. And this isn't true for everybody,
Speaker 1: because there's some people who you know, are scholars of
Speaker 1: this stuff, and you do need to to to do
Speaker 1: the deep reading. But if you want to understand the
Speaker 1: degree to which Siege and the Turner Diers Diaries influence
Speaker 1: the mass shootings that we see in the United States
Speaker 1: state that are carried out by the far right. You
Speaker 1: don't need to read those books to do that, right.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of really good scholarly analysis and that's part
Speaker 1: of what you and I try to do for people.
Speaker 1: Um and what what other you know, folks who are
Speaker 1: creating this kind of media other journalists do for folks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I will. I would say that I strongly balk at
Speaker 1: the I don't consider myself a journalist. Um yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and I don't consider that's something people talk about as well.
Speaker 1: On the subreddit, I get a lot of like comments
Speaker 1: on people appreciating the journalism in the series, and we
Speaker 1: do in some of our shows, like you know we
Speaker 1: did we went to the Border, mean mar last year.
Speaker 1: Garrison just got back from cop City. But like Bastards,
Speaker 1: isn't journalism, you know, sometimes it's like celebrating journalism, but
Speaker 1: it's it's it's inner detainment that I hope has like
Speaker 1: an educational quality to it. Yeah, it's I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't say this to belittle myself. I just don't see
Speaker 1: that as as the function of my job. I think,
Speaker 1: like like I have I have in the in the
Speaker 1: course of my work, occasionally done journalism by accidents. I
Speaker 1: did a long interview where I had like about the
Speaker 1: chas and and kind of the misconceptions that people had,
Speaker 1: and I had some you know, talks with people within
Speaker 1: and like that is technically, on its face a piece
Speaker 1: of journalism for sure. You know, absolutely it's not what
Speaker 1: I consider my uh strength or role to be well.
Speaker 1: And I honestly this goes back to what we were
Speaker 1: talking about with the young woman who filmed the video
Speaker 1: of of George Floyd. Um. Journalism is a profession, but
Speaker 1: it's also just like a set of tools, and that
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes you will use those tools in order
Speaker 1: to do other things. You know that that's that's certainly true.
Speaker 1: I'm curious you and I. You and I both kind
Speaker 1: of uh like make our our our work work uh differently.
Speaker 1: M Mine's ad supported obviously, So my conversation with fans,
Speaker 1: you know, outside of like when I'm doing a live
Speaker 1: show is primarily through we have a subreddit and we
Speaker 1: have Twitter, um, and that's uh, you know, there's some
Speaker 1: difficulty there. For one thing, like every single guest we have,
Speaker 1: there are people who will be like, this is the
Speaker 1: best guests you've ever had? And this person is the
Speaker 1: worst guest you've ever had, and there's absolutely no way
Speaker 1: to make decisions based on that, right, it's just so much. Um.
Speaker 1: You you've got a different relationship, or at least a
Speaker 1: different method of I think communicating. I imagine it's different,
Speaker 1: um because because your your Patreon supported I'm interested in
Speaker 1: how have I if at all? Have you seen kind
Speaker 1: of the conversations about what people want from you and
Speaker 1: you know the way in which you've been talking with
Speaker 1: your fans. How have you seen that change since twenty twenty? Well, Um,
Speaker 1: I think one of the major ways is since I've
Speaker 1: kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of people have kind of encouraged me
Speaker 1: to go more in that direction, and I have seen
Speaker 1: like a big drop in my support as a result.
Speaker 1: I think that it's it's a tricky balance to strike again.
Speaker 1: Many of these things are like such a balancing act
Speaker 1: because I always am careful to remind people that, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you can support me on Patreon if you like what
Speaker 1: I'm doing and want there to be more of it,
Speaker 1: but please don't operate under the assumption that doing so
Speaker 1: is activism or contributes to activism, because it is not
Speaker 1: you are not like making the revolution more than exactly
Speaker 1: you know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm
Speaker 1: going to put at the end of my video, like
Speaker 1: that's that's the value proposition here, Yeah, and I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's a I don't The reason I
Speaker 1: don't accept ad ad reads on Thoughtslime I do on
Speaker 1: scaredy Cats is because I don't want the perception that
Speaker 1: my views are going to be limited or held back
Speaker 1: by you know, the desire to seek out advertisers, which,
Speaker 1: whether or not I would have the integrity to withstand
Speaker 1: like it, it would create the illusion. But that creates
Speaker 1: the problem of well, now I kind of have to
Speaker 1: do what I think that my audience will want, and
Speaker 1: that's its own kettle of fish, Like I am I
Speaker 1: pushing people to donate more than than they might be
Speaker 1: comfortable with, and so that's you know, I don't I
Speaker 1: don't really know like the the ethics of it, to
Speaker 1: be perfectly frank, there have been times when people have
Speaker 1: made big donations and I've had to message them and
Speaker 1: say like, hey, I think you should you should probably
Speaker 1: take this money back. You probably weren't thinking straight when
Speaker 1: you sent me this money. I think you should probably
Speaker 1: have it back. Yeah, that's such an interesting thing for
Speaker 1: me because it also you know, I've I've thought about
Speaker 1: that myself quite a lot. You know. I had a
Speaker 1: decision to make when we first started doing these shows
Speaker 1: about how it was going to be done, and I
Speaker 1: took the ad supported corporate route, and I've been very
Speaker 1: happy with that so far. There's a lot of things
Speaker 1: that's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, um,
Speaker 1: you know, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol.
Speaker 1: But um, you know, it's one of those things. I
Speaker 1: made a comment, and this is part one of the
Speaker 1: one of the frustrating things about making media for a
Speaker 1: large audience is there's always going to be people who
Speaker 1: will like read into what you've said something you never meant.
Speaker 1: I made a comment once about like, you know, because
Speaker 1: we get people asking, well, why don't you do a
Speaker 1: Patreon or whatever? Why do you do it this way?
Speaker 1: And I just made a comment like expressing what you
Speaker 1: had just expressed, like, well, you know, I feel weird
Speaker 1: sometimes asking for money and if I can just like
Speaker 1: get money from a big company and you know, hire
Speaker 1: my friends and do my work. I feel okay doing that.
Speaker 1: It's how most of my career has worked. So that's
Speaker 1: what I'm most comfortable doing. And yes, there were people
Speaker 1: who took from that, like well, Robert doesn't think it's
Speaker 1: ethical to have a Patreon. It's like half of my
Speaker 1: friends make their living son Patreon. I do not have
Speaker 1: an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will
Speaker 1: say that when I heard you mentioned that in an episode,
Speaker 1: and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No,
Speaker 1: I mean I think like Cody Johnston, who I've worked
Speaker 1: with for what fifteen years now, has a massive Patreon.
Speaker 1: Tom and Dave Boyd lived with some of my best friends.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, like it's I think it's perfectly it's
Speaker 1: it's certainly no less ethical, and you can make a
Speaker 1: case people do that it's more ethical than being ad supported.
Speaker 1: It's just like, I mean, some of it just comes
Speaker 1: down to like what kind of stuff are you making
Speaker 1: and what kind of like person are you and what's
Speaker 1: going to work best with you as like a creative
Speaker 1: method in a way of interacting with fans. And they
Speaker 1: have downsides and they have positives. You know, it's also
Speaker 1: like a matter of of what you're able to do
Speaker 1: to certain extents, because like, I don't know how to
Speaker 1: get advertisers. Yeah, any advertisers that I've ever gotten on
Speaker 1: my my horror channel have just reached out to me,
Speaker 1: and like, I don't know if I'm getting as much
Speaker 1: money out of them as they should be. I have
Speaker 1: no idea. I just I just kind of wing it.
Speaker 1: You know, like if you have that background in radio
Speaker 1: or broadcasting or what have you, like it, can you
Speaker 1: know that it's it's a much more viable option for
Speaker 1: some people than it is for others. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: Mean a lot of why it works for me the
Speaker 1: way that it does is because I've had a fifteen
Speaker 1: year career in not in broadcasts, but you know, in
Speaker 1: comedy writing and whatnot. And so I mean that's how
Speaker 1: I got the I got my podcast hosted on my
Speaker 1: Heart in the first place, and that's like a thing.
Speaker 1: And this is actually one of the things that concerns
Speaker 1: me most about the ship that's happening with AI right now,
Speaker 1: because you know, there's this, Uh, the folks that kind
Speaker 1: of I came into making media for all of us
Speaker 1: started as fairly a political comedy. I mean that's Cody
Speaker 1: Johnston write some more news. Cody was making videos about
Speaker 1: like chat roulette and penises when we when we all
Speaker 1: started working together, very funny videos, but like we were
Speaker 1: making silly things. Um, and everyone has kind of uh
Speaker 1: moved into making like, you know, pretty pretty serious fact
Speaker 1: based media. Um. You know, Cody does a very popular,
Speaker 1: very political kind of current events show. And we were
Speaker 1: able to get good at making the kind of media
Speaker 1: that we made and build the connections that we built
Speaker 1: and build the audiences that we built because we had
Speaker 1: years of time where you could make a decent living
Speaker 1: writing stuff for the Internet. And I see the kind
Speaker 1: of shit that I'm afraid AI is going to do
Speaker 1: to these jobs where people would get their start as
Speaker 1: writers and whatnot. Maybe it wasn't the best, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not that you're not doing the best writing you're
Speaker 1: ever going to do the jobs that get replace by AI.
Speaker 1: But it's a foot in the door, and I keep
Speaker 1: feeling I feel like I keep seeing the room for
Speaker 1: people to put their foot in the door get smaller
Speaker 1: and smaller every year, and that's that worries me a lot.
Speaker 1: I definitely know what you mean. I also feel that
Speaker 1: like there's a fear among some people that like, you
Speaker 1: get crowded out of these spaces the more people there
Speaker 1: are doing this sort of thing, and I kind of
Speaker 1: feel like that's not the case. I'd like the AI stuff.
Speaker 1: I definitely share your concerns, but yeah, the the institutional
Speaker 1: barriers and people's way, like I think that like to
Speaker 1: be frank, like, I started doing this on a shitty
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars computer and a completely legal video editing software,
Speaker 1: but I love video editing software. I found it in
Speaker 1: a dumpster and I used that, so you know, and
Speaker 1: then like through that, I was able to be able
Speaker 1: to afford a fancy camera in some lights and you know,
Speaker 1: but like I didn't know what I was doing, Like
Speaker 1: it was all self taught. And I think there has
Speaker 1: to be that kind of DIY attitude, yeah, for people.
Speaker 1: And it is something I try to encourage in people,
Speaker 1: is that like, just just do it like I did it,
Speaker 1: you can do it. Yeah, you know. I think that's
Speaker 1: a great point because I am coming at this from
Speaker 1: the old man dumerist perspective of somebody who like the
Speaker 1: world has changed from the way it was when I'm
Speaker 1: young when I was young, and people don't get their
Speaker 1: career started that way anymore. And your point is very
Speaker 1: valid that while changes in the industry have closed specific doors,
Speaker 1: they've also created some and I think probably in the
Speaker 1: long run, it is better for people to get their
Speaker 1: foot in the door doing what you did than rewriting
Speaker 1: a bunch of press releases about tech gadgets for a
Speaker 1: shady website that takes advantage of the Google algorithm, which
Speaker 1: has always started my career. I think that's actually a
Speaker 1: really valid I think, Yeah, I don't. I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's a It depends on your end goal too, right,
Speaker 1: But I think like the thing that becomes incumbent on
Speaker 1: on people like me is to like help people, you know,
Speaker 1: Like I've experienced a certain amount of success and so,
Speaker 1: and I attribute that largely to the fact that, like
Speaker 1: when I was just starting out, like I had no
Speaker 1: idea how to make people see my shit. I'd like,
Speaker 1: I did not know what I was doing. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: a bigger creator just reached down and it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: can I share your video? I think it's really good,
Speaker 1: And it kind of snowballed from there. So my philosophy
Speaker 1: has always been like you take these uh you know,
Speaker 1: you you make space for to lift people up with you.
Speaker 1: And in doing so, it's not an entirely selfless gesture either,
Speaker 1: because in doing so, if if there's an extremely talented
Speaker 1: person who succeeds partially because you help them, now you
Speaker 1: have a connection to an extremely talented person. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's a sen for lack of a better term,
Speaker 1: mutual aid in a very yeah, loose sense. I suppose
Speaker 1: that reminds me of something a good friend of mine
Speaker 1: and a colleague at Cracked who now helps run the
Speaker 1: Small Beans podcast network said to me years and years
Speaker 1: ago when he was directing a video, which is, I
Speaker 1: want to spend the rest of my career getting hired
Speaker 1: and fired by my friends. Which is I think a
Speaker 1: nice way of looking at it. And there's a degree
Speaker 1: to which it's a very old Hollywood way of looking
Speaker 1: at it, But it doesn't. It also works very well
Speaker 1: in this It can work very well in this new,
Speaker 1: this new kind of ecosystem that is still being put together.
Speaker 1: And I do think that it's because I see a
Speaker 1: lot and I don't. I'm not someone who does a
Speaker 1: lot of time like I like to watch. I watch
Speaker 1: like the stuff that you put together, the stuff h
Speaker 1: Bomber guy puts together where it's actual like videos on topics,
Speaker 1: and I'm learning something this stuff that that Dan Olsen
Speaker 1: puts together. You know, I'm not so much into And
Speaker 1: this is not I'm not attacking anybody. I'm not like
Speaker 1: trying to shoot on the field. But personally I don't
Speaker 1: watch like the just kind of like stream stuff a lot,
Speaker 1: and I it does seem like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: conflicts between people in that, and I'm wondering, you know,
Speaker 1: my hope is that there's more people building connections to
Speaker 1: create resiliency between the people who are are trying to
Speaker 1: make good shit and trying to make stuff that people
Speaker 1: enjoy and that has an impact on people and that
Speaker 1: even changes people in positive ways. And it sounds like
Speaker 1: from what from what you're talking about, you know, honestly
Speaker 1: from what I experience too, I do think that's more
Speaker 1: the case than like the drama that that goes viral
Speaker 1: on Twitter from time to time. Yeah, I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I hope I hope so too. I think that that
Speaker 1: it's it's very easy to piss people off and it's
Speaker 1: much harder to get people's attention by being kind. But
Speaker 1: you know, I like, look, you know, how many nice
Speaker 1: comments do I gain in a day? Can't count? But
Speaker 1: like the one shitty comments will always stick out. It's
Speaker 1: the same way like if if I have a thousand
Speaker 1: pleasant interactions with someone else, uh, nobody notices. But if I,
Speaker 1: you know, get into if I pick a fight with somebody,
Speaker 1: you know, it's people are going to remember forever. I
Speaker 1: think that's the thing that unsettles me most. And this
Speaker 1: isn't actually even just like this isn't about streaming media
Speaker 1: or left wing media or whatever. This is a problem
Speaker 1: of social media that You're right, it's the it's the
Speaker 1: fights that always get most of the attention as opposed
Speaker 1: to them. I mean not entirely, because some of like
Speaker 1: the big moments is particularly in recent left wing media
Speaker 1: things like um, you know, people doing these giant streams
Speaker 1: that raise huge amounts of money for a cause. So
Speaker 1: that that certainly is a thing that happens and does
Speaker 1: get a lot of attention when it does happen. But
Speaker 1: you are fighting against and I think we have to
Speaker 1: be consciously fighting against this system that does to engender conflict. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's also kind of difficult and I and you know,
Speaker 1: keep in mind this is this is perhaps coming from
Speaker 1: a bias perspective when there are individuals and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to name names who do see that as an
Speaker 1: easy source of generating attention. Uh, it's it's very easy
Speaker 1: to the same way that, like, if I'm going to
Speaker 1: make a video on a subject, I will frame it
Speaker 1: as like I'm disagreeing with Ben Shapiro or I'm disagreeing
Speaker 1: with Jordan Peterson. It's very easy to go look at
Speaker 1: thought slime, there's a big piece of shit because he
Speaker 1: thought this when when actually this is the truth. That's
Speaker 1: more attention grabbing than just you know, a kind of
Speaker 1: neutrally positioned argument. Yeah, so it's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: a tricky problem. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the
Speaker 1: ones that, um that I think on quite a lot. Well, um,
Speaker 1: I think that's most of what I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about today. Did you want to like throwing anything else
Speaker 1: or if not, we can go to plugs. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm good, that's pretty much it. I will say that
Speaker 1: one of the things that tends to bother me the
Speaker 1: most is people will occasionally say to me that they'll
Speaker 1: send a message thing you seem like a really good person,
Speaker 1: and I will say thank you. But please don't feel
Speaker 1: that way about content creators, because why would I make
Speaker 1: a work that portrayed myself as a bad person? And
Speaker 1: while I, in my mind think I am a good person,
Speaker 1: I think it sets the dangerous precedent that you could
Speaker 1: allow yourself to be emotionally manipulated by someone else who
Speaker 1: might not be well the name of the game. When
Speaker 1: you are creating media, particularly when you're creating media that's
Speaker 1: meant to make people feel things, part of that is manipulation, right.
Speaker 1: Manipulate is not an inherently negative term. You know, Stanley
Speaker 1: Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to persuade you, Yeah, you do it does
Speaker 1: It is incumbent upon the audience for their own protection
Speaker 1: to keep that in mind. And it's incumbent upon ethical
Speaker 1: people who make stuff to not create cults, at least
Speaker 1: not create too many cults. Yeah, as much as you
Speaker 1: can avoid it, for sure. Yeah, all right, you want
Speaker 1: to plug your plugables. Sure, you can find my work
Speaker 1: at YouTube dot com. Slash Thoughtslime or thoughtslime dot com.
Speaker 1: You also find my horror content at YouTube dot com
Speaker 1: slash Scaredycats TV. Scaredycats was taken. That's me, That's what
Speaker 1: I do. I make videos about fartsand or butts. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on the show. That
Speaker 1: is going to be it for us today. We will
Speaker 1: be back probably tomorrow. Hey, we'll be back Monday with
Speaker 1: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 1: of the Universe. It Could Happen Here as a production
Speaker 1: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It
Speaker 1: Could Happen Here, updated monthly at Coolsonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.