Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a completion 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Hey, everybody, Robert here. UM.
Speaker 1: I recorded this with Jason about two days before UM
Speaker 1: Wizards of the Coast put out an announcement completely backpedaling
Speaker 1: on everything they had been planning to do to the
Speaker 1: Open Gaming License UM. Of survey of fifteen thousand fans
Speaker 1: said they were not happy with the Wizards, UH the
Speaker 1: authorizing UM the one point out open gaming license and uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, what it looks like is a lot of
Speaker 1: people unregistered from D and D beyond and UM. A
Speaker 1: lot of people called in complaining and the numbers folks
Speaker 1: at Wizards panicked. UM and as a result, they are
Speaker 1: completely folding on the plans to rescind or de authorize
Speaker 1: the Open Gaming License UM and in factive announced that
Speaker 1: they are making it UH the exact terms they use
Speaker 1: are irrevocable, and uh, yeah, that's that's good. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they put everything under an irrevocable Creative Commons license. So
Speaker 1: this is all just breaking, um, But I think it's
Speaker 1: broadly good news. Anytime a giant company chooses to do
Speaker 1: something kind of crummy with a piece of what what
Speaker 1: I would say is actually pretty meaningful intellectual heritage. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then they get slapped down and panic and reverse course,
Speaker 1: that's a good thing. Um. It shows a number of things,
Speaker 1: which one of which probably the most important of which
Speaker 1: is that the community of people who recognize their value
Speaker 1: in these kinds of games, in this h this pastime,
Speaker 1: this recreational activity, um also fundamentally value the essence of
Speaker 1: like what is open source ideology, which is nice, Like,
Speaker 1: it's nice to know that the open source folks we
Speaker 1: can still throw a punch every now and again, even
Speaker 1: if it's just a punch at Wizards of the Coast.
Speaker 1: So happy ending, everybody, Happy ending. Also, the good folks
Speaker 1: at Pizo sold out of eight months worth of Pathfinder
Speaker 1: books in like two weeks, so that's nice too. Uh,
Speaker 1: it could happen. Here is the podcast that you are
Speaker 1: listening to right now, I am Robert Evans. This is
Speaker 1: a show about things falling apart and sometimes putting them
Speaker 1: back together. And today we're we're taking a little bit
Speaker 1: of a different tax. In recent weeks, you've listened to
Speaker 1: us cover a wide variety of issues, from conflicts in
Speaker 1: places like me and mar two conflicts here at home
Speaker 1: in the city of Atlanta, UM, to deep dives in
Speaker 1: history and all that all that good stuff that that
Speaker 1: you know and of us. For today, we are talking
Speaker 1: about a subject that is unusually close to my heart.
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I'm gonna guess, just given the
Speaker 1: nature of our listenership, a decent chunk of you grew
Speaker 1: up playing d and d UM, and just because of
Speaker 1: how really shockingly suddenly it's become much more popular than
Speaker 1: it than it ever was previously, and much more mainstream.
Speaker 1: A lot of you who may have encountered as an adult, Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that's actually been written, kind of sociologically
Speaker 1: on on what Dungeons and Dragons is. A One point
Speaker 1: that some people will make is that it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of the first new game that we had that that
Speaker 1: human beings made up since like chess um, by which
Speaker 1: I mean you you have had war games for a
Speaker 1: very long period of time. But the concept of a
Speaker 1: role playing game and the way that that D and
Speaker 1: D is where you're essentially sitting down with a group
Speaker 1: of people and engaging in an act of collaborative storytelling
Speaker 1: that's kind of buttressed by a system of rules that's
Speaker 1: actually a prey the new idea. Now. Now, elements of
Speaker 1: this have existed forever um and in fact, kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting fact you'll run into is that in the
Speaker 1: late medieval period a lot of jousts had role playing elements,
Speaker 1: including ones were like rulers and and their their court
Speaker 1: would dress up as the knights of the round table
Speaker 1: and act in character as those nights. So elements of
Speaker 1: all of this stuff have existed for a while. But
Speaker 1: when Dungeons and Dragons kind of came together as a
Speaker 1: game for the first time, it was it is kind
Speaker 1: of worth seeing it as as something really new and
Speaker 1: valuable in the history of play and the history of
Speaker 1: human creativity. Um So, as a result of that, I
Speaker 1: do kind of think, I personally think there's something a
Speaker 1: little bit sacred about that that basic idea, and one
Speaker 1: of the things that's really interesting to me about the
Speaker 1: industry that grew up around Dungeons and Dragons is that
Speaker 1: there have always been a lot of people in it
Speaker 1: who I think feel the same way UM and I
Speaker 1: think one of these people was a guy named Ryan Dancy,
Speaker 1: and Ryan Dancy Um was vice president in charge of
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast for a
Speaker 1: while UM and he helped actually negotiate the sale of
Speaker 1: the Dungeons and Dragons property to Wizards of the Coast
Speaker 1: when the company that had been distributing it fell apart.
Speaker 1: And Dancy was a big part of the institution in
Speaker 1: the year two thousand of what became known as the
Speaker 1: Open Gaming License. And basically what this meant is that
Speaker 1: the set of rules that that D and D worked by,
Speaker 1: and at a round two thousand, which was I think
Speaker 1: you would call it like three point oh, was the
Speaker 1: system in place basically got elements of the mechanics got
Speaker 1: effectively open sourced. UM and so Wizards of the Coast
Speaker 1: UM went from what had been the previous move of
Speaker 1: the people who had owned D and D, which was
Speaker 1: kind of to oppose people trying to make third party
Speaker 1: content using the ruled source to embracing it and allowing
Speaker 1: it to do that freely. UM. And now I'm going
Speaker 1: to introduce our guest who was one of the people who,
Speaker 1: uh is kind of the one of the most influence
Speaker 1: will folks in what happened after this, because once the
Speaker 1: Open Gaming License came into effect, there's suddenly this galaxy
Speaker 1: of new games and supplemental materials that people start making, UM,
Speaker 1: which you know, Wizards is not profiting from directly, but
Speaker 1: which the hobby profits from. UM. And one of the
Speaker 1: people who has who has been most influential in that,
Speaker 1: is our guest today, Jason Bollman. Jason, you are the
Speaker 1: game a lead game designer at Piazzo and the creator
Speaker 1: of Pathfinder, which is the I mean, it's not Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons, but it uses as its base that kind
Speaker 1: of open gaming UH system, and it's it's what I
Speaker 1: play when I get a chance to sit down and
Speaker 1: play a role playing game. So, first off, Jason, thank
Speaker 1: you for several thousand hours of of my my childhood
Speaker 1: and early adulthood UM spent playing Pathfinder. Yeah, well thanks
Speaker 1: for having me. And yeah, PISO kind of spun off
Speaker 1: from Wizards of the Coast, Um, you know, back in
Speaker 1: the early days of the open game license, and we
Speaker 1: were there official publishers of their magazine until that kind
Speaker 1: of came to an end, and then we we started
Speaker 1: making our own game based off the open game license
Speaker 1: and did I did I? Did I get all that
Speaker 1: right earlier? Do you have any kind of clarifications she'd
Speaker 1: like to add before we move further into the conflict,
Speaker 1: and there is a conflict. We're not just talking about
Speaker 1: how cool d there are. I think there's a there's
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to note about games. Games are kind
Speaker 1: of weird when it comes to copyright and ownership, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of why the open game license is so important. Right.
Speaker 1: So TSR, the company that owned Dungeons and Dragons before
Speaker 1: Wizards of the Coast, was pretty pretty litigious, as you mentioned, um,
Speaker 1: but they ended up getting into kind of a bind
Speaker 1: because you know, the game itself is one that encourages
Speaker 1: people to make their own content, to kind of homebrew
Speaker 1: stuff and invent their own stories. And what it comes
Speaker 1: down to is that you know, ultimately game mechanics can't
Speaker 1: be copyrighted. That that's been long held, that that those
Speaker 1: sorts of things you cannot copyright. That's why you see
Speaker 1: so many versions of like scrabble that aren't scrabble. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's why anyone can make a basketball team or
Speaker 1: a basketball league and play basketball. You don't have to
Speaker 1: get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1: So the Open Game License wasn't about giving everyone permission
Speaker 1: to use rules, which is something that could already kind
Speaker 1: of do. It was about giving them kind of a
Speaker 1: safe harbor, a place that everybody involved kind of knew
Speaker 1: that this was all okay, no one was going to
Speaker 1: be filing frivolous, frivolous lawsuits, and that you could use
Speaker 1: kind of direct references without having to be a copyright
Speaker 1: lawyer or retaining a giant staff. It allowed a lot
Speaker 1: of very little businesses to kind of spring up, making, Hey,
Speaker 1: here's my cool adventure that I ran from my group.
Speaker 1: You can buy it and play it with your group. Now,
Speaker 1: little things like that, And I don't think it's for
Speaker 1: nothing that number one a huge thing. And this has
Speaker 1: become as Silicon Valley has kind of turned more mercenary,
Speaker 1: This has become less of a thing but a massive thing.
Speaker 1: And the early history of Silicon Valley in the tech
Speaker 1: industry was the open source movement, you know, was the
Speaker 1: idea that a lot of people should be able to collaboratively,
Speaker 1: work and iterate on things without having to worry about
Speaker 1: who owns the basic idea, right, you know. Lennox Is
Speaker 1: is a great example of this, and the the ideology
Speaker 1: behind the open source movement was a big influence in
Speaker 1: the open gaming license. I mean, Dancy kind of admits
Speaker 1: that himself. There's a quote where he says that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we need to embrace some of these ideas
Speaker 1: at the heart of the open source movement because I
Speaker 1: think it will be a good business decision for Wizards
Speaker 1: of the Coast. It will on the whole, even if
Speaker 1: we're not profiting directly from every sort of like thing
Speaker 1: that people make off of this, the fact that it's
Speaker 1: going to cause the hobby to explode will benefit us.
Speaker 1: And I think he's been proven right in that because
Speaker 1: D and D has gone from this thing that like
Speaker 1: I got bullied for in high school too. There's these
Speaker 1: massive podcast there's been TV shows that are just people
Speaker 1: playing the game. Game like it has reached this level.
Speaker 1: I never really expected it would of, like critical and
Speaker 1: and mass acceptance, which has been really cool to see.
Speaker 1: It's been one of the things that I've been happiest
Speaker 1: about watching occurs socially in the last couple of decades. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't disagree that the business case wasn't super tight, right,
Speaker 1: the way that the O g L got all of
Speaker 1: the other game companies, many of which had their own
Speaker 1: entirely different games in the early two thousands, they all
Speaker 1: abandoned them and started making content for D and d UM,
Speaker 1: and that just kind of carried forward a large swath
Speaker 1: of kind of the game industry, which is pretty cottage, right.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of small players. There's not a lot
Speaker 1: of large corporations in here. Um. You know, in fact,
Speaker 1: Wizards is by far the largest, And so you've got
Speaker 1: a bunch of small game companies that are are seeing
Speaker 1: this as a great opportunity to kind of play in
Speaker 1: the big pool. And a lot of them followed suit.
Speaker 1: So obviously the reason we are here today is that
Speaker 1: a paul has been cast recently over what has up
Speaker 1: until now been kind of a lovely thing. Um. Wizards
Speaker 1: of the Coast got a new CEO pretty recently, right, Um,
Speaker 1: Cynthia Williams is relatively new. Yeah, and and there is
Speaker 1: basically murmuring coming from the company that's like, we don't
Speaker 1: think D and D is properly capitalized. We we believe
Speaker 1: that there's we are leaving money on the table here
Speaker 1: and kind of in the wake of some of that
Speaker 1: stuff coming out, they announced a series of changes to
Speaker 1: the Open Gaming License. And if you if you kind
Speaker 1: of want to take it from here and explain, because
Speaker 1: I've i've I've I've read and listened to a number
Speaker 1: of different folks. I'm saying like, well, it's not as
Speaker 1: bad as people are are fearing, and some folks saying
Speaker 1: like this would effectively kill a huge chunk of the
Speaker 1: hobby and a bunch of the companies that have grown
Speaker 1: up in the wake of the Open Gaming License. And
Speaker 1: I'm I'm interested in your take on what what Wizards
Speaker 1: is doing here and what actually kind of is it risk.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think you you you've plued into the
Speaker 1: start of this, which was in early December of last year,
Speaker 1: Hasbro earnings call uh Cynthia basically came out and said
Speaker 1: D and D was under monetized and they had been
Speaker 1: spending the entire previous year, really proliferating magic they're gathering,
Speaker 1: which is their other giant brand and kind of really
Speaker 1: making a lot of money, like talks of like it
Speaker 1: is a billion dollar brand and um, as a result,
Speaker 1: you know, there was kind of some murmurings and some
Speaker 1: rumblings going through December, um talking about a new version
Speaker 1: of the O g L. Wizards themselves came out on
Speaker 1: December twenty one, so just a few days before Christmas,
Speaker 1: and said that a new O g L was coming
Speaker 1: and that it had notes in it about royalty reporting
Speaker 1: and um, you know, mentioning that folks won't need to
Speaker 1: pay until later um and that um, you know, really
Speaker 1: this new license is only going to be to make
Speaker 1: books and PDF. So they said this on December twenty one.
Speaker 1: And the royalty part of that is was really quite
Speaker 1: challenging because it said if you make over seven dollars
Speaker 1: a year, um, you might have to pay a sizeable
Speaker 1: percentage of your your your gross profit. Like and that's terrifying,
Speaker 1: which when you're talking about a business and and this
Speaker 1: is not the gaming industry does not run on huge margins. Um. No,
Speaker 1: unless you're like making Warhammer models that you're selling for
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty dollars for a piece of plastic
Speaker 1: that's tied. Yeah, the margins are pretty tight. Um. So
Speaker 1: saying like past, you know, seven K, your company with
Speaker 1: however many employees, has to give a quarter like that,
Speaker 1: that'll sink people. Yeah. I think a lot of companies,
Speaker 1: the larger ones, couldn't sustain that, right. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think saying your gross over seven just basically means make
Speaker 1: sure you only make seven hundred dollars that year. Um.
Speaker 1: I I do think that that is that is a real,
Speaker 1: real dangerous thing to a lot of these businesses. Now,
Speaker 1: for a lot of the content creators, this is never
Speaker 1: gonna matter. But I do believe that part of this was,
Speaker 1: you know, seeing gigantic, multimillion dollar kickstarters happening and kind
Speaker 1: of going whereas our yeah, we want a piece of this, um.
Speaker 1: And the answer to that is that, like you know,
Speaker 1: and it's problematic just crediting the creation of D and
Speaker 1: D solely to Gary Gygax, but like the people who
Speaker 1: came up with and play tested and made D and
Speaker 1: D a thing, and then the people who iterated and
Speaker 1: changed and evolved it from you know, the original game
Speaker 1: to a D and d um and the years of
Speaker 1: FACCO to to three point oh, like like morally outside
Speaker 1: of like what I think is justifiable in corporate law
Speaker 1: and stuff like, morally, I think it's fucked up to
Speaker 1: say that like some company forever gets a piece of
Speaker 1: that when what it is is like human beings coming
Speaker 1: together to try to figure out the most efficient way
Speaker 1: to run an engine for storytelling. Um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's fucked up to me to think
Speaker 1: about it this way. So they announced this alteration to
Speaker 1: the Open Gaming License and I'm going to guess those
Speaker 1: were some dark days at at the s O offices.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, you know, uh, most of us at
Speaker 1: PISO at that point in time, we're kind of on
Speaker 1: vacation and we kind of just filed it away and
Speaker 1: we're like, okay, well it's a draft and they're just talking.
Speaker 1: So um, you know, we get to back, you know,
Speaker 1: from our break and it's the beginning of the year
Speaker 1: and this is now January five is when a bombshell
Speaker 1: article drops on Gizmoto by CODEGA and they really laid
Speaker 1: out kind of what was in this proposed license, apparently
Speaker 1: having had portions of it linked to them, and um,
Speaker 1: you know it confirmed a margin, but maybe only for
Speaker 1: for kickstarters, which then got confer earned by someone at
Speaker 1: kickstarter on Twitter. Um and it also included a bit
Speaker 1: in there that there was a clause that said watsy
Speaker 1: could listen to the coast could use any of the
Speaker 1: content you create under the license for free, never having
Speaker 1: to make pay royalties to you, never having to give
Speaker 1: you any credit. They could just take your work. Um
Speaker 1: And and they phrased it in such a way that
Speaker 1: it sounded like it was, you know, well, just in
Speaker 1: case we make something similar, we don't want to get sued.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and we're talking about just to clarify it
Speaker 1: for people. We're not talking about like if you introduce mechanics,
Speaker 1: because again that that's not what this is covered. We're
Speaker 1: talking about if you create characters, if you create if
Speaker 1: you build stories, they have a right to utilize that
Speaker 1: story that you've made things that are actually copyrightable, right, Stories,
Speaker 1: ideas and expressions are copyrightable. Um uh, you know, but
Speaker 1: rules aren't. So that that drops on the fifth and
Speaker 1: on the night the full draft document leaks and you've
Speaker 1: got streamers and influencers reading it live on YouTube, and
Speaker 1: this thing just starts to snowball. Um and from the
Speaker 1: ninth forward things start moving very quickly. Um. On the tenth,
Speaker 1: a number of major kind of third party publishers, these
Speaker 1: are folks who print with the O jail announced that
Speaker 1: they were not going to go with that, and one
Speaker 1: of the largest ones, you know, announced, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: doing that at all. I'm going to create my entire
Speaker 1: brand new game. I'm leaving all of this behind. And
Speaker 1: the further on social media turned into basically a firestorm.
Speaker 1: Um it It's real sign of how how much more
Speaker 1: how many people both love and play versions of this
Speaker 1: game that there was so much media attention from like
Speaker 1: major media organs like this. This was not just you know,
Speaker 1: those of us who are into gaming, um, you know,
Speaker 1: freaking out over this change the Wizards of the Coast
Speaker 1: has made. This was like, I mean, I was seeing
Speaker 1: it everywhere. Very few things have like broken as widely
Speaker 1: in my media in ecosystem as as this. There was
Speaker 1: an article, there was a story about it today on NPR. UM,
Speaker 1: so there was another one. There was one other important
Speaker 1: aspect in the league, um that I think is really important.
Speaker 1: One is that the new o g L could be
Speaker 1: canceled at any time with thirty days notice. And they
Speaker 1: were climbing that they were de authorizing the previous o
Speaker 1: g L, which up to this point everyone kind of
Speaker 1: assumed was irrevocable, right it had. It has clauses in
Speaker 1: it that say, if we ever put on a new
Speaker 1: version of this license, you can ignore it and continue
Speaker 1: to use this one. Right, but it uses this word
Speaker 1: in there that says you can continue to use any
Speaker 1: authorized version of the license, never minding that the contract
Speaker 1: doesn't mention how you might d authorize a license. Um.
Speaker 1: So there there this draft of the o g L
Speaker 1: says that they're de authorizing the previous version, which puts
Speaker 1: all of the work of the past twenty years into doubt.
Speaker 1: And at this point in time, the fans are revolting
Speaker 1: right there. There are a lot of folks canceling their
Speaker 1: subscriptions to D and D Beyond, which is kind of
Speaker 1: there in house character generation tools that you pay a
Speaker 1: monthly subscription for. Um. And things really start spinning out
Speaker 1: of hand to the point where D and D actually
Speaker 1: has to respond to it and pulled back UM and
Speaker 1: kind of retreat from this and saying Hey, we're gonna
Speaker 1: answer your questions. What you saw was just a draft um,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh that was never supposed to leak um.
Speaker 1: But it was at this point in time that we
Speaker 1: actually launched our own license. We had been talking to
Speaker 1: some of the other publishers and by that, I mean
Speaker 1: we pizo uh to create a brand new safe harbor
Speaker 1: for folks to publish on. Or now it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's not gonna be owned by us, It's going
Speaker 1: to be owned by a law firm that actually drafted
Speaker 1: the first o g L. But you started to see
Speaker 1: this giant fork happening um where a lot of folks
Speaker 1: are just abandoning ship. And I mean, what do you
Speaker 1: think this means? Because obviously Wizards has already announced a
Speaker 1: new version of the of the o g L beyond
Speaker 1: like the one that got leaked, and I think are
Speaker 1: kind of in damage control mode. Do you think this
Speaker 1: is something that like there is any way for them
Speaker 1: to pull back from or do you think that kind
Speaker 1: of the inherent instability of the o g L now
Speaker 1: that they're kind of making these claims at while we
Speaker 1: can actually change the deal anytime we want, has that
Speaker 1: sort of irreficably altered the ground. I think that they've
Speaker 1: damaged a lot of people's trust in them, right, I
Speaker 1: think over over the past few weeks, especially when they
Speaker 1: went silent and then frankly the first retraction was really
Speaker 1: kind of awkward and filled with kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: we didn't lose, we won. This was great. Now we
Speaker 1: learned how to make a better license. Right, they're clearly
Speaker 1: stepping back, stepping back, stepping back, And their most recent
Speaker 1: step back, which just happened, you know, on the eighteenth,
Speaker 1: so you know, a week ago or so, basically said
Speaker 1: that they were going to release the core of the
Speaker 1: game to Creative Commons and their new license was going
Speaker 1: to be irrevocable and last forever. But it still contains
Speaker 1: a lot of kind of poison pills, things like we
Speaker 1: are still the authorizing the first version of the license,
Speaker 1: and we have this morality clause that says if we
Speaker 1: find your content offensive, we can just kill your license
Speaker 1: without Yeah, which is fucked up, because I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think I need to explain why that's fucked up. Um,
Speaker 1: that that puts that puts a lot of the most
Speaker 1: creative kind of projects to at risk, Like that I God,
Speaker 1: that's that's ugly. I mean, I don't think anybody in
Speaker 1: this industry wants to see any deeply offensive, problematic content. Um,
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of stuff that is, frankly, a
Speaker 1: lot more marginal and explorer, you know, issues of the
Speaker 1: human condition that folks might want to explore in a game.
Speaker 1: And who's to say that someone at Wizards might go, well, sorry,
Speaker 1: that's offensive to me. You don't get to make it. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody wants to invest their creativity and
Speaker 1: risk their business on what someone they will never have
Speaker 1: met thinks of their work. Yeah. The problem is not that,
Speaker 1: like I want as the most defensive role playing games
Speaker 1: I can get. The problem is like, well, who determines
Speaker 1: what offensive is? And it's a bunch of lawyers in
Speaker 1: business minute Wizards of the Coast. At least that's the worry, right,
Speaker 1: Like not necessarily that that's how it would work out,
Speaker 1: but you just you get no guarantee. And this stuff,
Speaker 1: this stuff evolves over time, right, you know what what
Speaker 1: is fine today maybe problematic tomorrow. We learned those things
Speaker 1: and we evolved from them and we change. But I
Speaker 1: don't think anybody wants to have kind of the this
Speaker 1: you know, acts hanging over our head of like, well, sorry,
Speaker 1: that's now offensive, So we're going to kill the entire license. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so where are we? Where are we now? Like it
Speaker 1: looks like Piezo Yawler are moving forward with the O
Speaker 1: r C along with a number of other people. Can
Speaker 1: you give me any of what that's going to look like?
Speaker 1: Because one of the things that that does concern me
Speaker 1: is um and this is a very selfish concern, but
Speaker 1: like I grew very comfortable with, you know, three point five,
Speaker 1: which is essentially the machinery that underpins Pathfinder and UM
Speaker 1: It's one of those things like if I didn't play
Speaker 1: again for twenty years, I could probably sit down with
Speaker 1: the material in my head and run a campaign just
Speaker 1: because so much of that stuff is burned into my brain.
Speaker 1: Are we like, what is the mechanics kind of underlying
Speaker 1: the O r C and how is it going to
Speaker 1: be different from what we've we've gotten used to. So
Speaker 1: I'll say this, We're we're in the very early days, yes,
Speaker 1: And what what's happening right now is we are you know,
Speaker 1: in coordination with a number of other publishers working with
Speaker 1: a Zoro law and are the people who wrote the
Speaker 1: original o g l uh and had, you know, fully
Speaker 1: intended for it to be a perpetual license, and we're
Speaker 1: working with them to to create kind of a rules
Speaker 1: neutral license that the entire game industry can use to
Speaker 1: share work, because there's there's like a lot of nuance
Speaker 1: that was in the o g l that allowed different
Speaker 1: companies to share creative work together, and a lot of
Speaker 1: companies used it as kind of a bridging license, even
Speaker 1: if they weren't using Dungeons and Dragons at all, they
Speaker 1: would just use the license as a framework to kind
Speaker 1: of exchange ideas. And that's what we want the ORC
Speaker 1: to be. The ORC needs to be a license that
Speaker 1: allows everybody in the game industry to open up their
Speaker 1: content and share work with each other and iterate and
Speaker 1: expand and grow. That's our real goal, um And ultimately
Speaker 1: we are not going to own it. No one's going
Speaker 1: to own it. We're actually going to try and find
Speaker 1: it onprofit to administer the license going forward so that
Speaker 1: we don't ever have to worry about this again. Nobody
Speaker 1: wants to go through what we've been going through for
Speaker 1: the past three weeks, so that's kind of that's kind
Speaker 1: of one half of it. The other half is what
Speaker 1: happens to Pathfinder UM. And obviously, you know, when it
Speaker 1: came to path Finder second Edition, we rewrote the game
Speaker 1: from scratch and it is now fully our game. It's
Speaker 1: something we own and we control UM. So we feel
Speaker 1: pretty confident that we're just going to keep on rolling
Speaker 1: with with Pathfinder. And ultimately, you know, we don't actually
Speaker 1: believe that the previous version of the O g l
Speaker 1: even can be rescinded, So I guess we'll see how
Speaker 1: that plays out. I can see this having an overall
Speaker 1: positive outcome, just in that if we get this new
Speaker 1: kind of thing that creators can use UM as a
Speaker 1: as a core point to branch off from when they
Speaker 1: are when they're making games that's actually under solid legal
Speaker 1: footing that isn't kind of reliant upon the whims of
Speaker 1: a publicly traded company, then in the long term, you know,
Speaker 1: that is in the long term, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: better for creators because it's more like the way things
Speaker 1: were for the first twenty years of the O g
Speaker 1: l UM. Do you I mean, like, what do you
Speaker 1: see as kind of some pitfalls and sort of trying
Speaker 1: to trying to make this this happened, trying to move
Speaker 1: things in this kind of more productive direction. Well, I
Speaker 1: think you can always you know, kind of fracture, you know,
Speaker 1: balkanize the market to the point where where everybody has
Speaker 1: such a small slice event that you know, no one
Speaker 1: can really get the kind of numbers they need to
Speaker 1: succeed because you're You're right, it is. It is a
Speaker 1: pretty small industry. The margin on you know, printed media
Speaker 1: isn't exactly great. But I think a lot of these
Speaker 1: companies do have the numbers to survive. But I think
Speaker 1: that right now everybody's trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: replace parts of what has just been lost. Um. Everybody's
Speaker 1: trying to kind of go in their different directions right now.
Speaker 1: And some of that is going to be really good,
Speaker 1: because I think we're gonna get a lot of really
Speaker 1: great games, um, and I'm excited to see him, um.
Speaker 1: But I do think that I think one of the
Speaker 1: worries just for the industry is that they kind of
Speaker 1: all had one flag they were rallying around, and now
Speaker 1: everyone's running in different directions and hoping that after all
Speaker 1: of this shakes out, everybody has kind of enough gamers
Speaker 1: to support a community. I think it's gonna work out.
Speaker 1: I think that there's a number of standouts happening already.
Speaker 1: Um you know, M C, d M and Cobald are
Speaker 1: obviously racing to do things. There's a bunch of kind
Speaker 1: of known players in the industry, US, Cobalt, Chaos, Um, Green, Ronan,
Speaker 1: all of them are pretty big companies position to kind
Speaker 1: of have good player bases with great games and mechanics
Speaker 1: underneath them. So I I think the big loser here
Speaker 1: is frankly, of the coast. They you know, up up
Speaker 1: until you know, the end of this year or the
Speaker 1: end of last year, they were undisputedly the largest game
Speaker 1: company in the entire table top role playing game industry,
Speaker 1: and that's still true today. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: cracks in that armor, and it does make me wonder
Speaker 1: how it's going to fracture out over time, and how
Speaker 1: many of their fans, many of which never heard of Pathfinder,
Speaker 1: never heard of you know, these other game companies call
Speaker 1: of Cthulo and stuff, are now suddenly exploring these games.
Speaker 1: And you know, frankly, the wealth of smaller Indian zin
Speaker 1: games that are out there, there's so much to play
Speaker 1: right now, and watsy has just told their fan base, hey,
Speaker 1: go check it out. It's interesting because it it kind
Speaker 1: of speaks to something that I've I've always loved and
Speaker 1: also found kind of sociologically fascinating about table top gaming,
Speaker 1: which is you just brought up call Off Cthulhu, which
Speaker 1: is a game that is I don't believe is under
Speaker 1: the control of the original company that it was made under.
Speaker 1: People have been playing versions of Calliff Cthuloo for a
Speaker 1: very long time. Jngeans and Dragons has gone through multiple owners.
Speaker 1: Shadow Run, which I played a lot of as a kid,
Speaker 1: has gone through multiple owners, and the rules sets change
Speaker 1: in the company that is profit from the official licensed
Speaker 1: material changes. But no matter what happens, even when those
Speaker 1: companies go wonder the games keep going. And that's there's
Speaker 1: something I think unique there that is, it's not the
Speaker 1: case even like um, you know, there's versions of it
Speaker 1: that happens in in PC gaming. But there's also this
Speaker 1: thing that happens that that a lot of gamers I
Speaker 1: know complain about, which is that like periodically, shit will
Speaker 1: get removed for whatever reason a company goes under a
Speaker 1: game is not supported and that game is just gone.
Speaker 1: That little piece of culture has just gone. And it
Speaker 1: seems like so far. I'm not gonna say in every case,
Speaker 1: because obviously there have been games that have have you know,
Speaker 1: people stopped playing and stuff in the tabletop space, but
Speaker 1: it's there's this continuity, you know, even in the face
Speaker 1: of of changing of the guards in terms of like
Speaker 1: what companies are successful, um of like people keep playing
Speaker 1: these the same games and iterating them and changing them,
Speaker 1: and um, I don't know. That's that always one of
Speaker 1: the things I found most inspiring about the way tabletop works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I do think the legacy of tabletop role
Speaker 1: playing games is one of cooperation. It was there from
Speaker 1: the start, right, you know, the moment Gary and is
Speaker 1: Uh and Dave and folks you know got together and
Speaker 1: started turning their you know, miniatures war game and giving
Speaker 1: characters to them, and everyone started building a story together.
Speaker 1: That spark was the start, and it's carried through in
Speaker 1: a million different ways and a million different tables. And
Speaker 1: even if you know, the companies go under or disappear,
Speaker 1: people with those books are still playing those games. There's
Speaker 1: plenty of people still playing a D and D first edition, right,
Speaker 1: you know they never left and they're fine with that,
Speaker 1: and and I salute them. Yeah, I think about and again,
Speaker 1: this is like one of the reasons this has such
Speaker 1: a place in my heart. I I started playing a
Speaker 1: D and D. But you know, it was my friends
Speaker 1: and I would play at a at cub Scout camp outs,
Speaker 1: and we didn't have acts us two dice, so we
Speaker 1: we had the rule books. We had like the Monster's
Speaker 1: Manual in the Player's Guide, and we use those as
Speaker 1: jumping off points, and we would bring like a bunch
Speaker 1: of nickels and we would we would figure out way
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, for this action, you've gotta get three
Speaker 1: heads out of five flips or something like that, and
Speaker 1: that's a success in this And like so many people
Speaker 1: have stories like that, have variants of that, because it
Speaker 1: really is fundamentally what you need for any of these games,
Speaker 1: which is what makes them so durable, is a group
Speaker 1: of people to want to sit around a table and
Speaker 1: tell a story together, which is rad. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: there's nothing else like it, right there, really isn't it.
Speaker 1: And that's why I think you're seeing so much fervor
Speaker 1: over this because for a lot of people, this is
Speaker 1: very deeply personal gathering together with your friends and telling
Speaker 1: a story together. That's something you and your friends built.
Speaker 1: And you know, uh, if you happen to find a
Speaker 1: way to make some money off of it, great, that's
Speaker 1: that's your creativity coming to life. And frankly, kind of
Speaker 1: having a big giant corporation come in and say, hey,
Speaker 1: where's my cut is not really very fun. No, uh,
Speaker 1: And I my heart goes out to to to you
Speaker 1: and your colleagues over how stressful this last three or
Speaker 1: four weeks has been. And I hope that we're past
Speaker 1: the worst of it. Um. It certainly seems like some
Speaker 1: what's going to come out of this is going to
Speaker 1: be pretty exciting, So I'm hopeful. Uh, And it sounds
Speaker 1: like you're hopeful. Yeah, I think you know. Over the
Speaker 1: past couple of weeks there's been a lot of sleepless
Speaker 1: nights and a lot of egency meetings. But frankly, I
Speaker 1: feel more excited and energized about the future of Pizo,
Speaker 1: about the future of gaming, than I have in quite
Speaker 1: a long time. So by Piso's games, pick up some
Speaker 1: Pathfinder books, go to your go to your nearest game store, um,
Speaker 1: and and pick one up or two or three, Um, Jason,
Speaker 1: anything else you want up plug at the end here. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can learn more about Pieso in our games, so
Speaker 1: that would be Pathfinder and star Finder Ato dot com.
Speaker 1: We have a blog they're talking about the Orc and
Speaker 1: we'll undoubtedly have more to say about it here in
Speaker 1: the coming weeks. Uh. As for me, you can find
Speaker 1: me on all the very social media platforms at backslash
Speaker 1: Jason Bowman bu well m A h N. Thank you Jason,
Speaker 1: both for sitting down for this interview and for all
Speaker 1: of all of the many, many countless hours I have
Speaker 1: spent playing games that you had a hand in making.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Robert. We'll have to get together and roll
Speaker 1: some dice together soon. I would love that. All right, everybody,
Speaker 1: that's a sod uh see you tomorrow, Hi, and welcome
Speaker 1: to it could happen here a podcast which today is
Speaker 1: only me and my guest Nicole, and today we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking a little bit about immigration, about immigration policy
Speaker 1: over the last three or four years, and about some
Speaker 1: of the strange laws that impacted. So Nicole is joining me.
Speaker 1: She works for Alotto Lado, and Nicole would likely tochose
Speaker 1: herself explain a little bit about what you do. Hi,
Speaker 1: my name is Nicole Elizabeth Ramos and I am the
Speaker 1: director of Alto Lavos Order Rights Project, which is based
Speaker 1: in Tijuana, Mexico. Great, okay, So I think prehaps to
Speaker 1: start off with you could clear people in on a
Speaker 1: little bit of what you guys do, because you do
Speaker 1: some incredible work and it's very, very valuable to board
Speaker 1: the communities, and I think a lot of people, if
Speaker 1: they don't live in along the boarder, might not be
Speaker 1: familiar with it. At Lado, we provide legal orientation to
Speaker 1: migrants that are considering seeking asylum in the US. We
Speaker 1: started off as a project that focused locally on migrants
Speaker 1: in Tijuana, and over the years we have expanded to
Speaker 1: serve migrants in Mexicali and then remotely in other cities
Speaker 1: along the US Mexico border, including Grenosa, Matamoro, Squads, pieg
Speaker 1: Uh And in this legal orientation, we're providing information about
Speaker 1: what are the current policies at the moment that will
Speaker 1: impact their ability to seek asylum in the US or
Speaker 1: prevent them from doing so, or how these policies might
Speaker 1: be impacting their family composition. So policies that are related
Speaker 1: to detention or family separation. After we provide legal orientation,
Speaker 1: we are then identifying asylum seekers that fall into several
Speaker 1: vulnerability categories to provide additional accompaniment through this process. Because
Speaker 1: the policies are shifting and changing and becoming more restrictive
Speaker 1: over time, it's very confusing and cumbersome to we throw
Speaker 1: all of the fuzz and figure out what you need
Speaker 1: to do in order to seek asylum in the US.
Speaker 1: So that's where we come in and we provide the
Speaker 1: orientation in multiple languages. The border is a very diverse place.
Speaker 1: Is not just Spanish speakers that are coming, but people
Speaker 1: that speak Ation, Creole, French, Farsi, indigenous languages, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish,
Speaker 1: um and all of these people need access to information.
Speaker 1: That's one of the pillars of our program is that
Speaker 1: migrants have the absolute right to accurate legal information about
Speaker 1: the process that they will be entering. Among the asylum
Speaker 1: teachers that we work with, we also identify those that
Speaker 1: our need of shelter and make referrals and coroplated shelters
Speaker 1: for medical care. In some instances, we assist with obtaining
Speaker 1: medications or obtaining a needed surgery. If the migrant is
Speaker 1: not have access to those resources helping them obtain access
Speaker 1: to HIV medication or hormone treatment. And of those migrants,
Speaker 1: we are also connecting them with other supportive services from
Speaker 1: our partners UM that have shelters, that have programs where
Speaker 1: they're giving them basic dispenses of food because they are
Speaker 1: struggling with food and security, trying to create as much
Speaker 1: of a social safety net as possible because UH folks
Speaker 1: are waiting at the border for longer and longer periods
Speaker 1: of time. The border used to be a place that
Speaker 1: people passed through, maybe they were here for a few
Speaker 1: days before ultimately they were able to present them at
Speaker 1: a present themselves at a US port of entry UM
Speaker 1: to a US official and enter the asylum process. However,
Speaker 1: now we have individuals that have been waiting at the
Speaker 1: border for years, who may not have work status in Mexico,
Speaker 1: may not be Spanish speakers, and are really struggling to
Speaker 1: meet their basic needs. And so we've had to expand
Speaker 1: our services from not just legal service provider, provider of
Speaker 1: legal information, but also providing humanitarian aid so that people
Speaker 1: can be healthy and as well as possible UM while
Speaker 1: they're waiting yeah, and it's it's incredibly valuable, and it's
Speaker 1: it's amazing how you guys can continue to step up
Speaker 1: and scale up as the federal government has continued to
Speaker 1: fail people. Um. And I think if people haven't come
Speaker 1: to the border, they probably won't be aware of, like
Speaker 1: you say, that diversity of people who come to the
Speaker 1: US Mexico boarder. Like I remember a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: I was working within a Romo translator and we were
Speaker 1: speaking to people who would come from Ethiopia, people come
Speaker 1: from Eritrea. It's a it's a very of course, people
Speaker 1: coming from Ukraine. Now, it's very diverse space, which is
Speaker 1: something that kind of gets collapsed pretty often in border reporting.
Speaker 1: I think like all that diversity gets collapsed into like
Speaker 1: like just people are lump together as migrants for people
Speaker 1: seeking asylum. And that's a shame because it's what makes
Speaker 1: part of what makes us so complicated, but also what
Speaker 1: makes these border places such kind of interesting and special places.
Speaker 1: And and I like what you said about all the
Speaker 1: sort of services that are provided as well. It's incredible
Speaker 1: to look at how these services are provided by huge
Speaker 1: broad network of like volunteers of nonprofit of of NGOs
Speaker 1: as well as some government agencies, and how people have
Speaker 1: stepped up consistently, especially in the last I guess six seven.
Speaker 1: It did seem such a long time. It's just like
Speaker 1: how people have stepped up to help each other along
Speaker 1: the border. So perhaps if we go back, you and
Speaker 1: I we're just talking before we started. If we go
Speaker 1: back to eighteen, which people may or may not remember,
Speaker 1: was the mid term, in the middle of Donald Trump's presidency,
Speaker 1: and a large caravan of people, a group of people
Speaker 1: that particularly larger, remarkable eardy, a group of people arrived
Speaker 1: at the border and became kind of the center of
Speaker 1: something of like a and they became I think their
Speaker 1: their arrival was used by both political parties part of
Speaker 1: this at midterm messaging, and and I think that was
Speaker 1: maybe for some people, especially if if they're younger and
Speaker 1: had been watching their news, the sort of first introduction
Speaker 1: to the asylum process. So can you explain kind of
Speaker 1: how asylum is supposed to happen, and then maybe we
Speaker 1: can get into some of the weird and bizarre things
Speaker 1: that have been happening to it in the past three
Speaker 1: or four years. Asylum is supposed to be a system
Speaker 1: that's managed first by by government authorities UM under Title eight,
Speaker 1: section twelve five of the United States Code, US immigration
Speaker 1: officer at port of entry UM or at any point
Speaker 1: in between ports of entries such as border patrol, when
Speaker 1: they are presented with a person that expresses that they
Speaker 1: have a fear of return to their home country, that
Speaker 1: they fear of persecution, to refer them along the track
Speaker 1: to be processed as an asylum seeker. Now, that can
Speaker 1: mean that that person is still detained for the entirety
Speaker 1: of their asylum case and sent to an immigration detention center.
Speaker 1: That could also mean that that person is given court
Speaker 1: paperwork to show up an immigration court at a later
Speaker 1: date to begin the process of explaining their case to
Speaker 1: the immigration court and getting a final decision UM. Over
Speaker 1: the years, beginning at the end of the Obama administration,
Speaker 1: continuing through the Trump administration, and also continuing even now
Speaker 1: into the Biden administration, we have seen policies issued by
Speaker 1: CDP which restrict access to the port of entry for
Speaker 1: asilent seekers UM. Initially, it started out in two thousand
Speaker 1: and sixteen, where the Obama administration came up with a
Speaker 1: policy called the Metering Policy, which was known as the waitlist,
Speaker 1: which required at first only Haitian asylum seekers to put
Speaker 1: their name on a wait list with Mexican immigration authorities
Speaker 1: and then they would be called in groups um to
Speaker 1: enter the US. And that was in response to the
Speaker 1: exodus of immigrants that we saw coming from Haiti and
Speaker 1: through Brazil in two thousand and sixteen. The metering list
Speaker 1: was later expanded to apply to all nationalities, including Mexican
Speaker 1: migrants that were trying to flee their own country, including
Speaker 1: those that had legitimate claims for protection being persecuted by
Speaker 1: members of their own government. Everyone had to still get
Speaker 1: on this list. That policy was extended in an ideological
Speaker 1: framework when the Trump administration came up with a program
Speaker 1: known as Remain in Mexico and just building upon that
Speaker 1: idea that it is okay to make asylum seekers wait
Speaker 1: in territory in which they fear persecution because a lot
Speaker 1: of people here persecution in Mexico UM, and under the
Speaker 1: Remain in Mexico policy so known as the Migrant Protection
Speaker 1: Protocols m p P. They we always refer to it
Speaker 1: as the Migrant Persecution Protocols because it feels it's extremely
Speaker 1: all WELLI in right, like people like to use a
Speaker 1: welly and wrong, but that that one that went prett. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this program required asylum seekers that were entered. They were
Speaker 1: placed into a program called MPP. They were given court
Speaker 1: date and people were to appear at court in their
Speaker 1: nearest border city where there was an immigration court at
Speaker 1: some date in the future. It could be a few weeks,
Speaker 1: it could be several months, it could be a year.
Speaker 1: And in between their court hearings, they would be required
Speaker 1: to remain in Mexico. They could only go to the
Speaker 1: court of entry on their date of their court They
Speaker 1: would be transported to court and then transported back to
Speaker 1: Mexico after their court, leaving Mexico people in Mexico in
Speaker 1: limbo for years. And then when the pandemic came, we
Speaker 1: saw the border closed entirely. Under title for you to
Speaker 1: the Trump administration build it as necessary to protect the
Speaker 1: American public from migrants that could be carriers of COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: But this is really, you know, no different than other
Speaker 1: immigration legislation that we've seen throughout history, which tends to
Speaker 1: paint immigrants as vectors of disease um and we need
Speaker 1: to just keep them out at all costs. And under
Speaker 1: Title for you to it's just a wall of policy.
Speaker 1: People tried to present themselves at the port of entry
Speaker 1: and they're turned away. People enter the US UH at
Speaker 1: different points that are not parts of entry without inspection
Speaker 1: UM and get caught and they're expelled immediately back to Mexico,
Speaker 1: or if it's not a country that Mexico will accept
Speaker 1: an expulsion, they could be detained in US custody and
Speaker 1: then expelled back to their country of origin without any
Speaker 1: opportunity to week with an asylum officer UM. Right now,
Speaker 1: we have been dealing with title for you two in
Speaker 1: a process where certain number of people are exempted from
Speaker 1: this blanket denial every day UH and different ports of
Speaker 1: entry along the border participate. Each part of entry has
Speaker 1: its own cap numerical cap UM. And initially, when this
Speaker 1: program started in May, the names of people that were
Speaker 1: being submitted as exemptions, the asylum seekers names were submitted
Speaker 1: by civil society organizations such as Ladoulo. Just this year alone,
Speaker 1: we've submitted around eleven thousand, five hundred I'm sorry, eleven
Speaker 1: exemption requests UM, and that was from individuals from twenty
Speaker 1: nine different countries speaking just over thirty different languages. So
Speaker 1: now though, the system has recently changed to a smartphone
Speaker 1: application known as c DP one, which requires migrants to
Speaker 1: download this application to their smartphone, assuming that they have
Speaker 1: a smartphone, and then complete this lengthy application UM that
Speaker 1: requires them to upload a photo UM for facial recognition
Speaker 1: software and wait for an appointment date to be made available.
Speaker 1: And they have to keep entering the fifth multiple times
Speaker 1: and until an appointment date becomes available, waking up every
Speaker 1: morning at five thirty for when the new slots are
Speaker 1: made available at six am. And the problem, among many
Speaker 1: problems with this application is that right now it's only
Speaker 1: available in Spanish and English, so if you speak any
Speaker 1: other language, are not able to access it UM And
Speaker 1: we have to give you an example. UM. We have
Speaker 1: an online survey where people register or try I to
Speaker 1: seek help from us. We have over since April one,
Speaker 1: over fifteen thousand unique fifty unique responses. Around half of
Speaker 1: those are from Haitian creole speakers cannot access this app
Speaker 1: to get an appointment. The other issue is is that
Speaker 1: the facial recognition software that's integrated into the cd P
Speaker 1: one app. You know, there's a lot of studies throughout
Speaker 1: the years about how this software will lead to false
Speaker 1: positives or failure to recognize for individuals that have um
Speaker 1: Afro descendant features or individuals that have more indigenous features.
Speaker 1: And we have seen this firsthand. So many of our
Speaker 1: Haitian clients are unable to even complete the profile and
Speaker 1: they are taking photos with cameras that have a decent,
Speaker 1: you know, lens capacity, and they still can't get past
Speaker 1: the facial recognition software. Yeah. It's just like a layers
Speaker 1: on layers of sort of you know, sometimes it's just
Speaker 1: them being like ineffective. Sometimes it just seems cruel. Let's
Speaker 1: go back a little bit to title forty two, because
Speaker 1: that word has been thrown around a lot, right, Title
Speaker 1: thirty two isn't initially it's not immigration law, is it.
Speaker 1: It's it's public health law. Is that right? I guess
Speaker 1: it's it's public it's a public health policy that's part
Speaker 1: of immigration law. Yes, it's public health policy that's being
Speaker 1: applied in the immigration contacts to close the border. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then one thing that I think we've seen a
Speaker 1: lot recently is like one of the worst accounts on Twitter,
Speaker 1: which is the Border Patrol Union, likes to they do
Speaker 1: occasionally like tweet their own losses, which is kind of funny,
Speaker 1: but they like to throw out these statistics right constantly
Speaker 1: about encounters at the border. Can you explain how under
Speaker 1: title forty two, each encounter might not be a unique individual. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: those individuals are overcounted because people will make multiple attempts
Speaker 1: to try to enter the US because they're so desperate.
Speaker 1: It's a dystopian healthscape on this side of the border,
Speaker 1: with people being trafficked, kidnapped for extortion, tortured, raped, murdered,
Speaker 1: sold uh. And so if that were any reasonable person,
Speaker 1: you would try tan fifteen times whatever it took to
Speaker 1: get across to safety. And the Border Patrol Union is
Speaker 1: disingenuous because it knows this, and instead it pulls out
Speaker 1: a figure that is much larger than what it represents
Speaker 1: in actual people. And they're disingenuous and how they describe it, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see
Speaker 1: through it. And of course, when we combine this with
Speaker 1: the the wall or the fence or whatever you want
Speaker 1: to call it, people are crossing in more remote and
Speaker 1: more dangerous areas to makes the crossing more risky, right,
Speaker 1: and results in hirings in two people dying, hiding themselves
Speaker 1: trying to cross, which, as you say, it's it's not
Speaker 1: a reasonable thing to do when you're faced with these
Speaker 1: terrible circumstances. Yeah, there's a beautiful poem called Home by
Speaker 1: Warsha Sire who's a Somali British poet, and one of
Speaker 1: the lines is you don't put your child in a
Speaker 1: in a boat unless it's safer than the land. No
Speaker 1: one would attempt to cross a thirty football or wade
Speaker 1: the Rio Grand or across the Arizona desert in the
Speaker 1: middle of summer unless what was behind them they were
Speaker 1: so sure was going to kill them. And the way
Speaker 1: that we've structured the wall and raising the height of
Speaker 1: the wall to make it harder to cross, and to
Speaker 1: build as much wall along the places where it would
Speaker 1: be a little bit easier to cross, the people making
Speaker 1: it so the only way to cross is through the
Speaker 1: most dangerous parts. That that's intentional, that is, you know,
Speaker 1: designed for people to die, because the government mistakenly believes
Speaker 1: that if it kills more people that folks will be deterred.
Speaker 1: But that's um not actually what we see on the ground. No,
Speaker 1: like it's not a vacuum, right, people are coming from
Speaker 1: bad things like making just making the board a difficult
Speaker 1: one will do nothing more than kill more people, which
Speaker 1: is what they've succeeded in doing, sadly, and so and
Speaker 1: then another thing I wanted to get it as Title
Speaker 1: forty two with this this crazy series of court cases
Speaker 1: around Title forty two, right, so can you explain, like
Speaker 1: why Titled forty two hasn't been repealed when we've done
Speaker 1: away with almost every other protection for people in kind
Speaker 1: of an ongoing pandemic. Title forty two could be repealed
Speaker 1: if the government was so not so intent on fighting
Speaker 1: the repeal of Title forty two. The A C. L
Speaker 1: U as been import for the last few years around
Speaker 1: Title for You to um in a case called we
Speaker 1: Sha we shah be my workis, and the judge in
Speaker 1: that case issued a decision in December ruling that turning
Speaker 1: away asylum seekers using Title for You two as a
Speaker 1: pretext um to turn asylum seekers away was unlawful. However,
Speaker 1: that decision was stayed. The government requested that the decision
Speaker 1: be uh temporarily stayed to give it time to make
Speaker 1: operational plans. The A C. L You did not oppose
Speaker 1: that stay and as a result. During that time, a
Speaker 1: group of conservative states filed intervening litigation UM to make
Speaker 1: their arguments about how their interests were harmed by the decision.
Speaker 1: And so now that cases before the Supreme Court and
Speaker 1: they will not hear the case until February, and we
Speaker 1: could be waiting as long as June for a decision. Yeah,
Speaker 1: many of those lots of those states weren't even along
Speaker 1: the border, right, that's some of the ones who sued. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's still a mystery to all of us along the border.
Speaker 1: How interior states that sure might be receiving people coming
Speaker 1: from the border, but UM don't have that close nexus.
Speaker 1: Is in there are border community and they're being immediately impacted.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, pretty pretty female stuff. And the other issue
Speaker 1: I want to raise for people is the narrative is
Speaker 1: that we're in a crisis. The border is in a crisis.
Speaker 1: There's so many people, we can't possibly help them all.
Speaker 1: We close the border for over two years, so of
Speaker 1: course there's going to be more people because we've made
Speaker 1: it impossible for people to access. However, the sports of
Speaker 1: and Tree have contingency plans for mass migration events. This
Speaker 1: is something that UM was learned during the context of
Speaker 1: our litigation UM against c VP around access to the
Speaker 1: board of entry, and we see that the government is
Speaker 1: capable of responding rapidly in a manner that is consistent
Speaker 1: with human dignity, and how it responded to thirty thousand
Speaker 1: Ukrainians showing up in Tijuana this spring. In some days,
Speaker 1: c d P accepted as many as a thousand Ukrainians
Speaker 1: in a given day, where as both on those days
Speaker 1: they were accepting zero of other nationality, and they were
Speaker 1: able to get up to speed so quickly because every
Speaker 1: port of entry has a contingency plan. We are the
Speaker 1: United States government. We are arguably one of the most powerful,
Speaker 1: well resource governments on Earth. If you buy the line
Speaker 1: that this is a crisis and we don't have a
Speaker 1: contingency plan, then we've got a lot of work to
Speaker 1: do here, um. And so it's not it's a it's
Speaker 1: a manufactured crisis. Uh. We have the resources, we have
Speaker 1: the personnel. C DP has the largest law enforcement budget
Speaker 1: of all the law enforcement agencies in the federal government,
Speaker 1: and they have hands of thousands of personnel. It's what
Speaker 1: we lack is the political will and the emotional capital
Speaker 1: to do what we've already agreed to under US federal
Speaker 1: law as well as the Refugee Convention which we signed
Speaker 1: following World War Two, which was designed to prevent further
Speaker 1: genocide for their persecution of large groups of people. Um,
Speaker 1: but we continue to renag on on on those obligations
Speaker 1: to which we read to Yeah, yeah, like when we
Speaker 1: talk about genocide and persecution, Like I personally know people
Speaker 1: from me and MAA who are really struggling with the
Speaker 1: United States asylum system right now, and yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: deeply just infuriating to see them continue to pursue this
Speaker 1: kind of like waving my hands in the air, I
Speaker 1: don't know what to do kind of thing. Let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about Joe Biden and his policies, because
Speaker 1: like they've been blackluster or just completely like in some cases,
Speaker 1: you know, he he's issued executive orders which basically have
Speaker 1: gone on fulfilled right regarding asylum. And so they made
Speaker 1: a statement a few weeks ago now and Biden visited
Speaker 1: the border, and can you explain what he said in
Speaker 1: that statement? And then sort of what the Biden administration
Speaker 1: hasn't done to clear up the asylum system that it
Speaker 1: promised it would do. The Buiding administration made a lot
Speaker 1: of promises on the campaign trail. UM made an effort
Speaker 1: to put advocates in places in DHS other key positions
Speaker 1: to give the appearance that it was serious about reform
Speaker 1: and treating immigrants in a way that is dignified and humane. UM.
Speaker 1: But what we've seen is a continuation of Trump policies
Speaker 1: which restrict access to the border. For example, UM the
Speaker 1: new asylum band that they are proposing through regulation where
Speaker 1: individuals that have translated through another country UM and did
Speaker 1: not seek asylum in that country even if that country
Speaker 1: was not a safe country for them, UM that they
Speaker 1: would be precluded from applying for asylum. A lot of
Speaker 1: people are have been enthusiastic about these new parole programs
Speaker 1: for specific nationalities like Paraguans and Aswelans, um Haitians, Cubans. However,
Speaker 1: those programs are really just scraps UM. They have a
Speaker 1: thirty thousand person cap UM. The Ukrainian parole program had
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand person cap which has already been surpassed
Speaker 1: surpassed UM. Ukrainian sponsors well as the Ukrainian asylum seekers
Speaker 1: that were presenting through that prop RAM had much less
Speaker 1: by way of requirements UM. And so they've made a
Speaker 1: separate and not equal program for other nationalities which just
Speaker 1: happened to be nationalities that aren't white. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: hard not to see a kind of white people first
Speaker 1: approach to asylum here. Yeah, it's certainly challenge histr ability
Speaker 1: not to believe it's our right racist. So I wonder
Speaker 1: like going forward, obviously people listening will probably be sort
Speaker 1: of upset and concerned the continuing failures of our government.
Speaker 1: You don't think about it? Can you outline like how
Speaker 1: people can help? I know there's lots of people who
Speaker 1: will do direct mutual aid right like people like food
Speaker 1: not bombs of feeding people in Tijuana, But how can
Speaker 1: folks maybe who are at the border, and then who
Speaker 1: aren't near the border, how can how can they help
Speaker 1: well organizations that are at the border, including our who
Speaker 1: work with volunteers that are remote, um, particularly if they
Speaker 1: have a foreign language skill, because we can't serve toens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people each year with just the staff
Speaker 1: that we have UM and so we have a really
Speaker 1: robust remote volunteer network UM. I would also encourage people,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, to look for organizations in their
Speaker 1: own community that are serving immigrants. It is incredibly humbling
Speaker 1: to move to another country and realize you don't know
Speaker 1: how to read the light bill, UM, you don't know
Speaker 1: how to register your kids for school? Can your kids
Speaker 1: go to school? Where? Can I go to the doctor?
Speaker 1: What you know? What is an ambulance? What that you
Speaker 1: know that I do? I not have to pay for that?
Speaker 1: All of these things that might be different from them,
Speaker 1: And a real lack of volunteers to assist people with
Speaker 1: those daily integration activities UM that are so important to
Speaker 1: figuring out how your new community works. UM. I also
Speaker 1: encourage people too, when there's an opportunity to have conversations
Speaker 1: with your elected official, to have those conversations, write emails,
Speaker 1: go in person if that's an opportunity. Different officials will
Speaker 1: have open days for their offices where you might be
Speaker 1: able to get maybe not face time with that official,
Speaker 1: but with their point person who is overseeing that issue
Speaker 1: right now. Are elected officials, they don't care about immigration
Speaker 1: because a lot of their constituents are not making it
Speaker 1: known to them what it is that they care about,
Speaker 1: and that they're willing to go to drastic measures such
Speaker 1: as shutting down their office. Um, if they don't take
Speaker 1: action on immigration, we're all just thinking about it as Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this is happening to immigrants. This is not me. I
Speaker 1: am a citizen. But all of the worst fascist policies
Speaker 1: are tried out first on groups and so id that
Speaker 1: have less political power, UM, on people that have criminal convictions,
Speaker 1: on the people who have disabilities that make it impossible
Speaker 1: for them to communicate, um, on immigrants, and so I
Speaker 1: would really encourage you're if you're concerned about fascism, if
Speaker 1: you're concerned about how your rights may be trampled in
Speaker 1: the future, that focus on immigrants, because they are the
Speaker 1: testing ground for a lot of fascist government's worst intentions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we've already seen that, right if people aren't familiar.
Speaker 1: It was bor Tech among others who were out there
Speaker 1: running around Portland checking people into unmarked vans. It was
Speaker 1: DHS drones surveiling people in Minneapolis. It was indeed DHS
Speaker 1: surveiling I think people from Malatlado and other organizations in
Speaker 1: eighteen when lots of US acrossing the board are very
Speaker 1: often to help people who were part of what's called
Speaker 1: the migrant caravan then and so like this this is
Speaker 1: happening to us. Right. There's a thing that crime think
Speaker 1: have on some of their posters which I always like,
Speaker 1: which is the border doesn't protect you, it controls you,
Speaker 1: which I think is it's more true than ever now,
Speaker 1: Like it's just sort of yeah, it's a place where
Speaker 1: we experiment with these policies and they seem to they
Speaker 1: seem to get away with them, right, Like, it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be something that people care about that they
Speaker 1: did even two or three years ago under the Trump administration.
Speaker 1: I wonder they call it. How can people Another thing
Speaker 1: that I think people lack is like a direct connection
Speaker 1: to people seeking asylum or to the situation at the border,
Speaker 1: right Like, every time something happens. I'm sure you've seen
Speaker 1: this more often than I have. And someone from l
Speaker 1: A or d C or New York or whatever kind
Speaker 1: of parachutes into border communities, does it. I can see
Speaker 1: that this is the frustration that you share. It does
Speaker 1: a story which misses masses of context and then bug
Speaker 1: us off back to the place where they came from.
Speaker 1: And so like, where where can people find better connections
Speaker 1: to the situation for people seeking asylum? I really like
Speaker 1: a blog and it's also a podcast every week, quarter
Speaker 1: Chronicles Todd Miller's Quarterer Chronicles. I also would recommend reading
Speaker 1: all of Todd Miller's books. He is an incredible investigative
Speaker 1: journalist that does the dive on how we got to
Speaker 1: this militarized state of your border. UM. So I would
Speaker 1: recommend starting with Border Patrol Nation and just going straight
Speaker 1: through there. UM. I also think Pro Publica also does
Speaker 1: really great investigative long dive reporting the intersect. I would
Speaker 1: look at those places. Yeah, yeah, I think if you're
Speaker 1: in a border community, like it's a really know that
Speaker 1: hard to cross, and see what's going on for yourself
Speaker 1: and and do a little something to help, you know,
Speaker 1: make some of your your money that you set aside
Speaker 1: veloping other people can go a long way if you
Speaker 1: choose to use it that way. And Nicole, how can
Speaker 1: people support your work directly? Like it's there a website
Speaker 1: or Twitter account they can follow to find more. Now,
Speaker 1: we do have our own website. We're also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and LinkedIn. We regularly post opportunities to volunteer remotely, volunteer
Speaker 1: in person, UM and campaigns that people want to donate
Speaker 1: to UM there's that opportunity as well. Great, and is
Speaker 1: there anything else you want to share about that you
Speaker 1: feel that our listeners should know, maybe if they haven't
Speaker 1: been following border situation closely. The border situation is part
Speaker 1: of a larger historical context. And briefly I talked about
Speaker 1: earlier the US as a signatory to the Refugee Convention,
Speaker 1: which is an outgrowth of the horror that the world
Speaker 1: collectively felt um when we came to grips with what
Speaker 1: happened during the Holocaust, and you know, we collectively said
Speaker 1: never again, never again. Part of our part in the
Speaker 1: Holocaust was we rejected the m S. St. Louis from
Speaker 1: the coast of Florida, and there was over nine d
Speaker 1: Jewish refugees that were on that boat. No other country
Speaker 1: accepted them, Cuba, Canada rejected and ultimately had to go
Speaker 1: back to Europe. And some of those people ultimately died
Speaker 1: in the Holocaust. And and those deaths are are on
Speaker 1: our conscience. Uh. And any time the asylum seekers are
Speaker 1: being turned away along the border when they have the
Speaker 1: legal right to present themselves under existing US law and
Speaker 1: international law, it's a it's a repetition of the M
Speaker 1: s St. Louis, except it's happening all across the border
Speaker 1: every single day. Yeah, that's very well put, and it is.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if it's one person or a hundred people,
Speaker 1: like it's a tragedy every time we can't give some
Speaker 1: We have plenty of safe places for people to go,
Speaker 1: but when deciding not to not to welcome them, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very very sad. Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: giving us some of your afternoon, Nicole. Um. If people
Speaker 1: want to find you personally, do you have a personal
Speaker 1: social media Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm loosen on Twitter. Okay, great? And altro laddo? Is
Speaker 1: it just a laddo on Twitter? Yest level? Sometimes we
Speaker 1: have a love level dot work and again yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's a l O t r O l A d
Speaker 1: O if people are need to spend out right. Thank you, wonderful,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Hello and welcome to It could
Speaker 1: happen here once again. Posted by myself Andrew from the
Speaker 1: YouTube channel andrewism as we talk about whatever and whatever
Speaker 1: in question is the second most populous country in the world,
Speaker 1: and one potential vision for its future drawn from its
Speaker 1: anti cludal past are speaking of course about India, a
Speaker 1: sub concerant from which I draw a good portion of
Speaker 1: my heritage, and one that boasts over nine thousand years
Speaker 1: of recorded history and roughly fifty years of known human settlement.
Speaker 1: India is an incredibly diverised country ethnically, linguistically, religiously and otherwise.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately it has suffered much of the same faith
Speaker 1: that the rest the world has fallen, creating the rapacious
Speaker 1: appetite of British clunialism. Well, historically, the Indian local economy
Speaker 1: was dependent upon the most productive and sustainable agriculture and horticulture,
Speaker 1: and of course pottery and footing. Jamaican jewelry was very
Speaker 1: well known for jewelry, and in fact Indian jewelry makers
Speaker 1: ended up starting some very successful jewelry businesses when they
Speaker 1: were freed from indentionship in or that um. They also
Speaker 1: got involved in leather work and a lot of other
Speaker 1: economic activities in India. UM. But the basis of India
Speaker 1: has traditionally, historically, you know, for thousands of years been textiles,
Speaker 1: different types of textiles. Each village had its spinners and
Speaker 1: carters and dyers and weavers who were of course at
Speaker 1: the heart of that village's economy. But an interesting outcome
Speaker 1: of British cleanism in India has been the flooding of
Speaker 1: India with the machine made, inexpensive, mass produced textiles from
Speaker 1: Lancashire during you know, in Briturn's Industrial Revolution, the local
Speaker 1: textile artists who are very quickly put out to business
Speaker 1: and village economies suffered very terribly. So I mean, you know, well,
Speaker 1: I think we're familiar with this sort of general story.
Speaker 1: Smaller cottage industries became overrun by you know, mass production.
Speaker 1: And of course I don't mean to sound like I'm
Speaker 1: entirely demonizing mass production, just describing what has happened. Of course,
Speaker 1: mass production has had its many benefits in providing access
Speaker 1: to resources and two products many different people. But of
Speaker 1: course it's also had its many drawbacks, including you know,
Speaker 1: the share environmental impact as well as the impact on
Speaker 1: people um you know, as Mark spoke about, of um,
Speaker 1: their alienation from the process of production, as the industrial
Speaker 1: system basically separated each step in the process of production
Speaker 1: two different workers and so no one had a hand
Speaker 1: in the production of a product and start to finish,
Speaker 1: and of course that that had significant social and I
Speaker 1: would also assume mental impact on the people with you know,
Speaker 1: that whole era of British economic imperialism happening in the UH.
Speaker 1: The changes that took place within a generation was so rapid,
Speaker 1: you know, your headwards spin that evolution of you know,
Speaker 1: the India home economy. It was really a site to behold.
Speaker 1: And another element of British economic impuialism and British imperialism
Speaker 1: more broadly was the instruction of British education under colonial
Speaker 1: rule in the eighteenth century UM. When Lord McCaulay introduced
Speaker 1: the Indian Education Act in the British Parliament UM, he said,
Speaker 1: and I quote, a single shelf of a good European
Speaker 1: library was with the whole native literature of India. Neither
Speaker 1: as a language of the law, nor as a language
Speaker 1: of religion, has a sang script any particular claim to
Speaker 1: our engagement. We must do our best to form a
Speaker 1: class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English
Speaker 1: in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. So
Speaker 1: the typical racism, typical white pants, burdon, typical you know. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, this phrase was used in a North American
Speaker 1: indigenous American context. But I believe the phrase is taking
Speaker 1: the Indian out to the man. Yeah, kill the Indians,
Speaker 1: save the man, right, Um, So it's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: It's a different type of Indian talking about there, but
Speaker 1: that sort of idea still applies. And really that sort
Speaker 1: of sentiment is something that has existed throughout the history
Speaker 1: of communism, something that you know is seen in all
Speaker 1: of Britain's former colonies. Because Monster's Aim was put into
Speaker 1: Parliament and pushed forward, it was pursued with the mind
Speaker 1: to the British raj or the traditional schools that took
Speaker 1: place in different village communities were gradually replaced by colonial
Speaker 1: schools and universities. Of course, taking advantage of the cast
Speaker 1: and class system that was in place in India prior
Speaker 1: to their arrival, the British would have selected wealthier Indians
Speaker 1: to be sensed to public schools such as Eaton and
Speaker 1: Haru and universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and those Indians
Speaker 1: that you know, they learned English poetry, English law, English
Speaker 1: customs to the neglect of their own culture. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like, why read the classics of the Vadas when
Speaker 1: you have Shakespeare and the London times. And so having
Speaker 1: been raised in that environment, having grown up, having basically
Speaker 1: their minds colonized from the crib, they began to see
Speaker 1: their own cultures as backward, uncivilized, old fashioned, regressive and
Speaker 1: again something you see all over the world. You sorts
Speaker 1: in the residential schools, you see it in the schools
Speaker 1: in the Caribbean, and you see it in schools in Africa.
Speaker 1: Basically everywhere they colonized went um. They would take a generation,
Speaker 1: they were take generations of young people, and they would
Speaker 1: developed that self hatred um not the staining for their
Speaker 1: own culture by you know, positioning um their education, British
Speaker 1: education as you know, superior. In fact, during the process
Speaker 1: of decolonization coulde and quote um of you know, formal
Speaker 1: political independence many of the former colonies of Britain, particularly
Speaker 1: the Caribbeans. That's where most familiar um. A lot of
Speaker 1: the people who became you know, the fullest prime ministers
Speaker 1: of the country, the one that would establish the trajectory
Speaker 1: of the country for years of decades to come. Um.
Speaker 1: Thinking of people like Bustamante in Jamaica, Eric Williams, Dr.
Speaker 1: Ric Williams and Trance peakle Um among others. Basically all
Speaker 1: of the fullest prime ministers basically every single Caribbean country.
Speaker 1: They had all been educated, um in English schools, in
Speaker 1: English universities, in well in the prestige schools of their countries,
Speaker 1: didn't end up being flewn out to Britain itself, and
Speaker 1: they basically became the rulers, became the leaders um well
Speaker 1: handed power over by the British to basically rule in
Speaker 1: their stead. Of course, that's all the talk of finally independence. UM.
Speaker 1: People got caught up in that energy of political independence
Speaker 1: and freedom from the control of the British after all
Speaker 1: the decades and centuries of struggle. But unfortunately it proved,
Speaker 1: I believe to be a ruse as very little changed
Speaker 1: for the average person in the s post political independence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something that Phnan talks about um in in
Speaker 1: the sort of Francophone context of like, even even in
Speaker 1: countries you have like Atward, you know that the colonizes
Speaker 1: are thrown up actual revolutions, you get this class of
Speaker 1: like like lawyers and intellectuals who are like have been
Speaker 1: educated like in imperialist powers or in sort of their schools,
Speaker 1: who wind up as like the first generation of of
Speaker 1: post independence leaders and those people like you know what,
Speaker 1: whether they want to or not, end up sort of
Speaker 1: like reflecting the sort of values and political positions of
Speaker 1: like of the form of colonial powers. And there's this
Speaker 1: whole sort of dynamic that like I feel like, I
Speaker 1: feel like this is the part of but not that
Speaker 1: people don't read very much, But that's about how these
Speaker 1: leaders sort of like lose touch with it with the
Speaker 1: sort of like math anti colonial masses, and how they
Speaker 1: sort of like wind up reincorporating their countries back into
Speaker 1: sort of colonialism. Yeah. Yeah, that's really how you see
Speaker 1: that nucleonal dynamic developing UM. And it's really it's hard
Speaker 1: to tell, um retrospectively whether these leaders thought they were
Speaker 1: actually you know, anti colonial or if they knew that
Speaker 1: they were you know, carrying on a particular legacy. But
Speaker 1: I find that because is only um only recently celebrate
Speaker 1: to just last year sixty years of independence, there of
Speaker 1: course people who are alive prior to independence, and so
Speaker 1: you find a lot of the older generation how they
Speaker 1: how some of them speak, particularly more educated ones, how
Speaker 1: they carry themselves or they dress, the attitudes their spouse
Speaker 1: is very much like to get any kind of respect
Speaker 1: in their time, you had to behave with me, had
Speaker 1: to present yourself with me, and to present yourself in
Speaker 1: a as approximate to Britishness as possible, the whole you know,
Speaker 1: conversation of respectability, politics and stuff. So I have some
Speaker 1: understanding of what they had to go through and where
Speaker 1: they're coming from when they hold onto these perspectives still
Speaker 1: because that's what they grew up in. Um. But it
Speaker 1: really is a shame that they've been hooling back progress
Speaker 1: for so long now because they still hold on to
Speaker 1: these deeply conservative, deeply religious, deeply reactionary ideas that we're
Speaker 1: just you know, they just implicated within the edecute and
Speaker 1: system and in the cultural cast all the time. I
Speaker 1: was just when I was talking about Fan, I was
Speaker 1: thinking as well about like, have you read a book
Speaker 1: called Beyond the Boundary by C. L. James Andrew. I
Speaker 1: haven't because it's about cricket and I'm not too integrated cricket.
Speaker 1: But I've been, Um, I know it's an iconic and
Speaker 1: I think he ye, he explains a lot of that
Speaker 1: very well. I think people could read it even if
Speaker 1: they don't. Like I'm not a big cricket person. But
Speaker 1: it's certainly one of the best sports books I've read,
Speaker 1: and maybe one of the best books. And he doesn't
Speaker 1: he put on a lot of bangers in his time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he did have some bags, highly recommended. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: if you don't want to read about cricket. He also
Speaker 1: talks about this in The crewmin and the Ghana Revolution. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is not about cricket. It's more of an autobiography,
Speaker 1: like seen through the lens of his his ricket, I think.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it'd be cool because I know he spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time. He grew up of course born
Speaker 1: readers and stuff and true and that, so we're interested
Speaker 1: to see um sort of if he talks about his
Speaker 1: political development, how Adau was in this time in Tranad, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he does. It's been a while since I've
Speaker 1: read it, but I think he talks about like how
Speaker 1: he sort of saw himself constituted as colonial subjectly through
Speaker 1: his experiences interacting with British people on one of the
Speaker 1: places where the terrains where he'd encountered them, I guess
Speaker 1: was playing cricket because great, yes, of course, and you know,
Speaker 1: thankfully we've come to decimate them at their own game
Speaker 1: as usual, it's true. Yeah yeah, And even like English
Speaker 1: cricket at a certain point, like getting really into cricket,
Speaker 1: which I know it is a diversion, but like they
Speaker 1: had rules where you could only have a certain number
Speaker 1: of international players playing for each English county. It's it's extreme,
Speaker 1: like if you look at how the Empire constituted white
Speaker 1: through sport, and like who was allowed to play rugby,
Speaker 1: which is a touching sport, and who was allowed to
Speaker 1: play cricket, which which isn't normally a touching sport like
Speaker 1: it did think it's racist as fun, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: of course it's hilariousism in sports history. Sorry for the
Speaker 1: cricket diversion. Sorry, please continue, as it's entirely fine. I see,
Speaker 1: it's all Greek to me because I don't know what
Speaker 1: any of those points or numbers or anything means um
Speaker 1: to many different types of cricket. I mean, I've had
Speaker 1: people try to explain to me before. It's just that
Speaker 1: my thing. Um. I know people who play it though,
Speaker 1: so you know, good for them at all. But back
Speaker 1: to India, right, if there's one particular person in India's
Speaker 1: history that really represented this type of Western educated colony
Speaker 1: his subject, trying to be something bigger than that kind
Speaker 1: of mentality. It was Jawaharlal who became the first Prime
Speaker 1: minister after independence. Their ruf course so to promote the
Speaker 1: industrialization of India not be a capitalist route, but by
Speaker 1: more of a centralized plan and route, which is why
Speaker 1: if you look in the India India's constitution you will
Speaker 1: see that it's reference to itself as a socialist country. Actually, really,
Speaker 1: if I'm remembering right, neighbor, it was like he was
Speaker 1: like a Fabian socialist or something. Yeah, yeah, his inspiration came,
Speaker 1: his inspiration came from the intellectuals of the London School
Speaker 1: of Economics and the Fabian society. So yeah, he's quite
Speaker 1: the character. You see, the sort of direction that he
Speaker 1: ends up putting the country. And I mean even today,
Speaker 1: India in many ways continues to be ruled in the
Speaker 1: English way without English rulers. Um, just like in the
Speaker 1: Caribbean continues to be ruled in the English way without
Speaker 1: English rulers. In Africa, you know, the various countries have
Speaker 1: been ruling their various colonize and powers way rather than
Speaker 1: in their own way without the colonizes rulers, father colonizing rulers. UM.
Speaker 1: The industrialists, the intellectuals, the entrepreneurs, all of them are
Speaker 1: working with the government to see the salvation of India
Speaker 1: taking place in a subordination to the world. Back can
Speaker 1: the I M F from the G A T T.
Speaker 1: You know, they see India as part of this global economy,
Speaker 1: meant to submit into sue to multinational corporations. UM. But
Speaker 1: of course the people of India h not to please
Speaker 1: in the people of India suffering under the brunt of
Speaker 1: that UM. After seeing the failures of of course the
Speaker 1: Congress Party under Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi and
Speaker 1: her son Rajiv Gandhi. Um, the poor continues to be
Speaker 1: poor than ever. The middle classes and tuning towards h
Speaker 1: just say certain directions. UM. And of course, as we've
Speaker 1: seen in the past few years, the farmers have been
Speaker 1: agitating against various pressures. They've been placed under things, kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. And it was pretty much how Mahatma Gandhi
Speaker 1: predicted that it would. Because unlike Neru and unlike other
Speaker 1: Western here to thinkers of his time, UM Gandhi thought
Speaker 1: differently about what India's potential could be what it looked like.
Speaker 1: And that's part of the reason they killed him. And
Speaker 1: I must preface this discussion of Gandhi's vision of a
Speaker 1: free India by Norton of course, that Gandhi himself was
Speaker 1: a very flawed person. Um, you know, racist, sexist, Um,
Speaker 1: pretty sure he assaulted somebody, He did some very um
Speaker 1: fucked up stuff to his niece. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I just well, well leave it at that. But I
Speaker 1: mean that's not something you can put aside for something
Speaker 1: to be cognizant of. But one of the aspects of
Speaker 1: um his time on this planet had been his development
Speaker 1: of a sort of a vision of a free India,
Speaker 1: not as a nation state, but as a confederation of
Speaker 1: self governance, self reliance, self employed people living in village
Speaker 1: communities deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads.
Speaker 1: It would have been a sort of a bottom up
Speaker 1: system where the power to decide what could be important
Speaker 1: into an expert from the village via economic and political power.
Speaker 1: All I mean in the hands of village assemblies, where
Speaker 1: people in these village assemblies, in these communities would continue
Speaker 1: to live in relative how many with their surroundings with um.
Speaker 1: They would continue to we've their homespun clothes, eat their
Speaker 1: home and grown food, use their home made goods, care
Speaker 1: for their animals, their forests and their lands, take care
Speaker 1: of the futility the soil, enjoy the home grown stories
Speaker 1: and epics of India, and continue to build their temples
Speaker 1: and appreciates their various regional distinctive cultures. This was meant
Speaker 1: to be the system, the practice the idea of the
Speaker 1: philosophy of Swadeshi, which is a conjunction of two San
Speaker 1: Skrit words Swa which meaning self or own and desh
Speaker 1: meaning country, Swadeshi as an adjective meaning of one's own country.
Speaker 1: According to the principle of Swadeshi, the idea is that
Speaker 1: whatever has made or produced in a village must be
Speaker 1: used first and foremost by the members of that village.
Speaker 1: So I mean there could be traded and collaboration between
Speaker 1: villages and communities, but gardily thread it should be minimal,
Speaker 1: like a sort of an ice and on the cake.
Speaker 1: Um goods and services to him was something that should
Speaker 1: have been generated within the community. The things that needed
Speaker 1: to be used by the community should be created in
Speaker 1: that community. Another influential. Perhaps the most influential aspect of
Speaker 1: Swedeshi and Swadeshi philosophy took place in the early twentieth
Speaker 1: century as a direct fallout the decision of the British
Speaker 1: India governments to partition Bengal. The use of Swedeshi goods
Speaker 1: or the goods that are produced and made in India
Speaker 1: by and here for Indians, and the boycott of foreign
Speaker 1: made goods were among the two main objectives of the
Speaker 1: Swedeeshi movement, and the boycott resolution ended up being passed
Speaker 1: in Calcutta City Hall in August seven nine four UM
Speaker 1: boycott in the use of Manchester cloth and sold from
Speaker 1: Liverpool in the district to barrisl The masses adopted the
Speaker 1: message of boycott aformadoods and the value of the British cloth,
Speaker 1: So they have fell very rapidly. Various songs and cultural
Speaker 1: works ended up being produced in the time UM to
Speaker 1: sort of bolster the movement. At one point one English
Speaker 1: cloths were burned as part of the boycott, and the
Speaker 1: symbol of caddy spinners, the sort of tool that was
Speaker 1: used to weave cloth to we've fibers creaton, became a
Speaker 1: nature force in the movement and the representation of the movement.
Speaker 1: I think I get what you're saying, that we can
Speaker 1: all benefit from a little specialization and and that the
Speaker 1: like improvements that that brings, while still sort of acknowledging
Speaker 1: that autonomy is desirable. Yeah, I think there needs to
Speaker 1: be some some balance between your autonomy and surft reliance
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing, and also operation. I think
Speaker 1: he goes a bit too much in that autonomy direction.
Speaker 1: But in the context of when these ideas being developed,
Speaker 1: it's sort of understandable because, um, in this time, you know,
Speaker 1: the self reliance of the people as being vastly eroded,
Speaker 1: people being forced into you know, cities, they've lost their
Speaker 1: livelihoods um, and they were there was a sort of
Speaker 1: developing reliance and the global economy. Whereaswold As she proposes
Speaker 1: that you know, India avoids economic dependence on external market
Speaker 1: forces that create these vulnerabilities and communities that end up, um,
Speaker 1: you know, really harming the members of that community, so
Speaker 1: that she's meant to avoid the unhealthy and wasteful environmental
Speaker 1: destructive transportation of goods um between communities, avoiding the excessive
Speaker 1: emissions that would cause um and promoting, of course, the
Speaker 1: development of a strong economic base to satisfy the needs
Speaker 1: of the community, to satisfy the UH local production consumption,
Speaker 1: so that she is kind of about both creating a
Speaker 1: self reliant India and also creating self reliant villages within India,
Speaker 1: so that each village is a microcosum of the greater India,
Speaker 1: a web of sort of a distributed, decentralized web of
Speaker 1: loosely interconnected communities. In a time where the British were
Speaker 1: promoting the centralized, industrialized, mechanized mode of production, Gandhy was
Speaker 1: turning to the principle of decentralized, home grown and handcrafted
Speaker 1: modes of production UH rather than mass production production by
Speaker 1: the masses. I think there was also a spiritual component
Speaker 1: of the idea of Swadeshi, because at the time Gandhy
Speaker 1: was not a fan of the idea that people were
Speaker 1: not using their hands to produce, the idea that, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone should be involved in some kind of um trade
Speaker 1: or skill of some kind that utilizes their hands because
Speaker 1: of you know, the whole spiritual component of using the
Speaker 1: body that you have fully and another aspect of the spirituality,
Speaker 1: so that she was of course the idea of this
Speaker 1: locally based community, enhancing a community spirit, community relationships, and
Speaker 1: community well being, an economy that actively encourages mutual aid,
Speaker 1: that encourages the principle of care between families, neighbors, animals, lands, forestry,
Speaker 1: natural resources for present and future generations. It's there confrontation
Speaker 1: of the driving force between mass production which Gandi so
Speaker 1: has this cult of the individual, where there must be
Speaker 1: to expansion of the economy of global scale uh and
Speaker 1: expand the consumption production of the sake of economic growth
Speaker 1: out of a desire for the individual's personal whims, for
Speaker 1: the desire for you know, personal and corporate profit. Another reason,
Speaker 1: of course, that Gandhi rallied against this idea of mass
Speaker 1: production and promoting in production for the masses by the masses,
Speaker 1: it's because mass production leads people leave in their villages,
Speaker 1: they land, their crafts and their homesteads to go work
Speaker 1: in factories where they became cogs in a machine, standing
Speaker 1: in a conveyor belt, living in enchanty towns and dependence
Speaker 1: upon the movesy of the bosses, and of course as
Speaker 1: those bosses gained access to more efficient technologies because they
Speaker 1: were constant in pursuit of greater productivity in this creative profit.
Speaker 1: The masters of this economy, you know, they want more
Speaker 1: efficient machines working faster, and so they want less people.
Speaker 1: We can loose machines, and so the result was that
Speaker 1: the people who have to move to these cities to
Speaker 1: working these factories we eventually thrown out when they were
Speaker 1: no longer considered useful and became and joining the millions
Speaker 1: of unemployed, you know, rootless, job less people in uh
Speaker 1: Indian society. Sweeter she instead encourages the idea that the
Speaker 1: machine sholl be something that subordinates the worker, but instead
Speaker 1: something that is subordinated to the worker, that it hasn't
Speaker 1: become the master, but instead it is mastered and allows
Speaker 1: us to orchestrate our own pace of you know, human activity.
Speaker 1: It's not that Sweeter Sweaters she is necessarily against automation,
Speaker 1: against technological development, but it's more so that it aims
Speaker 1: to circumvent the harms that could be called by such
Speaker 1: technology is being out of the control of the people
Speaker 1: themselves and in the control of the select private few.
Speaker 1: I thinks what that she has a sort of an
Speaker 1: element of glorification of the past. Um they weren't doing
Speaker 1: my research for this episode, I ended up looking into um.
Speaker 1: Of course, the writings of proponents is what a she um?
Speaker 1: And people discussing Andy's thoughts on the subject, and I'll
Speaker 1: just quote one particular passage, So what as she is
Speaker 1: the way to comprehensive peace, peace with oneself, peace between
Speaker 1: people's and peace with nature. The global economy drives people
Speaker 1: toward high performance, high achievement, and high ambition from materialistic success.
Speaker 1: This results in stress, loss of mening, loss of in
Speaker 1: a peace, loss of space for posonal family relationships, and
Speaker 1: loss of spiritual life. Gandhi realized and in the past
Speaker 1: life in India was not only prosperous but also conducive
Speaker 1: to philosophical and spiritual development, so that she, fora Gandhi,
Speaker 1: was a spiritual imperative. I think it's understandable that a
Speaker 1: decolonial project would attempt to develop a pride in the
Speaker 1: history of the people who have gone through so much
Speaker 1: um and you know their legacy and their traditions in
Speaker 1: their ideas. But I think it's a bit of a
Speaker 1: stretch to um glorify h India's past and and precluling
Speaker 1: your past in such a respect. I don't think any
Speaker 1: people's free cluling your past should be excessively glory glorified
Speaker 1: or um like mythologized, mythologized, yeah, romanticized, because I feel
Speaker 1: as though one that clouds our judgments UM and critical
Speaker 1: eye for the aspects of you know, past societies that
Speaker 1: do do it need to be challenged, do need to
Speaker 1: be changed um. I think that's part of my issues.
Speaker 1: So that she is this idea that you know, if
Speaker 1: things just go back to uh, these sorts of villages
Speaker 1: and village community, is that everything else would just be okay.
Speaker 1: But of course there were other issues that Inki was
Speaker 1: teaing with even Priortic colonization, you know, in terms of sexism,
Speaker 1: in terms of the control of the cast system and
Speaker 1: the higher casts UM, and the other aspects of Indian
Speaker 1: society that of course were made um more surveyor by
Speaker 1: British communism. Colorism, I think is one of those issues
Speaker 1: that of course existed Priortic colonization, but was made worse
Speaker 1: by the British and the presence in your subcontinent. But
Speaker 1: I think striking that balance of uh, cleaning, learning from
Speaker 1: respecting that um that prequeling the past, but also in
Speaker 1: our equal on our projects, not excessively romanticizing the past
Speaker 1: in an effort to progress towards the future these days,
Speaker 1: I believe SOWE actually is most known for its focus
Speaker 1: on protect protectionism. It's sustained foreign important investment. But it
Speaker 1: was of course a very wide spanning philosophy. It was
Speaker 1: a vision um and a philosophy of life that Gandhi
Speaker 1: held his entire life. That's I It's not something that
Speaker 1: I was familiar with prior to looking into it and
Speaker 1: my continued pursuit of decluding your perspectives and explorations of
Speaker 1: various post cluing projects and philosophies. But it's something that
Speaker 1: I've appreciated despite my criticisms or some aspects of it.
Speaker 1: Asked about all I have FIOL today. You can find
Speaker 1: me on YouTube at andreism, on Twitter dot com, slash
Speaker 1: and It's cool seeing true, and you could support me
Speaker 1: on Patreon dot com, slash sat Drew, You're welcome today
Speaker 1: could happen here a podcast that's being done for the
Speaker 1: first time and not the second time because we had
Speaker 1: bike problems. We did not just record a very funny
Speaker 1: intro that is now completely lost. Yeah, you'll you'll you'll
Speaker 1: never hear it. You'll you'll never you ever know what
Speaker 1: great fun we had. The joy was in the creation.
Speaker 1: They're not not in the sharing. Yeah, process, not an
Speaker 1: event structure, etcetera, etcetera. So I'm I'm mia, I'm a
Speaker 1: I'm gonna doing this episode. Also Garrison is here Hello, hi,
Speaker 1: and also James, Hi, I'm recording. So we're good now.
Speaker 1: Yet the good news is stunning Lee, as as as
Speaker 1: as much as it seems we are now more prepared
Speaker 1: to record this episode. I when we're last time. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well what are we? What are we? What are we
Speaker 1: talking about? We we we are We are talking about
Speaker 1: the age of the gender bureaucrat. So as as people
Speaker 1: are probably aware, there is a raft of anti trans
Speaker 1: bill sweeping through state legislatures um. The latest of these
Speaker 1: bills to pass as a time of recording is the
Speaker 1: bill in Utah which is banned miners from getting gender
Speaker 1: affirming care like hormone therapy, hormone blockers, and any kind
Speaker 1: of gender affirming surgery for anyone who's not already receiving them.
Speaker 1: Does does the Utah one also banned like therapy like
Speaker 1: talk therapy. No, but they're there, So on the one hand,
Speaker 1: doesn't band talk therapy. On the other hand, there's a
Speaker 1: provision in there that I think might also suggest that
Speaker 1: people do conversion therapy. So that's great. Um it fucking sucks.
Speaker 1: Ass uh yeah, kid, kids are going to die because
Speaker 1: of this bill. The people who are writing and signing
Speaker 1: these bills know that kids are going to die. We
Speaker 1: know this because Utah's Governor, Spencer Cox, who is the
Speaker 1: guy who signed the bill, vetoed an earlier ban on
Speaker 1: trans athletes participating in school sports, specifically signing the risk
Speaker 1: of suicide. So she knows this is going to kill kids.
Speaker 1: He signs us anyways, and we are now living in
Speaker 1: what I call the age of the gender bearacrat um.
Speaker 1: We we're gonna spend We're gonna have another episode later
Speaker 1: on where we spend a lot of time going through
Speaker 1: all of the individual bills and the stuff Trump has
Speaker 1: been saying about this, because Jesus Christ, pretty pretty pretty
Speaker 1: grim stuff that they're I mean, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: making making trans people out to be the boogeyman did
Speaker 1: not work in their favor greatly in the mid terms,
Speaker 1: but it seems like they're not trying to. They're not
Speaker 1: trying to change their tactics here. They are still going
Speaker 1: all in based on Trump's speech from a few days ago,
Speaker 1: the of of using the using the transgender menace as
Speaker 1: the as the greatest threat to America and the and
Speaker 1: the and the nuclear family. So we'll see how that
Speaker 1: goes for them, like electorally. But it's pretty bad rhetoric
Speaker 1: to see flying around. I think they it does really
Speaker 1: well with the people who who allowed and like, like
Speaker 1: you often see this in like primaries, right, like people
Speaker 1: pushed to the limits of their party, because that plays
Speaker 1: well with the most politicized people. And for sure, if
Speaker 1: you're going to a Trump rally, like three years after
Speaker 1: he got kicked out, yeah, you are also a bigot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But before we do that, I I want to before
Speaker 1: we actually really do an EPSO on this, I want
Speaker 1: to take a look at the sort of bureaucratic grounding
Speaker 1: for this entire thing. And to do that we need
Speaker 1: to look up gender bureaucrats and the American gender bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to cite my sources a bit and
Speaker 1: say that I stole this from a incredibly unlikely source,
Speaker 1: which is the Bowist Review. Of Shrek to what stop?
Speaker 1: Have a speak those words again? This is the Mauice
Speaker 1: Review of Strict two is one of the three great
Speaker 1: sort of text of American maoism. There's this one, there's
Speaker 1: Torgeable Attractive People's War the Florida Everglades, and then there's
Speaker 1: that time the the RCP got into a fight with
Speaker 1: the PSL and they're both trying to grab each other's signs. Amazing,
Speaker 1: amazing stuff. But unfortunately, you know, having having come up
Speaker 1: with the term gender bureaucrat, which is incredibly useful their maoists,
Speaker 1: so that they're constitutionally and politically just unable to understand
Speaker 1: what a bureaucrat is. So I have now stolen this
Speaker 1: term and I'm using it for other purposes reappropriate. No,
Speaker 1: it's stealing their mauists. It's it's never wrong to steal
Speaker 1: from maoists. Okay, fine, So all right, it's get getting
Speaker 1: back sort of serious stuff to understand what this is.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about sort of the term assigned
Speaker 1: gender at birth. Um. This used to be a like,
Speaker 1: I used to be fairly common kind of in in
Speaker 1: in circles to like refer to people is like a
Speaker 1: mab or a FABS like a side mail at Earth
Speaker 1: or assigned female at Earth. And it's a it kind
Speaker 1: of sucks as the term. It's been replaced by other stuff.
Speaker 1: But I think there's something important here, which is I
Speaker 1: want to go back and look at the assigned part,
Speaker 1: and I want to I want to look at the
Speaker 1: cecifically the part about the gender being assigned, because I
Speaker 1: think there's something that gets lost in sort of popular
Speaker 1: discussions of this, which is that when when people think
Speaker 1: about like the term like the assignment of gender, right,
Speaker 1: they think about it as something that's created socially. Right.
Speaker 1: They think about it as you know, people being like
Speaker 1: pressured to perform one kind of gender or another by
Speaker 1: the people around them, sort of by their families, by
Speaker 1: just like people walking down the street. And this is
Speaker 1: all true, but there's also something else going on here.
Speaker 1: And that's something else going on here is we need
Speaker 1: to ask ourselves when we talk about someone's gender being assigned,
Speaker 1: who is it being assigned by? Because this is an
Speaker 1: actual specific person, right, The person who actually assigns your
Speaker 1: gender is a doctor or sometimes a nurse or a midwife.
Speaker 1: And this person is the first gender bureaucrat they're the
Speaker 1: first gender bereacraft because they are the person who sits
Speaker 1: down and puts down what your gender is on a form. Now, Okay,
Speaker 1: you may be asking yourself, right, mio, why should anyone
Speaker 1: care that your gender is now on a piece of paper? Well,
Speaker 1: because and also maybe like they're they're also mainly at
Speaker 1: least now in like a in like a medical scientific sense,
Speaker 1: it's mainly like, oh, what parts do you have? Um,
Speaker 1: and then using those parts as as a carryover for
Speaker 1: gender as it's been modeled after ever since we stopped
Speaker 1: dressing boys and girls and dresses and all the same clothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and well we'll get into sort of like how
Speaker 1: this has sort of changed over time. But okay, so
Speaker 1: to understand why this actually matters, I think what we
Speaker 1: need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is, because this
Speaker 1: is a thing that used to be fairly common talk
Speaker 1: about on the left and then people have stopped doing
Speaker 1: over the past maybe like half decade. The anthropologist David
Speaker 1: Graeber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career. Probably his
Speaker 1: most famous book is one of his later worst, called
Speaker 1: Bullshit Jobs. But I want to go back to an
Speaker 1: earlier thing that he wrote called The Utopia of Rules.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm gonna read a little bit
Speaker 1: of one of the first sections of it. Bureaucratic knowledge
Speaker 1: is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means
Speaker 1: ignoring all the subtleties of real life existence and reducing
Speaker 1: everything to preconceive mechanical or statistical formula. Whether it's a
Speaker 1: matter of forms, rule statistics, or questionnaires, it is always
Speaker 1: a matter of simplification. Typically, it's not very different from
Speaker 1: the boss who walks into the kitchen to make an
Speaker 1: arbitrary snap pocsition as to what went wrong. In either case,
Speaker 1: it is a matter of applying very simple, pre existing
Speaker 1: templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often
Speaker 1: leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the
Speaker 1: impression that they are dealing with people who have, for
Speaker 1: some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of
Speaker 1: glasses that only allows them to see two percent of
Speaker 1: what's in front of them. So, you know, we we
Speaker 1: can see some of the the core aspects of bureaucracy here, right.
Speaker 1: Bureaucracy inherently is an act of simplification. Um. Because of
Speaker 1: sort of the tech like literally the technical systems of
Speaker 1: what a bureaucracy is, and because of how it how
Speaker 1: it stores information, how it bows information around, it can
Speaker 1: only see the world in incredibly sort of simplified terms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has to like abstract these things that make assumption
Speaker 1: that's based off those abstractions in order to have any
Speaker 1: type of functionality. Yeah, so so great. Grebor later says
Speaker 1: that like this, you know, Okay, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: like the sort of simplification and model making that goes
Speaker 1: on into bureaucracy can be really really frustrating with you
Speaker 1: have to interact with it. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, so the reduction of the complex to the simple,
Speaker 1: it's not just you know, a thing that's inherently evil
Speaker 1: in its in and of itself, it's the basis of
Speaker 1: all thoughts because you know, like we we we actually
Speaker 1: can't and like in and of ourselves s us the
Speaker 1: world by immediately holding in our minds all of the
Speaker 1: information at one time, right, the way we understand the
Speaker 1: world as simplications and models. Yeah, and we we it's
Speaker 1: a pattern recognition, recreating recursive spot loops that give us
Speaker 1: the very concept of meaning, and like that's how we
Speaker 1: know what words are. Yeah, and so true, you know,
Speaker 1: you can you can, you can look it's it's also
Speaker 1: possible to take a lot of data and make nonsense
Speaker 1: out of it. And this is this is this is
Speaker 1: a field called economics market Yeah but yeah, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so it's it's this is also the basis of all
Speaker 1: social theory, right, Like, like social theory is about taking
Speaker 1: a bunch of incredibly complicated like in messy relationships and
Speaker 1: just statistical stuff and just the noise of people doing
Speaker 1: doing things in everyday lives and trying to establish sort
Speaker 1: of like ways of understanding them. And you know, this
Speaker 1: in some sense is a kind of violence, right It's
Speaker 1: it's a violence of simplification. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, the violence you're during true reality here bears
Speaker 1: more resemble to sort of like Bacoonian's creative destruction. Right
Speaker 1: you're you know, you're imposing a kind of violence on reality,
Speaker 1: you know, in in simplifying and destroying a bunch of
Speaker 1: aspects of it so you can understand just like one
Speaker 1: part of it at a time. But you know, this.
Speaker 1: This is a useful thing, right, It's how we think
Speaker 1: like we we literally couldn't do anything without it. But
Speaker 1: as Graver puts it, the problem of right The problems
Speaker 1: arise at the moment that violence is no longer metaphorical. Here,
Speaker 1: let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones. Jim Cooper,
Speaker 1: a former l a p D officer turned sociologist, has
Speaker 1: observed at the overwhelming majority of those who end up
Speaker 1: getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turned out to
Speaker 1: be innocent of any crime. Cops don't beat up burglars,
Speaker 1: he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple. The one
Speaker 1: thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from police
Speaker 1: is a challenge to their right to As he puts it,
Speaker 1: defined the situation. That is to say, yeah, that that
Speaker 1: that perfectly describes any any physical interaction with police. You know,
Speaker 1: this is one of the things I like about Greater
Speaker 1: because I mean, this is this is something that I
Speaker 1: noticed and I was in academia, is it is very
Speaker 1: very easy to tell who, like when you're reading a
Speaker 1: theorist social theorist talking about stuff like who has been
Speaker 1: to your gas before it, who hasn't. Yeah, I'm always
Speaker 1: reminded when we talk about like academics who have a
Speaker 1: real life of that picture of Edward said throwing stones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most based academic thing anyone his death yea. And like graver, Graver,
Speaker 1: I think, I think it's been to your gas on
Speaker 1: five continents or something like that, Like he's gotten around,
Speaker 1: he's he's on a lot of stuff. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is always nice whenever you can whenever these types
Speaker 1: of theorists who like, you know, they often will philosophize
Speaker 1: about like the nature of power, in the nature of
Speaker 1: the state, and sometimes it can get a little bit
Speaker 1: wishy washy, and it's nice when there's people who do that. Also,
Speaker 1: you know, like the material like the material reality of
Speaker 1: like power and how that yeah like how how how
Speaker 1: like the how like the philosophy of power transfers over
Speaker 1: to street politics is always always an interesting difference to
Speaker 1: to compare compare various theory too. In I was teaching
Speaker 1: a world history course and obviously it's remote because of
Speaker 1: the pandemic, right, um, so, like we were just logging
Speaker 1: in the morning and like fully aware that I had
Speaker 1: seen and been tear gassed with some of my students
Speaker 1: a night before and then just discussed like how the
Speaker 1: state has a monopoly on violence. People are get o
Speaker 1: the fucking lines up. Looks like you've got a massive
Speaker 1: bruise again. Yeah, it was. It was very instructive and
Speaker 1: everyone should do it in their history classes. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna keep reading from this. Cool, because there's
Speaker 1: a couple of more things I want. I want to
Speaker 1: get out of this. So okay. So you know he's
Speaker 1: talking about how, like you, you get a violent reaction
Speaker 1: from challenging the right to define the situation. That is,
Speaker 1: to say, no, this isn't a possible crime situation. This
Speaker 1: is a citizen who pays your salary walking his dog situation.
Speaker 1: So shove off. Let alone the in varyably disastrous. Wait,
Speaker 1: why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn't do anything.
Speaker 1: It's talking back above all that inspires beat downs and
Speaker 1: means challenging whatever administrative rubric and orderly a disorderly crowd,
Speaker 1: a properly or improperly registered vehicle has been applied by
Speaker 1: the officers discretionary judgments. The police truncheon is precisely the
Speaker 1: point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative
Speaker 1: schema and it's monopoly on coercive force come together. It
Speaker 1: only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first
Speaker 1: and foremost on attacks on those who insists on alternative
Speaker 1: schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts
Speaker 1: John Page's famous definition of mature intelligence is the ability
Speaker 1: to coordinate between multiple perspectives or multiple or possible perspectives,
Speaker 1: one can see here precisely how bureaucratic power, at the
Speaker 1: moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of
Speaker 1: infantile stupidity. Yeah, it's it is this weird, like childlike
Speaker 1: sense that is that is an interesting combination of thoughts.
Speaker 1: That's a fantastic I love it. I like literally read
Speaker 1: reading this book is like one of the things that
Speaker 1: really sort of like committed me to anarchism because you know,
Speaker 1: like it's it's a it's a book that actually takes
Speaker 1: violence seriously, and you know, while talking about bureaucracy was
Speaker 1: something that really doesn't I don't know, and it's a
Speaker 1: good critique and we kind of have lost it over
Speaker 1: the years. I feel like we've gotten into arguments about
Speaker 1: this sort of thing when discussing the usefulness of like
Speaker 1: a Fuco's theories of power and like and like how
Speaker 1: power functions, You've definitely brought up this passage before talking
Speaker 1: about how the extent of that is always is always
Speaker 1: measured by where the truncheon is hitting on, like the
Speaker 1: actual street level. Yeah, but you know, okay, Graber isn't
Speaker 1: writing about gender here really, right, He's he's mostly writing
Speaker 1: about sort of direct police violence. Although I mean it
Speaker 1: is worth noting that, like all the stuff that writing
Speaker 1: is informed by sort of like like by by actually
Speaker 1: specifically by by by actual critical race theory and by
Speaker 1: sort of like uh like femder standpoints theory stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, okay, if if if you, if you,
Speaker 1: if you look back at this right and you look
Speaker 1: back at sort of you know, the point at which
Speaker 1: the state's bureaucratic impetue, imperative for imposing simple administrative schemes,
Speaker 1: and the monopoly and force come together or specifically the
Speaker 1: parts that are about right, Like, the way you get
Speaker 1: a violent reaction is by being something that being something
Speaker 1: that a bereacrat thinks you're not. Yeah, that is it's
Speaker 1: challenging their their their version of reality and the challenge
Speaker 1: it's challenging the validity of their perception of reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, and if you think about this about
Speaker 1: five seconds, if you're a transperson, that's not good because someone,
Speaker 1: a bureaucrat, has already assigned you a gender at birth,
Speaker 1: and if you're not that gender, things are going to
Speaker 1: get really bad really quickly. Well, do you know what
Speaker 1: bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely
Speaker 1: consider greatly is all of the biaucracies that support the
Speaker 1: products and services that that funded this podcast. Well, I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoy your your your your five new bars
Speaker 1: of gold. Thank you for supporting the show. Um, we
Speaker 1: are back. Uh, let's talk about gender and the bureaucracy
Speaker 1: that seeks to contain it violence. So you know, if
Speaker 1: if if if you are, for example, intersects, the point
Speaker 1: at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative
Speaker 1: schema and it's monopoly on course if force comes together,
Speaker 1: is on the operating table of the hospital where you're born. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, first you a doctor assigns you a fucking gender,
Speaker 1: which is never intersects by the way, the doctor just
Speaker 1: decides whether you're male or female, and then you know,
Speaker 1: puts that gender und your birth certificate. Um, it's technically
Speaker 1: possible in some places to get it changed to intersect
Speaker 1: later in life. But when I say it's technically possible,
Speaker 1: I there might even want people who've done it. The
Speaker 1: first person who we know ever change their gender to
Speaker 1: intersect did it in TV. So yeah, I'm sure there
Speaker 1: were I mean, pre bureauqucy indigenous societies. I know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but this is this yeah, this is yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: like yeah, like and and this is like the way
Speaker 1: that like we treat intersect people also has gotten worse.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and we're gonna get into this, but you
Speaker 1: but it's like it's like, you know, this is a
Speaker 1: very like it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly
Speaker 1: more than two genders, and how how society reacts to that,
Speaker 1: I think says you know, A, it's it's an enormous
Speaker 1: sort of like it's something enormously impact intersect people, right,
Speaker 1: like you know, you have like an incredible amount of
Speaker 1: violence that is flicted onto them. And then secondly, the
Speaker 1: way intersect people is dealt with, it's something that reveals
Speaker 1: a lot about how the society is to look at
Speaker 1: gender and how society is going to look at the
Speaker 1: enforcement of gender. I think on the point of how
Speaker 1: it's in a lot of ways, the treatment of intersect
Speaker 1: people has gotten has gotten worse in the past like
Speaker 1: a few years. I feel like as the bureaucracy grows,
Speaker 1: the amount of violence that is necessary to maintain it
Speaker 1: also grows, and the bigger any any small thing threatens
Speaker 1: the validity of the entire bureaucracy. So they have to
Speaker 1: come down hard on anything that that is that is
Speaker 1: like deviant from that because they need to maintain the
Speaker 1: validity of the system that they have built. I think
Speaker 1: that's definitely an aspect. And the other thing that's really
Speaker 1: really bad is that, you know, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about board this more a bit later, but like the
Speaker 1: actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has
Speaker 1: increased so dramatically, even in the last fifty years. It
Speaker 1: is like like the the U s is a if
Speaker 1: to someone to someone living in right, the modern US
Speaker 1: is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society. It is like like it
Speaker 1: even like the even like the like you know, like
Speaker 1: like the sort of people like yeah, like even like
Speaker 1: the most sort of like totalitarian style on is bureaucrat
Speaker 1: like looks at the US and it's like, what the
Speaker 1: funk guys, you guys are taking taking bureaucracy too far,
Speaker 1: Like even just like the surveillance capacities definitely would like
Speaker 1: you would have loved that to to be to be fair,
Speaker 1: to be fair, the East Germans did really well with
Speaker 1: what they had, but I think it's really so. I
Speaker 1: think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the
Speaker 1: way you're able to do gender when you're well and
Speaker 1: when you're getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your
Speaker 1: Internet searches, they're like that that that's one side of it,
Speaker 1: and there's other sides of it in terms of like
Speaker 1: you know, people people seeking to make like different gender
Speaker 1: presentations illegal. How the how how that had That type
Speaker 1: of surveillance will eventually lead into pretty pretty druckon Ian well.
Speaker 1: And and I think I think in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: like the violence that has done to intersect kids is
Speaker 1: sort of it is one of the sort of origin
Speaker 1: points of this, right, Um, I I do actually want
Speaker 1: I want to sort of get into what what this
Speaker 1: is a little bit um since the nice in sixties.
Speaker 1: And again that what I'm saying this like this stuff
Speaker 1: is kind of recent, right, UM. Doctors have started commonly
Speaker 1: performing non consensual surgery and intersex kids to force them
Speaker 1: to conform to a gender. UM. Here's from a two
Speaker 1: thousand and thirteen report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur
Speaker 1: on Torture that's sited by Human Rights Watch. Children who
Speaker 1: are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to
Speaker 1: irreversible sex assignments, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalization, surgery performed
Speaker 1: without their informed consent or that of the parents, in
Speaker 1: an attempt quote, in an attempt to fix their sex,
Speaker 1: leaving them with permanent, permanent, irreversible infertility and causing severe
Speaker 1: mental suffering. And this is fucking horrible. It happens, it's
Speaker 1: all the time, and on all of the people who
Speaker 1: write these fucking laws that are like giving giving someone
Speaker 1: gender affirming care is like needling them specifically carve out
Speaker 1: sections so that doctors can keep sucking doing this intersex kids,
Speaker 1: And it's horrible. It's really interesting how like UM, so
Speaker 1: often the sports field is a terrain where this kind
Speaker 1: of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for
Speaker 1: the first time, Like the sports governing authorities have been
Speaker 1: fucking brutalizing intersex athletes for fifty years now, and every
Speaker 1: time it's because, yeah, they'll and they'll they'll put forth
Speaker 1: an argument and then lose in court most of the
Speaker 1: time because they'll they'll seek to advance like a very
Speaker 1: narrow definition of gender based on chromosomeality or something or
Speaker 1: testosterone levels or something, and then demonstrably this binary doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: right like, and then they'll lose, and they'll respond to
Speaker 1: losing by fucking destroying that person. Yeah, it's there are
Speaker 1: plenty of cases people can confined in history of that happening,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's sucked up and and and I think
Speaker 1: the more I've been thinking about this, the more I
Speaker 1: think that the sort of like that a lot of
Speaker 1: what turfism is is this kind of like it's it's
Speaker 1: attempting to take the bureaucratic categories as literal truth. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't work. It doesn't It doesn't actually work on
Speaker 1: a sort of either on a scientific level or on
Speaker 1: a sort of more philosophical level, because again, what what
Speaker 1: what what that sort of bureaucratic assignment is is a
Speaker 1: is a radical simplification of reality that destroys it destroys
Speaker 1: reality itself in order to create a sort of like
Speaker 1: an M or and F on a page. And when
Speaker 1: you when you try to go back into the real
Speaker 1: world that it doesn't work. It only works when you
Speaker 1: can enforce it with violence. Tests do be loving to
Speaker 1: enforce the end with the violence? Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this entire thing is sort of
Speaker 1: this this is the basis of the sort of of
Speaker 1: the of the American gender bureaucracy. Right, It's inherently violent.
Speaker 1: It's it's not just sort of a procedure for recording
Speaker 1: what your gender is. It is it always sort of
Speaker 1: has been and is increasingly more were so now becoming
Speaker 1: a system that imposes it imposes a gender on you. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and there's also a lot of ways that
Speaker 1: this bureaucracy you gets imposed on you that are you know,
Speaker 1: less extreme. You know, if if we go back to
Speaker 1: the question of like who are you assigned a gender for? Right,
Speaker 1: You're asigned a gender for the state, and you know,
Speaker 1: almost everything in your life depends on these bureaucratic documents.
Speaker 1: Because that's how the state understands you as a person
Speaker 1: by by these bureaucract documents like specifically birth certificates, process
Speaker 1: like driver's licenses, social Security cards, and sports generation papers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean like here here, here's the American Bar Association
Speaker 1: talking about birth certificates. They are so common that we
Speaker 1: might even overlook their significance. In the United States, birth
Speaker 1: certificates serve as a proof of an individual's age, citizenship, status,
Speaker 1: and identity. They are necessary to obtain Social Security, apply
Speaker 1: for a passport, in rolland schools, get a driver's license,
Speaker 1: gain employment, or apply for other benefits. Humanitarian Desmond too
Speaker 1: to describe the birthtific it as quote a small paper,
Speaker 1: but it actually establishes who you are and gives access
Speaker 1: to the rights and privileges and the obligations of citizenship.
Speaker 1: You know, and I think that does Manchoo two is
Speaker 1: being enormously optimistic about sort of what it means to
Speaker 1: be seen by the state here, because the other thing
Speaker 1: that it does is it exposes you to the state's
Speaker 1: violence in a way where you know it now the
Speaker 1: state like this, this is this is the mechanism with
Speaker 1: you which it now knows who you are, so it
Speaker 1: does not having one, like, yeah, it's when the soft
Speaker 1: sits try to not have birthtificates for their children get
Speaker 1: violent and this and this is the thing. And one
Speaker 1: of one of the things here about this is that
Speaker 1: like you know, okay, you used to be able to,
Speaker 1: like get away with not having birth certificates, right, like
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of Americans used not to
Speaker 1: used to like not. But one of one of the
Speaker 1: things that happens over the course of World War two
Speaker 1: is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureacratic capacity.
Speaker 1: And there's an expansion of state's bureacratic capacity because it
Speaker 1: has to you know, it has to go to war.
Speaker 1: But some taneously there's and there's something I didn't have
Speaker 1: to happen but did, is that you get the army
Speaker 1: and you get employers starting to ask people's birertificates. But
Speaker 1: if people don't have them, because like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I was, why why the funk do I need to
Speaker 1: record being born? Right? Like this is this this is
Speaker 1: only this is another thing you need. It's only a
Speaker 1: thing the state needs. Yeah, it's interesting to look at
Speaker 1: Like I was thinking about how this is also where
Speaker 1: the kind of front line of colonialism happens, like the
Speaker 1: enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people. Like you
Speaker 1: can look at specific individuals um osh tissues. One of them,
Speaker 1: they were a crow person in the cronation who like
Speaker 1: for for the United States as a scout's what's called
Speaker 1: bada and then was like in later life kind of
Speaker 1: forced to conform to a binary gender with which they
Speaker 1: didn't identify and they hadn't lived that way and because
Speaker 1: they had to, having being assigned identity papers to live
Speaker 1: on a reservation, you have to take one of the
Speaker 1: fucking boxes. Yeah, and you know, and the thing about
Speaker 1: those fucking exist right is you know, even like to
Speaker 1: this day, there are a lot of states where you
Speaker 1: can't change your gender, like on on you can't change
Speaker 1: what says in the card. You just can't. And you know,
Speaker 1: if they've assigned you a gender that's not your gender,
Speaker 1: then well tough luck. They have they have an they
Speaker 1: have monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and you
Speaker 1: don't you know, there's other stags where you need a
Speaker 1: fucking court order saying that you've had surgery in order
Speaker 1: to get the fucking you know, in order to change
Speaker 1: your bureaucratic person. And again the reason for this is
Speaker 1: and I cannot emphasize this enough. Fuck you. That is that.
Speaker 1: That is that, that is the reason for this. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to go back also to
Speaker 1: you know, look to to look a bit more about
Speaker 1: sort of bureacratic effects. Um I'm gonna read from a
Speaker 1: n triple epiece about trans guy in the UK and
Speaker 1: the fifties. From the start, the sensensialized press coverage or
Speaker 1: ferguson this transition focused on some surprisingly quote tition elements.
Speaker 1: Quote change of sex puts them in a different employment
Speaker 1: category with a raisin salary, reported one newspaper, underscoring the
Speaker 1: fact that being reclassified as male in the eyes of
Speaker 1: his employer at the British government tied into a complex
Speaker 1: network of gendered economic and labor discrimination. In fact, not
Speaker 1: only did his pay change, but his whole job category changed,
Speaker 1: even though he was doing exactly the same work under
Speaker 1: the same conditions. This was because women workers were simply
Speaker 1: were not simply paid less, but also kept in feminized
Speaker 1: job grades. In the civil service, despite the government's claims
Speaker 1: that service was a meritocracy, a question a question raised
Speaker 1: in Parliament by an MP who had heard about Ferguson,
Speaker 1: demanded to know what form and number of proofs other
Speaker 1: than a mirror announcement by the subject they've missed ended
Speaker 1: them a couple of times. I it is required before
Speaker 1: a female quote like like civil survey, is permitted to
Speaker 1: obtain a higher salary in a different employment category owing
Speaker 1: to a change in sex. By gaining a quote official change,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself, suddenly suddenly transformed into chief
Speaker 1: Experimental Officer with a male breadwinner salary large enough to
Speaker 1: support a family, rather than a woman's lower wage that
Speaker 1: was expected to be supplements mental to a family's earnings.
Speaker 1: For obvious reasons, noted the Treasury, we should not have
Speaker 1: to say anything which would have led to a request
Speaker 1: for the male payrade to be applied from his data's
Speaker 1: entry to the civil service. In other words, the Treasury
Speaker 1: wanted to ensure for that Ferguson did not try to
Speaker 1: claim back wages in turf Island. Always been very normal. Um.
Speaker 1: And uh, there's I wanna read a little bit more
Speaker 1: of this. Um. Conversely, a different civil servant, this time
Speaker 1: a trans woman who was working in the Admiral p
Speaker 1: Department and transitioning around the same time, was advised it
Speaker 1: was in her quote interest to delay official recognition of
Speaker 1: the change until at least January nineteen sixty assuming full
Speaker 1: equal pay in the civil services introduced by nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 1: Her employers wrote that it was in her quote own interest,
Speaker 1: in their opinion, continue wearing men's clothing for the time
Speaker 1: being in order to avoid your significant reduction in pay.
Speaker 1: That it's it's funny because like I it's not funny.
Speaker 1: It's sucked up and it's been stupid, isn't it. But
Speaker 1: like I knew trans people in Britain who would have
Speaker 1: grown up around this time, who like socially transitioned after retirement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or at least like openly to you know, we weren't
Speaker 1: like BFF or anything. But it's absolutely fucking insane that
Speaker 1: like that this argument was deployed. Yeah, And you know,
Speaker 1: you can you can see what's sort of going on here,
Speaker 1: which is that like you know, it's more it's more
Speaker 1: explicitly obvious and here that it is in a lot
Speaker 1: of other cases. But your status in the gender bureaucracy
Speaker 1: is a key element of how you're able to extract
Speaker 1: resources from the state. And you know, sometimes that's literally
Speaker 1: just an explicit pay gap, like it was based on
Speaker 1: institutional sexism. But you know, I think I think the
Speaker 1: second case is in a lot of ways more revealing. Right,
Speaker 1: the state and asgender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying, conform
Speaker 1: to what the jet the bureaucracy says your gender is,
Speaker 1: and it'll you'll get paid more, and if you don't,
Speaker 1: you'll get paid less. And if you look at this
Speaker 1: more abstractly, right, and in order to interface with the state,
Speaker 1: in order to extract well for benefits, in order to
Speaker 1: pay your fucking taxes, in order to drive, in order
Speaker 1: to buy alcohol, apparently now in order to buy the
Speaker 1: stupid cleaning bottles you of of compressed air but you
Speaker 1: have to use to to clean out your computer keyboards. Uh,
Speaker 1: in order to buy alcohol, in order to get on
Speaker 1: an airplane, you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic
Speaker 1: view of you. And if you don't, you can't do it.
Speaker 1: And and you know this this brings up the question,
Speaker 1: what right does the state have to assign my gender?
Speaker 1: And you know, the state will spit out a variety
Speaker 1: of sort of like pseudo medical and pseudo political explanations.
Speaker 1: But the answer is that the state has no right
Speaker 1: to tell you what your gender is except force. And
Speaker 1: you know, the the extent to which the state has
Speaker 1: actually been able to sort of do this kind of
Speaker 1: stuff has changed over time. But we we've talked about
Speaker 1: this a bit. But what like, you know, over the
Speaker 1: course of sort of over the course of sort of
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, and you know, we can also
Speaker 1: look at things like, uh, we can look at the
Speaker 1: War on Terror, we can look at neo liberalism and
Speaker 1: David Graber's Iron law of liberalism, which the Iron Law
Speaker 1: of liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative
Speaker 1: intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces, will
Speaker 1: have the ultimate effect of increasing a total number of regulations,
Speaker 1: the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats,
Speaker 1: the government employees, which I always love. But you know,
Speaker 1: like we we we've we've seen the sort of consequences
Speaker 1: of this playing out over the course of of you know,
Speaker 1: the last about a century. Right, if you go back
Speaker 1: to the age nineties, it was possible for basically private
Speaker 1: citizens to have just full on wars with each other
Speaker 1: in parts of the US, and that the government would
Speaker 1: just be like sure, okay, whatever, Like the people mining
Speaker 1: bird ship off of the coast of California are shooting
Speaker 1: each other with cannons again like whatever, Right, Like it's
Speaker 1: it's not really until the twentieth century, and really even
Speaker 1: in like the last fifty years has been a last
Speaker 1: expansion of this that like the state actually has full
Speaker 1: territorial control over everywhere that it claims to have control of. Right,
Speaker 1: we were like we we are just now getting to
Speaker 1: a place where the police can actually you know, like
Speaker 1: have like militarily hold the entire country at one time.
Speaker 1: And even then they can only do it as long
Speaker 1: as people sort of cooperate with them. Um, but you
Speaker 1: know this, this is really bad if you're a person
Speaker 1: who doesn't who who who the bureaucracy has deemed to
Speaker 1: be something else or and this is another you know,
Speaker 1: another sort of angle on this, right, Like, if you're
Speaker 1: someone who does not have documentation, the state very very
Speaker 1: quickly will just attempt to destroy you because you know,
Speaker 1: oh hey you don't you don't know the right paper.
Speaker 1: As this means the government can fucking arrest you and
Speaker 1: kick you out of the country. Yeah, and you know
Speaker 1: this is fucking horrible. Um, there's a lot of stuff, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other angles you can look at
Speaker 1: this from, right. I mean, like at some point we
Speaker 1: probably will do an episode about like the process of
Speaker 1: getting medical care and all of the people who you
Speaker 1: have to convince that you are your gender. But ye
Speaker 1: know that that's another episode in tirely what I want
Speaker 1: to get at here is that state bureaucratic power is
Speaker 1: being used by by just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats not
Speaker 1: only to force people to comply with their sort of
Speaker 1: state mandated gender when they deal with the state, but
Speaker 1: also to force them to inhabit that gender in their
Speaker 1: private lives, which is constitutes nothing less than a form
Speaker 1: of full scale genders hotel terrianism. Um. We talked about
Speaker 1: that fucking Utah bill, which you know again prohibits minors
Speaker 1: from getting gender affirming surgery people block as a hormone treatment.
Speaker 1: That that is a bill that forces people to live
Speaker 1: in their state mandated gender. In Florida, gender bureaucrats are
Speaker 1: allowed to physically inspect athletes they suspect of being tran
Speaker 1: which is to say, not conforming to fucking state bureautic
Speaker 1: gender controls. It's children, right, like children, like they are
Speaker 1: allowed to molest your child because they think that because
Speaker 1: they're they think they're trans. The other aspect of this is,
Speaker 1: obviously there is something we've talked about before that's something
Speaker 1: that you're starting to see with these bills is they're
Speaker 1: trying to make the bills age number go as high
Speaker 1: as possible. Yes, there's bills for people, there's bills proposing
Speaker 1: twenty five not so it's trying to trying to police
Speaker 1: and control the bodily autonomy of of complete adults, which
Speaker 1: obviously is not not a new thing for the GOP,
Speaker 1: specifically especially in the wake of the Roe v. Wade
Speaker 1: overturning um. But another aspect of like this, this this
Speaker 1: goes beyond just people who are younger than the age
Speaker 1: of nineteen. This this they're going to try to keep
Speaker 1: raising this as much as as much as possible. And
Speaker 1: this is where the types of surveillance that I was
Speaker 1: talking about before it's going to become a problem because
Speaker 1: if you're if you're googling how to do d I
Speaker 1: Y H R T and get stuff shipped in from Brazil.
Speaker 1: Don't think that the surveillance stuff is not gonna not
Speaker 1: gonna impact your ability to do that. They had also
Speaker 1: polices like the gender presentation of SIS people specifically CISS
Speaker 1: for me, and I think, like I think the people
Speaker 1: who are getting physically inspected because of these laws are
Speaker 1: just girls who are good at fucking sport. Like there's
Speaker 1: CIS girls. They just they might be like like taller
Speaker 1: or stronger or and like it's some anyone has the
Speaker 1: power to just be like, oh you're not you're not
Speaker 1: a girly enough girl. Uh, And so fucking now you
Speaker 1: get to go to the pervert room and get expected.
Speaker 1: And you know what was like in Texas? Right the
Speaker 1: law right now is that if the state, if the
Speaker 1: state thinks you're fucking child is not sufficiently close to
Speaker 1: the gender, they can fucking take your child from you
Speaker 1: and force them to be whatever fucking gender the state
Speaker 1: wants them to be. Right, And you know, any other
Speaker 1: period in history, if you walk into a room and
Speaker 1: tell a bunch of people the state is going to
Speaker 1: decide your fucking gender, everyone would lose their goddamn minds.
Speaker 1: This would be like this is a This is a
Speaker 1: like unfathomable like even in sort of like the depths
Speaker 1: of the sort of totalitarian like nightmare or states. This
Speaker 1: is like an unfathomable level of sort of state bureaucratic
Speaker 1: like in position onto people's lives. And yeah, you know
Speaker 1: it's the fucking us right we have, we have We
Speaker 1: are the most bureacratic society humanity has ever produced. Nobody
Speaker 1: thinks it's the most bureacratic society has ever produced. And
Speaker 1: you know, we are right now every day seeing the
Speaker 1: points at which bureaucracy meets violence. The last thing I
Speaker 1: have to say is that you know, like this, this,
Speaker 1: this is the future of gender. The future of gender
Speaker 1: is government bureaucrats, whether they're cops, politicians, doctor's shop, protective services,
Speaker 1: as school board administrators forcing you to be a gendor
Speaker 1: that they're not. But fundamentally, they have no fucking right
Speaker 1: to do this, right. What they have is power, and
Speaker 1: their grasp on power is still right now tenuous. So
Speaker 1: you know, it is possible to stop them going any
Speaker 1: further than this. It is possible to beat back the
Speaker 1: power of the state, and it is possible to have
Speaker 1: a world that's not this, and we know it's possible
Speaker 1: to have world it is not this because it wasn't
Speaker 1: like this like fifty years ago. So yeah, fuck him
Speaker 1: and that's that's that's that that, that's that. That that's
Speaker 1: gender bureaucrats. People should read David Gray. But learning about
Speaker 1: intersectionality for a fucking second. Another another another great resource
Speaker 1: to learn about how you can like mix up gender stuff.
Speaker 1: There's this new video game out right now which has
Speaker 1: a pretty intense character creation selection you can It's called
Speaker 1: let me See, It's called Hogwarts Legacy. Is that No
Speaker 1: I thought you were going with side called but it has,
Speaker 1: it has It has a lot of different customizations that
Speaker 1: you can do for your gender presentation and and and
Speaker 1: your body parts. I think refusing could do this on Twitter,
Speaker 1: but I need, I need, I need to take fucking
Speaker 1: one minute talk about the dumbest argument anyone has ever made,
Speaker 1: which is that I have to buy this game in
Speaker 1: order to support the developers. Which think about this five seconds, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: if you have to buy this game to support the developers,
Speaker 1: don't you have to buy every other game to support
Speaker 1: their developers? In fact, are are you not morally obligated
Speaker 1: to buy every single product on Earth, because if you
Speaker 1: don't buy every single product that's ever been made, you
Speaker 1: those those will not be deployed. It's bullshit here. This
Speaker 1: is such a weird like capitalism of a poison development
Speaker 1: thinking you're obligated to consume. Lots of people on I
Speaker 1: have been holding my tongue on Twitter about this from
Speaker 1: monks now watching people watching people made the argument, I
Speaker 1: have to buy something to sport developers, which again buy
Speaker 1: a different game. Support those developers, buy fucking go on strike.
Speaker 1: Fucking I don't know if you want, if you want
Speaker 1: to want to support the develophy give you money someone
Speaker 1: who is in a fucking video game developer. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: glad we're getting I'm glad glad we could have that
Speaker 1: that special bonding moment over the very inclusive gender settings
Speaker 1: inside this new hit video game. So that's that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: I hopefully we get an ad from them soon, but
Speaker 1: I hope, so, I hope. So the worst Twitter day
Speaker 1: of my life is the day we get that fucking
Speaker 1: ad gold presented by Hogwarts. Hi, everyone is it could
Speaker 1: happen here And it's just James today because today I'm
Speaker 1: doing a little interview on the situation for Hindu people.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with the Hindu genocide, we're not
Speaker 1: going to cover that in depth, but we will give
Speaker 1: a little bit of an overview. And I'm talking to
Speaker 1: on your Mo, who is Rhinga himself and who works
Speaker 1: with the National Unity Government and advising them about Reheinga
Speaker 1: people's human rights. I think the news cycle hasn't really
Speaker 1: covered many Rehiner issues since the Rhea genocide. The world's
Speaker 1: kind of moved off from caring about them, but they're
Speaker 1: still in a very difficult situation, and we want to
Speaker 1: update you on issues that continue to face the Rehenga people.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed the interview. So today I'm joined
Speaker 1: by on Kyomo, who's an advisor to the National Unity
Speaker 1: Government of Miama, which people will hopefully be familiar with.
Speaker 1: If not, he can explain a little bit of what
Speaker 1: that is. He's an advisor to the Ministry of Human
Speaker 1: Rights and also a Rehinger human rights activist himself. And so, Phi,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for
Speaker 1: having me. Yeah, So what I'd love to do today
Speaker 1: is I think if our listeners have listened to our
Speaker 1: previous coverage to what's happening in Mihama or Burma, depending
Speaker 1: on which one do you prefer. They will know a
Speaker 1: lot about the coup, and they will know a lot
Speaker 1: about the things of Pappasinsku right, the PDF and the
Speaker 1: ethnic resistance organizations, but I think they might not be
Speaker 1: as familiar with the situation that Reenga people have been
Speaker 1: in for a long time and continue to be in.
Speaker 1: It's a different part of the the country too. We
Speaker 1: were we were in um Massot, which is on the
Speaker 1: other side, So that's something we've covered a lot less.
Speaker 1: So perhaps you could begin by explaining, like why there
Speaker 1: are so many Rehindia refugees who have left. Obviously, the
Speaker 1: history of the persecution of Ranger people is very long.
Speaker 1: But if you could give us sort of a potted
Speaker 1: history of of the persecution of Rehinia people by various
Speaker 1: governments in Myanmar and and what has led to this
Speaker 1: massive exodus and this big refugee population of Hinda people, now,
Speaker 1: that would be great to start with. Great, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me in. The history is very long,
Speaker 1: but I will be concrete and and and short. The
Speaker 1: Ruheinga people has been in Myanmar before Burma even exists,
Speaker 1: before Burma become Burma, and before British came and their
Speaker 1: significant architect color related infrastructure that exists indicate existence of
Speaker 1: the Ruhengan. There's a lot of literature research and Ruhinga
Speaker 1: people themselves living in generations and generations um there indicates
Speaker 1: that Ruhinga are part of my and Mare and it
Speaker 1: he used to be and it will be. And Runga
Speaker 1: not only the ethnic minority, they are also the religious minority.
Speaker 1: Majority of premius people are Buddhists and of the second largest,
Speaker 1: followed by the Muslims are Christian, and then the third
Speaker 1: largest are Muslim and Ruhinga are Muslim and and Ruhinga
Speaker 1: are single Muslim ethnic groups and Sink also religious ethnic groups.
Speaker 1: And there has been historical exclusion discriminations sponsored by the
Speaker 1: and sponsored and carried out by the consecutive government of
Speaker 1: Myanmar to target this religious and ethnic minority, to exclude
Speaker 1: from religious, ethnic and social aspects of the society, and
Speaker 1: and it has been politically motivating for many government it
Speaker 1: has always been beneficial in in and mincing the larger
Speaker 1: populations of Myanmar by showing Runga as a threat to
Speaker 1: the country because of their religious differences and to the
Speaker 1: way that we were and we eat are slightly different
Speaker 1: than than Purmese because we have our own culture and
Speaker 1: own traditions and own language and and u and it's
Speaker 1: enriched by by those UH. Thus the first start of execution,
Speaker 1: like executing these discriminatory policies to work to the Runga
Speaker 1: has started as as long as um as far as
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty where the first coup took nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two when first took place, and then military consecutive
Speaker 1: military government accelerated that to form to UH situations where
Speaker 1: it could be UH defined and fall under the category
Speaker 1: of the crimes against humanity. So in nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: there is a big operations against Hina people to deport
Speaker 1: them and two thousand people has to be flee to
Speaker 1: to Bangladesh and some of them still remain as refugees
Speaker 1: to third generations for the generations in Bangladesh not being
Speaker 1: able to repatriate it to the place where they come from.
Speaker 1: And followed by that the nineteen UH ninety two there
Speaker 1: was another influx of the refugees and the refugee it's
Speaker 1: also the quite significant larger number of the refugees and
Speaker 1: and and not everyone could come back. And there is
Speaker 1: another layer of the refugees that remains UH from the
Speaker 1: report treating then from the violation the human rights violations
Speaker 1: became too through h gas business, a surial limiting the child,
Speaker 1: the number of child that you can have, and treating
Speaker 1: you less than an animals, not having the religious right
Speaker 1: to exercise the way that you believe, and restrictions of movement, killing, raping,
Speaker 1: and it's continued and it has been accelerated in different
Speaker 1: form and shape where it could be it could come
Speaker 1: to a situation it's from from crimes against you and
Speaker 1: it is being transformed to genocides and and in two
Speaker 1: thousands seventeen it's one to the highest pick of the
Speaker 1: genocides where a million people are being deported by burning
Speaker 1: and many people had a thousand people died and many
Speaker 1: thousands women being raped. And there are a lot of
Speaker 1: fatherless child in the camp today being UH big bond
Speaker 1: by by by by the woman's who victims of the
Speaker 1: of the rief of the Nyama military. And today there
Speaker 1: is a million people in Bangladesh and with no hope
Speaker 1: to be reportuated soon to the place of origin with
Speaker 1: safety and and dignity. And of course the political landscape
Speaker 1: in Myanmar has shifted. UH. It used to be in
Speaker 1: the democratic transition from two thousands ten to twenty with
Speaker 1: two consecutive different government and the democratically elected government has
Speaker 1: been overthrown by by a temkup by the military who
Speaker 1: had ruled the country for for for many decades. And
Speaker 1: UH and and of course the democratically elected government which
Speaker 1: I advise to UH is being some of the member
Speaker 1: of the government are being arrested, and some are in
Speaker 1: the in the ethnic territorial control, and and some are
Speaker 1: in exile, and and and so the country so the
Speaker 1: reactions of the fifty million people has been different because
Speaker 1: there has been several ku inman Mara and this was
Speaker 1: their the the political calculations of the military leaders to
Speaker 1: ATTEMPD the coup was wrong that they did not expect
Speaker 1: the resistance of the people. And then of course the
Speaker 1: the the young Generation Z people came in to to resist. Uitially,
Speaker 1: they claimed to be peacefully protesting to hand over the
Speaker 1: power back to the to the to the democratically elected people,
Speaker 1: but as a result they were being brutally cracked on
Speaker 1: and killed, arrested, and then and then the young people
Speaker 1: started to understand that we need to speak the language
Speaker 1: that they understand. They understand, so they speak that language
Speaker 1: is grabbing a gun and and and and promming the military.
Speaker 1: So followed by that, National Unity Government has been formed
Speaker 1: by with elected members of the of the of the
Speaker 1: parliament both lower Horna Opera hosts. So the National Unity
Speaker 1: Government today is the most the legitimate government of Yanmar
Speaker 1: and having also some tertorial control. Of course, majority of
Speaker 1: the government investor infrastructure are being being captured illegally by
Speaker 1: the military untain. Yeah, and it's interesting that people are
Speaker 1: familiar with the sort of ethnic makeup of previous governments
Speaker 1: and then the National Unity Government. From what I understand,
Speaker 1: it's not as much dominated by the majority ethnic Berman
Speaker 1: people in the International Unity Government as it was before
Speaker 1: even under their n LG. Right, even under sort of
Speaker 1: the most most democratic that there has been in the
Speaker 1: MA for some time, like there was still a domination
Speaker 1: by by one ethnicity. Right that the National Unity Government
Speaker 1: is more ethnically diverse, is that right? Correct? But still
Speaker 1: there are a lot of rooms for improvement. Particularly range
Speaker 1: people has always been part of Myanmar and politically excluded.
Speaker 1: And despite a million people being pushed out to the
Speaker 1: Bangladesh through a genocidal attempt, the remaining populations in Yenmar
Speaker 1: is six people politically represented both sides of populations under
Speaker 1: continued genocidal attempts of the Miyama made Free and the
Speaker 1: National United Government did not include politically meaningfully the Ruhinga
Speaker 1: populations still now and they appointed me as an adviser,
Speaker 1: But a politically representable size of populations need to be represented,
Speaker 1: not by functions alone. It's need to be both all
Speaker 1: represented by functions and number equally to to UH, to
Speaker 1: other ethnic And we're in the context of identity politics
Speaker 1: in me and Mare and your political rights and responsibilities
Speaker 1: to what to the nations are associated that the very
Speaker 1: identity that you were so time to time. There is
Speaker 1: a big questions like you know, we're moving forward to
Speaker 1: the part of democracy to make the country to back
Speaker 1: to the track of democracy. But the very principle of
Speaker 1: democracy is majority rules and and respect the minorities right right,
Speaker 1: and still the Runga are being despite the international pressure,
Speaker 1: particularly the United States and it's allies to have inclusive
Speaker 1: democracy and Ruhinga people are not yet meaningful included in
Speaker 1: the government. Yeah, and I think that's something we've spoken
Speaker 1: about a lot with with Karen and Karni, people who
Speaker 1: we've spoken to about the sort of the need for
Speaker 1: a more inclusive structure, whether that's like a federal democracy
Speaker 1: after obviously after the military hunter has been deposed, or
Speaker 1: certainly something that's more inclusive, and perhaps we can talk
Speaker 1: about how Like it's very interesting to me when I
Speaker 1: talk to young people generation Z people from the EMMA,
Speaker 1: they will say that like they wouldn't have even said
Speaker 1: sometimes for a hind yet like ten years ago, that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't have used to term they have they'd have
Speaker 1: seen the people who we now who we would call
Speaker 1: hin As Bangladesh. He's right because this was the narrative.
Speaker 1: Can you explain how you've explained very well that that's
Speaker 1: not true, but how that narrative was constructed and what
Speaker 1: it was used to do. I think it's once again
Speaker 1: to sclue through Hingen to curry our systematic destructions mentally
Speaker 1: and physically. The Rhinga is also a lot to do
Speaker 1: with their spreading propaganda, misinformations and and disinformations through a
Speaker 1: state let media boosts online and offline, and so this
Speaker 1: means these destructions has happened with the state sponsortain state
Speaker 1: pre plan intentional um intentional intentional UH way of doing it,
Speaker 1: and thus the society, the Hinga people has been restricted
Speaker 1: from moving. And this is one of the least developed
Speaker 1: region where the hunger people living. A lot of people
Speaker 1: from from like other state wouldn't be able to travel
Speaker 1: and go and see what is happening really inside there
Speaker 1: and to people would not be able to move parts
Speaker 1: of that to tell their stories. So all the narrative
Speaker 1: that people here is the military and the government what
Speaker 1: the government used to put at that moment. So in
Speaker 1: the in the in the eyes or in the perceptions
Speaker 1: of the people through Hingas are from Bangladesh and they
Speaker 1: are trying to to take over the country and they
Speaker 1: had a national security threat and that was denderative. So
Speaker 1: they the reality is being defined by the perceptions and
Speaker 1: falls and misinformations that being given in a consistent intentional
Speaker 1: way to the young people. And of course today I
Speaker 1: think has changed slightly to be seeing to what is
Speaker 1: reality and people showing the sympathy to what happened to
Speaker 1: the Ruhinga because it's every time something happened in me,
Speaker 1: I'm like that it's consistent to work to the Rhinga
Speaker 1: the human rights violations, crimes against humanity and genocide, and
Speaker 1: the people fifty million people in Myanmar were not either
Speaker 1: they're seeing neutral or their extending with the military not
Speaker 1: like too that this should do this and this is
Speaker 1: right to do to kill people, right to read because
Speaker 1: their national city security threat. But what had happened to
Speaker 1: the Ruhinga people, perhaps in the not the same shape
Speaker 1: and same as already or valocity or momentum or intensity
Speaker 1: has started to happen after the coup, to to the
Speaker 1: to the Bama people, and then they tend to realize
Speaker 1: what happened to ring What Ringa used to tell running
Speaker 1: the whole village is killing and raping is exactly what
Speaker 1: what what is happening? More or less exactly what is
Speaker 1: happening to us? Than they were right? And it's the
Speaker 1: big teams change and the proper traitors remain the same.
Speaker 1: And with that concept people come to but again I
Speaker 1: think they still it's a very small number of the populations,
Speaker 1: uh compared to the whole populations that lives in Yanmar
Speaker 1: and in in in the democratic principles, there is no
Speaker 1: like you don't tend to say something just because that
Speaker 1: you sympathize. And there are principles and values that you
Speaker 1: do not compromise in any circumstance. So equal right, justice
Speaker 1: and and inclusivity and like like celebrating of the diversity.
Speaker 1: These things are very core principles of of of the
Speaker 1: democracy that that we are like as a Burmese people
Speaker 1: asking from international community to help. What we're preaching for
Speaker 1: to ward to the democracy need to be demonstrated at home.
Speaker 1: First we need to act up on and and so
Speaker 1: I think the benchmark, there's no the benchmark shouldn't be
Speaker 1: defined to include or exclude someone based on the sympathies
Speaker 1: need to be based on the principles and values. Can
Speaker 1: you explain a little bit about the situation that range
Speaker 1: of people who have left meam or maybe they're in
Speaker 1: Cox's bizarre, maybe they're in no man's land, maybe they're
Speaker 1: they're now being moved to an island right? Can can
Speaker 1: you explain what life is like for those people? Of course,
Speaker 1: the when we can get people fleds to Bangladesh, it
Speaker 1: was attempting to survive, Uh, like they managed to survive
Speaker 1: and otherwise many died and they could be one of
Speaker 1: those who who died and they survive, meaning that these
Speaker 1: old people are have physical and mental destruction and untheless
Speaker 1: cars in their physical and mental aspects of the life.
Speaker 1: And and of course a million people in Bangladesh to
Speaker 1: be hosted by the BANGLADESHIPH government BANGLADESHIH people has been
Speaker 1: also very difficult because the resource in the given area
Speaker 1: is very limited and Bangladesh itself is a small country
Speaker 1: with with with limited resource and and we should always
Speaker 1: appreciate Bangladeship people and BANGLADESHIH government to open their arms
Speaker 1: and hurt to to to absorbs and and and a
Speaker 1: median people and and and and again. I think the
Speaker 1: problems started in Me and Mare and and the solutions
Speaker 1: need to be in Me and Mar and and people
Speaker 1: need to be going with say dignified h way to
Speaker 1: the place of origin. And and of course Bangladesh. It
Speaker 1: has been five years plus now that the people like
Speaker 1: the largest influx took place in Sucer and seventeen uh
Speaker 1: and there were repatricans settem being made and and the
Speaker 1: when people fled from My and Mar jump into the
Speaker 1: Nap River and be of bang all into those seventeen
Speaker 1: because the land was more dangerous than the sea. Situations
Speaker 1: remained very same or even worse than that now in
Speaker 1: in in mire Mar to be going back, so you
Speaker 1: you escape from a grape that you have buried, uh
Speaker 1: to be killed and being pushed to go back to
Speaker 1: to to me and mark it is as being sent
Speaker 1: him back to to the to the grape that you
Speaker 1: escape from from from dying. Uh. So the situation doesn't
Speaker 1: favor for a safe, dignified, voluntary return for the for
Speaker 1: the Reinga. That's Bangladeshi authorities are trying to find different
Speaker 1: innovative modality in different ways how to how to create
Speaker 1: sustainable situations for the renga, including relocations of the of
Speaker 1: the certain number of the of the of the Inga
Speaker 1: populations because the the the camps are very congested and
Speaker 1: the hygiene level in the camp a very low and
Speaker 1: there are a lot of also the the the crowd
Speaker 1: on like you know, if a million people in a
Speaker 1: small scale place like that's are being being closed, anything
Speaker 1: could happen anytime, you know. So the the the idea
Speaker 1: was too by the Bangladeshi government which doesn't fall into
Speaker 1: into the principle of international way of doing things, and
Speaker 1: and relocating some of these refugees to an island that
Speaker 1: has its a new islands. You know, human being has
Speaker 1: been ever lived there, and the island has been technically
Speaker 1: from various technical assessment has identified it's not livable by
Speaker 1: human being yet. And because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: like cyclones and and and flats and things like that,
Speaker 1: and it's very far away from millions of Bangladesh and
Speaker 1: and it yeah, so there is risk from UH from
Speaker 1: various perspective to be able. But despite this, Bangldeshi government
Speaker 1: has built, sheltered this and relocated UH some numbers of
Speaker 1: Rhinga and some of them went by their own will
Speaker 1: seeing that it might be a different and and some
Speaker 1: being maybe perhaps post and and of course there are
Speaker 1: a certain number of like around close to UH five
Speaker 1: to six thousand people in Norman's Land when Bangladesh at
Speaker 1: the beginning did not open its border when we're felleing
Speaker 1: and so this Norman Land we're being occupied by the
Speaker 1: nearby abilities because Bangladesh wouldn't open the gate for them
Speaker 1: and they were stuck in India. So they have happened
Speaker 1: to be stuck there since the last five years. Uh
Speaker 1: and the remaining lives in in in coxwas a districts
Speaker 1: of of Bangladesh in different parts of this this districts.
Speaker 1: So that's the situation. Yeah, that's very well said, and
Speaker 1: it's some people have have taken on recently leaving these
Speaker 1: camps in Bangladesh. They've taken on this very risky boat journey, right,
Speaker 1: I think they're going to places like Malaysia if I'm
Speaker 1: not taken Intonesia, And can you explain a little bit
Speaker 1: about like how prevalent that is in the co It's
Speaker 1: how incredibly like high riscued it is for people to
Speaker 1: take that journey. Sure, the the situations in the camp
Speaker 1: is not much different than the life that they used
Speaker 1: to live in in Indian mar Despite that, the level
Speaker 1: of the level of human rights violations and the treatment
Speaker 1: that they are having may not be the same. But
Speaker 1: Bangladesh is not a signature to nineteen fifty two Refugee
Speaker 1: Conventions and it's not legally obliged to be to be
Speaker 1: following all international norms and protocols to be to be
Speaker 1: hosting the the the the refugees. But despite they have
Speaker 1: demonstrated the humanity UH and demonstrated the moral obligations towards
Speaker 1: the humanity to to host the Median people and the
Speaker 1: then the million people. Some of them has been from
Speaker 1: ight and some of them are from nineteen, some of
Speaker 1: them are from two seventeen. Has a very dark future.
Speaker 1: They are closed in this fence camp and the movements
Speaker 1: are restricted. Access to informations are not given like the
Speaker 1: interne Access to informations are are like internet service and
Speaker 1: things like that has been denied. Access to livelihoods are
Speaker 1: denied and they're not able to legally work and solely
Speaker 1: rely onto to the International Humanity and assistem. Access to
Speaker 1: education has been denied. So the young people who are
Speaker 1: growing in this camp does not see a future that
Speaker 1: they will be able to go back to me and
Speaker 1: mar or if they live here as if you're living
Speaker 1: a debt, like you know, you don't have any any
Speaker 1: any way for what's seeing a bright fishure. So there
Speaker 1: is there is the only they don't have a best
Speaker 1: alternative to be trying to be exploring different paths and
Speaker 1: the only path it's happened to be is being created
Speaker 1: in the past. UH. In the past by some ruhingas
Speaker 1: taking these boats and making to Malaysia where they could
Speaker 1: do some domestic works and get a refugee status and
Speaker 1: maybe able to work, and and some were lucky enough
Speaker 1: to be resettled in the third country, a small number
Speaker 1: maybe less than two less than to three percent of
Speaker 1: the total total Ladyshire. So the journey is very risky.
Speaker 1: The the the the boats that they are taking the
Speaker 1: first the sea is very rough that they take, and
Speaker 1: their the infrastructure, both infrastructure that they're taking are not
Speaker 1: built like they not built in any way to be
Speaker 1: coping with this rough sea and rough rough weathers and climates.
Speaker 1: So many of these hunger people who make this less
Speaker 1: than fifty percent of them may make it to the
Speaker 1: to the destinations. Either they die on the sea, or
Speaker 1: they are being arrested by different navies and and and
Speaker 1: or they are they are being jailed by by Mia
Speaker 1: Mia and mar Junta. And in two thousand twenty two
Speaker 1: loan three thousand, five hundred more than three thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred people including children as young as two years old,
Speaker 1: are jail to five years for trying to attempt to
Speaker 1: to go to easier So this is this is what
Speaker 1: it is happening, so the the life is meaningless there.
Speaker 1: And of course taking this journey mine that you're toosing
Speaker 1: a coin whether you get a tail or you get
Speaker 1: you get head or you got tails, you know, and
Speaker 1: and and so it's like betting your life whether if
Speaker 1: you make it, you're you're a life to somewhat level meaningful.
Speaker 1: If you don't make it your life and it is
Speaker 1: more or less the same that you will live in
Speaker 1: there in there. So that's why these are the push factors,
Speaker 1: and of course they are full factors reunifications. If a
Speaker 1: son has made UH three years ago, five years ago
Speaker 1: to to Malaysia and working in the constructions or or
Speaker 1: or or or or gardening like levers and and you
Speaker 1: have a remaining family in the camp and you don't
Speaker 1: want to see your family in that situation, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna bring your family kids or children's or wife and
Speaker 1: you do that. And lastly, also they are growing youth
Speaker 1: in Malaysia who are who want to marry thee and
Speaker 1: maintain the culture and language and things like that, so
Speaker 1: they want to have rights bringing from the camp and
Speaker 1: and so they're they're different push factor pull factor as
Speaker 1: well from from Malaysia, but the primary factor is the
Speaker 1: push factor in India and Martin in Bangladesh, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's perfectly reasonable for people to want, so yeah,
Speaker 1: some futures and some chance to realize their own life
Speaker 1: and their goals. So can you explain people will probably
Speaker 1: have seen like I think we're recording this on Thursday, UM,
Speaker 1: which is the look at the date of the nineteen
Speaker 1: and people will have seen the last couple of days
Speaker 1: maybe videos of fires in no Man's land, and they
Speaker 1: will probably have seen like some acronyms, which are a
Speaker 1: lot of acronyms when when you're reading about me M
Speaker 1: I can be very confusing. So could you explain a
Speaker 1: little bit about who these two groups that we've seen,
Speaker 1: right the A R S A and the R s O,
Speaker 1: who they are and what they what they represent, and
Speaker 1: perhaps why these two groups who are nominally Brahingia are
Speaker 1: fighting each other. So the in the context of ME
Speaker 1: and MATH politics, the ethnic people UH has been fighting
Speaker 1: for decades and and and decades UH with ME and
Speaker 1: mom milstry and Bamah supremacy like larger majority supremacy UH.
Speaker 1: At the beginning, they were attempted during the time of
Speaker 1: independency through reconciliations and dial of meaning like without arms.
Speaker 1: But the language again being understood by the by the
Speaker 1: Myanmar larger majority, is the language that they speak as well.
Speaker 1: So then ethnic people started to grab the arms and
Speaker 1: resist control their territory to uh to attempted to control
Speaker 1: the territory in order to get the equal right and
Speaker 1: decide for their own future, be part of the decisions
Speaker 1: that collectively impact the nations and and basically equal right,
Speaker 1: justice and and and those those things. That's what ethnic
Speaker 1: people are are fighting for and giving their lives and
Speaker 1: livelihoods uh. It's nothing less than that and nothing more
Speaker 1: than That's very simple. We want to live with dignity
Speaker 1: freely equally with anyone else. And and so many ethnic
Speaker 1: revolutionary organizations forms came came up in different part of
Speaker 1: me and Mar representing different ethnic and Ruhenga also used
Speaker 1: to be one of those back in nineteen fifty uh
Speaker 1: for after nineteen forty eight dependent and nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: Ruheinga is the first one to drop the gun in
Speaker 1: a change of the peace with the government, saying that
Speaker 1: we are peace loving people and as long as you
Speaker 1: give us what what what our identity and and and
Speaker 1: we're able to and we are. So then there's a
Speaker 1: certain period of time that the Ruhenga people did not
Speaker 1: have an arm oppositions group because I am someone who
Speaker 1: believe in non violent movement, but in a context like
Speaker 1: me and mar Again, non violence movement wouldn't go anywhere
Speaker 1: if it's worked seventy years. Uh wouldn't have the longest
Speaker 1: singular war in the world more than seventy years, right,
Speaker 1: So we need to be practical and seeing the reality
Speaker 1: like that. So then uh, then again these things happened,
Speaker 1: and then and the Ruhinga things. Okay, then what we
Speaker 1: have been promised and what we have were we're being
Speaker 1: told to be promised to be given is not given.
Speaker 1: So we have to grab the gun again and form
Speaker 1: U do as the others are doing in order to
Speaker 1: to uh. So, the Ruhinga Solidarity Organization has been formed
Speaker 1: and it has been one of the popular organizations, getting
Speaker 1: a lot of popularity from the Ruhinga community. And then
Speaker 1: there were issues within the institution that has been growing.
Speaker 1: Of course, uh they were not able to maintain uh,
Speaker 1: the the institutional growth and institutional resource managements. And then
Speaker 1: the institution collapse and as well as it has to
Speaker 1: do something with that, like you don't have a territory
Speaker 1: like other other other arm oppositions group will will be
Speaker 1: in stations in me and Mark where we're stations in
Speaker 1: Bangladesh and Bangladesh government were not really supporting and not
Speaker 1: for them to survive with with with to enhandle its
Speaker 1: military capability. And of course there are several other other
Speaker 1: other things and and so then it's disappeared in between
Speaker 1: and then and two thousand fourteen. Uh, this guy, a
Speaker 1: guy called um this the guy who is leading currently
Speaker 1: the the the are se Arkanslevations Army who was born
Speaker 1: in in Pakistan and grew up in Saudi Arabia. His parents,
Speaker 1: he claimed his parents is Rhingen. Of course, uh he
Speaker 1: speaks the ring language. That's mean, it's indicated that he
Speaker 1: uh he's and came to to our kind of state
Speaker 1: to mobilize people saying that you needed to grab the gun.
Speaker 1: And this is what then people of course who have
Speaker 1: critical thinking skills and not believe into things because it's
Speaker 1: need to be from and within, and someone who does
Speaker 1: not understand how many and more politics look like cannot
Speaker 1: lead revolutions because revolutionary has to do a lot with
Speaker 1: the with the politics political landscape as well in the
Speaker 1: country and and uh but however there's a certain number
Speaker 1: of people who believe in it in very small numbers,
Speaker 1: and UH and Inga didn't want to again fight or
Speaker 1: or entry into violence, and they just want to live peacefully.
Speaker 1: And and that uh and today are resilient to to
Speaker 1: the to to what they're trying to UH gain equally
Speaker 1: as others. And and so then our consolvation Servey um
Speaker 1: e r S. He has attacked the post thirty different
Speaker 1: police forced in two thousand seventeen. That's where the collective
Speaker 1: punishment has been given as a result of the ring
Speaker 1: Ruhinga community. And it's not collective collective action. It was
Speaker 1: individual's action. Certain hundreds of people gather together and at
Speaker 1: tem police force and and and the whole regae population
Speaker 1: has been punished. So then followed by that as well,
Speaker 1: ours has been free student of judging themselves. And then
Speaker 1: so our are ruing A solebrity organizations also pop up
Speaker 1: parlelly back into nineteen and and and of course the
Speaker 1: ideology that they stent are slightly different from one another,
Speaker 1: and so they they they that's why the clash happened.
Speaker 1: And and UH ring A Solitary organization think that like
Speaker 1: the way that ours has been conducting and they're responsible.
Speaker 1: They they for what happened to the Ruhinga people as
Speaker 1: as collectively genocides and things I think like that, creating
Speaker 1: opportunities for Burmese military to to wipe out through Hingen,
Speaker 1: deported through Hunga. And so they were this political disagreement
Speaker 1: between these two groups and this no one land has
Speaker 1: been mostly occupied within the Ruhinga refugees. There some are
Speaker 1: some members are often try to to enter there and
Speaker 1: and and stations there and so recently UH the what
Speaker 1: we have learned from the ground is that our ringous
Speaker 1: solidarity organizations UH route out and operations to remove them
Speaker 1: from there and so that the Ringery within the normal
Speaker 1: lands could live peacefully without crimes and things like that.
Speaker 1: And and that's how the fighters started and and it's
Speaker 1: escalated and there were two hundred houses being burned on
Speaker 1: shelters ring refugee shelters. Around two thousand, five hundred to
Speaker 1: three thousand people has been UH has to be displaced.
Speaker 1: They were not allowed to enter to Bangladesh because normal
Speaker 1: land is not accessible by neither parties and and it's
Speaker 1: it's just in between. So some of them has destroyed
Speaker 1: the fans toward to Burma and enter to their because
Speaker 1: they just from the nearby abilities. They could see their
Speaker 1: abilities for five years, but they could not go back,
Speaker 1: so they so they so they went back there. But
Speaker 1: now myrmam latry is pushing them out from from there
Speaker 1: back to the Norman lands. Yeah, it's just yeah, a
Speaker 1: terrible situation. Um and thebilities are the only armed groups
Speaker 1: in that state, right there are other round groups, but
Speaker 1: like this, this sort of explains it more succinctly, Like
Speaker 1: if we get into the other round groups, it gets
Speaker 1: even more complicated. And so I wonder what people listening,
Speaker 1: obviously will They've they've heard a lot about about the
Speaker 1: conflict in Burma, about the various different groups that are
Speaker 1: being persecuted by the Burmese military. How can they help
Speaker 1: specifically with this issue? Is is there ways that people
Speaker 1: can can help out? I think we have seen how
Speaker 1: the world came together to help Ukraine people unjustly illegally
Speaker 1: to be attacked by by Russia and and threatening the
Speaker 1: democratic society of the world. And and that has been
Speaker 1: very inspiring appreciated and and and we stand with the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian people and people in Burmah has the life of
Speaker 1: the value of the life of the people in Burma
Speaker 1: has also there is no difference in life. You can
Speaker 1: buy one, you know. So we have been the people
Speaker 1: in Myanmar has been fighting for for UH the cost
Speaker 1: of life and livelihoods today with whatever means that they
Speaker 1: have to make this country back to the part of democracy.
Speaker 1: And and so international community should do beyond releasing the
Speaker 1: statement or or or of concern. And a statement of
Speaker 1: concern maybe maybe may name and shame and may put
Speaker 1: political pressure and political pressure. UH is not they think
Speaker 1: that being cared by by the by the by the junta.
Speaker 1: So the the the total enemy of the overall people,
Speaker 1: including drinking people, are the military and and and they're
Speaker 1: the one who has destroyed this country. And they're beyond
Speaker 1: who is destroying and they are responsible primarily responsible um
Speaker 1: people institutions who wiped out through ungen, who carried all
Speaker 1: the genocide. So I think the international community should do
Speaker 1: beyond beyond sanctions, arm embargo and and and respective citizens
Speaker 1: of the country should claim to their respective government to
Speaker 1: do more for Purmes people and the Runga people to
Speaker 1: deministrate the moral obligations to war to the humanity. And
Speaker 1: in twenty one century genocides took place while the world
Speaker 1: was watching, and we set in the United Nations back
Speaker 1: in nineteen uh nineteen fifty forty eight that never again.
Speaker 1: And and it's very shameful that it could, that genocide
Speaker 1: could take place in the eyes of eight billion people
Speaker 1: in twenty century and modern age and the world failed
Speaker 1: to protect the Runga. This party. There has been compelling stories,
Speaker 1: immages and settle actories and and and still it's continued
Speaker 1: to be so and followed by that crimes against community,
Speaker 1: war crimes has been being committed continually by the by
Speaker 1: the same military that committed genocide. And I think the
Speaker 1: international community will have at some point to answer to
Speaker 1: themselves on their beliefs of the humanity. Yeah, like I
Speaker 1: think the international community let's happen for too long, and
Speaker 1: they ignored it for too long, and then now it
Speaker 1: always happens right Like it's like for Coast Boomerang, the
Speaker 1: violence spreads and gets used in the metropol and it's
Speaker 1: deeply upsetting. What does that support look like from the
Speaker 1: international community like does that mean ah Man pads for PDF?
Speaker 1: Does it mean recognizing the National Unity Government? Like what
Speaker 1: concrete things should the community be doing? The international community
Speaker 1: should recognize there again, the there are some issues that
Speaker 1: need to be fixed within the the the National Unity Government,
Speaker 1: particularly the inclusions of the Ruhinga and other like it's
Speaker 1: it's positions to to the religious, other religious and ethnic minorities,
Speaker 1: particularly those are small and that need to be fixed.
Speaker 1: And international community should do it in an incentivice way
Speaker 1: that Okay, you do this and we will do this
Speaker 1: for you, and and and the recognitions come with incentive
Speaker 1: of supporting, uh, supporting because it's only legitimate. Whether we
Speaker 1: like the National Unity Government or not. We don't have
Speaker 1: the best alternative to it. It's democratically elected. And and
Speaker 1: there is a lot of issues within the within the
Speaker 1: within the within the the National Unity Government, particularly when
Speaker 1: it's come to the rocking issues. So these need to
Speaker 1: be dealt in in National Energy Government. I have been
Speaker 1: consistently advising them to fix this, acting beyond policy and
Speaker 1: and and and showing state level prioritized agenda with concrete
Speaker 1: milestone to to to the change toward to the Rhinga UH.
Speaker 1: And of course, parallel to that, international community should ensure
Speaker 1: that big supports are being given, being recognized and and
Speaker 1: and and in order to win these revolutions, which has
Speaker 1: shaken the very institution that has consumed the resource of
Speaker 1: the country in various means and ways UH. Some UH
Speaker 1: and one of the strongest institution has been shaken by
Speaker 1: the young people UH with very small means that they
Speaker 1: are very small and time to time, very innovative and
Speaker 1: and and and utilizing whatever means that they had. An
Speaker 1: international community should provide support to PIA to be first
Speaker 1: and foremost institutionalizing and and and and capacity building enhancing
Speaker 1: acting upon international standard. We are UH way of operating
Speaker 1: as as a as a military group and and of
Speaker 1: course when you are being established as a as a
Speaker 1: military UH institutions and it's is it's being formed by
Speaker 1: the by the legal government of Myanmar. And to support
Speaker 1: this this this military and many many nations are getting
Speaker 1: military assistance package and and I think international communities should
Speaker 1: have no problem to provide military system package too. Of
Speaker 1: course in a very principles and value based with with
Speaker 1: the value baste approach and and and and and let's
Speaker 1: include the technical support to to to set up the
Speaker 1: mechanisms to held the accountable and to ensure the transparencient
Speaker 1: accountable across the spectrum. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's
Speaker 1: very well said. And they do tend like if people
Speaker 1: aren't familiar with the way the PDFs have been organized
Speaker 1: like they they have been very respectful of like norms
Speaker 1: and laws of war and things like that, which obviously
Speaker 1: that these military have not. And I think an institutions
Speaker 1: that a group that has been with hundred hundred thousands
Speaker 1: of people, young people with no prior military experience and
Speaker 1: mostly operating in a very limited, uh to no resource
Speaker 1: context and being able to respect the human rights and
Speaker 1: human dignity should be recognized. You know there when you
Speaker 1: you have a gun, and there are there are things
Speaker 1: that happen and need to be justified in and and
Speaker 1: being held accountable for. But I'm saying that, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that it should be a lot in any any
Speaker 1: any kind of misconduct within the military systems need to
Speaker 1: be investigated properly and take actions upon and held accountable
Speaker 1: those who gave these who carried out these actions, and
Speaker 1: who gave common to carry out this action but the
Speaker 1: number of cases related to the to the to the
Speaker 1: to the to the PDP has been significantly low. And
Speaker 1: when when it's come to the to the human right
Speaker 1: violations and and it has to be zero and then
Speaker 1: one is too much. But I'm saying compared to UH
Speaker 1: to UH and and and I think cont need support
Speaker 1: need to be given there in order to to to
Speaker 1: enhance their capacity to defeat the junta plus to defeat
Speaker 1: it in the principle and value based with the principle
Speaker 1: and value based approach. Yeah, yeah, certainly they could definitely do.
Speaker 1: Like the people we've spoken to a terribly equipped by
Speaker 1: any modern standards, incredibly brave and innovative. They could certainly
Speaker 1: do a lot better. They have a lot more. Okay,
Speaker 1: where can people if people want to follow along with
Speaker 1: your work, which is very impressive, how can they find you?
Speaker 1: Do you have like do you want to share your
Speaker 1: Twitter account or a website? Maybe? Where can people keep
Speaker 1: up with you? So? I am on Twitter and Facebook
Speaker 1: mostly and my tutor is a k move two UH
Speaker 1: and which you can see it's with my pictures and
Speaker 1: and I have put my bio as well there and
Speaker 1: I'm also also very active on the Facebook and what
Speaker 1: the work related. Most of the work that I do
Speaker 1: UH are being not everything, but some part that international
Speaker 1: community need to know are being portrait there. And particularly UH,
Speaker 1: the the human rights situations related to the Ruhinga and
Speaker 1: Rhinga in Bangladesh are being being being shared there in
Speaker 1: a timely, very timely manner. Sometimes even lives. You know,
Speaker 1: it's happening now and being and yeah, yeah, you've been
Speaker 1: very good at that. I poo your Twitter account. It's
Speaker 1: very informative and it helps me stay informed. So it's
Speaker 1: it's a k m o E two if people are
Speaker 1: searching for it. Thank you so much for giving us
Speaker 1: some of your evening. I really really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else you want to get to before
Speaker 1: we finish up now? It's lovely to be part of
Speaker 1: the program, and thank you so much for helping me
Speaker 1: once again, Thank you very much. Hey, we'll be back
Speaker 1: Monday with more episodes every week from now until the
Speaker 1: heat death of the Universe. It could happen Here is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot
Speaker 1: com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
Speaker 1: find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.