It Could Happen Here Weekly 69

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a completion episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Hey, everybody, Robert here. UM.

(00:23):
I recorded this with Jason about two days before UM
Wizards of the Coast put out an announcement completely backpedaling
on everything they had been planning to do to the
Open Gaming License UM. Of survey of fifteen thousand fans
said they were not happy with the Wizards, UH the

(00:44):
authorizing UM the one point out open gaming license and uh,
I mean, what it looks like is a lot of
people unregistered from D and D beyond and UM. A
lot of people called in complaining and the numbers folks
at Wizards panicked. UM and as a result, they are
completely folding on the plans to rescind or de authorize

(01:06):
the Open Gaming License UM and in factive announced that
they are making it UH the exact terms they use
are irrevocable, and uh, yeah, that's that's good. Yeah, and
they put everything under an irrevocable Creative Commons license. So
this is all just breaking, um, But I think it's
broadly good news. Anytime a giant company chooses to do

(01:29):
something kind of crummy with a piece of what what
I would say is actually pretty meaningful intellectual heritage. Uh,
and then they get slapped down and panic and reverse course,
that's a good thing. Um. It shows a number of things,
which one of which probably the most important of which
is that the community of people who recognize their value

(01:50):
in these kinds of games, in this h this pastime,
this recreational activity, um also fundamentally value the essence of
like what is open source ideology, which is nice, Like,
it's nice to know that the open source folks we
can still throw a punch every now and again, even

(02:11):
if it's just a punch at Wizards of the Coast.
So happy ending, everybody, Happy ending. Also, the good folks
at Pizo sold out of eight months worth of Pathfinder
books in like two weeks, so that's nice too. Uh,
it could happen. Here is the podcast that you are

(02:33):
listening to right now, I am Robert Evans. This is
a show about things falling apart and sometimes putting them
back together. And today we're we're taking a little bit
of a different tax. In recent weeks, you've listened to
us cover a wide variety of issues, from conflicts in
places like me and mar two conflicts here at home
in the city of Atlanta, UM, to deep dives in

(02:56):
history and all that all that good stuff that that
you know and of us. For today, we are talking
about a subject that is unusually close to my heart.
Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I'm gonna guess, just given the
nature of our listenership, a decent chunk of you grew
up playing d and d UM, and just because of
how really shockingly suddenly it's become much more popular than

(03:20):
it than it ever was previously, and much more mainstream.
A lot of you who may have encountered as an adult, Um,
there's a lot that's actually been written, kind of sociologically
on on what Dungeons and Dragons is. A One point
that some people will make is that it's it's kind
of the first new game that we had that that
human beings made up since like chess um, by which

(03:43):
I mean you you have had war games for a
very long period of time. But the concept of a
role playing game and the way that that D and
D is where you're essentially sitting down with a group
of people and engaging in an act of collaborative storytelling
that's kind of buttressed by a system of rules that's
actually a prey the new idea. Now. Now, elements of
this have existed forever um and in fact, kind of

(04:05):
an interesting fact you'll run into is that in the
late medieval period a lot of jousts had role playing elements,
including ones were like rulers and and their their court
would dress up as the knights of the round table
and act in character as those nights. So elements of
all of this stuff have existed for a while. But
when Dungeons and Dragons kind of came together as a

(04:26):
game for the first time, it was it is kind
of worth seeing it as as something really new and
valuable in the history of play and the history of
human creativity. Um So, as a result of that, I
do kind of think, I personally think there's something a
little bit sacred about that that basic idea, and one
of the things that's really interesting to me about the

(04:48):
industry that grew up around Dungeons and Dragons is that
there have always been a lot of people in it
who I think feel the same way UM and I
think one of these people was a guy named Ryan Dancy,
and Ryan Dancy Um was vice president in charge of
Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast for a
while UM and he helped actually negotiate the sale of

(05:09):
the Dungeons and Dragons property to Wizards of the Coast
when the company that had been distributing it fell apart.
And Dancy was a big part of the institution in
the year two thousand of what became known as the
Open Gaming License. And basically what this meant is that
the set of rules that that D and D worked by,
and at a round two thousand, which was I think

(05:29):
you would call it like three point oh, was the
system in place basically got elements of the mechanics got
effectively open sourced. UM and so Wizards of the Coast
UM went from what had been the previous move of
the people who had owned D and D, which was
kind of to oppose people trying to make third party
content using the ruled source to embracing it and allowing

(05:52):
it to do that freely. UM. And now I'm going
to introduce our guest who was one of the people who,
uh is kind of the one of the most influence
will folks in what happened after this, because once the
Open Gaming License came into effect, there's suddenly this galaxy
of new games and supplemental materials that people start making, UM,
which you know, Wizards is not profiting from directly, but

(06:12):
which the hobby profits from. UM. And one of the
people who has who has been most influential in that,
is our guest today, Jason Bollman. Jason, you are the
game a lead game designer at Piazzo and the creator
of Pathfinder, which is the I mean, it's not Dungeons
and Dragons, but it uses as its base that kind
of open gaming UH system, and it's it's what I

(06:34):
play when I get a chance to sit down and
play a role playing game. So, first off, Jason, thank
you for several thousand hours of of my my childhood
and early adulthood UM spent playing Pathfinder. Yeah, well thanks
for having me. And yeah, PISO kind of spun off
from Wizards of the Coast, Um, you know, back in
the early days of the open game license, and we

(06:57):
were there official publishers of their magazine until that kind
of came to an end, and then we we started
making our own game based off the open game license
and did I did I? Did I get all that
right earlier? Do you have any kind of clarifications she'd
like to add before we move further into the conflict,
and there is a conflict. We're not just talking about
how cool d there are. I think there's a there's

(07:17):
an interesting thing to note about games. Games are kind
of weird when it comes to copyright and ownership, and
it's kind of why the open game license is so important. Right.
So TSR, the company that owned Dungeons and Dragons before
Wizards of the Coast, was pretty pretty litigious, as you mentioned, um,

(07:37):
but they ended up getting into kind of a bind
because you know, the game itself is one that encourages
people to make their own content, to kind of homebrew
stuff and invent their own stories. And what it comes
down to is that you know, ultimately game mechanics can't
be copyrighted. That that's been long held, that that those

(07:59):
sorts of things you cannot copyright. That's why you see
so many versions of like scrabble that aren't scrabble. Um. Yeah,
And it's why anyone can make a basketball team or
a basketball league and play basketball. You don't have to
get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball, exactly, exactly.
So the Open Game License wasn't about giving everyone permission
to use rules, which is something that could already kind

(08:22):
of do. It was about giving them kind of a
safe harbor, a place that everybody involved kind of knew
that this was all okay, no one was going to
be filing frivolous, frivolous lawsuits, and that you could use
kind of direct references without having to be a copyright
lawyer or retaining a giant staff. It allowed a lot

(08:45):
of very little businesses to kind of spring up, making, Hey,
here's my cool adventure that I ran from my group.
You can buy it and play it with your group. Now,
little things like that, And I don't think it's for
nothing that number one a huge thing. And this has
become as Silicon Valley has kind of turned more mercenary,
This has become less of a thing but a massive thing.
And the early history of Silicon Valley in the tech

(09:07):
industry was the open source movement, you know, was the
idea that a lot of people should be able to collaboratively,
work and iterate on things without having to worry about
who owns the basic idea, right, you know. Lennox Is
is a great example of this, and the the ideology
behind the open source movement was a big influence in
the open gaming license. I mean, Dancy kind of admits
that himself. There's a quote where he says that, like, yeah,

(09:29):
I think we need to embrace some of these ideas
at the heart of the open source movement because I
think it will be a good business decision for Wizards
of the Coast. It will on the whole, even if
we're not profiting directly from every sort of like thing
that people make off of this, the fact that it's
going to cause the hobby to explode will benefit us.
And I think he's been proven right in that because

(09:51):
D and D has gone from this thing that like
I got bullied for in high school too. There's these
massive podcast there's been TV shows that are just people
playing the game. Game like it has reached this level.
I never really expected it would of, like critical and
and mass acceptance, which has been really cool to see.
It's been one of the things that I've been happiest

(10:12):
about watching occurs socially in the last couple of decades. Yeah,
you can't disagree that the business case wasn't super tight, right,
the way that the O g L got all of
the other game companies, many of which had their own
entirely different games in the early two thousands, they all
abandoned them and started making content for D and d UM,

(10:36):
and that just kind of carried forward a large swath
of kind of the game industry, which is pretty cottage, right.
There's a bunch of small players. There's not a lot
of large corporations in here. Um. You know, in fact,
Wizards is by far the largest, And so you've got
a bunch of small game companies that are are seeing
this as a great opportunity to kind of play in

(10:58):
the big pool. And a lot of them followed suit.
So obviously the reason we are here today is that
a paul has been cast recently over what has up
until now been kind of a lovely thing. Um. Wizards
of the Coast got a new CEO pretty recently, right, Um,
Cynthia Williams is relatively new. Yeah, and and there is

(11:20):
basically murmuring coming from the company that's like, we don't
think D and D is properly capitalized. We we believe
that there's we are leaving money on the table here
and kind of in the wake of some of that
stuff coming out, they announced a series of changes to
the Open Gaming License. And if you if you kind
of want to take it from here and explain, because
I've i've I've I've read and listened to a number

(11:41):
of different folks. I'm saying like, well, it's not as
bad as people are are fearing, and some folks saying
like this would effectively kill a huge chunk of the
hobby and a bunch of the companies that have grown
up in the wake of the Open Gaming License. And
I'm I'm interested in your take on what what Wizards
is doing here and what actually kind of is it risk.

(12:01):
So yeah, I think you you you've plued into the
start of this, which was in early December of last year,
Hasbro earnings call uh Cynthia basically came out and said
D and D was under monetized and they had been
spending the entire previous year, really proliferating magic they're gathering,

(12:23):
which is their other giant brand and kind of really
making a lot of money, like talks of like it
is a billion dollar brand and um, as a result,
you know, there was kind of some murmurings and some
rumblings going through December, um talking about a new version
of the O g L. Wizards themselves came out on
December twenty one, so just a few days before Christmas,

(12:43):
and said that a new O g L was coming
and that it had notes in it about royalty reporting
and um, you know, mentioning that folks won't need to
pay until later um and that um, you know, really
this new license is only going to be to make
books and PDF. So they said this on December twenty one.

(13:03):
And the royalty part of that is was really quite
challenging because it said if you make over seven dollars
a year, um, you might have to pay a sizeable
percentage of your your your gross profit. Like and that's terrifying,
which when you're talking about a business and and this

(13:24):
is not the gaming industry does not run on huge margins. Um. No,
unless you're like making Warhammer models that you're selling for
a hundred and twenty dollars for a piece of plastic
that's tied. Yeah, the margins are pretty tight. Um. So
saying like past, you know, seven K, your company with
however many employees, has to give a quarter like that,

(13:46):
that'll sink people. Yeah. I think a lot of companies,
the larger ones, couldn't sustain that, right. I mean, I
think saying your gross over seven just basically means make
sure you only make seven hundred dollars that year. Um.
I I do think that that is that is a real,
real dangerous thing to a lot of these businesses. Now,

(14:07):
for a lot of the content creators, this is never
gonna matter. But I do believe that part of this was,
you know, seeing gigantic, multimillion dollar kickstarters happening and kind
of going whereas our yeah, we want a piece of this, um.
And the answer to that is that, like you know,
and it's problematic just crediting the creation of D and
D solely to Gary Gygax, but like the people who

(14:29):
came up with and play tested and made D and
D a thing, and then the people who iterated and
changed and evolved it from you know, the original game
to a D and d um and the years of
FACCO to to three point oh, like like morally outside
of like what I think is justifiable in corporate law
and stuff like, morally, I think it's fucked up to

(14:50):
say that like some company forever gets a piece of
that when what it is is like human beings coming
together to try to figure out the most efficient way
to run an engine for storytelling. Um, I don't know,
it's it's it's it's fucked up to me to think
about it this way. So they announced this alteration to

(15:11):
the Open Gaming License and I'm going to guess those
were some dark days at at the s O offices.
So so yeah, you know, uh, most of us at
PISO at that point in time, we're kind of on
vacation and we kind of just filed it away and
we're like, okay, well it's a draft and they're just talking.
So um, you know, we get to back, you know,

(15:32):
from our break and it's the beginning of the year
and this is now January five is when a bombshell
article drops on Gizmoto by CODEGA and they really laid
out kind of what was in this proposed license, apparently
having had portions of it linked to them, and um,
you know it confirmed a margin, but maybe only for

(15:57):
for kickstarters, which then got confer earned by someone at
kickstarter on Twitter. Um and it also included a bit
in there that there was a clause that said watsy
could listen to the coast could use any of the
content you create under the license for free, never having

(16:20):
to make pay royalties to you, never having to give
you any credit. They could just take your work. Um
And and they phrased it in such a way that
it sounded like it was, you know, well, just in
case we make something similar, we don't want to get sued.
But yeah, and we're talking about just to clarify it
for people. We're not talking about like if you introduce mechanics,
because again that that's not what this is covered. We're

(16:41):
talking about if you create characters, if you create if
you build stories, they have a right to utilize that
story that you've made things that are actually copyrightable, right, Stories,
ideas and expressions are copyrightable. Um uh, you know, but
rules aren't. So that that drops on the fifth and

(17:02):
on the night the full draft document leaks and you've
got streamers and influencers reading it live on YouTube, and
this thing just starts to snowball. Um and from the
ninth forward things start moving very quickly. Um. On the tenth,
a number of major kind of third party publishers, these

(17:23):
are folks who print with the O jail announced that
they were not going to go with that, and one
of the largest ones, you know, announced, yeah, I'm not
doing that at all. I'm going to create my entire
brand new game. I'm leaving all of this behind. And
the further on social media turned into basically a firestorm.
Um it It's real sign of how how much more

(17:46):
how many people both love and play versions of this
game that there was so much media attention from like
major media organs like this. This was not just you know,
those of us who are into gaming, um, you know,
freaking out over this change the Wizards of the Coast
has made. This was like, I mean, I was seeing
it everywhere. Very few things have like broken as widely

(18:09):
in my media in ecosystem as as this. There was
an article, there was a story about it today on NPR. UM,
so there was another one. There was one other important
aspect in the league, um that I think is really important.
One is that the new o g L could be
canceled at any time with thirty days notice. And they

(18:30):
were climbing that they were de authorizing the previous o
g L, which up to this point everyone kind of
assumed was irrevocable, right it had. It has clauses in
it that say, if we ever put on a new
version of this license, you can ignore it and continue
to use this one. Right, but it uses this word

(18:52):
in there that says you can continue to use any
authorized version of the license, never minding that the contract
doesn't mention how you might d authorize a license. Um.
So there there this draft of the o g L
says that they're de authorizing the previous version, which puts
all of the work of the past twenty years into doubt.

(19:12):
And at this point in time, the fans are revolting
right there. There are a lot of folks canceling their
subscriptions to D and D Beyond, which is kind of
there in house character generation tools that you pay a
monthly subscription for. Um. And things really start spinning out
of hand to the point where D and D actually
has to respond to it and pulled back UM and

(19:35):
kind of retreat from this and saying Hey, we're gonna
answer your questions. What you saw was just a draft um,
you know, and uh that was never supposed to leak um.
But it was at this point in time that we
actually launched our own license. We had been talking to
some of the other publishers and by that, I mean
we pizo uh to create a brand new safe harbor

(19:58):
for folks to publish on. Or now it's a it's
a it's not gonna be owned by us, It's going
to be owned by a law firm that actually drafted
the first o g L. But you started to see
this giant fork happening um where a lot of folks
are just abandoning ship. And I mean, what do you
think this means? Because obviously Wizards has already announced a

(20:21):
new version of the of the o g L beyond
like the one that got leaked, and I think are
kind of in damage control mode. Do you think this
is something that like there is any way for them
to pull back from or do you think that kind
of the inherent instability of the o g L now
that they're kind of making these claims at while we
can actually change the deal anytime we want, has that

(20:42):
sort of irreficably altered the ground. I think that they've
damaged a lot of people's trust in them, right, I
think over over the past few weeks, especially when they
went silent and then frankly the first retraction was really
kind of awkward and filled with kind of like, well,

(21:02):
we didn't lose, we won. This was great. Now we
learned how to make a better license. Right, they're clearly
stepping back, stepping back, stepping back, And their most recent
step back, which just happened, you know, on the eighteenth,
so you know, a week ago or so, basically said
that they were going to release the core of the
game to Creative Commons and their new license was going

(21:24):
to be irrevocable and last forever. But it still contains
a lot of kind of poison pills, things like we
are still the authorizing the first version of the license,
and we have this morality clause that says if we
find your content offensive, we can just kill your license
without Yeah, which is fucked up, because I mean, I

(21:46):
don't think I need to explain why that's fucked up. Um,
that that puts that puts a lot of the most
creative kind of projects to at risk, Like that I God,
that's that's ugly. I mean, I don't think anybody in
this industry wants to see any deeply offensive, problematic content. Um,
But there's a lot of stuff that is, frankly, a
lot more marginal and explorer, you know, issues of the

(22:08):
human condition that folks might want to explore in a game.
And who's to say that someone at Wizards might go, well, sorry,
that's offensive to me. You don't get to make it. Um.
I don't think anybody wants to invest their creativity and
risk their business on what someone they will never have
met thinks of their work. Yeah. The problem is not that,

(22:30):
like I want as the most defensive role playing games
I can get. The problem is like, well, who determines
what offensive is? And it's a bunch of lawyers in
business minute Wizards of the Coast. At least that's the worry, right,
Like not necessarily that that's how it would work out,
but you just you get no guarantee. And this stuff,
this stuff evolves over time, right, you know what what

(22:50):
is fine today maybe problematic tomorrow. We learned those things
and we evolved from them and we change. But I
don't think anybody wants to have kind of the this
you know, acts hanging over our head of like, well, sorry,
that's now offensive, So we're going to kill the entire license. Yeah,
so where are we? Where are we now? Like it
looks like Piezo Yawler are moving forward with the O

(23:14):
r C along with a number of other people. Can
you give me any of what that's going to look like?
Because one of the things that that does concern me
is um and this is a very selfish concern, but
like I grew very comfortable with, you know, three point five,
which is essentially the machinery that underpins Pathfinder and UM
It's one of those things like if I didn't play
again for twenty years, I could probably sit down with

(23:35):
the material in my head and run a campaign just
because so much of that stuff is burned into my brain.
Are we like, what is the mechanics kind of underlying
the O r C and how is it going to
be different from what we've we've gotten used to. So
I'll say this, We're we're in the very early days, yes,
And what what's happening right now is we are you know,
in coordination with a number of other publishers working with

(23:58):
a Zoro law and are the people who wrote the
original o g l uh and had, you know, fully
intended for it to be a perpetual license, and we're
working with them to to create kind of a rules
neutral license that the entire game industry can use to
share work, because there's there's like a lot of nuance
that was in the o g l that allowed different

(24:20):
companies to share creative work together, and a lot of
companies used it as kind of a bridging license, even
if they weren't using Dungeons and Dragons at all, they
would just use the license as a framework to kind
of exchange ideas. And that's what we want the ORC
to be. The ORC needs to be a license that
allows everybody in the game industry to open up their
content and share work with each other and iterate and

(24:43):
expand and grow. That's our real goal, um And ultimately
we are not going to own it. No one's going
to own it. We're actually going to try and find
it onprofit to administer the license going forward so that
we don't ever have to worry about this again. Nobody
wants to go through what we've been going through for
the past three weeks, so that's kind of that's kind
of one half of it. The other half is what

(25:04):
happens to Pathfinder UM. And obviously, you know, when it
came to path Finder second Edition, we rewrote the game
from scratch and it is now fully our game. It's
something we own and we control UM. So we feel
pretty confident that we're just going to keep on rolling
with with Pathfinder. And ultimately, you know, we don't actually

(25:25):
believe that the previous version of the O g l
even can be rescinded, So I guess we'll see how
that plays out. I can see this having an overall
positive outcome, just in that if we get this new
kind of thing that creators can use UM as a

(25:46):
as a core point to branch off from when they
are when they're making games that's actually under solid legal
footing that isn't kind of reliant upon the whims of
a publicly traded company, then in the long term, you know,
that is in the long term, it's it's it's it's
better for creators because it's more like the way things
were for the first twenty years of the O g

(26:06):
l UM. Do you I mean, like, what do you
see as kind of some pitfalls and sort of trying
to trying to make this this happened, trying to move
things in this kind of more productive direction. Well, I
think you can always you know, kind of fracture, you know,
balkanize the market to the point where where everybody has
such a small slice event that you know, no one

(26:29):
can really get the kind of numbers they need to
succeed because you're You're right, it is. It is a
pretty small industry. The margin on you know, printed media
isn't exactly great. But I think a lot of these
companies do have the numbers to survive. But I think
that right now everybody's trying to figure out how to
replace parts of what has just been lost. Um. Everybody's

(26:52):
trying to kind of go in their different directions right now.
And some of that is going to be really good,
because I think we're gonna get a lot of really
great games, um, and I'm excited to see him, um.
But I do think that I think one of the
worries just for the industry is that they kind of
all had one flag they were rallying around, and now
everyone's running in different directions and hoping that after all

(27:12):
of this shakes out, everybody has kind of enough gamers
to support a community. I think it's gonna work out.
I think that there's a number of standouts happening already.
Um you know, M C, d M and Cobald are
obviously racing to do things. There's a bunch of kind
of known players in the industry, US, Cobalt, Chaos, Um, Green, Ronan,

(27:33):
all of them are pretty big companies position to kind
of have good player bases with great games and mechanics
underneath them. So I I think the big loser here
is frankly, of the coast. They you know, up up
until you know, the end of this year or the
end of last year, they were undisputedly the largest game

(27:55):
company in the entire table top role playing game industry,
and that's still true today. But there's a lot of
cracks in that armor, and it does make me wonder
how it's going to fracture out over time, and how
many of their fans, many of which never heard of Pathfinder,
never heard of you know, these other game companies call
of Cthulo and stuff, are now suddenly exploring these games.

(28:15):
And you know, frankly, the wealth of smaller Indian zin
games that are out there, there's so much to play
right now, and watsy has just told their fan base, hey,
go check it out. It's interesting because it it kind
of speaks to something that I've I've always loved and
also found kind of sociologically fascinating about table top gaming,

(28:38):
which is you just brought up call Off Cthulhu, which
is a game that is I don't believe is under
the control of the original company that it was made under.
People have been playing versions of Calliff Cthuloo for a
very long time. Jngeans and Dragons has gone through multiple owners.
Shadow Run, which I played a lot of as a kid,
has gone through multiple owners, and the rules sets change

(28:58):
in the company that is profit from the official licensed
material changes. But no matter what happens, even when those
companies go wonder the games keep going. And that's there's
something I think unique there that is, it's not the
case even like um, you know, there's versions of it
that happens in in PC gaming. But there's also this

(29:18):
thing that happens that that a lot of gamers I
know complain about, which is that like periodically, shit will
get removed for whatever reason a company goes under a
game is not supported and that game is just gone.
That little piece of culture has just gone. And it
seems like so far. I'm not gonna say in every case,
because obviously there have been games that have have you know,

(29:39):
people stopped playing and stuff in the tabletop space, but
it's there's this continuity, you know, even in the face
of of changing of the guards in terms of like
what companies are successful, um of like people keep playing
these the same games and iterating them and changing them,
and um, I don't know. That's that always one of

(30:00):
the things I found most inspiring about the way tabletop works. Yeah,
I mean, I do think the legacy of tabletop role
playing games is one of cooperation. It was there from
the start, right, you know, the moment Gary and is
Uh and Dave and folks you know got together and
started turning their you know, miniatures war game and giving

(30:23):
characters to them, and everyone started building a story together.
That spark was the start, and it's carried through in
a million different ways and a million different tables. And
even if you know, the companies go under or disappear,
people with those books are still playing those games. There's
plenty of people still playing a D and D first edition, right,
you know they never left and they're fine with that,

(30:45):
and and I salute them. Yeah, I think about and again,
this is like one of the reasons this has such
a place in my heart. I I started playing a
D and D. But you know, it was my friends
and I would play at a at cub Scout camp outs,
and we didn't have acts us two dice, so we
we had the rule books. We had like the Monster's
Manual in the Player's Guide, and we use those as

(31:06):
jumping off points, and we would bring like a bunch
of nickels and we would we would figure out way
it's like, okay, for this action, you've gotta get three
heads out of five flips or something like that, and
that's a success in this And like so many people
have stories like that, have variants of that, because it
really is fundamentally what you need for any of these games,
which is what makes them so durable, is a group

(31:28):
of people to want to sit around a table and
tell a story together, which is rad. Yeah, I mean
there's nothing else like it, right there, really isn't it.
And that's why I think you're seeing so much fervor
over this because for a lot of people, this is
very deeply personal gathering together with your friends and telling
a story together. That's something you and your friends built.

(31:50):
And you know, uh, if you happen to find a
way to make some money off of it, great, that's
that's your creativity coming to life. And frankly, kind of
having a big giant corporation come in and say, hey,
where's my cut is not really very fun. No, uh,
And I my heart goes out to to to you
and your colleagues over how stressful this last three or

(32:13):
four weeks has been. And I hope that we're past
the worst of it. Um. It certainly seems like some
what's going to come out of this is going to
be pretty exciting, So I'm hopeful. Uh, And it sounds
like you're hopeful. Yeah, I think you know. Over the
past couple of weeks there's been a lot of sleepless
nights and a lot of egency meetings. But frankly, I
feel more excited and energized about the future of Pizo,

(32:37):
about the future of gaming, than I have in quite
a long time. So by Piso's games, pick up some
Pathfinder books, go to your go to your nearest game store, um,
and and pick one up or two or three, Um, Jason,
anything else you want up plug at the end here. Uh. Yeah,
you can learn more about Pieso in our games, so

(32:58):
that would be Pathfinder and star Finder Ato dot com.
We have a blog they're talking about the Orc and
we'll undoubtedly have more to say about it here in
the coming weeks. Uh. As for me, you can find
me on all the very social media platforms at backslash
Jason Bowman bu well m A h N. Thank you Jason,
both for sitting down for this interview and for all

(33:20):
of all of the many, many countless hours I have
spent playing games that you had a hand in making.
Thank you. Robert. We'll have to get together and roll
some dice together soon. I would love that. All right, everybody,
that's a sod uh see you tomorrow, Hi, and welcome

(33:49):
to it could happen here a podcast which today is
only me and my guest Nicole, and today we're gonna
be talking a little bit about immigration, about immigration policy
over the last three or four years, and about some
of the strange laws that impacted. So Nicole is joining me.
She works for Alotto Lado, and Nicole would likely tochose

(34:09):
herself explain a little bit about what you do. Hi,
my name is Nicole Elizabeth Ramos and I am the
director of Alto Lavos Order Rights Project, which is based
in Tijuana, Mexico. Great, okay, So I think prehaps to
start off with you could clear people in on a
little bit of what you guys do, because you do
some incredible work and it's very, very valuable to board

(34:31):
the communities, and I think a lot of people, if
they don't live in along the boarder, might not be
familiar with it. At Lado, we provide legal orientation to
migrants that are considering seeking asylum in the US. We
started off as a project that focused locally on migrants
in Tijuana, and over the years we have expanded to

(34:55):
serve migrants in Mexicali and then remotely in other cities
along the US Mexico border, including Grenosa, Matamoro, Squads, pieg
Uh And in this legal orientation, we're providing information about
what are the current policies at the moment that will
impact their ability to seek asylum in the US or

(35:17):
prevent them from doing so, or how these policies might
be impacting their family composition. So policies that are related
to detention or family separation. After we provide legal orientation,
we are then identifying asylum seekers that fall into several
vulnerability categories to provide additional accompaniment through this process. Because

(35:42):
the policies are shifting and changing and becoming more restrictive
over time, it's very confusing and cumbersome to we throw
all of the fuzz and figure out what you need
to do in order to seek asylum in the US.
So that's where we come in and we provide the
orientation in multiple languages. The border is a very diverse place.

(36:06):
Is not just Spanish speakers that are coming, but people
that speak Ation, Creole, French, Farsi, indigenous languages, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish,
um and all of these people need access to information.
That's one of the pillars of our program is that
migrants have the absolute right to accurate legal information about

(36:27):
the process that they will be entering. Among the asylum
teachers that we work with, we also identify those that
our need of shelter and make referrals and coroplated shelters
for medical care. In some instances, we assist with obtaining
medications or obtaining a needed surgery. If the migrant is

(36:48):
not have access to those resources helping them obtain access
to HIV medication or hormone treatment. And of those migrants,
we are also connecting them with other supportive services from
our partners UM that have shelters, that have programs where
they're giving them basic dispenses of food because they are

(37:11):
struggling with food and security, trying to create as much
of a social safety net as possible because UH folks
are waiting at the border for longer and longer periods
of time. The border used to be a place that
people passed through, maybe they were here for a few
days before ultimately they were able to present them at

(37:32):
a present themselves at a US port of entry UM
to a US official and enter the asylum process. However,
now we have individuals that have been waiting at the
border for years, who may not have work status in Mexico,
may not be Spanish speakers, and are really struggling to
meet their basic needs. And so we've had to expand
our services from not just legal service provider, provider of

(37:54):
legal information, but also providing humanitarian aid so that people
can be healthy and as well as possible UM while
they're waiting yeah, and it's it's incredibly valuable, and it's
it's amazing how you guys can continue to step up
and scale up as the federal government has continued to

(38:15):
fail people. Um. And I think if people haven't come
to the border, they probably won't be aware of, like
you say, that diversity of people who come to the
US Mexico boarder. Like I remember a couple of years ago,
I was working within a Romo translator and we were
speaking to people who would come from Ethiopia, people come
from Eritrea. It's a it's a very of course, people

(38:35):
coming from Ukraine. Now, it's very diverse space, which is
something that kind of gets collapsed pretty often in border reporting.
I think like all that diversity gets collapsed into like
like just people are lump together as migrants for people
seeking asylum. And that's a shame because it's what makes
part of what makes us so complicated, but also what

(38:56):
makes these border places such kind of interesting and special places.
And and I like what you said about all the
sort of services that are provided as well. It's incredible
to look at how these services are provided by huge
broad network of like volunteers of nonprofit of of NGOs
as well as some government agencies, and how people have

(39:18):
stepped up consistently, especially in the last I guess six seven.
It did seem such a long time. It's just like
how people have stepped up to help each other along
the border. So perhaps if we go back, you and
I we're just talking before we started. If we go
back to eighteen, which people may or may not remember,
was the mid term, in the middle of Donald Trump's presidency,

(39:41):
and a large caravan of people, a group of people
that particularly larger, remarkable eardy, a group of people arrived
at the border and became kind of the center of
something of like a and they became I think their
their arrival was used by both political parties part of
this at midterm messaging, and and I think that was

(40:04):
maybe for some people, especially if if they're younger and
had been watching their news, the sort of first introduction
to the asylum process. So can you explain kind of
how asylum is supposed to happen, and then maybe we
can get into some of the weird and bizarre things
that have been happening to it in the past three
or four years. Asylum is supposed to be a system

(40:26):
that's managed first by by government authorities UM under Title eight,
section twelve five of the United States Code, US immigration
officer at port of entry UM or at any point
in between ports of entries such as border patrol, when
they are presented with a person that expresses that they

(40:49):
have a fear of return to their home country, that
they fear of persecution, to refer them along the track
to be processed as an asylum seeker. Now, that can
mean that that person is still detained for the entirety
of their asylum case and sent to an immigration detention center.
That could also mean that that person is given court

(41:09):
paperwork to show up an immigration court at a later
date to begin the process of explaining their case to
the immigration court and getting a final decision UM. Over
the years, beginning at the end of the Obama administration,
continuing through the Trump administration, and also continuing even now

(41:31):
into the Biden administration, we have seen policies issued by
CDP which restrict access to the port of entry for
asilent seekers UM. Initially, it started out in two thousand
and sixteen, where the Obama administration came up with a
policy called the Metering Policy, which was known as the waitlist,

(41:54):
which required at first only Haitian asylum seekers to put
their name on a wait list with Mexican immigration authorities
and then they would be called in groups um to
enter the US. And that was in response to the
exodus of immigrants that we saw coming from Haiti and
through Brazil in two thousand and sixteen. The metering list

(42:16):
was later expanded to apply to all nationalities, including Mexican
migrants that were trying to flee their own country, including
those that had legitimate claims for protection being persecuted by
members of their own government. Everyone had to still get
on this list. That policy was extended in an ideological

(42:39):
framework when the Trump administration came up with a program
known as Remain in Mexico and just building upon that
idea that it is okay to make asylum seekers wait
in territory in which they fear persecution because a lot
of people here persecution in Mexico UM, and under the
Remain in Mexico policy so known as the Migrant Protection

(43:01):
Protocols m p P. They we always refer to it
as the Migrant Persecution Protocols because it feels it's extremely
all WELLI in right, like people like to use a
welly and wrong, but that that one that went prett. Yeah,
this program required asylum seekers that were entered. They were

(43:21):
placed into a program called MPP. They were given court
date and people were to appear at court in their
nearest border city where there was an immigration court at
some date in the future. It could be a few weeks,
it could be several months, it could be a year.
And in between their court hearings, they would be required
to remain in Mexico. They could only go to the

(43:42):
court of entry on their date of their court They
would be transported to court and then transported back to
Mexico after their court, leaving Mexico people in Mexico in
limbo for years. And then when the pandemic came, we
saw the border closed entirely. Under title for you to
the Trump administration build it as necessary to protect the

(44:05):
American public from migrants that could be carriers of COVID nineteen.
But this is really, you know, no different than other
immigration legislation that we've seen throughout history, which tends to
paint immigrants as vectors of disease um and we need
to just keep them out at all costs. And under

(44:26):
Title for you to it's just a wall of policy.
People tried to present themselves at the port of entry
and they're turned away. People enter the US UH at
different points that are not parts of entry without inspection
UM and get caught and they're expelled immediately back to Mexico,

(44:47):
or if it's not a country that Mexico will accept
an expulsion, they could be detained in US custody and
then expelled back to their country of origin without any
opportunity to week with an asylum officer UM. Right now,
we have been dealing with title for you two in

(45:07):
a process where certain number of people are exempted from
this blanket denial every day UH and different ports of
entry along the border participate. Each part of entry has
its own cap numerical cap UM. And initially, when this
program started in May, the names of people that were

(45:30):
being submitted as exemptions, the asylum seekers names were submitted
by civil society organizations such as Ladoulo. Just this year alone,
we've submitted around eleven thousand, five hundred I'm sorry, eleven
exemption requests UM, and that was from individuals from twenty

(45:51):
nine different countries speaking just over thirty different languages. So
now though, the system has recently changed to a smartphone
application known as c DP one, which requires migrants to
download this application to their smartphone, assuming that they have
a smartphone, and then complete this lengthy application UM that

(46:17):
requires them to upload a photo UM for facial recognition
software and wait for an appointment date to be made available.
And they have to keep entering the fifth multiple times
and until an appointment date becomes available, waking up every
morning at five thirty for when the new slots are
made available at six am. And the problem, among many

(46:42):
problems with this application is that right now it's only
available in Spanish and English, so if you speak any
other language, are not able to access it UM And
we have to give you an example. UM. We have
an online survey where people register or try I to
seek help from us. We have over since April one,

(47:04):
over fifteen thousand unique fifty unique responses. Around half of
those are from Haitian creole speakers cannot access this app
to get an appointment. The other issue is is that
the facial recognition software that's integrated into the cd P
one app. You know, there's a lot of studies throughout

(47:26):
the years about how this software will lead to false
positives or failure to recognize for individuals that have um
Afro descendant features or individuals that have more indigenous features.
And we have seen this firsthand. So many of our
Haitian clients are unable to even complete the profile and

(47:50):
they are taking photos with cameras that have a decent,
you know, lens capacity, and they still can't get past
the facial recognition software. Yeah. It's just like a layers
on layers of sort of you know, sometimes it's just
them being like ineffective. Sometimes it just seems cruel. Let's

(48:10):
go back a little bit to title forty two, because
that word has been thrown around a lot, right, Title
thirty two isn't initially it's not immigration law, is it.
It's it's public health law. Is that right? I guess
it's it's public it's a public health policy that's part
of immigration law. Yes, it's public health policy that's being
applied in the immigration contacts to close the border. Yeah.

(48:32):
And then one thing that I think we've seen a
lot recently is like one of the worst accounts on Twitter,
which is the Border Patrol Union, likes to they do
occasionally like tweet their own losses, which is kind of funny,
but they like to throw out these statistics right constantly
about encounters at the border. Can you explain how under

(48:54):
title forty two, each encounter might not be a unique individual. Yeah. Absolutely,
those individuals are overcounted because people will make multiple attempts
to try to enter the US because they're so desperate.
It's a dystopian healthscape on this side of the border,

(49:15):
with people being trafficked, kidnapped for extortion, tortured, raped, murdered,
sold uh. And so if that were any reasonable person,
you would try tan fifteen times whatever it took to
get across to safety. And the Border Patrol Union is
disingenuous because it knows this, and instead it pulls out

(49:39):
a figure that is much larger than what it represents
in actual people. And they're disingenuous and how they describe it, Yeah, yeah,
I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see
through it. And of course, when we combine this with
the the wall or the fence or whatever you want
to call it, people are crossing in more remote and
more dangerous areas to makes the crossing more risky, right,

(50:02):
and results in hirings in two people dying, hiding themselves
trying to cross, which, as you say, it's it's not
a reasonable thing to do when you're faced with these
terrible circumstances. Yeah, there's a beautiful poem called Home by
Warsha Sire who's a Somali British poet, and one of
the lines is you don't put your child in a

(50:23):
in a boat unless it's safer than the land. No
one would attempt to cross a thirty football or wade
the Rio Grand or across the Arizona desert in the
middle of summer unless what was behind them they were
so sure was going to kill them. And the way
that we've structured the wall and raising the height of

(50:47):
the wall to make it harder to cross, and to
build as much wall along the places where it would
be a little bit easier to cross, the people making
it so the only way to cross is through the
most dangerous parts. That that's intentional, that is, you know,
designed for people to die, because the government mistakenly believes

(51:09):
that if it kills more people that folks will be deterred.
But that's um not actually what we see on the ground. No,
like it's not a vacuum, right, people are coming from
bad things like making just making the board a difficult
one will do nothing more than kill more people, which
is what they've succeeded in doing, sadly, and so and

(51:31):
then another thing I wanted to get it as Title
forty two with this this crazy series of court cases
around Title forty two, right, so can you explain, like
why Titled forty two hasn't been repealed when we've done
away with almost every other protection for people in kind
of an ongoing pandemic. Title forty two could be repealed

(51:51):
if the government was so not so intent on fighting
the repeal of Title forty two. The A C. L
U as been import for the last few years around
Title for You to um in a case called we
Sha we shah be my workis, and the judge in

(52:11):
that case issued a decision in December ruling that turning
away asylum seekers using Title for You two as a
pretext um to turn asylum seekers away was unlawful. However,
that decision was stayed. The government requested that the decision
be uh temporarily stayed to give it time to make

(52:35):
operational plans. The A C. L You did not oppose
that stay and as a result. During that time, a
group of conservative states filed intervening litigation UM to make
their arguments about how their interests were harmed by the decision.
And so now that cases before the Supreme Court and

(52:56):
they will not hear the case until February, and we
could be waiting as long as June for a decision. Yeah,
many of those lots of those states weren't even along
the border, right, that's some of the ones who sued. Yeah,
that's still a mystery to all of us along the border.

(53:16):
How interior states that sure might be receiving people coming
from the border, but UM don't have that close nexus.
Is in there are border community and they're being immediately impacted.
Yeah yeah, pretty pretty female stuff. And the other issue
I want to raise for people is the narrative is

(53:40):
that we're in a crisis. The border is in a crisis.
There's so many people, we can't possibly help them all.
We close the border for over two years, so of
course there's going to be more people because we've made
it impossible for people to access. However, the sports of
and Tree have contingency plans for mass migration events. This

(54:05):
is something that UM was learned during the context of
our litigation UM against c VP around access to the
board of entry, and we see that the government is
capable of responding rapidly in a manner that is consistent
with human dignity, and how it responded to thirty thousand

(54:26):
Ukrainians showing up in Tijuana this spring. In some days,
c d P accepted as many as a thousand Ukrainians
in a given day, where as both on those days
they were accepting zero of other nationality, and they were
able to get up to speed so quickly because every
port of entry has a contingency plan. We are the

(54:48):
United States government. We are arguably one of the most powerful,
well resource governments on Earth. If you buy the line
that this is a crisis and we don't have a
contingency plan, then we've got a lot of work to
do here, um. And so it's not it's a it's
a manufactured crisis. Uh. We have the resources, we have
the personnel. C DP has the largest law enforcement budget

(55:08):
of all the law enforcement agencies in the federal government,
and they have hands of thousands of personnel. It's what
we lack is the political will and the emotional capital
to do what we've already agreed to under US federal
law as well as the Refugee Convention which we signed

(55:30):
following World War Two, which was designed to prevent further
genocide for their persecution of large groups of people. Um,
but we continue to renag on on on those obligations
to which we read to Yeah, yeah, like when we
talk about genocide and persecution, Like I personally know people
from me and MAA who are really struggling with the

(55:51):
United States asylum system right now, and yeah, it's really
deeply just infuriating to see them continue to pursue this
kind of like waving my hands in the air, I
don't know what to do kind of thing. Let's talk
a little bit about Joe Biden and his policies, because
like they've been blackluster or just completely like in some cases,

(56:14):
you know, he he's issued executive orders which basically have
gone on fulfilled right regarding asylum. And so they made
a statement a few weeks ago now and Biden visited
the border, and can you explain what he said in
that statement? And then sort of what the Biden administration
hasn't done to clear up the asylum system that it

(56:34):
promised it would do. The Buiding administration made a lot
of promises on the campaign trail. UM made an effort
to put advocates in places in DHS other key positions
to give the appearance that it was serious about reform
and treating immigrants in a way that is dignified and humane. UM.

(57:00):
But what we've seen is a continuation of Trump policies
which restrict access to the border. For example, UM the
new asylum band that they are proposing through regulation where
individuals that have translated through another country UM and did
not seek asylum in that country even if that country

(57:21):
was not a safe country for them, UM that they
would be precluded from applying for asylum. A lot of
people are have been enthusiastic about these new parole programs
for specific nationalities like Paraguans and Aswelans, um Haitians, Cubans. However,
those programs are really just scraps UM. They have a

(57:43):
thirty thousand person cap UM. The Ukrainian parole program had
a hundred thousand person cap which has already been surpassed
surpassed UM. Ukrainian sponsors well as the Ukrainian asylum seekers
that were presenting through that prop RAM had much less
by way of requirements UM. And so they've made a

(58:07):
separate and not equal program for other nationalities which just
happened to be nationalities that aren't white. Yeah. Yeah, it's
hard not to see a kind of white people first
approach to asylum here. Yeah, it's certainly challenge histr ability
not to believe it's our right racist. So I wonder

(58:28):
like going forward, obviously people listening will probably be sort
of upset and concerned the continuing failures of our government.
You don't think about it? Can you outline like how
people can help? I know there's lots of people who
will do direct mutual aid right like people like food
not bombs of feeding people in Tijuana, But how can

(58:52):
folks maybe who are at the border, and then who
aren't near the border, how can how can they help
well organizations that are at the border, including our who
work with volunteers that are remote, um, particularly if they
have a foreign language skill, because we can't serve toens
of thousands of people each year with just the staff

(59:13):
that we have UM and so we have a really
robust remote volunteer network UM. I would also encourage people,
as you pointed out, to look for organizations in their
own community that are serving immigrants. It is incredibly humbling
to move to another country and realize you don't know

(59:33):
how to read the light bill, UM, you don't know
how to register your kids for school? Can your kids
go to school? Where? Can I go to the doctor?
What you know? What is an ambulance? What that you
know that I do? I not have to pay for that?
All of these things that might be different from them,
And a real lack of volunteers to assist people with

(59:54):
those daily integration activities UM that are so important to
figuring out how your new community works. UM. I also
encourage people too, when there's an opportunity to have conversations
with your elected official, to have those conversations, write emails,
go in person if that's an opportunity. Different officials will

(01:00:16):
have open days for their offices where you might be
able to get maybe not face time with that official,
but with their point person who is overseeing that issue
right now. Are elected officials, they don't care about immigration
because a lot of their constituents are not making it
known to them what it is that they care about,

(01:00:37):
and that they're willing to go to drastic measures such
as shutting down their office. Um, if they don't take
action on immigration, we're all just thinking about it as Okay, well,
this is happening to immigrants. This is not me. I
am a citizen. But all of the worst fascist policies
are tried out first on groups and so id that

(01:01:00):
have less political power, UM, on people that have criminal convictions,
on the people who have disabilities that make it impossible
for them to communicate, um, on immigrants, and so I
would really encourage you're if you're concerned about fascism, if
you're concerned about how your rights may be trampled in

(01:01:22):
the future, that focus on immigrants, because they are the
testing ground for a lot of fascist government's worst intentions. Yeah,
and we've already seen that, right if people aren't familiar.
It was bor Tech among others who were out there
running around Portland checking people into unmarked vans. It was
DHS drones surveiling people in Minneapolis. It was indeed DHS

(01:01:45):
surveiling I think people from Malatlado and other organizations in
eighteen when lots of US acrossing the board are very
often to help people who were part of what's called
the migrant caravan then and so like this this is
happening to us. Right. There's a thing that crime think
have on some of their posters which I always like,

(01:02:06):
which is the border doesn't protect you, it controls you,
which I think is it's more true than ever now,
Like it's just sort of yeah, it's a place where
we experiment with these policies and they seem to they
seem to get away with them, right, Like, it doesn't
seem to be something that people care about that they
did even two or three years ago under the Trump administration.
I wonder they call it. How can people Another thing

(01:02:29):
that I think people lack is like a direct connection
to people seeking asylum or to the situation at the border,
right Like, every time something happens. I'm sure you've seen
this more often than I have. And someone from l
A or d C or New York or whatever kind
of parachutes into border communities, does it. I can see
that this is the frustration that you share. It does

(01:02:51):
a story which misses masses of context and then bug
us off back to the place where they came from.
And so like, where where can people find better connections
to the situation for people seeking asylum? I really like
a blog and it's also a podcast every week, quarter
Chronicles Todd Miller's Quarterer Chronicles. I also would recommend reading

(01:03:13):
all of Todd Miller's books. He is an incredible investigative
journalist that does the dive on how we got to
this militarized state of your border. UM. So I would
recommend starting with Border Patrol Nation and just going straight
through there. UM. I also think Pro Publica also does

(01:03:33):
really great investigative long dive reporting the intersect. I would
look at those places. Yeah, yeah, I think if you're
in a border community, like it's a really know that
hard to cross, and see what's going on for yourself
and and do a little something to help, you know,
make some of your your money that you set aside
veloping other people can go a long way if you

(01:03:54):
choose to use it that way. And Nicole, how can
people support your work directly? Like it's there a website
or Twitter account they can follow to find more. Now,
we do have our own website. We're also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
and LinkedIn. We regularly post opportunities to volunteer remotely, volunteer

(01:04:14):
in person, UM and campaigns that people want to donate
to UM there's that opportunity as well. Great, and is
there anything else you want to share about that you
feel that our listeners should know, maybe if they haven't
been following border situation closely. The border situation is part
of a larger historical context. And briefly I talked about

(01:04:35):
earlier the US as a signatory to the Refugee Convention,
which is an outgrowth of the horror that the world
collectively felt um when we came to grips with what
happened during the Holocaust, and you know, we collectively said
never again, never again. Part of our part in the
Holocaust was we rejected the m S. St. Louis from

(01:04:58):
the coast of Florida, and there was over nine d
Jewish refugees that were on that boat. No other country
accepted them, Cuba, Canada rejected and ultimately had to go
back to Europe. And some of those people ultimately died
in the Holocaust. And and those deaths are are on
our conscience. Uh. And any time the asylum seekers are

(01:05:21):
being turned away along the border when they have the
legal right to present themselves under existing US law and
international law, it's a it's a repetition of the M
s St. Louis, except it's happening all across the border
every single day. Yeah, that's very well put, and it is.
It doesn't matter if it's one person or a hundred people,
like it's a tragedy every time we can't give some

(01:05:42):
We have plenty of safe places for people to go,
but when deciding not to not to welcome them, and yeah,
it's very very sad. Well, thank you so much for
giving us some of your afternoon, Nicole. Um. If people
want to find you personally, do you have a personal
social media Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. Um. Yes,
I'm loosen on Twitter. Okay, great? And altro laddo? Is

(01:06:06):
it just a laddo on Twitter? Yest level? Sometimes we
have a love level dot work and again yeah, so
there's a l O t r O l A d
O if people are need to spend out right. Thank you, wonderful,
Thank you so much, Hello and welcome to It could

(01:06:40):
happen here once again. Posted by myself Andrew from the
YouTube channel andrewism as we talk about whatever and whatever
in question is the second most populous country in the world,
and one potential vision for its future drawn from its
anti cludal past are speaking of course about India, a

(01:07:03):
sub concerant from which I draw a good portion of
my heritage, and one that boasts over nine thousand years
of recorded history and roughly fifty years of known human settlement.
India is an incredibly diverised country ethnically, linguistically, religiously and otherwise.

(01:07:24):
But unfortunately it has suffered much of the same faith
that the rest the world has fallen, creating the rapacious
appetite of British clunialism. Well, historically, the Indian local economy
was dependent upon the most productive and sustainable agriculture and horticulture,

(01:07:45):
and of course pottery and footing. Jamaican jewelry was very
well known for jewelry, and in fact Indian jewelry makers
ended up starting some very successful jewelry businesses when they
were freed from indentionship in or that um. They also
got involved in leather work and a lot of other

(01:08:05):
economic activities in India. UM. But the basis of India
has traditionally, historically, you know, for thousands of years been textiles,
different types of textiles. Each village had its spinners and
carters and dyers and weavers who were of course at
the heart of that village's economy. But an interesting outcome

(01:08:27):
of British cleanism in India has been the flooding of
India with the machine made, inexpensive, mass produced textiles from
Lancashire during you know, in Briturn's Industrial Revolution, the local
textile artists who are very quickly put out to business
and village economies suffered very terribly. So I mean, you know, well,

(01:08:48):
I think we're familiar with this sort of general story.
Smaller cottage industries became overrun by you know, mass production.
And of course I don't mean to sound like I'm
entirely demonizing mass production, just describing what has happened. Of course,
mass production has had its many benefits in providing access

(01:09:10):
to resources and two products many different people. But of
course it's also had its many drawbacks, including you know,
the share environmental impact as well as the impact on
people um you know, as Mark spoke about, of um,
their alienation from the process of production, as the industrial

(01:09:35):
system basically separated each step in the process of production
two different workers and so no one had a hand
in the production of a product and start to finish,
and of course that that had significant social and I
would also assume mental impact on the people with you know,

(01:09:56):
that whole era of British economic imperialism happening in the UH.
The changes that took place within a generation was so rapid,
you know, your headwards spin that evolution of you know,
the India home economy. It was really a site to behold.
And another element of British economic impuialism and British imperialism

(01:10:18):
more broadly was the instruction of British education under colonial
rule in the eighteenth century UM. When Lord McCaulay introduced
the Indian Education Act in the British Parliament UM, he said,
and I quote, a single shelf of a good European
library was with the whole native literature of India. Neither

(01:10:39):
as a language of the law, nor as a language
of religion, has a sang script any particular claim to
our engagement. We must do our best to form a
class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. So
the typical racism, typical white pants, burdon, typical you know. Um.

(01:11:02):
Of course, this phrase was used in a North American
indigenous American context. But I believe the phrase is taking
the Indian out to the man. Yeah, kill the Indians,
save the man, right, Um, So it's kind of interesting.
It's a different type of Indian talking about there, but
that sort of idea still applies. And really that sort

(01:11:22):
of sentiment is something that has existed throughout the history
of communism, something that you know is seen in all
of Britain's former colonies. Because Monster's Aim was put into
Parliament and pushed forward, it was pursued with the mind
to the British raj or the traditional schools that took
place in different village communities were gradually replaced by colonial

(01:11:47):
schools and universities. Of course, taking advantage of the cast
and class system that was in place in India prior
to their arrival, the British would have selected wealthier Indians
to be sensed to public schools such as Eaton and
Haru and universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and those Indians
that you know, they learned English poetry, English law, English

(01:12:08):
customs to the neglect of their own culture. You know,
It's like, why read the classics of the Vadas when
you have Shakespeare and the London times. And so having
been raised in that environment, having grown up, having basically
their minds colonized from the crib, they began to see
their own cultures as backward, uncivilized, old fashioned, regressive and

(01:12:33):
again something you see all over the world. You sorts
in the residential schools, you see it in the schools
in the Caribbean, and you see it in schools in Africa.
Basically everywhere they colonized went um. They would take a generation,
they were take generations of young people, and they would
developed that self hatred um not the staining for their

(01:12:54):
own culture by you know, positioning um their education, British
education as you know, superior. In fact, during the process
of decolonization coulde and quote um of you know, formal
political independence many of the former colonies of Britain, particularly
the Caribbeans. That's where most familiar um. A lot of

(01:13:17):
the people who became you know, the fullest prime ministers
of the country, the one that would establish the trajectory
of the country for years of decades to come. Um.
Thinking of people like Bustamante in Jamaica, Eric Williams, Dr.
Ric Williams and Trance peakle Um among others. Basically all
of the fullest prime ministers basically every single Caribbean country.

(01:13:41):
They had all been educated, um in English schools, in
English universities, in well in the prestige schools of their countries,
didn't end up being flewn out to Britain itself, and
they basically became the rulers, became the leaders um well

(01:14:02):
handed power over by the British to basically rule in
their stead. Of course, that's all the talk of finally independence. UM.
People got caught up in that energy of political independence
and freedom from the control of the British after all
the decades and centuries of struggle. But unfortunately it proved,

(01:14:26):
I believe to be a ruse as very little changed
for the average person in the s post political independence. Yeah,
this is something that Phnan talks about um in in
the sort of Francophone context of like, even even in
countries you have like Atward, you know that the colonizes
are thrown up actual revolutions, you get this class of

(01:14:47):
like like lawyers and intellectuals who are like have been
educated like in imperialist powers or in sort of their schools,
who wind up as like the first generation of of
post independence leaders and those people like you know what,
whether they want to or not, end up sort of

(01:15:07):
like reflecting the sort of values and political positions of
like of the form of colonial powers. And there's this
whole sort of dynamic that like I feel like, I
feel like this is the part of but not that
people don't read very much, But that's about how these
leaders sort of like lose touch with it with the

(01:15:28):
sort of like math anti colonial masses, and how they
sort of like wind up reincorporating their countries back into
sort of colonialism. Yeah. Yeah, that's really how you see
that nucleonal dynamic developing UM. And it's really it's hard
to tell, um retrospectively whether these leaders thought they were
actually you know, anti colonial or if they knew that

(01:15:50):
they were you know, carrying on a particular legacy. But
I find that because is only um only recently celebrate
to just last year sixty years of independence, there of
course people who are alive prior to independence, and so
you find a lot of the older generation how they
how some of them speak, particularly more educated ones, how

(01:16:13):
they carry themselves or they dress, the attitudes their spouse
is very much like to get any kind of respect
in their time, you had to behave with me, had
to present yourself with me, and to present yourself in
a as approximate to Britishness as possible, the whole you know,
conversation of respectability, politics and stuff. So I have some

(01:16:34):
understanding of what they had to go through and where
they're coming from when they hold onto these perspectives still
because that's what they grew up in. Um. But it
really is a shame that they've been hooling back progress
for so long now because they still hold on to
these deeply conservative, deeply religious, deeply reactionary ideas that we're

(01:16:56):
just you know, they just implicated within the edecute and
system and in the cultural cast all the time. I
was just when I was talking about Fan, I was
thinking as well about like, have you read a book
called Beyond the Boundary by C. L. James Andrew. I
haven't because it's about cricket and I'm not too integrated cricket.

(01:17:19):
But I've been, Um, I know it's an iconic and
I think he ye, he explains a lot of that
very well. I think people could read it even if
they don't. Like I'm not a big cricket person. But
it's certainly one of the best sports books I've read,
and maybe one of the best books. And he doesn't
he put on a lot of bangers in his time. Yeah,

(01:17:41):
he did have some bags, highly recommended. Yeah, if you
if you don't want to read about cricket. He also
talks about this in The crewmin and the Ghana Revolution. Yeah,
that is not about cricket. It's more of an autobiography,
like seen through the lens of his his ricket, I think.
But yeah, it'd be cool because I know he spent

(01:18:03):
a lot of time. He grew up of course born
readers and stuff and true and that, so we're interested
to see um sort of if he talks about his
political development, how Adau was in this time in Tranad, Yeah,
I think he does. It's been a while since I've
read it, but I think he talks about like how
he sort of saw himself constituted as colonial subjectly through

(01:18:25):
his experiences interacting with British people on one of the
places where the terrains where he'd encountered them, I guess
was playing cricket because great, yes, of course, and you know,
thankfully we've come to decimate them at their own game
as usual, it's true. Yeah yeah, And even like English

(01:18:49):
cricket at a certain point, like getting really into cricket,
which I know it is a diversion, but like they
had rules where you could only have a certain number
of international players playing for each English county. It's it's extreme,
like if you look at how the Empire constituted white
through sport, and like who was allowed to play rugby,
which is a touching sport, and who was allowed to
play cricket, which which isn't normally a touching sport like

(01:19:11):
it did think it's racist as fun, yeah, I mean,
of course it's hilariousism in sports history. Sorry for the
cricket diversion. Sorry, please continue, as it's entirely fine. I see,
it's all Greek to me because I don't know what
any of those points or numbers or anything means um

(01:19:32):
to many different types of cricket. I mean, I've had
people try to explain to me before. It's just that
my thing. Um. I know people who play it though,
so you know, good for them at all. But back
to India, right, if there's one particular person in India's
history that really represented this type of Western educated colony
his subject, trying to be something bigger than that kind

(01:19:52):
of mentality. It was Jawaharlal who became the first Prime
minister after independence. Their ruf course so to promote the
industrialization of India not be a capitalist route, but by
more of a centralized plan and route, which is why
if you look in the India India's constitution you will
see that it's reference to itself as a socialist country. Actually, really,

(01:20:16):
if I'm remembering right, neighbor, it was like he was
like a Fabian socialist or something. Yeah, yeah, his inspiration came,
his inspiration came from the intellectuals of the London School
of Economics and the Fabian society. So yeah, he's quite
the character. You see, the sort of direction that he
ends up putting the country. And I mean even today,

(01:20:38):
India in many ways continues to be ruled in the
English way without English rulers. Um, just like in the
Caribbean continues to be ruled in the English way without
English rulers. In Africa, you know, the various countries have
been ruling their various colonize and powers way rather than
in their own way without the colonizes rulers, father colonizing rulers. UM.

(01:21:03):
The industrialists, the intellectuals, the entrepreneurs, all of them are
working with the government to see the salvation of India
taking place in a subordination to the world. Back can
the I M F from the G A T T.
You know, they see India as part of this global economy,
meant to submit into sue to multinational corporations. UM. But

(01:21:27):
of course the people of India h not to please
in the people of India suffering under the brunt of
that UM. After seeing the failures of of course the
Congress Party under Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi and
her son Rajiv Gandhi. Um, the poor continues to be

(01:21:48):
poor than ever. The middle classes and tuning towards h
just say certain directions. UM. And of course, as we've
seen in the past few years, the farmers have been
agitating against various pressures. They've been placed under things, kind

(01:22:11):
of stuff. And it was pretty much how Mahatma Gandhi
predicted that it would. Because unlike Neru and unlike other
Western here to thinkers of his time, UM Gandhi thought
differently about what India's potential could be what it looked like.

(01:22:32):
And that's part of the reason they killed him. And
I must preface this discussion of Gandhi's vision of a
free India by Norton of course, that Gandhi himself was
a very flawed person. Um, you know, racist, sexist, Um,

(01:22:53):
pretty sure he assaulted somebody, He did some very um
fucked up stuff to his niece. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just well, well leave it at that. But I
mean that's not something you can put aside for something
to be cognizant of. But one of the aspects of
um his time on this planet had been his development

(01:23:18):
of a sort of a vision of a free India,
not as a nation state, but as a confederation of
self governance, self reliance, self employed people living in village
communities deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads.
It would have been a sort of a bottom up
system where the power to decide what could be important

(01:23:42):
into an expert from the village via economic and political power.
All I mean in the hands of village assemblies, where
people in these village assemblies, in these communities would continue
to live in relative how many with their surroundings with um.
They would continue to we've their homespun clothes, eat their

(01:24:03):
home and grown food, use their home made goods, care
for their animals, their forests and their lands, take care
of the futility the soil, enjoy the home grown stories
and epics of India, and continue to build their temples
and appreciates their various regional distinctive cultures. This was meant

(01:24:25):
to be the system, the practice the idea of the
philosophy of Swadeshi, which is a conjunction of two San
Skrit words Swa which meaning self or own and desh
meaning country, Swadeshi as an adjective meaning of one's own country.
According to the principle of Swadeshi, the idea is that

(01:24:49):
whatever has made or produced in a village must be
used first and foremost by the members of that village.
So I mean there could be traded and collaboration between
villages and communities, but gardily thread it should be minimal,
like a sort of an ice and on the cake.
Um goods and services to him was something that should
have been generated within the community. The things that needed

(01:25:11):
to be used by the community should be created in
that community. Another influential. Perhaps the most influential aspect of
Swedeshi and Swadeshi philosophy took place in the early twentieth
century as a direct fallout the decision of the British
India governments to partition Bengal. The use of Swedeshi goods

(01:25:35):
or the goods that are produced and made in India
by and here for Indians, and the boycott of foreign
made goods were among the two main objectives of the
Swedeeshi movement, and the boycott resolution ended up being passed
in Calcutta City Hall in August seven nine four UM
boycott in the use of Manchester cloth and sold from
Liverpool in the district to barrisl The masses adopted the

(01:25:58):
message of boycott aformadoods and the value of the British cloth,
So they have fell very rapidly. Various songs and cultural
works ended up being produced in the time UM to
sort of bolster the movement. At one point one English
cloths were burned as part of the boycott, and the

(01:26:21):
symbol of caddy spinners, the sort of tool that was
used to weave cloth to we've fibers creaton, became a
nature force in the movement and the representation of the movement.
I think I get what you're saying, that we can

(01:26:42):
all benefit from a little specialization and and that the
like improvements that that brings, while still sort of acknowledging
that autonomy is desirable. Yeah, I think there needs to
be some some balance between your autonomy and surft reliance
and that kind of thing, and also operation. I think
he goes a bit too much in that autonomy direction.

(01:27:04):
But in the context of when these ideas being developed,
it's sort of understandable because, um, in this time, you know,
the self reliance of the people as being vastly eroded,
people being forced into you know, cities, they've lost their
livelihoods um, and they were there was a sort of

(01:27:26):
developing reliance and the global economy. Whereaswold As she proposes
that you know, India avoids economic dependence on external market
forces that create these vulnerabilities and communities that end up, um,
you know, really harming the members of that community, so
that she's meant to avoid the unhealthy and wasteful environmental

(01:27:50):
destructive transportation of goods um between communities, avoiding the excessive
emissions that would cause um and promoting, of course, the
development of a strong economic base to satisfy the needs
of the community, to satisfy the UH local production consumption,

(01:28:12):
so that she is kind of about both creating a
self reliant India and also creating self reliant villages within India,
so that each village is a microcosum of the greater India,
a web of sort of a distributed, decentralized web of
loosely interconnected communities. In a time where the British were

(01:28:37):
promoting the centralized, industrialized, mechanized mode of production, Gandhy was
turning to the principle of decentralized, home grown and handcrafted
modes of production UH rather than mass production production by
the masses. I think there was also a spiritual component
of the idea of Swadeshi, because at the time Gandhy

(01:28:59):
was not a fan of the idea that people were
not using their hands to produce, the idea that, you know,
everyone should be involved in some kind of um trade
or skill of some kind that utilizes their hands because
of you know, the whole spiritual component of using the
body that you have fully and another aspect of the spirituality,

(01:29:23):
so that she was of course the idea of this
locally based community, enhancing a community spirit, community relationships, and
community well being, an economy that actively encourages mutual aid,
that encourages the principle of care between families, neighbors, animals, lands, forestry,
natural resources for present and future generations. It's there confrontation

(01:29:51):
of the driving force between mass production which Gandi so
has this cult of the individual, where there must be
to expansion of the economy of global scale uh and
expand the consumption production of the sake of economic growth
out of a desire for the individual's personal whims, for

(01:30:12):
the desire for you know, personal and corporate profit. Another reason,
of course, that Gandhi rallied against this idea of mass
production and promoting in production for the masses by the masses,
it's because mass production leads people leave in their villages,

(01:30:32):
they land, their crafts and their homesteads to go work
in factories where they became cogs in a machine, standing
in a conveyor belt, living in enchanty towns and dependence
upon the movesy of the bosses, and of course as
those bosses gained access to more efficient technologies because they
were constant in pursuit of greater productivity in this creative profit.

(01:30:55):
The masters of this economy, you know, they want more
efficient machines working faster, and so they want less people.
We can loose machines, and so the result was that
the people who have to move to these cities to
working these factories we eventually thrown out when they were
no longer considered useful and became and joining the millions

(01:31:17):
of unemployed, you know, rootless, job less people in uh
Indian society. Sweeter she instead encourages the idea that the
machine sholl be something that subordinates the worker, but instead
something that is subordinated to the worker, that it hasn't
become the master, but instead it is mastered and allows

(01:31:40):
us to orchestrate our own pace of you know, human activity.
It's not that Sweeter Sweaters she is necessarily against automation,
against technological development, but it's more so that it aims
to circumvent the harms that could be called by such

(01:32:01):
technology is being out of the control of the people
themselves and in the control of the select private few.
I thinks what that she has a sort of an
element of glorification of the past. Um they weren't doing
my research for this episode, I ended up looking into um.

(01:32:23):
Of course, the writings of proponents is what a she um?
And people discussing Andy's thoughts on the subject, and I'll
just quote one particular passage, So what as she is
the way to comprehensive peace, peace with oneself, peace between
people's and peace with nature. The global economy drives people

(01:32:45):
toward high performance, high achievement, and high ambition from materialistic success.
This results in stress, loss of mening, loss of in
a peace, loss of space for posonal family relationships, and
loss of spiritual life. Gandhi realized and in the past
life in India was not only prosperous but also conducive
to philosophical and spiritual development, so that she, fora Gandhi,

(01:33:07):
was a spiritual imperative. I think it's understandable that a
decolonial project would attempt to develop a pride in the
history of the people who have gone through so much
um and you know their legacy and their traditions in

(01:33:31):
their ideas. But I think it's a bit of a
stretch to um glorify h India's past and and precluling
your past in such a respect. I don't think any
people's free cluling your past should be excessively glory glorified

(01:33:51):
or um like mythologized, mythologized, yeah, romanticized, because I feel
as though one that clouds our judgments UM and critical
eye for the aspects of you know, past societies that
do do it need to be challenged, do need to

(01:34:12):
be changed um. I think that's part of my issues.
So that she is this idea that you know, if
things just go back to uh, these sorts of villages
and village community, is that everything else would just be okay.
But of course there were other issues that Inki was
teaing with even Priortic colonization, you know, in terms of sexism,

(01:34:34):
in terms of the control of the cast system and
the higher casts UM, and the other aspects of Indian
society that of course were made um more surveyor by
British communism. Colorism, I think is one of those issues

(01:34:55):
that of course existed Priortic colonization, but was made worse
by the British and the presence in your subcontinent. But
I think striking that balance of uh, cleaning, learning from
respecting that um that prequeling the past, but also in
our equal on our projects, not excessively romanticizing the past

(01:35:15):
in an effort to progress towards the future these days,
I believe SOWE actually is most known for its focus
on protect protectionism. It's sustained foreign important investment. But it
was of course a very wide spanning philosophy. It was
a vision um and a philosophy of life that Gandhi

(01:35:35):
held his entire life. That's I It's not something that
I was familiar with prior to looking into it and
my continued pursuit of decluding your perspectives and explorations of
various post cluing projects and philosophies. But it's something that
I've appreciated despite my criticisms or some aspects of it.

(01:36:00):
Asked about all I have FIOL today. You can find
me on YouTube at andreism, on Twitter dot com, slash
and It's cool seeing true, and you could support me
on Patreon dot com, slash sat Drew, You're welcome today

(01:36:30):
could happen here a podcast that's being done for the
first time and not the second time because we had
bike problems. We did not just record a very funny
intro that is now completely lost. Yeah, you'll you'll you'll
never hear it. You'll you'll never you ever know what
great fun we had. The joy was in the creation.
They're not not in the sharing. Yeah, process, not an

(01:36:54):
event structure, etcetera, etcetera. So I'm I'm mia, I'm a
I'm gonna doing this episode. Also Garrison is here Hello, hi,
and also James, Hi, I'm recording. So we're good now.
Yet the good news is stunning Lee, as as as
as much as it seems we are now more prepared
to record this episode. I when we're last time. So yeah,

(01:37:18):
well what are we? What are we? What are we
talking about? We we we are We are talking about
the age of the gender bureaucrat. So as as people
are probably aware, there is a raft of anti trans
bill sweeping through state legislatures um. The latest of these
bills to pass as a time of recording is the
bill in Utah which is banned miners from getting gender
affirming care like hormone therapy, hormone blockers, and any kind

(01:37:39):
of gender affirming surgery for anyone who's not already receiving them.
Does does the Utah one also banned like therapy like
talk therapy. No, but they're there, So on the one hand,
doesn't band talk therapy. On the other hand, there's a
provision in there that I think might also suggest that
people do conversion therapy. So that's great. Um it fucking sucks.

(01:38:00):
Ass uh yeah, kid, kids are going to die because
of this bill. The people who are writing and signing
these bills know that kids are going to die. We
know this because Utah's Governor, Spencer Cox, who is the
guy who signed the bill, vetoed an earlier ban on
trans athletes participating in school sports, specifically signing the risk
of suicide. So she knows this is going to kill kids.

(01:38:21):
He signs us anyways, and we are now living in
what I call the age of the gender bearacrat um.
We we're gonna spend We're gonna have another episode later
on where we spend a lot of time going through
all of the individual bills and the stuff Trump has
been saying about this, because Jesus Christ, pretty pretty pretty
grim stuff that they're I mean, on the one hand,

(01:38:43):
making making trans people out to be the boogeyman did
not work in their favor greatly in the mid terms,
but it seems like they're not trying to. They're not
trying to change their tactics here. They are still going
all in based on Trump's speech from a few days ago,
the of of using the using the transgender menace as
the as the greatest threat to America and the and

(01:39:05):
the and the nuclear family. So we'll see how that
goes for them, like electorally. But it's pretty bad rhetoric
to see flying around. I think they it does really
well with the people who who allowed and like, like
you often see this in like primaries, right, like people
pushed to the limits of their party, because that plays
well with the most politicized people. And for sure, if
you're going to a Trump rally, like three years after

(01:39:27):
he got kicked out, yeah, you are also a bigot. Yeah.
But before we do that, I I want to before
we actually really do an EPSO on this, I want
to take a look at the sort of bureaucratic grounding
for this entire thing. And to do that we need
to look up gender bureaucrats and the American gender bureaucracy.
So I'm going to cite my sources a bit and

(01:39:49):
say that I stole this from a incredibly unlikely source,
which is the Bowist Review. Of Shrek to what stop?
Have a speak those words again? This is the Mauice
Review of Strict two is one of the three great
sort of text of American maoism. There's this one, there's

(01:40:09):
Torgeable Attractive People's War the Florida Everglades, and then there's
that time the the RCP got into a fight with
the PSL and they're both trying to grab each other's signs. Amazing,
amazing stuff. But unfortunately, you know, having having come up
with the term gender bureaucrat, which is incredibly useful their maoists,
so that they're constitutionally and politically just unable to understand

(01:40:31):
what a bureaucrat is. So I have now stolen this
term and I'm using it for other purposes reappropriate. No,
it's stealing their mauists. It's it's never wrong to steal
from maoists. Okay, fine, So all right, it's get getting
back sort of serious stuff to understand what this is.
I want to talk about sort of the term assigned

(01:40:52):
gender at birth. Um. This used to be a like,
I used to be fairly common kind of in in
in circles to like refer to people is like a
mab or a FABS like a side mail at Earth
or assigned female at Earth. And it's a it kind
of sucks as the term. It's been replaced by other stuff.
But I think there's something important here, which is I

(01:41:14):
want to go back and look at the assigned part,
and I want to I want to look at the
cecifically the part about the gender being assigned, because I
think there's something that gets lost in sort of popular
discussions of this, which is that when when people think
about like the term like the assignment of gender, right,
they think about it as something that's created socially. Right.
They think about it as you know, people being like
pressured to perform one kind of gender or another by

(01:41:36):
the people around them, sort of by their families, by
just like people walking down the street. And this is
all true, but there's also something else going on here.
And that's something else going on here is we need
to ask ourselves when we talk about someone's gender being assigned,
who is it being assigned by? Because this is an
actual specific person, right, The person who actually assigns your

(01:41:58):
gender is a doctor or sometimes a nurse or a midwife.
And this person is the first gender bureaucrat they're the
first gender bereacraft because they are the person who sits
down and puts down what your gender is on a form. Now, Okay,
you may be asking yourself, right, mio, why should anyone
care that your gender is now on a piece of paper? Well,

(01:42:20):
because and also maybe like they're they're also mainly at
least now in like a in like a medical scientific sense,
it's mainly like, oh, what parts do you have? Um,
and then using those parts as as a carryover for
gender as it's been modeled after ever since we stopped
dressing boys and girls and dresses and all the same clothing. Yeah,

(01:42:43):
and and well we'll get into sort of like how
this has sort of changed over time. But okay, so
to understand why this actually matters, I think what we
need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is, because this
is a thing that used to be fairly common talk
about on the left and then people have stopped doing
over the past maybe like half decade. The anthropologist David
Graeber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career. Probably his

(01:43:05):
most famous book is one of his later worst, called
Bullshit Jobs. But I want to go back to an
earlier thing that he wrote called The Utopia of Rules.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm gonna read a little bit
of one of the first sections of it. Bureaucratic knowledge
is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means
ignoring all the subtleties of real life existence and reducing

(01:43:27):
everything to preconceive mechanical or statistical formula. Whether it's a
matter of forms, rule statistics, or questionnaires, it is always
a matter of simplification. Typically, it's not very different from
the boss who walks into the kitchen to make an
arbitrary snap pocsition as to what went wrong. In either case,
it is a matter of applying very simple, pre existing
templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often

(01:43:52):
leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the
impression that they are dealing with people who have, for
some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of
glasses that only allows them to see two percent of
what's in front of them. So, you know, we we
can see some of the the core aspects of bureaucracy here, right.
Bureaucracy inherently is an act of simplification. Um. Because of

(01:44:14):
sort of the tech like literally the technical systems of
what a bureaucracy is, and because of how it how
it stores information, how it bows information around, it can
only see the world in incredibly sort of simplified terms. Yeah,
it has to like abstract these things that make assumption
that's based off those abstractions in order to have any
type of functionality. Yeah, so so great. Grebor later says

(01:44:35):
that like this, you know, Okay, on the one hand,
like the sort of simplification and model making that goes
on into bureaucracy can be really really frustrating with you
have to interact with it. But on the other hand,
you know, so the reduction of the complex to the simple,
it's not just you know, a thing that's inherently evil
in its in and of itself, it's the basis of
all thoughts because you know, like we we we actually

(01:44:58):
can't and like in and of ourselves s us the
world by immediately holding in our minds all of the
information at one time, right, the way we understand the
world as simplications and models. Yeah, and we we it's
a pattern recognition, recreating recursive spot loops that give us
the very concept of meaning, and like that's how we
know what words are. Yeah, and so true, you know,

(01:45:21):
you can you can, you can look it's it's also
possible to take a lot of data and make nonsense
out of it. And this is this is this is
a field called economics market Yeah but yeah, you know, okay,
so it's it's this is also the basis of all
social theory, right, Like, like social theory is about taking
a bunch of incredibly complicated like in messy relationships and

(01:45:43):
just statistical stuff and just the noise of people doing
doing things in everyday lives and trying to establish sort
of like ways of understanding them. And you know, this
in some sense is a kind of violence, right It's
it's a violence of simplification. But on the other hand,
you know, the violence you're during true reality here bears
more resemble to sort of like Bacoonian's creative destruction. Right

(01:46:03):
you're you know, you're imposing a kind of violence on reality,
you know, in in simplifying and destroying a bunch of
aspects of it so you can understand just like one
part of it at a time. But you know, this.
This is a useful thing, right, It's how we think
like we we literally couldn't do anything without it. But
as Graver puts it, the problem of right The problems
arise at the moment that violence is no longer metaphorical. Here,

(01:46:26):
let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones. Jim Cooper,
a former l a p D officer turned sociologist, has
observed at the overwhelming majority of those who end up
getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turned out to
be innocent of any crime. Cops don't beat up burglars,
he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple. The one
thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from police

(01:46:48):
is a challenge to their right to As he puts it,
defined the situation. That is to say, yeah, that that
that perfectly describes any any physical interaction with police. You know,
this is one of the things I like about Greater
because I mean, this is this is something that I
noticed and I was in academia, is it is very
very easy to tell who, like when you're reading a
theorist social theorist talking about stuff like who has been

(01:47:10):
to your gas before it, who hasn't. Yeah, I'm always
reminded when we talk about like academics who have a
real life of that picture of Edward said throwing stones. Yeah,
most based academic thing anyone his death yea. And like graver, Graver,
I think, I think it's been to your gas on

(01:47:31):
five continents or something like that, Like he's gotten around,
he's he's on a lot of stuff. Yeah, it is.
It is always nice whenever you can whenever these types
of theorists who like, you know, they often will philosophize
about like the nature of power, in the nature of
the state, and sometimes it can get a little bit
wishy washy, and it's nice when there's people who do that. Also,

(01:47:52):
you know, like the material like the material reality of
like power and how that yeah like how how how
like the how like the philosophy of power transfers over
to street politics is always always an interesting difference to
to compare compare various theory too. In I was teaching

(01:48:12):
a world history course and obviously it's remote because of
the pandemic, right, um, so, like we were just logging
in the morning and like fully aware that I had
seen and been tear gassed with some of my students
a night before and then just discussed like how the
state has a monopoly on violence. People are get o
the fucking lines up. Looks like you've got a massive
bruise again. Yeah, it was. It was very instructive and

(01:48:35):
everyone should do it in their history classes. Yeah, okay,
So I'm gonna keep reading from this. Cool, because there's
a couple of more things I want. I want to
get out of this. So okay. So you know he's
talking about how, like you, you get a violent reaction
from challenging the right to define the situation. That is,
to say, no, this isn't a possible crime situation. This
is a citizen who pays your salary walking his dog situation.

(01:48:57):
So shove off. Let alone the in varyably disastrous. Wait,
why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn't do anything.
It's talking back above all that inspires beat downs and
means challenging whatever administrative rubric and orderly a disorderly crowd,
a properly or improperly registered vehicle has been applied by
the officers discretionary judgments. The police truncheon is precisely the

(01:49:21):
point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative
schema and it's monopoly on coercive force come together. It
only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first
and foremost on attacks on those who insists on alternative
schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts

(01:49:42):
John Page's famous definition of mature intelligence is the ability
to coordinate between multiple perspectives or multiple or possible perspectives,
one can see here precisely how bureaucratic power, at the
moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of
infantile stupidity. Yeah, it's it is this weird, like childlike

(01:50:02):
sense that is that is an interesting combination of thoughts.
That's a fantastic I love it. I like literally read
reading this book is like one of the things that
really sort of like committed me to anarchism because you know,
like it's it's a it's a book that actually takes
violence seriously, and you know, while talking about bureaucracy was

(01:50:24):
something that really doesn't I don't know, and it's a
good critique and we kind of have lost it over
the years. I feel like we've gotten into arguments about
this sort of thing when discussing the usefulness of like
a Fuco's theories of power and like and like how
power functions, You've definitely brought up this passage before talking
about how the extent of that is always is always

(01:50:45):
measured by where the truncheon is hitting on, like the
actual street level. Yeah, but you know, okay, Graber isn't
writing about gender here really, right, He's he's mostly writing
about sort of direct police violence. Although I mean it
is worth noting that, like all the stuff that writing
is informed by sort of like like by by actually
specifically by by by actual critical race theory and by

(01:51:07):
sort of like uh like femder standpoints theory stuff. Um,
but you know, okay, if if if you, if you,
if you look back at this right and you look
back at sort of you know, the point at which
the state's bureaucratic impetue, imperative for imposing simple administrative schemes,
and the monopoly and force come together or specifically the

(01:51:27):
parts that are about right, Like, the way you get
a violent reaction is by being something that being something
that a bereacrat thinks you're not. Yeah, that is it's
challenging their their their version of reality and the challenge
it's challenging the validity of their perception of reality. Yeah,
and you know, and if you think about this about

(01:51:49):
five seconds, if you're a transperson, that's not good because someone,
a bureaucrat, has already assigned you a gender at birth,
and if you're not that gender, things are going to
get really bad really quickly. Well, do you know what
bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely
consider greatly is all of the biaucracies that support the

(01:52:10):
products and services that that funded this podcast. Well, I
hope you enjoy your your your your five new bars
of gold. Thank you for supporting the show. Um, we
are back. Uh, let's talk about gender and the bureaucracy
that seeks to contain it violence. So you know, if
if if if you are, for example, intersects, the point

(01:52:33):
at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative
schema and it's monopoly on course if force comes together,
is on the operating table of the hospital where you're born. Um,
you know, first you a doctor assigns you a fucking gender,
which is never intersects by the way, the doctor just
decides whether you're male or female, and then you know,
puts that gender und your birth certificate. Um, it's technically

(01:52:55):
possible in some places to get it changed to intersect
later in life. But when I say it's technically possible,
I there might even want people who've done it. The
first person who we know ever change their gender to
intersect did it in TV. So yeah, I'm sure there
were I mean, pre bureauqucy indigenous societies. I know that. Yeah,

(01:53:17):
but this is this yeah, this is yeah, I mean
like yeah, like and and this is like the way
that like we treat intersect people also has gotten worse.
Like yeah, and we're gonna get into this, but you
but it's like it's like, you know, this is a
very like it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly
more than two genders, and how how society reacts to that,

(01:53:39):
I think says you know, A, it's it's an enormous
sort of like it's something enormously impact intersect people, right,
like you know, you have like an incredible amount of
violence that is flicted onto them. And then secondly, the
way intersect people is dealt with, it's something that reveals
a lot about how the society is to look at

(01:54:00):
gender and how society is going to look at the
enforcement of gender. I think on the point of how
it's in a lot of ways, the treatment of intersect
people has gotten has gotten worse in the past like
a few years. I feel like as the bureaucracy grows,
the amount of violence that is necessary to maintain it
also grows, and the bigger any any small thing threatens

(01:54:24):
the validity of the entire bureaucracy. So they have to
come down hard on anything that that is that is
like deviant from that because they need to maintain the
validity of the system that they have built. I think
that's definitely an aspect. And the other thing that's really
really bad is that, you know, we're going to talk
about board this more a bit later, but like the

(01:54:44):
actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has
increased so dramatically, even in the last fifty years. It
is like like the the U s is a if
to someone to someone living in right, the modern US
is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society. It is like like it
even like the even like the like you know, like

(01:55:05):
like the sort of people like yeah, like even like
the most sort of like totalitarian style on is bureaucrat
like looks at the US and it's like, what the
funk guys, you guys are taking taking bureaucracy too far,
Like even just like the surveillance capacities definitely would like
you would have loved that to to be to be fair,
to be fair, the East Germans did really well with
what they had, but I think it's really so. I

(01:55:27):
think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the
way you're able to do gender when you're well and
when you're getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your
Internet searches, they're like that that that's one side of it,
and there's other sides of it in terms of like
you know, people people seeking to make like different gender
presentations illegal. How the how how that had That type

(01:55:48):
of surveillance will eventually lead into pretty pretty druckon Ian well.
And and I think I think in a lot of ways,
like the violence that has done to intersect kids is
sort of it is one of the sort of origin
points of this, right, Um, I I do actually want
I want to sort of get into what what this
is a little bit um since the nice in sixties.

(01:56:09):
And again that what I'm saying this like this stuff
is kind of recent, right, UM. Doctors have started commonly
performing non consensual surgery and intersex kids to force them
to conform to a gender. UM. Here's from a two
thousand and thirteen report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on Torture that's sited by Human Rights Watch. Children who
are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to

(01:56:32):
irreversible sex assignments, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalization, surgery performed
without their informed consent or that of the parents, in
an attempt quote, in an attempt to fix their sex,
leaving them with permanent, permanent, irreversible infertility and causing severe
mental suffering. And this is fucking horrible. It happens, it's

(01:56:56):
all the time, and on all of the people who
write these fucking laws that are like giving giving someone
gender affirming care is like needling them specifically carve out
sections so that doctors can keep sucking doing this intersex kids,
And it's horrible. It's really interesting how like UM, so
often the sports field is a terrain where this kind
of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for

(01:57:19):
the first time, Like the sports governing authorities have been
fucking brutalizing intersex athletes for fifty years now, and every
time it's because, yeah, they'll and they'll they'll put forth
an argument and then lose in court most of the
time because they'll they'll seek to advance like a very
narrow definition of gender based on chromosomeality or something or

(01:57:42):
testosterone levels or something, and then demonstrably this binary doesn't exist,
right like, and then they'll lose, and they'll respond to
losing by fucking destroying that person. Yeah, it's there are
plenty of cases people can confined in history of that happening,
and yeah, it's sucked up and and and I think
the more I've been thinking about this, the more I

(01:58:02):
think that the sort of like that a lot of
what turfism is is this kind of like it's it's
attempting to take the bureaucratic categories as literal truth. But
that doesn't work. It doesn't It doesn't actually work on
a sort of either on a scientific level or on
a sort of more philosophical level, because again, what what
what what that sort of bureaucratic assignment is is a

(01:58:22):
is a radical simplification of reality that destroys it destroys
reality itself in order to create a sort of like
an M or and F on a page. And when
you when you try to go back into the real
world that it doesn't work. It only works when you
can enforce it with violence. Tests do be loving to
enforce the end with the violence? Yeah, and you know,
I mean this is this entire thing is sort of

(01:58:46):
this this is the basis of the sort of of
the of the American gender bureaucracy. Right, It's inherently violent.
It's it's not just sort of a procedure for recording
what your gender is. It is it always sort of
has been and is increasingly more were so now becoming
a system that imposes it imposes a gender on you. Um,
you know, and there's also a lot of ways that

(01:59:08):
this bureaucracy you gets imposed on you that are you know,
less extreme. You know, if if we go back to
the question of like who are you assigned a gender for? Right,
You're asigned a gender for the state, and you know,
almost everything in your life depends on these bureaucratic documents.
Because that's how the state understands you as a person
by by these bureaucract documents like specifically birth certificates, process

(01:59:28):
like driver's licenses, social Security cards, and sports generation papers. Yeah,
I mean like here here, here's the American Bar Association
talking about birth certificates. They are so common that we
might even overlook their significance. In the United States, birth
certificates serve as a proof of an individual's age, citizenship, status,
and identity. They are necessary to obtain Social Security, apply

(01:59:51):
for a passport, in rolland schools, get a driver's license,
gain employment, or apply for other benefits. Humanitarian Desmond too
to describe the birthtific it as quote a small paper,
but it actually establishes who you are and gives access
to the rights and privileges and the obligations of citizenship.
You know, and I think that does Manchoo two is
being enormously optimistic about sort of what it means to

(02:00:15):
be seen by the state here, because the other thing
that it does is it exposes you to the state's
violence in a way where you know it now the
state like this, this is this is the mechanism with
you which it now knows who you are, so it
does not having one, like, yeah, it's when the soft
sits try to not have birthtificates for their children get

(02:00:35):
violent and this and this is the thing. And one
of one of the things here about this is that
like you know, okay, you used to be able to,
like get away with not having birth certificates, right, like
a lot of a lot of Americans used not to
used to like not. But one of one of the
things that happens over the course of World War two
is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureacratic capacity.
And there's an expansion of state's bureacratic capacity because it

(02:00:57):
has to you know, it has to go to war.
But some taneously there's and there's something I didn't have
to happen but did, is that you get the army
and you get employers starting to ask people's birertificates. But
if people don't have them, because like I don't know,
I was, why why the funk do I need to
record being born? Right? Like this is this this is
only this is another thing you need. It's only a
thing the state needs. Yeah, it's interesting to look at

(02:01:20):
Like I was thinking about how this is also where
the kind of front line of colonialism happens, like the
enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people. Like you
can look at specific individuals um osh tissues. One of them,
they were a crow person in the cronation who like
for for the United States as a scout's what's called
bada and then was like in later life kind of

(02:01:42):
forced to conform to a binary gender with which they
didn't identify and they hadn't lived that way and because
they had to, having being assigned identity papers to live
on a reservation, you have to take one of the
fucking boxes. Yeah, and you know, and the thing about
those fucking exist right is you know, even like to
this day, there are a lot of states where you

(02:02:03):
can't change your gender, like on on you can't change
what says in the card. You just can't. And you know,
if they've assigned you a gender that's not your gender,
then well tough luck. They have they have an they
have monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and you
don't you know, there's other stags where you need a
fucking court order saying that you've had surgery in order
to get the fucking you know, in order to change

(02:02:25):
your bureaucratic person. And again the reason for this is
and I cannot emphasize this enough. Fuck you. That is that.
That is that, that is the reason for this. Um, yeah,
I want to I want to go back also to
you know, look to to look a bit more about
sort of bureacratic effects. Um I'm gonna read from a
n triple epiece about trans guy in the UK and

(02:02:46):
the fifties. From the start, the sensensialized press coverage or
ferguson this transition focused on some surprisingly quote tition elements.
Quote change of sex puts them in a different employment
category with a raisin salary, reported one newspaper, underscoring the
fact that being reclassified as male in the eyes of
his employer at the British government tied into a complex

(02:03:07):
network of gendered economic and labor discrimination. In fact, not
only did his pay change, but his whole job category changed,
even though he was doing exactly the same work under
the same conditions. This was because women workers were simply
were not simply paid less, but also kept in feminized
job grades. In the civil service, despite the government's claims
that service was a meritocracy, a question a question raised

(02:03:31):
in Parliament by an MP who had heard about Ferguson,
demanded to know what form and number of proofs other
than a mirror announcement by the subject they've missed ended
them a couple of times. I it is required before
a female quote like like civil survey, is permitted to
obtain a higher salary in a different employment category owing

(02:03:54):
to a change in sex. By gaining a quote official change,
Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself, suddenly suddenly transformed into chief
Experimental Officer with a male breadwinner salary large enough to
support a family, rather than a woman's lower wage that
was expected to be supplements mental to a family's earnings.
For obvious reasons, noted the Treasury, we should not have

(02:04:16):
to say anything which would have led to a request
for the male payrade to be applied from his data's
entry to the civil service. In other words, the Treasury
wanted to ensure for that Ferguson did not try to
claim back wages in turf Island. Always been very normal. Um.
And uh, there's I wanna read a little bit more
of this. Um. Conversely, a different civil servant, this time

(02:04:38):
a trans woman who was working in the Admiral p
Department and transitioning around the same time, was advised it
was in her quote interest to delay official recognition of
the change until at least January nineteen sixty assuming full
equal pay in the civil services introduced by nineteen sixty one.
Her employers wrote that it was in her quote own interest,

(02:04:58):
in their opinion, continue wearing men's clothing for the time
being in order to avoid your significant reduction in pay.
That it's it's funny because like I it's not funny.
It's sucked up and it's been stupid, isn't it. But
like I knew trans people in Britain who would have
grown up around this time, who like socially transitioned after retirement. Yeah,

(02:05:22):
or at least like openly to you know, we weren't
like BFF or anything. But it's absolutely fucking insane that
like that this argument was deployed. Yeah, And you know,
you can you can see what's sort of going on here,
which is that like you know, it's more it's more
explicitly obvious and here that it is in a lot
of other cases. But your status in the gender bureaucracy

(02:05:44):
is a key element of how you're able to extract
resources from the state. And you know, sometimes that's literally
just an explicit pay gap, like it was based on
institutional sexism. But you know, I think I think the
second case is in a lot of ways more revealing. Right,
the state and asgender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying, conform

(02:06:05):
to what the jet the bureaucracy says your gender is,
and it'll you'll get paid more, and if you don't,
you'll get paid less. And if you look at this
more abstractly, right, and in order to interface with the state,
in order to extract well for benefits, in order to
pay your fucking taxes, in order to drive, in order
to buy alcohol, apparently now in order to buy the
stupid cleaning bottles you of of compressed air but you

(02:06:26):
have to use to to clean out your computer keyboards. Uh,
in order to buy alcohol, in order to get on
an airplane, you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic
view of you. And if you don't, you can't do it.
And and you know this this brings up the question,
what right does the state have to assign my gender?
And you know, the state will spit out a variety
of sort of like pseudo medical and pseudo political explanations.

(02:06:49):
But the answer is that the state has no right
to tell you what your gender is except force. And
you know, the the extent to which the state has
actually been able to sort of do this kind of
stuff has changed over time. But we we've talked about
this a bit. But what like, you know, over the
course of sort of over the course of sort of

(02:07:12):
of the twentieth century, and you know, we can also
look at things like, uh, we can look at the
War on Terror, we can look at neo liberalism and
David Graber's Iron law of liberalism, which the Iron Law
of liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative
intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces, will
have the ultimate effect of increasing a total number of regulations,

(02:07:33):
the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats,
the government employees, which I always love. But you know,
like we we we've we've seen the sort of consequences
of this playing out over the course of of you know,
the last about a century. Right, if you go back
to the age nineties, it was possible for basically private
citizens to have just full on wars with each other

(02:07:54):
in parts of the US, and that the government would
just be like sure, okay, whatever, Like the people mining
bird ship off of the coast of California are shooting
each other with cannons again like whatever, Right, Like it's
it's not really until the twentieth century, and really even
in like the last fifty years has been a last

(02:08:14):
expansion of this that like the state actually has full
territorial control over everywhere that it claims to have control of. Right,
we were like we we are just now getting to
a place where the police can actually you know, like
have like militarily hold the entire country at one time.
And even then they can only do it as long
as people sort of cooperate with them. Um, but you

(02:08:34):
know this, this is really bad if you're a person
who doesn't who who who the bureaucracy has deemed to
be something else or and this is another you know,
another sort of angle on this, right, Like, if you're
someone who does not have documentation, the state very very
quickly will just attempt to destroy you because you know,

(02:08:55):
oh hey you don't you don't know the right paper.
As this means the government can fucking arrest you and
kick you out of the country. Yeah, and you know
this is fucking horrible. Um, there's a lot of stuff, Like,
there's a lot of other angles you can look at
this from, right. I mean, like at some point we
probably will do an episode about like the process of
getting medical care and all of the people who you

(02:09:16):
have to convince that you are your gender. But ye
know that that's another episode in tirely what I want
to get at here is that state bureaucratic power is
being used by by just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats not
only to force people to comply with their sort of
state mandated gender when they deal with the state, but
also to force them to inhabit that gender in their
private lives, which is constitutes nothing less than a form

(02:09:39):
of full scale genders hotel terrianism. Um. We talked about
that fucking Utah bill, which you know again prohibits minors
from getting gender affirming surgery people block as a hormone treatment.
That that is a bill that forces people to live
in their state mandated gender. In Florida, gender bureaucrats are
allowed to physically inspect athletes they suspect of being tran

(02:10:00):
which is to say, not conforming to fucking state bureautic
gender controls. It's children, right, like children, like they are
allowed to molest your child because they think that because
they're they think they're trans. The other aspect of this is,
obviously there is something we've talked about before that's something

(02:10:20):
that you're starting to see with these bills is they're
trying to make the bills age number go as high
as possible. Yes, there's bills for people, there's bills proposing
twenty five not so it's trying to trying to police
and control the bodily autonomy of of complete adults, which
obviously is not not a new thing for the GOP,

(02:10:43):
specifically especially in the wake of the Roe v. Wade
overturning um. But another aspect of like this, this this
goes beyond just people who are younger than the age
of nineteen. This this they're going to try to keep
raising this as much as as much as possible. And
this is where the types of surveillance that I was
talking about before it's going to become a problem because

(02:11:04):
if you're if you're googling how to do d I
Y H R T and get stuff shipped in from Brazil.
Don't think that the surveillance stuff is not gonna not
gonna impact your ability to do that. They had also
polices like the gender presentation of SIS people specifically CISS
for me, and I think, like I think the people
who are getting physically inspected because of these laws are

(02:11:26):
just girls who are good at fucking sport. Like there's
CIS girls. They just they might be like like taller
or stronger or and like it's some anyone has the
power to just be like, oh you're not you're not
a girly enough girl. Uh, And so fucking now you
get to go to the pervert room and get expected.
And you know what was like in Texas? Right the
law right now is that if the state, if the

(02:11:48):
state thinks you're fucking child is not sufficiently close to
the gender, they can fucking take your child from you
and force them to be whatever fucking gender the state
wants them to be. Right, And you know, any other
period in history, if you walk into a room and
tell a bunch of people the state is going to
decide your fucking gender, everyone would lose their goddamn minds.
This would be like this is a This is a

(02:12:10):
like unfathomable like even in sort of like the depths
of the sort of totalitarian like nightmare or states. This
is like an unfathomable level of sort of state bureaucratic
like in position onto people's lives. And yeah, you know
it's the fucking us right we have, we have We
are the most bureacratic society humanity has ever produced. Nobody
thinks it's the most bureacratic society has ever produced. And

(02:12:31):
you know, we are right now every day seeing the
points at which bureaucracy meets violence. The last thing I
have to say is that you know, like this, this,
this is the future of gender. The future of gender
is government bureaucrats, whether they're cops, politicians, doctor's shop, protective services,
as school board administrators forcing you to be a gendor
that they're not. But fundamentally, they have no fucking right

(02:12:53):
to do this, right. What they have is power, and
their grasp on power is still right now tenuous. So
you know, it is possible to stop them going any
further than this. It is possible to beat back the
power of the state, and it is possible to have
a world that's not this, and we know it's possible
to have world it is not this because it wasn't
like this like fifty years ago. So yeah, fuck him

(02:13:15):
and that's that's that's that that, that's that. That that's
gender bureaucrats. People should read David Gray. But learning about
intersectionality for a fucking second. Another another another great resource
to learn about how you can like mix up gender stuff.
There's this new video game out right now which has

(02:13:35):
a pretty intense character creation selection you can It's called
let me See, It's called Hogwarts Legacy. Is that No
I thought you were going with side called but it has,
it has It has a lot of different customizations that
you can do for your gender presentation and and and
your body parts. I think refusing could do this on Twitter,

(02:13:59):
but I need, I need, I need to take fucking
one minute talk about the dumbest argument anyone has ever made,
which is that I have to buy this game in
order to support the developers. Which think about this five seconds, right, Okay,
if you have to buy this game to support the developers,
don't you have to buy every other game to support
their developers? In fact, are are you not morally obligated
to buy every single product on Earth, because if you
don't buy every single product that's ever been made, you

(02:14:22):
those those will not be deployed. It's bullshit here. This
is such a weird like capitalism of a poison development
thinking you're obligated to consume. Lots of people on I
have been holding my tongue on Twitter about this from
monks now watching people watching people made the argument, I
have to buy something to sport developers, which again buy

(02:14:44):
a different game. Support those developers, buy fucking go on strike.
Fucking I don't know if you want, if you want
to want to support the develophy give you money someone
who is in a fucking video game developer. Well, I'm
glad we're getting I'm glad glad we could have that
that special bonding moment over the very inclusive gender settings

(02:15:08):
inside this new hit video game. So that's that's pretty cool.
I hopefully we get an ad from them soon, but
I hope, so, I hope. So the worst Twitter day
of my life is the day we get that fucking
ad gold presented by Hogwarts. Hi, everyone is it could

(02:15:41):
happen here And it's just James today because today I'm
doing a little interview on the situation for Hindu people.
If you're not familiar with the Hindu genocide, we're not
going to cover that in depth, but we will give
a little bit of an overview. And I'm talking to
on your Mo, who is Rhinga himself and who works
with the National Unity Government and advising them about Reheinga

(02:16:03):
people's human rights. I think the news cycle hasn't really
covered many Rehiner issues since the Rhea genocide. The world's
kind of moved off from caring about them, but they're
still in a very difficult situation, and we want to
update you on issues that continue to face the Rehenga people.
I hope you enjoyed the interview. So today I'm joined
by on Kyomo, who's an advisor to the National Unity

(02:16:26):
Government of Miama, which people will hopefully be familiar with.
If not, he can explain a little bit of what
that is. He's an advisor to the Ministry of Human
Rights and also a Rehinger human rights activist himself. And so, Phi,
thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for
having me. Yeah, So what I'd love to do today
is I think if our listeners have listened to our
previous coverage to what's happening in Mihama or Burma, depending

(02:16:50):
on which one do you prefer. They will know a
lot about the coup, and they will know a lot
about the things of Pappasinsku right, the PDF and the
ethnic resistance organizations, but I think they might not be
as familiar with the situation that Reenga people have been
in for a long time and continue to be in.

(02:17:11):
It's a different part of the the country too. We
were we were in um Massot, which is on the
other side, So that's something we've covered a lot less.
So perhaps you could begin by explaining, like why there
are so many Rehindia refugees who have left. Obviously, the
history of the persecution of Ranger people is very long.

(02:17:33):
But if you could give us sort of a potted
history of of the persecution of Rehinia people by various
governments in Myanmar and and what has led to this
massive exodus and this big refugee population of Hinda people, now,
that would be great to start with. Great, thank you,
thank you for having me in. The history is very long,

(02:17:54):
but I will be concrete and and and short. The
Ruheinga people has been in Myanmar before Burma even exists,
before Burma become Burma, and before British came and their
significant architect color related infrastructure that exists indicate existence of

(02:18:17):
the Ruhengan. There's a lot of literature research and Ruhinga
people themselves living in generations and generations um there indicates
that Ruhinga are part of my and Mare and it
he used to be and it will be. And Runga
not only the ethnic minority, they are also the religious minority.

(02:18:38):
Majority of premius people are Buddhists and of the second largest,
followed by the Muslims are Christian, and then the third
largest are Muslim and Ruhinga are Muslim and and Ruhinga
are single Muslim ethnic groups and Sink also religious ethnic groups.
And there has been historical exclusion discriminations sponsored by the

(02:19:01):
and sponsored and carried out by the consecutive government of
Myanmar to target this religious and ethnic minority, to exclude
from religious, ethnic and social aspects of the society, and
and it has been politically motivating for many government it
has always been beneficial in in and mincing the larger

(02:19:22):
populations of Myanmar by showing Runga as a threat to
the country because of their religious differences and to the
way that we were and we eat are slightly different
than than Purmese because we have our own culture and
own traditions and own language and and u and it's
enriched by by those UH. Thus the first start of execution,

(02:19:49):
like executing these discriminatory policies to work to the Runga
has started as as long as um as far as
back in nineteen sixty where the first coup took nineteen
sixty two when first took place, and then military consecutive
military government accelerated that to form to UH situations where

(02:20:09):
it could be UH defined and fall under the category
of the crimes against humanity. So in nineteen seventy eight
there is a big operations against Hina people to deport
them and two thousand people has to be flee to
to Bangladesh and some of them still remain as refugees

(02:20:32):
to third generations for the generations in Bangladesh not being
able to repatriate it to the place where they come from.
And followed by that the nineteen UH ninety two there
was another influx of the refugees and the refugee it's
also the quite significant larger number of the refugees and

(02:20:52):
and and not everyone could come back. And there is
another layer of the refugees that remains UH from the
report treating then from the violation the human rights violations
became too through h gas business, a surial limiting the child,
the number of child that you can have, and treating

(02:21:14):
you less than an animals, not having the religious right
to exercise the way that you believe, and restrictions of movement, killing, raping,
and it's continued and it has been accelerated in different
form and shape where it could be it could come
to a situation it's from from crimes against you and
it is being transformed to genocides and and in two

(02:21:37):
thousands seventeen it's one to the highest pick of the
genocides where a million people are being deported by burning
and many people had a thousand people died and many
thousands women being raped. And there are a lot of
fatherless child in the camp today being UH big bond
by by by by the woman's who victims of the

(02:21:59):
of the rief of the Nyama military. And today there
is a million people in Bangladesh and with no hope
to be reportuated soon to the place of origin with
safety and and dignity. And of course the political landscape
in Myanmar has shifted. UH. It used to be in
the democratic transition from two thousands ten to twenty with

(02:22:21):
two consecutive different government and the democratically elected government has
been overthrown by by a temkup by the military who
had ruled the country for for for many decades. And
UH and and of course the democratically elected government which
I advise to UH is being some of the member

(02:22:43):
of the government are being arrested, and some are in
the in the ethnic territorial control, and and some are
in exile, and and and so the country so the
reactions of the fifty million people has been different because
there has been several ku inman Mara and this was
their the the political calculations of the military leaders to

(02:23:03):
ATTEMPD the coup was wrong that they did not expect
the resistance of the people. And then of course the
the the young Generation Z people came in to to resist. Uitially,
they claimed to be peacefully protesting to hand over the
power back to the to the to the democratically elected people,
but as a result they were being brutally cracked on

(02:23:24):
and killed, arrested, and then and then the young people
started to understand that we need to speak the language
that they understand. They understand, so they speak that language
is grabbing a gun and and and and promming the military.
So followed by that, National Unity Government has been formed
by with elected members of the of the of the
parliament both lower Horna Opera hosts. So the National Unity

(02:23:47):
Government today is the most the legitimate government of Yanmar
and having also some tertorial control. Of course, majority of
the government investor infrastructure are being being captured illegally by
the military untain. Yeah, and it's interesting that people are
familiar with the sort of ethnic makeup of previous governments
and then the National Unity Government. From what I understand,

(02:24:09):
it's not as much dominated by the majority ethnic Berman
people in the International Unity Government as it was before
even under their n LG. Right, even under sort of
the most most democratic that there has been in the
MA for some time, like there was still a domination
by by one ethnicity. Right that the National Unity Government

(02:24:30):
is more ethnically diverse, is that right? Correct? But still
there are a lot of rooms for improvement. Particularly range
people has always been part of Myanmar and politically excluded.
And despite a million people being pushed out to the
Bangladesh through a genocidal attempt, the remaining populations in Yenmar
is six people politically represented both sides of populations under

(02:24:52):
continued genocidal attempts of the Miyama made Free and the
National United Government did not include politically meaningfully the Ruhinga
populations still now and they appointed me as an adviser,
But a politically representable size of populations need to be represented,
not by functions alone. It's need to be both all
represented by functions and number equally to to UH, to

(02:25:16):
other ethnic And we're in the context of identity politics
in me and Mare and your political rights and responsibilities
to what to the nations are associated that the very
identity that you were so time to time. There is
a big questions like you know, we're moving forward to
the part of democracy to make the country to back
to the track of democracy. But the very principle of

(02:25:40):
democracy is majority rules and and respect the minorities right right,
and still the Runga are being despite the international pressure,
particularly the United States and it's allies to have inclusive
democracy and Ruhinga people are not yet meaningful included in
the government. Yeah, and I think that's something we've spoken

(02:26:00):
about a lot with with Karen and Karni, people who
we've spoken to about the sort of the need for
a more inclusive structure, whether that's like a federal democracy
after obviously after the military hunter has been deposed, or
certainly something that's more inclusive, and perhaps we can talk
about how Like it's very interesting to me when I

(02:26:23):
talk to young people generation Z people from the EMMA,
they will say that like they wouldn't have even said
sometimes for a hind yet like ten years ago, that
they wouldn't have used to term they have they'd have
seen the people who we now who we would call
hin As Bangladesh. He's right because this was the narrative.
Can you explain how you've explained very well that that's

(02:26:45):
not true, but how that narrative was constructed and what
it was used to do. I think it's once again
to sclue through Hingen to curry our systematic destructions mentally
and physically. The Rhinga is also a lot to do
with their spreading propaganda, misinformations and and disinformations through a

(02:27:07):
state let media boosts online and offline, and so this
means these destructions has happened with the state sponsortain state
pre plan intentional um intentional intentional UH way of doing it,
and thus the society, the Hinga people has been restricted
from moving. And this is one of the least developed

(02:27:29):
region where the hunger people living. A lot of people
from from like other state wouldn't be able to travel
and go and see what is happening really inside there
and to people would not be able to move parts
of that to tell their stories. So all the narrative
that people here is the military and the government what
the government used to put at that moment. So in

(02:27:50):
the in the in the eyes or in the perceptions
of the people through Hingas are from Bangladesh and they
are trying to to take over the country and they
had a national security threat and that was denderative. So
they the reality is being defined by the perceptions and
falls and misinformations that being given in a consistent intentional

(02:28:13):
way to the young people. And of course today I
think has changed slightly to be seeing to what is
reality and people showing the sympathy to what happened to
the Ruhinga because it's every time something happened in me,
I'm like that it's consistent to work to the Rhinga
the human rights violations, crimes against humanity and genocide, and

(02:28:33):
the people fifty million people in Myanmar were not either
they're seeing neutral or their extending with the military not
like too that this should do this and this is
right to do to kill people, right to read because
their national city security threat. But what had happened to

(02:28:55):
the Ruhinga people, perhaps in the not the same shape
and same as already or valocity or momentum or intensity
has started to happen after the coup, to to the
to the Bama people, and then they tend to realize
what happened to ring What Ringa used to tell running
the whole village is killing and raping is exactly what
what what is happening? More or less exactly what is

(02:29:17):
happening to us? Than they were right? And it's the
big teams change and the proper traitors remain the same.
And with that concept people come to but again I
think they still it's a very small number of the populations,
uh compared to the whole populations that lives in Yanmar
and in in in the democratic principles, there is no
like you don't tend to say something just because that

(02:29:39):
you sympathize. And there are principles and values that you
do not compromise in any circumstance. So equal right, justice
and and inclusivity and like like celebrating of the diversity.
These things are very core principles of of of the
democracy that that we are like as a Burmese people

(02:30:01):
asking from international community to help. What we're preaching for
to ward to the democracy need to be demonstrated at home.
First we need to act up on and and so
I think the benchmark, there's no the benchmark shouldn't be
defined to include or exclude someone based on the sympathies
need to be based on the principles and values. Can
you explain a little bit about the situation that range

(02:30:23):
of people who have left meam or maybe they're in
Cox's bizarre, maybe they're in no man's land, maybe they're
they're now being moved to an island right? Can can
you explain what life is like for those people? Of course,
the when we can get people fleds to Bangladesh, it
was attempting to survive, Uh, like they managed to survive

(02:30:47):
and otherwise many died and they could be one of
those who who died and they survive, meaning that these
old people are have physical and mental destruction and untheless
cars in their physical and mental aspects of the life.
And and of course a million people in Bangladesh to
be hosted by the BANGLADESHIPH government BANGLADESHIH people has been

(02:31:09):
also very difficult because the resource in the given area
is very limited and Bangladesh itself is a small country
with with with limited resource and and we should always
appreciate Bangladeship people and BANGLADESHIH government to open their arms
and hurt to to to absorbs and and and a

(02:31:31):
median people and and and and again. I think the
problems started in Me and Mare and and the solutions
need to be in Me and Mar and and people
need to be going with say dignified h way to
the place of origin. And and of course Bangladesh. It
has been five years plus now that the people like
the largest influx took place in Sucer and seventeen uh

(02:31:52):
and there were repatricans settem being made and and the
when people fled from My and Mar jump into the
Nap River and be of bang all into those seventeen
because the land was more dangerous than the sea. Situations
remained very same or even worse than that now in
in in mire Mar to be going back, so you

(02:32:12):
you escape from a grape that you have buried, uh
to be killed and being pushed to go back to
to to me and mark it is as being sent
him back to to the to the grape that you
escape from from from dying. Uh. So the situation doesn't
favor for a safe, dignified, voluntary return for the for
the Reinga. That's Bangladeshi authorities are trying to find different

(02:32:36):
innovative modality in different ways how to how to create
sustainable situations for the renga, including relocations of the of
the certain number of the of the of the Inga
populations because the the the camps are very congested and
the hygiene level in the camp a very low and
there are a lot of also the the the crowd

(02:32:58):
on like you know, if a million people in a
small scale place like that's are being being closed, anything
could happen anytime, you know. So the the the idea
was too by the Bangladeshi government which doesn't fall into
into the principle of international way of doing things, and
and relocating some of these refugees to an island that

(02:33:21):
has its a new islands. You know, human being has
been ever lived there, and the island has been technically
from various technical assessment has identified it's not livable by
human being yet. And because there are a lot of
like cyclones and and and flats and things like that,
and it's very far away from millions of Bangladesh and

(02:33:41):
and it yeah, so there is risk from UH from
various perspective to be able. But despite this, Bangldeshi government
has built, sheltered this and relocated UH some numbers of
Rhinga and some of them went by their own will
seeing that it might be a different and and some

(02:34:03):
being maybe perhaps post and and of course there are
a certain number of like around close to UH five
to six thousand people in Norman's Land when Bangladesh at
the beginning did not open its border when we're felleing
and so this Norman Land we're being occupied by the
nearby abilities because Bangladesh wouldn't open the gate for them

(02:34:23):
and they were stuck in India. So they have happened
to be stuck there since the last five years. Uh
and the remaining lives in in in coxwas a districts
of of Bangladesh in different parts of this this districts.
So that's the situation. Yeah, that's very well said, and

(02:34:43):
it's some people have have taken on recently leaving these
camps in Bangladesh. They've taken on this very risky boat journey, right,
I think they're going to places like Malaysia if I'm
not taken Intonesia, And can you explain a little bit
about like how prevalent that is in the co It's
how incredibly like high riscued it is for people to
take that journey. Sure, the the situations in the camp

(02:35:08):
is not much different than the life that they used
to live in in Indian mar Despite that, the level
of the level of human rights violations and the treatment
that they are having may not be the same. But
Bangladesh is not a signature to nineteen fifty two Refugee
Conventions and it's not legally obliged to be to be

(02:35:30):
following all international norms and protocols to be to be
hosting the the the the refugees. But despite they have
demonstrated the humanity UH and demonstrated the moral obligations towards
the humanity to to host the Median people and the
then the million people. Some of them has been from

(02:35:52):
ight and some of them are from nineteen, some of
them are from two seventeen. Has a very dark future.
They are closed in this fence camp and the movements
are restricted. Access to informations are not given like the
interne Access to informations are are like internet service and
things like that has been denied. Access to livelihoods are

(02:36:13):
denied and they're not able to legally work and solely
rely onto to the International Humanity and assistem. Access to
education has been denied. So the young people who are
growing in this camp does not see a future that
they will be able to go back to me and
mar or if they live here as if you're living
a debt, like you know, you don't have any any
any way for what's seeing a bright fishure. So there

(02:36:36):
is there is the only they don't have a best
alternative to be trying to be exploring different paths and
the only path it's happened to be is being created
in the past. UH. In the past by some ruhingas
taking these boats and making to Malaysia where they could
do some domestic works and get a refugee status and

(02:36:56):
maybe able to work, and and some were lucky enough
to be resettled in the third country, a small number
maybe less than two less than to three percent of
the total total Ladyshire. So the journey is very risky.
The the the the boats that they are taking the
first the sea is very rough that they take, and

(02:37:18):
their the infrastructure, both infrastructure that they're taking are not
built like they not built in any way to be
coping with this rough sea and rough rough weathers and climates.
So many of these hunger people who make this less
than fifty percent of them may make it to the
to the destinations. Either they die on the sea, or

(02:37:38):
they are being arrested by different navies and and and
or they are they are being jailed by by Mia
Mia and mar Junta. And in two thousand twenty two
loan three thousand, five hundred more than three thousand, five
hundred people including children as young as two years old,
are jail to five years for trying to attempt to

(02:37:59):
to go to easier So this is this is what
it is happening, so the the life is meaningless there.
And of course taking this journey mine that you're toosing
a coin whether you get a tail or you get
you get head or you got tails, you know, and
and and so it's like betting your life whether if

(02:38:20):
you make it, you're you're a life to somewhat level meaningful.
If you don't make it your life and it is
more or less the same that you will live in
there in there. So that's why these are the push factors,
and of course they are full factors reunifications. If a
son has made UH three years ago, five years ago
to to Malaysia and working in the constructions or or

(02:38:40):
or or or or gardening like levers and and you
have a remaining family in the camp and you don't
want to see your family in that situation, and you're
gonna bring your family kids or children's or wife and
you do that. And lastly, also they are growing youth
in Malaysia who are who want to marry thee and
maintain the culture and language and things like that, so
they want to have rights bringing from the camp and

(02:39:02):
and so they're they're different push factor pull factor as
well from from Malaysia, but the primary factor is the
push factor in India and Martin in Bangladesh, right, yeah,
and it's it's perfectly reasonable for people to want, so yeah,
some futures and some chance to realize their own life
and their goals. So can you explain people will probably

(02:39:24):
have seen like I think we're recording this on Thursday, UM,
which is the look at the date of the nineteen
and people will have seen the last couple of days
maybe videos of fires in no Man's land, and they
will probably have seen like some acronyms, which are a
lot of acronyms when when you're reading about me M
I can be very confusing. So could you explain a

(02:39:46):
little bit about who these two groups that we've seen,
right the A R S A and the R s O,
who they are and what they what they represent, and
perhaps why these two groups who are nominally Brahingia are
fighting each other. So the in the context of ME
and MATH politics, the ethnic people UH has been fighting

(02:40:09):
for decades and and and decades UH with ME and
mom milstry and Bamah supremacy like larger majority supremacy UH.
At the beginning, they were attempted during the time of
independency through reconciliations and dial of meaning like without arms.

(02:40:29):
But the language again being understood by the by the
Myanmar larger majority, is the language that they speak as well.
So then ethnic people started to grab the arms and
resist control their territory to uh to attempted to control
the territory in order to get the equal right and

(02:40:52):
decide for their own future, be part of the decisions
that collectively impact the nations and and basically equal right,
justice and and and those those things. That's what ethnic
people are are fighting for and giving their lives and
livelihoods uh. It's nothing less than that and nothing more
than That's very simple. We want to live with dignity

(02:41:12):
freely equally with anyone else. And and so many ethnic
revolutionary organizations forms came came up in different part of
me and Mar representing different ethnic and Ruhenga also used
to be one of those back in nineteen fifty uh
for after nineteen forty eight dependent and nineteen fifty two,
Ruheinga is the first one to drop the gun in

(02:41:35):
a change of the peace with the government, saying that
we are peace loving people and as long as you
give us what what what our identity and and and
we're able to and we are. So then there's a
certain period of time that the Ruhenga people did not
have an arm oppositions group because I am someone who
believe in non violent movement, but in a context like

(02:41:56):
me and mar Again, non violence movement wouldn't go anywhere
if it's worked seventy years. Uh wouldn't have the longest
singular war in the world more than seventy years, right,
So we need to be practical and seeing the reality
like that. So then uh, then again these things happened,
and then and the Ruhinga things. Okay, then what we

(02:42:18):
have been promised and what we have were we're being
told to be promised to be given is not given.
So we have to grab the gun again and form
U do as the others are doing in order to
to uh. So, the Ruhinga Solidarity Organization has been formed
and it has been one of the popular organizations, getting

(02:42:38):
a lot of popularity from the Ruhinga community. And then
there were issues within the institution that has been growing.
Of course, uh they were not able to maintain uh,
the the institutional growth and institutional resource managements. And then
the institution collapse and as well as it has to
do something with that, like you don't have a territory
like other other other arm oppositions group will will be

(02:43:03):
in stations in me and Mark where we're stations in
Bangladesh and Bangladesh government were not really supporting and not
for them to survive with with with to enhandle its
military capability. And of course there are several other other
other things and and so then it's disappeared in between
and then and two thousand fourteen. Uh, this guy, a

(02:43:26):
guy called um this the guy who is leading currently
the the the are se Arkanslevations Army who was born
in in Pakistan and grew up in Saudi Arabia. His parents,
he claimed his parents is Rhingen. Of course, uh he
speaks the ring language. That's mean, it's indicated that he

(02:43:48):
uh he's and came to to our kind of state
to mobilize people saying that you needed to grab the gun.
And this is what then people of course who have
critical thinking skills and not believe into things because it's
need to be from and within, and someone who does
not understand how many and more politics look like cannot
lead revolutions because revolutionary has to do a lot with

(02:44:11):
the with the politics political landscape as well in the
country and and uh but however there's a certain number
of people who believe in it in very small numbers,
and UH and Inga didn't want to again fight or
or entry into violence, and they just want to live peacefully.
And and that uh and today are resilient to to

(02:44:32):
the to to what they're trying to UH gain equally
as others. And and so then our consolvation Servey um
e r S. He has attacked the post thirty different
police forced in two thousand seventeen. That's where the collective
punishment has been given as a result of the ring
Ruhinga community. And it's not collective collective action. It was

(02:44:56):
individual's action. Certain hundreds of people gather together and at
tem police force and and and the whole regae population
has been punished. So then followed by that as well,
ours has been free student of judging themselves. And then
so our are ruing A solebrity organizations also pop up
parlelly back into nineteen and and and of course the

(02:45:20):
ideology that they stent are slightly different from one another,
and so they they they that's why the clash happened.
And and UH ring A Solitary organization think that like
the way that ours has been conducting and they're responsible.
They they for what happened to the Ruhinga people as

(02:45:41):
as collectively genocides and things I think like that, creating
opportunities for Burmese military to to wipe out through Hingen,
deported through Hunga. And so they were this political disagreement
between these two groups and this no one land has
been mostly occupied within the Ruhinga refugees. There some are
some members are often try to to enter there and

(02:46:04):
and and stations there and so recently UH the what
we have learned from the ground is that our ringous
solidarity organizations UH route out and operations to remove them
from there and so that the Ringery within the normal
lands could live peacefully without crimes and things like that.
And and that's how the fighters started and and it's

(02:46:27):
escalated and there were two hundred houses being burned on
shelters ring refugee shelters. Around two thousand, five hundred to
three thousand people has been UH has to be displaced.
They were not allowed to enter to Bangladesh because normal
land is not accessible by neither parties and and it's

(02:46:48):
it's just in between. So some of them has destroyed
the fans toward to Burma and enter to their because
they just from the nearby abilities. They could see their
abilities for five years, but they could not go back,
so they so they so they went back there. But
now myrmam latry is pushing them out from from there
back to the Norman lands. Yeah, it's just yeah, a

(02:47:10):
terrible situation. Um and thebilities are the only armed groups
in that state, right there are other round groups, but
like this, this sort of explains it more succinctly, Like
if we get into the other round groups, it gets
even more complicated. And so I wonder what people listening,
obviously will They've they've heard a lot about about the

(02:47:32):
conflict in Burma, about the various different groups that are
being persecuted by the Burmese military. How can they help
specifically with this issue? Is is there ways that people
can can help out? I think we have seen how
the world came together to help Ukraine people unjustly illegally

(02:47:55):
to be attacked by by Russia and and threatening the
democratic society of the world. And and that has been
very inspiring appreciated and and and we stand with the
Ukrainian people and people in Burmah has the life of
the value of the life of the people in Burma
has also there is no difference in life. You can

(02:48:16):
buy one, you know. So we have been the people
in Myanmar has been fighting for for UH the cost
of life and livelihoods today with whatever means that they
have to make this country back to the part of democracy.
And and so international community should do beyond releasing the
statement or or or of concern. And a statement of

(02:48:39):
concern maybe maybe may name and shame and may put
political pressure and political pressure. UH is not they think
that being cared by by the by the by the junta.
So the the the total enemy of the overall people,
including drinking people, are the military and and and they're
the one who has destroyed this country. And they're beyond

(02:49:01):
who is destroying and they are responsible primarily responsible um
people institutions who wiped out through ungen, who carried all
the genocide. So I think the international community should do
beyond beyond sanctions, arm embargo and and and respective citizens
of the country should claim to their respective government to

(02:49:21):
do more for Purmes people and the Runga people to
deministrate the moral obligations to war to the humanity. And
in twenty one century genocides took place while the world
was watching, and we set in the United Nations back
in nineteen uh nineteen fifty forty eight that never again.

(02:49:43):
And and it's very shameful that it could, that genocide
could take place in the eyes of eight billion people
in twenty century and modern age and the world failed
to protect the Runga. This party. There has been compelling stories,
immages and settle actories and and and still it's continued

(02:50:04):
to be so and followed by that crimes against community,
war crimes has been being committed continually by the by
the same military that committed genocide. And I think the
international community will have at some point to answer to
themselves on their beliefs of the humanity. Yeah, like I

(02:50:25):
think the international community let's happen for too long, and
they ignored it for too long, and then now it
always happens right Like it's like for Coast Boomerang, the
violence spreads and gets used in the metropol and it's
deeply upsetting. What does that support look like from the
international community like does that mean ah Man pads for PDF?

(02:50:46):
Does it mean recognizing the National Unity Government? Like what
concrete things should the community be doing? The international community
should recognize there again, the there are some issues that
need to be fixed within the the the National Unity Government,
particularly the inclusions of the Ruhinga and other like it's

(02:51:10):
it's positions to to the religious, other religious and ethnic minorities,
particularly those are small and that need to be fixed.
And international community should do it in an incentivice way
that Okay, you do this and we will do this
for you, and and and the recognitions come with incentive
of supporting, uh, supporting because it's only legitimate. Whether we

(02:51:34):
like the National Unity Government or not. We don't have
the best alternative to it. It's democratically elected. And and
there is a lot of issues within the within the
within the within the the National Unity Government, particularly when
it's come to the rocking issues. So these need to
be dealt in in National Energy Government. I have been
consistently advising them to fix this, acting beyond policy and

(02:51:58):
and and and showing state level prioritized agenda with concrete
milestone to to to the change toward to the Rhinga UH.
And of course, parallel to that, international community should ensure
that big supports are being given, being recognized and and
and and in order to win these revolutions, which has

(02:52:19):
shaken the very institution that has consumed the resource of
the country in various means and ways UH. Some UH
and one of the strongest institution has been shaken by
the young people UH with very small means that they
are very small and time to time, very innovative and
and and and utilizing whatever means that they had. An

(02:52:42):
international community should provide support to PIA to be first
and foremost institutionalizing and and and and capacity building enhancing
acting upon international standard. We are UH way of operating
as as a as a military group and and of
course when you are being established as a as a

(02:53:02):
military UH institutions and it's is it's being formed by
the by the legal government of Myanmar. And to support
this this this military and many many nations are getting
military assistance package and and I think international communities should
have no problem to provide military system package too. Of
course in a very principles and value based with with

(02:53:25):
the value baste approach and and and and and let's
include the technical support to to to set up the
mechanisms to held the accountable and to ensure the transparencient
accountable across the spectrum. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's
very well said. And they do tend like if people
aren't familiar with the way the PDFs have been organized
like they they have been very respectful of like norms

(02:53:47):
and laws of war and things like that, which obviously
that these military have not. And I think an institutions
that a group that has been with hundred hundred thousands
of people, young people with no prior military experience and
mostly operating in a very limited, uh to no resource

(02:54:09):
context and being able to respect the human rights and
human dignity should be recognized. You know there when you
you have a gun, and there are there are things
that happen and need to be justified in and and
being held accountable for. But I'm saying that, I'm not
saying that it should be a lot in any any
any kind of misconduct within the military systems need to

(02:54:31):
be investigated properly and take actions upon and held accountable
those who gave these who carried out these actions, and
who gave common to carry out this action but the
number of cases related to the to the to the
to the to the PDP has been significantly low. And
when when it's come to the to the human right
violations and and it has to be zero and then

(02:54:54):
one is too much. But I'm saying compared to UH
to UH and and and I think cont need support
need to be given there in order to to to
enhance their capacity to defeat the junta plus to defeat
it in the principle and value based with the principle
and value based approach. Yeah, yeah, certainly they could definitely do.
Like the people we've spoken to a terribly equipped by

(02:55:17):
any modern standards, incredibly brave and innovative. They could certainly
do a lot better. They have a lot more. Okay,
where can people if people want to follow along with
your work, which is very impressive, how can they find you?
Do you have like do you want to share your
Twitter account or a website? Maybe? Where can people keep
up with you? So? I am on Twitter and Facebook

(02:55:37):
mostly and my tutor is a k move two UH
and which you can see it's with my pictures and
and I have put my bio as well there and
I'm also also very active on the Facebook and what
the work related. Most of the work that I do
UH are being not everything, but some part that international

(02:55:58):
community need to know are being portrait there. And particularly UH,
the the human rights situations related to the Ruhinga and
Rhinga in Bangladesh are being being being shared there in
a timely, very timely manner. Sometimes even lives. You know,
it's happening now and being and yeah, yeah, you've been

(02:56:20):
very good at that. I poo your Twitter account. It's
very informative and it helps me stay informed. So it's
it's a k m o E two if people are
searching for it. Thank you so much for giving us
some of your evening. I really really appreciate your time.
Is there anything else you want to get to before
we finish up now? It's lovely to be part of
the program, and thank you so much for helping me
once again, Thank you very much. Hey, we'll be back

(02:56:46):
Monday with more episodes every week from now until the
heat death of the Universe. It could happen Here is
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