Part One: Hunger Strikes: From Ireland to Palestine

Margaret talks with Shereen about the long history of hunger strikes by prisoners and refugees.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to ADHD History Hour with Margaret. I'm
your host, Margaret, and each week I try to make
a coherent story out of all the rabbit holes that
I fell down that week. Usually there are rabbit holes
about cool people did cool stuff. What do you think, Sophie,
should be change the name of the podcast the cool
People Did Cool Stuff? Or should we keep ADHD History Hour.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
I don't know. I know it depends on how you
feel that week.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Okay, fair well, this week we have Sharen as our guest.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, Hi, Saren, Hi, Margaret, thanks for having me back anytime.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Serene is host of the podcast. It could happen here. Yes,
also has a resume that makes me want to guess
whether or not you have particular shared mental issues? Is me?

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:52):
I have. I'm not well to say the least. I
just got clear, uh.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Specifically a resume full of a thousand interests assurance book.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Busy always baby.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah. Also, I just like do not know who I am,
so I just continue to flail about. Right, I do
know who I am, but I think I'm just I mean,
this is ADHD History Hour. I mean, just let me
write in that happens. That's that's me all right, yeah, okay.
Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie up, Sophie. Our audio

(01:26):
engineers Ian. Everyone wants to say Hi, Ian, And our
music was produced for us by On Woman on Women.
This week, we're going to talk about hunger strikes, the
tool used by folks who have no other tools left.
And in particular, we're gonna talk about hunger strikes in
two countries that have faced very similar problems and have

(01:47):
developed very similar solutions, Ireland and Palestine. Along the way,
we're going to do too much context because I really
like context. Okay, here's my theory, okay, And how when
you're like eating soup, the best part is the crackers
that you put in the soup.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
This is a universal experience, right, Oh huh yeah, the
crunch yeah yeah, yeah. The crackers are the context. Right.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Oh. The soup is the main idea, and the crackers
are what you need to digest it.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well yeah, and to leave full, yes.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Leave satisfied and sated.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
And and it's empty carbs.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
So you're here your family.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, you've ever been around hunger strikers? I only have once.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
I haven't. I can't say I have.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
I was once in Athens, Greece. This is probably twenty eleven.
I'm very bad at tracking my own travels. I think
it's twenty eleven, and so I tried to like look
up was like hunger strike, immigrant hunger strike in Greece,
and it was like there's a major one every year basically.
But I think I was there for the twenty eleven one.

(03:09):
And I've talked a bit about the Greek neighborhood of
Exarchia on the show before in Athens, I think in
the episode about riot dogs. But in short, it's the
sort of anarchist neighborhood of Athens that has greater to
lesser degrees. It's autonomous from the Greek state and the police.
It's a really cool place. There's lots of graffiti, and

(03:29):
there's lots of people self organizing to feed people and
take care of each other. There's like a self organized park.
And the thing that impressed me the most was that
I saw the degree to which Greek anarchists and the
refugee population were working together to help the refugee population.
I went to one of the many squatted social centers

(03:51):
in Greece that has been transformed into a housing and
education and a place for self organization for refugees mostly
from Swanna countries. And not only was it free housing,
but it was also protection from the Greek police, because
this is like one of the major reasons why the refugees. Well,
a lot of people were trying to arrest them, but

(04:12):
there were a lot of people who didn't want the
police to be able to arrest them, and fortunately they
had all these like self organized places that the police
cannot safely go right m h. Police can't go to
a squat in Exarchia without an awful lot of police.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
What's a sorry, this is go ahead, non intelligent, but
like what's the the vibe for lack of a better word,
of the Greek police, Like what do they carry guns?
Are they terrible? I mean, all cults are terrible, but
you know what I mean, Like, what level of bad
are they?

Speaker 1 (04:46):
So that's actually funny. I don't remember whether or not
they carry guns, but the Greek police, at least most
of my information is about ten years old. When I
was there. The regular Greek police are like not great,
but then there's a group of police called the Delta.
I would like the they're actually I think the moped cops,
but they're like the worst cops and they specifically a

(05:07):
lot of them were or are I don't know about
our but were members of I think It's Golden Dawn.
They like the Nazi group, the Nazi political party in Greece.
So the police in Athens in particular, but in Greece
in general are like absolutely skew, way, way more right

(05:28):
wing than the rest of the population.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
I see, Okay, it's good to know. Did not know that.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, And they would like go in force into Xarchia,
Like if you saw police in Exarchia at that time,
you saw like fifty police in Oxarchia, because otherwise they
can't really be there. The police station there is routinely
molotovt But yeah, So while I was in Exarchia, there
was an immigrant hunger strike happening, and this particular one

(05:56):
was North African immigrants, many of whom had were not
recent refugees, actually had been working for many years in
the country until the economic downturn had forced them out
of work. And basically the government was like, oh, you're
no longer are legal immigrants who do cheap agricultural labor,
so we want you gone. And they were like, this
doesn't seem like a fair deal based on the fact

(06:16):
that we're the ones who feed you, and Greece was like,
we don't really care what's fair. We're the government, right.
This is verbatim translation.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Yeah, that sounds like them.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah. So the hunger Strikers went behind the walls of
the into the courtyard of one of these like large
squatted buildings, right, and there're so these huge tents, the
big old style that in my mind you see like
like military style tents, like you know, the giant tents

(06:47):
that thirty people can sleep in, you know. And they're
the refugees. They're lying in the shade and they're hunger
striking for themselves and most importantly for their fellow refugees
and immigrants. I was there as an independent journalist, which
is not something that i'd do much anymore what he
used to do, and so I took a bunch of
photos and I had some conversations not with the hunger
strikers but with like their media represented representatives, and later

(07:14):
a bunch of them got transferred to hospitals. Hospitals were
a contested space, right, so it was like actually kind
of cool. There was this major movement in Greece. It
wasn't just like the anarchists or whatever, right, there were
a lot of people who were openly confrontational with the
right wing policies of the government. So a lot of
people when they would go to the hospital, the police

(07:36):
would show up and be like, oh, we want to
arrest these people, and the doctors would physically drive out
the police from the hospitals, which is something I would
like to see more of. Ye, And I don't know,
it was really moving. I saw dozens of people with
no recourse but to skirt close to death in order

(07:57):
to fight for dignity and fair treatment. And it worked.
After six weeks of three hundred people hunger striking, mostly
from North Africa, it shamed the government into action and
they won temporary permits. I one thing that's like really
annoying about this kind of action is that the media

(08:18):
usually kind of like drops off and you never like,
I don't know what happened to them later, you know,
right right.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
I Mean it's also like shame is such a like
the fact that that is what makes the government do
anything is so infuriating, Like yeah, it's it's just uh yeah.
And and the person that's hunger striking is literally like
on death's door potentially, and the government is just like

(08:48):
this is going to be a bad look and they
do something like it's so just the whole the whole
dynamic is bonkers.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
I don't know. Yeah, No, and that's that's what this
episode is about, is that dynamic. And yeah, so we're
going to talk about that, and we're going to talk
about two colonized countries that have a long history of
cooperation and solidarity, Ireland and Palestine. And one of the

(09:15):
reasons I want to tie these two together. One, they're
both actually just very natural places to talk about hunger strikes.
But two, I think that a lot of American society,
especially white American society, seems to think that the Irish
anti settler movement is legitimate, but the Palestinian one isn't.
And yeah, I don't agree with that. So I'm going
to make a lot of comparisons between the two today.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
No, I think it's necessary. Also, Like I don't know,
I don't think really people realize the connection or the
similarities usually because they think it's like, oh, that's like
a brown person problem and this is like this is different.
You know totally h but I'm glad you're bringing it
up because they're so related, if not extremely similar, you

(09:58):
know what I mean, Like it's I don't know, and
I feel like people that go through something like that
are always going to be in solidarity with each other
because they understand at a level that most people don't.
So I'm glad you're doing this episode. Cool.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
No, I'm glad. Yeah, Like I didn't, it's not in
the script, but I ended up like reading a bunch
of like Palestinian immigrants in Ireland and Ireland being like, oh,
this is like the one place in Europe where I
can walk down the street and see Palestinian flags and like, yeah,
you know, feel comfortable. Obviously, Ireland, like everywhere, is dealing
with some right wing bullshit right now, and there's like

(10:33):
a lot going on with people fighting against right wing
Irish nationalism and all of that, but that's sort of
beside the point.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yeah, it is, it is. Sorry, No, I'm just thinking,
like how fucked up it is that the only time
a Palestinian or like some like can feel comfortable is
if a country has also experienced like something terrible like
they did. You know what, I mean like that's the
only reason and they can feel like they can be
Palestinian is because oh, this country also went through some

(11:05):
fucked up shit like all the other countries probably are
just like it's like that. That's it's like the annoying
uh you only care about something when it affects you thing,
but like country version. Yeah, it's just so silly to
actually see that happened. Anyway.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Continue, Yeah, so to talk about the hunger strike, we're
going to talk about ancient Irish legal customs. Great, mmm,
crackers in the soup, the hunger This is a weird
comparison to makes this this whole thing is about not whatever.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Anyway, So it's too late. You're on the trade. You
have to continue going on this trade.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
The hunger strike is probably as old as society, and
I can point to it. One of the places I
can point to that easily is in Ireland. There's a
but I hunt law, which is the pre colonial legal
system of Ireland. And I promise I didn't go out
of my way to find out to work it into
this episode, even though it's come up a bunch of
times recently on this shows. There's a bunch of written

(12:08):
records of Brahaon law. But it's also impossible to translate
with certainty because it's it was not a particularly write
things down culture. And okay, there's lots of reasons, right,
but overall the idea seems to have been passed down
successfully throughout history and I think it's neat and hunger
strikes are literally written into ancient Irish legal code, so

(12:32):
to talk about the law system in general, of like
this is the sort of pre Christian and up to
early Christian actually up to different parts of Ireland was
up to like the middle of the like fifteen hundreds
and some places up to about nineteen hundred, you had
elements of this law. Individuals didn't have absolute ownership of land. Instead,
lands were owned by the larger clan and then divvied up,

(12:54):
and sometimes they were divvied up equally, sometimes hierarchically. But
everyone had access to a whole bunch of common land,
including pastures but also some pastures, but also all the forests,
mountain mountains, bogs and wastelands. And then a lot of
the decision making would happen at these huge assemblies that
would meet in graveyards because their entire legal system grew

(13:17):
out of funeral practices because the Irish have got in
their blood.

Speaker 3 (13:22):
Wow yeah, wow, that is just sick.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah totally. And then also really interestingly, most crime and
punishment was not up to the state, like the clan
leaders are king or whatever the fuck right. Only political
crimes were handled by the state. If you're trying to
like go over the government, the states like as kind
of about us, we should probably do something right. All

(13:48):
other crime, like stealing shit and murdering people and all
that kind of stuff was handled by a sort of
non state court. A jury of peers would investigate the
crime and then bring their findings to a judge. And
the judge was a Breyhon and who would decide the
right or right and wrong of it and then meet
out a punishment. And the Brehons would like the judges

(14:08):
would like go different places. Sometimes it's different. It changed
over time, right, like sometimes they were more formal, sometimes
they were less formal. For a while, anyone could be
a judge as long as they were like a learned guy.
I don't know if it was mentally or not. Actually,
there's like weird. Gender in ancient Ireland was way more
equal than most of the rest of history. It was,

(14:29):
but it was also not perfect, you know.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
Right, better better than most, yeah, but not perfect.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Yeah, and then so later. So originally any and at
least any dude who was like considered learned could become one.
And then eventually it was you had to study for
twenty years in order to be one.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
Twenty years. Yeah, what do you study for twenty years?

Speaker 1 (14:52):
I guess you just I don't know. It's probably a
combination of ethics and like precedent and social norms and
all kinds of shit. It seemed to work fairly well, okay,
they most punishments weren't vengeance based. There was capital punishment existed,
but it was like really rare. In some places in

(15:13):
the old myths and stuff, they'll be like, oh, anyone
who kills someone must die or whatever, but that was like,
actually rarely what happened in practice. Other high level punishments
were banishment and gouging out the eyes, but these were
not so different. Yeah, I know, right, These were not common.
Usually it was basically debt. Now you owe this family,

(15:37):
like some of your land, some of your chickens. I
don't know if their chickens are not some of you know,
some of your money whatever. There's no cops. There's no prisons,
or rather, there's no public prisons for some really bad crimes.
If you're in debt and can't pay it, you become
a slave to the other family until your debt is paid.

(15:57):
Oh and then you go free. So it would be
like instead of prison, it's like, well, now you're in
prison of you killed this family's kid, so now you've
got to like serve them for five years.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
I don't honestly, that doesn't not make sense to me personally.
But it doesn't make sense, or it doesn't not it
doesn't not make sense. Yeah, no, it it's like if
you're if you're gonna just just to if we pretend
that someone did a terrible thing to family, the least
they could do is serve the family for redemption, you

(16:30):
know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
So, I mean it's better than fucking throwing someone in
prison for twenty years. Yeah, like learn how to do
crime and have a horrible life and are tortured.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, totally, totally.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah. And usually though it was like all right, you
lost your lands or you got to give up some
cows or whatever. To these folks, it was fairly the
reason that there wasn't capital punishment much in it. I
think this is a little bit my inference. It was
a successful method of stopping like revenge killings and mob
rule right, all without the interference of an actual state

(17:05):
or a specialized roles besides the judges. And if the judge,
the one who study for twenty years, if he gives
a he gives a ruling that later people overturn, the
judge often loses their job for good because they're like, oh,
you actually did. It's like you had to study for
twenty years because you have to get this right. You

(17:26):
can't fuck this up, right, you know.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
I mean I think I was thinking about it as
after we said twenty years thing, and it feels like
they're just waiting for the person to get older, like
to be like older and wiser, you know, like, oh,
you have to wait at least twenty years because your
brain needs to evolve a bit and then you can
make decisions. But it is interesting, yeah yeah, yeah, no.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
I I mean like I have like notes. This isn't
like a no note situation, but like it sounds better
than what we live with currently by oh yeah, magnitude, Yes, yes,
and yeah, and so what does it have to do
with hunger strikes? I'm glad you asked my own script. Well, Ireland,

(18:13):
what does it have to do with hunger strikes? I'm
glad you asked. Ireland and India had really specific and
interesting overlaps in this ancient law, and one of them
was the right to redress by fasting by hunger strike.
So if you've if you've been wronged by someone who's
socially above you, like a clan leader, king or whatever

(18:35):
the fuck, it sure is hard to enforce because like
you know, there's no cops, right and like you're not
gonna be able to come up with as strong of
like a posse as the other guy is. So there's
tristcod fasting, and it is the legal process of show
up at your better's doorstep, wait outside, refusing to eat

(18:59):
until he socially shamed into complying with the judgment against him.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
So shame is the driving force. Yes, you're across the board.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yes, and and it'll come up a couple times in
this but the it's not make someone change their mind,
it's not change their heart. It is shame. It is
embarrassed them in front of their community.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
It's not I don't want to see this person die,
it's I don't want people to think I'm terrible.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, exactly, Okay, And then I fell down this rabbit hole.
I was like, why the fuck is it? India and
Ireland are the two places with this written into their
ancient legal codes. Mm hmmm, well, and I get really annoyed. Okay, So,
like a lot of people who want to talk about
like similarities between far flung cultures are conspiracy minded and

(19:52):
like talking about aliens and like just like not on
a page that I'm really interested in or like really
interested in some like racial myths that I have just
like no fucking time. But the best explanation that I've
been able to find. You've got Indo European languages, right,
This is the larger family tree of languages that forty

(20:13):
six percent of the world speaks as a first language.
Everything from English and Irish to Italian to Bengali to
Farsi are all Indo European languages. They almost certainly originate
from a language that gets called proto Indo European. People
like to argue about where that came from, but currently

(20:34):
the sort of scientific consensus is that it came from
the Pontic Caspian Step, which is a region that covers
like Ukraine to Kazakistan, kind of like near the Black
Sea and shit, where the Yamnaya people lived around three
thousand BC. And then it's spread out from there, and
it spread out so well because the Yamnaya people might

(20:57):
have been the first horseback riders in the world. WHOA, Yeah,
I decided not to go down a huge rabbit hole
about horses. But one day, one day, yeah, I would
love that. I was like, my like horse girl friend
was like explaining, got really excited about every time I

(21:18):
do any research, she's able to tie it into horses
in one way or another, and this one was like
really easy.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
I mean, I love horses. I will always remember this
one comment. This random person I don't even remember who
made this comment, but it was someone in a circle
of friends or something, and they were saying that like something.
I was just saying something about how oh, I was
really upset because in medieval times it really feels like

(21:44):
they abuse the horses or like they drug them up
or whatever. They seem so miserable. Yeah, And then the
person was like, well, horses are meant to be ridden
on by humans, like that's where they're that's why they're there,
or whatever, like something indicating that, like the horses on this.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Planet, yeah, yeah, to.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Have a human on top of it. And I got
so pissed. And my main personality trait is that I'm angry.
I hide it very well, but I'm usually very angry
all the time. And I got so mad, and I
was like, what do you fucking mean, like a it's
an animal. Yeah, it would have been here if you
were here. So I don't know. Horses I think are

(22:23):
beautiful creatures and I would love a horse rabbit hole
one day. Yeah, sorry for that tangent. I just always
think of that. I guess so mad.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
No, No, I'm like making a mental note than when
I do a horse episode, I should have you as
the guest. So if there, if there's this Indo European culture,
then some of its furthest fringes, the furthest it gets.
Some of it is Ireland in India, right, northern India,
mm hmm. And this is the more conjectural part of this.

(22:58):
At the fringes, older tradition's hand hang on longer because
they're not as like often conquered, right, Ireland wasn't conquered
by Rome, so Roman stuff didn't replace Irish stuff the
way that Roman stuff replaced like ancient British stuff, for example.
And this hypothesis is used to explain a bunch of

(23:19):
overlaps between Celtic and Vedic culture and cosmology, Vedic culture
being ancient Hinduism basically some differences there. But and again
anything that's like learn about ancient religions and their overlap,
I'm like taken with a fucking grain assault. So I'm
not like coming in hard being like, but it sure
is interesting that there's a ton of linguistic mythological overlaps,

(23:42):
and in this particular case, the right to redress by
by hunger strike. But of course Ireland and India aren't
the only places where hunger strikes happened historically. They also
happen in our gnome. No, it's usually we're actually sponsored
by people who give us food, won't sell people food advertisers.

(24:09):
Here they go and we're back. So what is a
hunger strike? It's fairly self evident. I think I'm guessing
it's when you refuse to eat until your demands are
met It falls into the larger category of non violence
nonviolent resistance, and I think people tend to misunderstand nonviolent resistance.

(24:33):
We've talked about some non violent resistance on this show.
I admit that sometimes we've talked a little bit more
about the violent resistance. But we'll continue to talk about
non violence resistance on the show too. Understand the traditional
conception of the hunger strike. I'm going to turn back
to Ireland because there's this Irish writer, This guy actually sucks.
His name's Yates. He's a piece.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
I like that you preface it with that so I
could know exactly what I should be thinking when you're
saying it. Yeah, this guy sucks, just foy I and
this is the context. Yeah I love that.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, Like I love Yeates's poem The Second Coming, But
it's like I love it because it's about everything falling
apart he and it presents it as if it's bad,
and I'm like, yeah, the center can hold mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world. What rough be slouching towards Bethlehem?
Like I'm into it, but.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
Like look at to do list. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeats was always I mean, he was like being an
Irish nationalist is actually very complicated who is not necessarily
a right wing position like any anti colonial nationalism. But
later he just was a fascist. He just was like, man,
democracy sucks. Hitler's great support the Blue Shirts, which were
like Ireland's fascist movement, so he sucks. But he summed

(25:49):
up the hunger strike really well in his play The
King's Threshold. This is a line from The King, and
now I kind of like, I haven't read the whole play.
I kind of wonder whether he's like actually trying to
talk shit on hunger strikes and he's just making it cool,
you know, because that seems to be his thing.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
The King says he has chosen death, refusing to eat
or drink, that he may bring disgrace upon me. For
there is a custom, an old and foolish custom, that
if a man be wronged, or think that he is wronged,
and starve upon another's threshold till he die, the common
people for all time to come will raise a heavy
cry against that threshold, even though it be the King's.

(26:27):
So yeah, it's it's not about making someone have a
like ghost of Christmas past revelation that they were like
on the wrong side of history and like they should
be nice to people. It's about being like, not only
will everyone hate you, but like a thousand years from
now people are still going to fucking hate you.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
You know.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yeah, that's pretty strong. Hatred is strong.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, yeah, it mo it is. Why not it's your
primary emotion, as you've expressed.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
But yeah, I mean it's there, Yeah, it's ever present.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
I want to contrast it with a quote that I
think is a true quote by future friend of the
pod Assada Shakur, and this is from an autobiography. The
quote is nobody in the world, nobody in history, has
ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense
of the people who are pressing them. And people use
that quote to dismiss nonviolence. But I think this is

(27:22):
an important quote with which to understand nonviolence because it
isn't about appealing to the moral sense of people. Because
like when cops like, getting beat up by cops doesn't
make cops feel bad, you know, right, And it doesn't
make the people who sent out those cops feel bad.
The answer to how do you sleep at night is

(27:44):
usually like a baby in my make mansion that I
bought with the money I made by hurting people, you know.
But when nonviolence is ostensibly capable of doing, is shaming
the cops and those who sent them out in front
of their community. And the problem is, i'man to conjecture
land here woo. In a capitalist society, community is almost

(28:07):
meaningless term, right, since money is the primary thing of value.
Non violence isn't always effective because you can be like
you'd be like, I don't care if my neighbors hate me.
I have a fucking McMansion, you know. Yeah, So it
takes a functioning society and a healthy community to allow
nonviolence to work out its most effective, which means that

(28:29):
if you don't want the people you're pressing to fucking
murder you, you should listen to shame and anyway should
let nonviolence work. Hunger strikes, as I've seen them, don't
tend to work when it's like some random person who
isn't in prison or isn't directly oppressed, who's just like
I'm going to go on hunger strike until the climate
change is solved or whatever. Right, But when movements of people,

(28:50):
especially prisoners or refugees or other people who are in
some way unfree, when they do it, it can be
powerful as hell. Humans can live for a while without food.
It's not a good idea. I'm not advocating this. I
think people probably picked up on the content note based
on the title of the episode. I hope. So your
body feeds itself with your body fat and then your

(29:11):
muscles and bone, and you're like bone, marrow and shit,
and sometimes around usually sixty to seventy days, you die,
sometimes way earlier than that, sometimes longer than that. And
a lot of hunger strikers die. You are playing chicken
with the government when you hunger strike. Prisons have dealt

(29:32):
with this in a couple of ways. One of them,
one of the older ways they don't tend to do
this anymore, is that they would just release people when
they started to get sick. They did this with a
lot of the Suffragettes. Actually in England, Suffergets actually did
a bunch of hunger strike stuff that isn't in this episode.
And one day I'll cover the Suffragettes and how they
were in some ways very cool and in some ways
not because of the racism, just in case people were

(29:52):
wondering why anyway, So they would let these people go
and then as soon as they were healthy again, you'd
put them back in prison.

Speaker 3 (29:59):
You know, oh my god.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
And then the other way, go eat and then come back. Yeah, totally, totally.
The other way, the newer fangled way is that they
put a tube up your nose and down into your throat.
In nineteen seventy five, the World Medical Association declared that
doctors should not force feed strikers and that it is
a form of torture. This has stopped almost no one.

(30:27):
Whenever international law makes something illegal, it doesn't change anything.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Maybe oh not at all. International law is the most
empty bucket of words, like nothing actually like I don't know,
Like Palestine's a great example of that. You'll hear like
these real violated international laws committing crimes against humanity. Here
they go again, Like it's basically all it is it

(30:52):
actually ever happens. Yeah, it doesn't mean anything at all.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
Yeah, EU still won't recognize Palestine.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
Like yeah, it's like, oh, Israel is an apartheid state.
This is all the organizations that say so, oh well,
like it's basically the vibe of it, Like there's nothing
actually like powerful about international law at all.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
It's like when men acknowledge that their friends are sketchy
to women but don't do anything about it.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
You know, Like that's a good comparison.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
I remember, like one of my friends was assaulted by
someone and then their roommate was like, oh, sorry, but
my friend he's a titty grabber when he's drunk.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, You're like, all right, we've determined this man is
a kitty grabber. Should there be consequences?

Speaker 3 (31:43):
Right? Should we have a talk?

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (31:45):
At least?

Speaker 1 (31:45):
Yeah, I know that's international law and palace fine, yeah, yeah,
titty grabbing. The Bureau of Prisons in the US, for example,
says that it is quote it is the responsibility of
the Bureau of Prisons to monitor the health and welfare
of individual inmates and to ensure that procedures are pursued
to preserve life. Which is really funny because I have

(32:07):
a friend who teaches harm reduction and gives it harm
reduction supplies and has had to like go into prisons
and teach guards how to use nelocks own and love
the reverse OD drug, and the prison guards have it
and they just don't use it. They just watch people
die because they're all like, oh, they believe that, you know,

(32:27):
the cops of that we are like folklore that if
you're in the same room as fentanyl and you're already dead,
you know. Yeah, yeah, So the Bureau of Prisons clearly
very committed.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
To Oh yeah, they care about them so much.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
Yeah, of course they do. Yeah. Some hunger strikers go
until they die, some give up. Others like those North
African strikers and the squads of Athens, have their demands met.
And first we're going to talk about the Irish hunger
strike of nineteen eighty one. I have avoided talking about
twenty century Irish history for a reason. The reason is

(33:06):
twentieth century Irish history is messy as fuck. But considering that,
the other thing we're gonna talk about this week is Palestine,
it's just complicated week where yeah, yeah, once Ireland was colonized,
you had really clear good guys and bad guys for
a while, right, Irish was anti colonial, like the Irish
anti colonial uprisings, they were good. England was bad. There's

(33:28):
some blurriness. There's people who mistakenly frame it as a
Catholic versus Protestant think. Solely the Catholic Church was up
to a lot of no good against the Irish Catholics,
and against other people. There were right wing and left
wing tendencies within the different resistance movements. Overall. Ireland good
England bad decent way to frame things. If you don't
want history to condemn your country with blanket statements, don't

(33:51):
be a genocidal colonial power. Until the Irish warfare independence
came to a truce on July eleventh, nineteen twenty one.
The short version of this truce was that basically, there's
the Irish War for Independence was happening, and they were like, fuck,
you get the fuck out of our country, right, and
they were doing all right, And then England was like,
all right, we're offering you a deal. What if most

(34:12):
of Ireland becomes more or less independent, but it's still
a dominion of the UK, and you like, swear fealty
to our monarchy. And then we get a chunk of
northern Ireland and this stays formerly part of the United Kingdom.
And about half the Irish were like, yeah, I could
be done with war. This is really bad and it
keeps fucking killing us, so sure we'll take the deal.

(34:33):
The other half we're like, are you fucking kidding me?
Fuck the monarchy. Also, we get all of Ireland, not
most of Ireland. So they had a civil war, and
the right for wrong gets way blurrier. At this point.
I've got a position in that my family was anti treaty,
which is to say, they fought for a unified Irish Republic.

(34:54):
This was by and large the more lefty side of things,
and the side that I think is better. It's also
the side that lost against a force that now had
the backing of the English Army that they'd just been fighting.
So as soon as Michael Collins and those other focks
were like, well, from my position, those other fucks were like, ah,
we've made a deal with England, they just like turn
around and use fucking England to crush the people they'd

(35:15):
just been fighting alongside of My great uncle, who fought
in the Easter Rising, went to his grave cursing the
name of Michael Collins, the IRA leader who sold out Ireland. Well,
then Irish politics got real fucking messy for basically the
entire twentieth century because you no longer have like now
you have Irish versus Irish right right, and this gets

(35:37):
flattened to Catholic versus Protestant, which is a bit of truth,
but the more accurate sides are loyalists who want Northern
Ireland to remain part of the UK, sometimes called unionists,
and then the nationalists who want Northern Ireland return to
the Republic of Ireland. And by and large the nationalists
are actually socialists and lefty, and actually many of them
were probably internationalists, and by and large the you know,

(36:01):
the other sides more right wing.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
What we were there benefits to be I mean, there
had to have been benefits for being with England, no,
from their perspective.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
I think, and I'm not entirely certain. I think that
there were probably a ton of economic benefits. But also
it was a lot of the people, especially in Northern Ireland,
maybe not the majority, but a lot of the people
were more culturally saw themselves as Anglican, saw themselves as
coming from England. And you also have it like it's
really messy, I mean, partly in that they're all white, right,

(36:34):
so you can't like use like race to distinguish a lot.
Northern Ireland had a higher percentage of people who were
descended from English settlers, right, But people don't make a distinction,
and it's kind of interesting. People don't make a distinction
of someone who has descended from English settlers versus someone
who's like family isn't right, And when they do make

(36:58):
that distinction, it's usually like versus Protestant. Frankly, but again
that's a rude exaggeration. There are a ton of Protestants
who fought for Irish independence, right, But yeah, no, I
actually I should know more about what the like.

Speaker 3 (37:14):
I mean, I thought you should or not, But like,
I mean, it's just it's just pretty shitty to be like, oh, well,
we're gonna fight the person I was just fighting next
to you because of X, Y and Z. Yeah, I
don't know. I mean, this is maybe also silly to
ask or even say out loud. Are there like if

(37:36):
there's no racism involved the color? If the color doesn't
play a factor, do accents play a factor? Like I've like,
you know, how like certain accents indicate you're like from
a shitty part of town quote unquote, or like you're
from this area or whatever. Does that you think play
a factor with English versus Ireland or not? Really?

Speaker 1 (37:54):
I mostly don't know, because I don't know about Northern Ireland,
where most of this tension is happening. I only know
about it as it relates to Ireland as a whole.
You have a lot of oppression against the gel Tech
to the Irish speaking part of Ireland, which is largely
the northwest and the West coast of Ireland. Okay, and
I know that there is a large cultural difference, but

(38:17):
I know more about this in the nineteenth century than
I do in the early twentieth century, just based on
what I've read.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
That's fair. I'm just kind of yeah, no, no, no,
it's yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
I mean because like there's all these times throughout this
where you're going to talk about like people machine gunning
Catholics on the street, and I'm like, how'd they know
they were Catholic?

Speaker 3 (38:33):
Right?

Speaker 1 (38:33):
There probably has some way of knowing it. I just
don't currently know what that way is.

Speaker 3 (38:38):
I don't know if they did, but okay, yeah, right,
like how do you well?

Speaker 1 (38:43):
I mean, it's like if someone's like walking down the
street holding the like, I.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
Don't know unless they're like I'm Catholic, like a sign
or something.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, Like, no, I don't know, And it wasn't a
lot of our listeners do know, because a lot of
our listeners are Irish. So let us know, but let
us know in a polite way instead of what the
fuck is wrong with you? Ay, So in nineteen twenty two,
the Northern Irish government, the brand new government, passes the
Special Powers Act. This is going to be completely unrecognizable

(39:13):
to people who study what's happening in Palestine right now,
where suspects no longer had to be charged with crimes
in order to be arrested.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
Yeah in Ireland.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, in Northern Ireland, which is you know, the other country,
the conflict, the zone.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
Yeah, and so that sounds about right, I mean taking
tips for israel.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
I guess yeah, well it's the way around Israel doesn't
exist at this point.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
Wait, what time are we talking to? Twenty two twenty two? Okay, yes,
I was still I was jumping around in my head.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
No, no, it's okay.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
From bringing me back to that area.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Well, there's going to be like direct overlap later when
I get to the sixties and seventies. But yeah, the
Special Powers Act mean that suspects could be arrested and
flogged without trial. So basically, and the cop is allowed
to beat up anyone they want. They're like, oh, you're
like arrested, not I gonna hit you? Like so Nationalists
got elected in Northern Ireland in nineteen twenty two, and
they're like democratic elections, and the government was like, oh,

(40:11):
never mind about democracy, and so they just redrew all
the lines so that Nationals couldn't get elected, which isn't
familiar in the United States. Loyalists and therefore generally Protestants
were given preferential treatment with housing and jobs and shit.
The ninety percent Protestant cops love beating up Catholics and
we're generally not good. And this goes on and largely

(40:32):
armed resistance takes a back seat for a while. A
couple of the generation or so. Nineteen sixty nine, a
civil rights struggle by the Catholics in Northern Ireland kicks up.
And this is a this is a civil rights struggle.
It's not actually a let's reunite with Ireland struggle. It's
a just like, could you stop please beating us all

(40:53):
up and giving it discriminating against us. And this kicks
off what's known as the Truble, when the British Army
comes and occupies the area and responds to the civil
rights struggle. But you know, I won't give you any trouble.
It's the stuff it's it's buying stuff. It's just like
it's almost like our entire system is set up to

(41:15):
allow you to spend money that you don't even have.
You could go into debt to buy with whatever comes.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
No, it's one thing you can rely on, you know,
just how buying things works. Yeah, good job, that was
a great segway. Good job.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Thanks, There you go and we're back. I am struggling
to come up with a more British word for thirty
year War of occupation than the troubles, Like.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
It makes it sound almost cute and unfortunately like, Oh
I have the I have the sniffles. Oh, I have
the rumbles of my tummy. Yeah, I'm really dying, That's
what it sounds like.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
Yeah, totally a little bit of a rough there as
you're on fire. Yeah. And so soon enough the let's
not like, let's just not get treated like shit campaign
becomes actually let's rejoin Ireland campaign. The IRA the Irish

(42:19):
Republican Army, which was the name of the military force
that won independence from England that came out of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood. They they have split into a million
pieces at this point, including but not limited to the
Real IRA, the Official IRA, the Provisional IRA, and the
National Liberation Irish National Liberation Army. Most of these groups

(42:43):
are socialists, but they disagree about things that I'm sure
seemed important at the time. Sometimes they shoot each other
over these things. And they and a bunch of other
folks are now attacking and have been, but are now
especially they're attacking British occupiers, and they're attacking loyalists and
their riots, and there's lots of terrorist attacks on both sides.

(43:07):
More than half the people killed and the whole mess
were civilians fifty two percent of the people killed in
the troubles, which is part of why like, like, I
don't have like a lot of communication Irish family, but
they like overall were like, man, we don't want to
talk about politics. This is like what you know, because
you're like, this is just a bad thing that happened.
Right to a lot of people's perspective. A majority of

(43:28):
the civilians killed in the troubles were killed by loyalist
paramilitaries like the Ulster Volunteer Force the UVF, or by
British soldiers, but the IRA absolutely killed a lot of
civilians too. The Republican side killed more Republican fighters than
their enemies did, which is kind of bad, right, Why

(43:49):
is that in fighting? Oh? Just where the real IRA
it's in our name, or where the official IRA, well
where the provisional provisional doesn't actually sound as like tough.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Honestly, like the most childish bullshit. But also like with guns,
it's like you're at recess but with weapons, you know
what I mean.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Like, it's no, totally I don't know, but I will
say I was talking to my friends about this before
we recorded. I don't think that they are to blame entirely.
I think England put them in this position. Like people
talk about.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
Life, I'm just mad about fighting in job, Yeah, telling anyone,
I'm just thinking, Yeah, fighting is actually pretty silly when
you think about it.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
Yeah, a lot of times, especially on your own fucking side,
people talk about crabs in a bucket pulling each other down, right,
and they'll be like, oh, it's human nature. Crabs in
a bucket always pulling each other down. The bucket is
not the crab's natural habitat. That's a very good point,
and I don't know if the other side started it, though,

(44:52):
is a decent excuse for all of the killing that
included a lot of civilians. But the terrorism and civilian
murders started the Ulcer Volunteer Force, the loyalist paramilitary group,
whom they just started bombing Catholic homes and schools and
shooting random Catholics on the street. That's what kicked off
this violence. So in nineteen seventy one, the British Army

(45:15):
conducted Operation Demetrius, which swept up three hundred and forty
two people suspected of involvement in the IRA. A lot
of the people that they swept up had long since
retired from the IRA or had never been involved at all.
They also swept up a bunch of the civil rights
leaders who had no ties to any violence or even nationalism.
And of course, even though the UVF was actually killing

(45:37):
way more civilians and had started it, none of the
UVF was targeted by this sweep because it's not that
the British government disapproved of terrorist violence, it's that they
disapproved of terrorist violence against the British government, and this
only escalated the sectarian violence. When all these people got arrested,
folks weren't actually accused of any crime. This wasn't imprisonment

(45:59):
it was in tournament and thousands of people were interred
as a result of this. In nineteen seventy two, you
get the thing that caused you two to write the
only good song that they wrote, which I don't even
know if they wrote, but they play.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
You're gonna have to tell me you chose something that
I purposely know nothing about.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Great. Yeah, My main, my main thing that I know
about you too is that they snuck that album on
everybody's phone.

Speaker 3 (46:26):
That's all. That's the only thing I know and want
to know.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Unfortunately, and Bono wear sunglasses all the time and.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
He likes things. He's like saving the world, but he's
actually just a liberal pon. Yeah. No, but they were
a song called blood or they play I don't know
wrote I didn't look it up. They have a song
called Bloody Sunday. A thing happened in nineteen seventy two
that's called Bloody Sunday. And there was a protest march.
You know, got all this paramilitary stuff happening in the
IRA fighting all like that. There was also just social

(46:53):
movements with thousands and thousands of people who were fighting
but through less clandestine means, and most of this was
organized or a lot of this. This particular march we're
going to talk about was organized by the Northern Ireland
Civil Rights Association NICRA and it was a big, peaceful,
unarmed march in the city of Derry. Darry was a
majority Catholic and it was majority Nationalist. But so because

(47:17):
it was Catholic, it had been cut out of public funding.
The roads were like fucking gone to shit, and it
was basically being like economically mistreated by the loyalist government.
So there was a protest march. The Prime Minister was like, no,
you can't have a march, and people were like, why
would I care what you have to say about that,

(47:37):
We're going to have a march. Ten or fifteen thousand
people marched. The occupying army started by shooting rubber bullets
and tear gas, so people started throwing rocks at the army.
The army opened fire. They shot twenty six people, many
of whom were running away or were rendering aid. Every
eye witness besides the soldiers attest to this. The soldiers

(47:58):
were like, no, we only shot people who were throwing
nail bombs at us, even though there was no evidence
of that.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
I mean, that's classic what you say, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, rocks,
Yeah yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
That person threw a rock in my general direction, so
I shot his mother.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yes exactly. Oh, okay, and that's in that case, that's
totally fair.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah yeah. Is that man's fault for throwing the rock.
At least one soldier was seen shooting randomly into the crowd,
firing from the hip. Fourteen people, all Catholics, were killed.
All of them were unarmed, Six of them were boys.
One was a fifty nine year old man who hadn't

(48:40):
been part of the march. He'd just been walking through
the neighborhood and he died from his wounds a few
days later. This wasn't even the only massacre the British
Army did in Northern Ireland this year. Tens of thousands
of people came to the funeral. In the nearby country
of Actual Ireland. They held a day of mourning with
Saramon's held at both Catholic and Protestant churches, because again,

(49:05):
I mean, religion is part of it, but it's not
the whole fucking thing, like people want us to believe.
The largest general strike that Europe had ever seen since
the since World War Two, happened. As a result of this,
thousands of people marched to the British Embassy in Dublin
and they protested with a very respectable diversity of tactics.
Some people non violently placed thirteen coffins on the steps
of the British embassy. Other people burned the embassy down.

(49:30):
Both acceptable, I think, I agree. Diversity of tactics makes it.

Speaker 3 (49:34):
Honestly and both extremely symbolic and poetic. I will go
I'll go that far. I think those are chef's kiss
if you can let me say that.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, No, both of those are great. I
fully support the one conclusion that came out of Bloody
Sunday for the Irish of the Republic of Ireland and
for the nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was pretty much
that the I that paramilitary force was legitimate and that
it was a war against colonial occupation in Northern Ireland.

(50:07):
And so the IRA sees itself as a legitimate army.
It does not see itself as like, well doesn't see
itself as terrorists. It sees itself as an army.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
Well, of course it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
Yeah, No, they think that they had a good reason
to believe what they believed, and I overall agree with them.
I also don't like when armies target civilians, but yeah,
it doesn't make them not an army.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
Yeah, also does that make them not terrorists?

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Right totally? But yeah, I mean both can be true. Yeah,
fucking these words are anyway. So things are heating up.
The interred prisoners. They're actually given for a while something
called special category status, which is basically prisoner of war status,
and so the Geneva Can Conventions applied to them. And

(50:55):
how the IRA won that status for themselves was force
of arms. It was a precondition for any discussion of
a truce, right. The government's like, oh, let's like figure
this out, and they were like, you better treat our
arrested people like prisoners of war before we'll even talk
about coming to the table with you. So for a
little while you had that, and you had we'll talk

(51:16):
a little bit more about what that meant a little bit.
But a few years later the UK was like, eh,
what if we stop treating them special We're like UK
and they're just fucking Ireland. Fuck them. In nineteen seventy six,
a fucking baron named Merlin, because the United Kingdom is
a fantasy land.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
Sorry one more time, just for emphasis.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
Yeah, this man his name, he was a baron named Merlin.
Got it spelled a little y instead of an eye.
Of course it is what was I think? Yeah, it's
completely different, so Baron Merlin ash.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
Yeah, he's unique.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
Yeah, he rolled away the rock from his grave. I
don't remember enough about what happened to Merlin. I think
he ended up with a rock in front of his grave.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
His name was Merlin.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yeah, okay, he announces no more special category status. Prisoners
are just fucking prisoners. They will have to wear prison
clothes and do prison labor and shit. And by the way,
the name of the prison was Her Majesty's Prison Maze.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
No it wasn't.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
It absolutely was. There was a nearby town called Maze,
right but like ms Yeah, no, no wise in here,
so not corn, not corn like the trap.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
So yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
So there's basically a minotaur in her center of Her
Majesty's Prison Maze.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
And it's a lot. Sorry, this is just the most
British thing I've ever heard of my life. You know,
the troubles Her Majesty's Prison mays where Baron Merlin has changed.
If it wasn't so fucked up. It would be like,
actually hilarious, Loki still is I know because we can
see it like say it in retrospect.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
But like, come on, yeah, Like if you're going to
be the prison in the town of Maze, just be
like Maze's Prison or something. Don't be prison Maze and
don't be her Majesty's Prison. Mays No, unless you have
a minotaur, then you can call it that.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
Honestly, Okay, maybe this is crude, but it could be
sexual to her Majesty's Prison Maze, like that could be
some there's something there. I have it fleshed out completely,
but I think there's something there.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
Anyway I do, we'll have new merch.

Speaker 3 (53:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
And so this change of status to where people were
now being treated like regular prisoners, it didn't make people happy.
And to be clear, actually several times throughout what's going
to happen, the prisoners were like, it's not that we
want to be treated better than the other prisoners. You
should treat them well too, What the fuck is wrong
with you? But this change of status, it didn't make
people happy, and it didn't strip the status from previous intorneys,

(54:09):
but it fucked with all the new kids who did
something about it, which I'm gonna tell you about on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
A maze can be a bush, right, you can.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Have a bush may Oh, okay, I see where you're going.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I'm not anyway. Is that the Yeah?
What what you got?

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Besides?

Speaker 3 (54:35):
Uh, I am I'm one of the rotating hosts on
it could happen here, but the rest of them are
are fairly talented and phenomenal doing great work. So go
listen to that. I have my own podcast called Ethnically
Ambiguous that I host with on a hose Nea and

(54:56):
the rest of the stuff. You can google if you
want to, but you don't have to. You can follow
me on social if you want. Shiro Hero instagram' sure
a hero sixty six to six on Twitter, but I'm
actually not there anymore, so maybe you can encourage me
to be there. I would never encourage to Twitter on Twitter? Now, Okay? Great?

Speaker 1 (55:13):
I mean on X.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
On X.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
God kill me. We thought Meadow was bad, you know,
we thought threat whatever X. Yeah, it's like Merlin, that's
you know what I mean? Like this, it's just as
nerdy as being.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
I think it is less respectable than Merlin.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
I agree, at least Merlin hunt magic.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
I know, wasn't that cutemated King Arthur that I watched
as a kid. Yeah, and his hat with all flopping yeah. Yeah,
And if you want to see me, probably not dressed
up like a wizard. I will be tabling, presenting, and
playing at the Asheville Anarchist Book Fair, which is or
it's called the Another Carolina Anarchist Book Fair because people

(55:55):
are trying to make I mean, have successfully made clever
acab puns. And that is August ninth through thirteenth of
twenty twenty three in Asheville, North Carolina. I will be
presenting a talk called a Halfway Concise History of Anarchism.
So if you like listening to me talk about history,
which you probably do if you made it this far,

(56:16):
unless you're hate listening, in which case please don't come
to my event, but keep listening for the numbers like yeah,
totally set up a little machine that downloads it ever anyway,
And then I'll be playing with my dark pop band
solo project called Nomadic War Machine on Saturday night, so

(56:36):
I will exist. I'm doing all of my socializing for
the year in two.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Days, right, Yeah, just knock it out. Yeah, get it down,
then just stay home.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Back to my house in the mountains as soon as
it's over. Just kidding.

Speaker 3 (56:49):
I can't wait to see you while there. Cut it out, Ian, right,
you could just cut the other part Outquin.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Sophie.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
When you gotta plug, I just fall at cool zone
media while you still can.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
Yet, I think I'm gonna not switch to another social media.
I think I'm just gonna.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Here's what's here's what I find so creepy about it.
I was like, let me go see what this app is,
and it automatically enrolls you.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Yeah, I did the same thing I had to, and
so I don't.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
I don't I like technically have an account, but I don't,
but I didn't want to. And then it does this
weird thing where it like brands you and puts your
like user bar code, like not bar like user number
code on your Instagram profile. And it took me a
really long time to figure out how to remove.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
That, but I did.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Wait, yeah, so if you yeah, so if you look
at like, if you accidentally have threads, it's gonna put
this weird code thing on. I'm ready.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
That's so stupid.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
On your Instagram and I I thought that was really creepy.

Speaker 3 (58:01):
Far more people than I thought were on there, to
be honest, and I was like, oh, and also automatic, because.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
It automatically enrolls you is the problem.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
Yeah, that's true. That's actually very true.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
And then it does that weird thing where it puts
that code on your Instagram profile, which I find to
be really weird to know. I am not on threads yet,
but I am on threads, but I'm not on threads.
And that's all I have to say about threads. We'll
be back, motherfuckers. Sorry, I love you.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
Bye.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
I got what podcast I was on? Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.