It Could Happen Here Weekly 73

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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 compilation 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 got to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions. The sun never sets

(00:27):
on the British Empire because God doesn't trust the British
in the dark. Welcome to It could happen here a
podcast at hold. So the only good American tradition is
rebellion against the British. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and
today we're gonna be talking about the happenings in their
perfidious Albion. Joining me live from one of the most
accursed states currently in existence is Sophie from Mars, the

(00:50):
co host of Red Planet a week you Leftist Brown Table,
who does many other wonderful things that involve anarchism and
organizing and stuff. Sophie, how how are you? How are
you hanging in there in this sort of incusingly failed
state in the very good. That was a very good introduction.
I do think that Britain is largely out of God's
sight and by consequence, outside of his love. So I

(01:12):
think he summed it up pretty well. I mean, I'm okay.
I had an experience to minor hate crime today, so
it's another normal day of being a trans person in
the UK. Some guy tried to film me on his
phone and I was like, hey, I can see that
you're filming me, and he didn't like argue you and
be like no I wasn't, so I know that he was.
It was very cool. Yeah, yeah, Turf Turf Island continues

(01:33):
to be incredibly normal. And by incredible normal, I mean this. Look.
Look at the at the end of World War Two,
lots of states were divided into pieces. The UK should
have been one of them. I hold, but on it now,
Oh that's true. I mean trans people, we are working
on destroying of the Union. Yeah, this is this is
all bad. It created incredible stuff coming. I really thought

(01:57):
it was going to be Brexit, that that final we destroyed.
He had a kingdom and of trans people that finally
did it. Truly incredible stuff. So you want to ask
me what it's like to be British, you know, Okay,
So I well, I mean, should we both do like
accents for this one? Should we should we both feel like,

(02:19):
oh my governor, let's rumphy, So what eo pie and
smashed peas? Oh okay? So I okay. You know, I
spent some time looking at like sort of British export
charts and like as much stuff in the British economy,

(02:40):
and none of them at any point had Britain's chief export,
which is jokes about Britain. No I no, no, no,
wondering your economies and shamboos. Export is like white supremacist
war crimes. That's true. But the thing is like they're
they're they're the UKs of like ability to export white
supremacist war crimes is at an all time low. It's

(03:00):
kind of like it. It's really funny. I was in Armenia,
like fairly recently for sagery, and I went to a
talk by someone who like used to work in DC
and I worked with the Armenian government, and they were
talking about like how what kind of external support they
could expect for like the conflict without as a baishan,
and someone brought up Britain and he was just like,

(03:20):
Britain's not really a player on the international stage any Yeah,
it's it's not that funny, but it's kind of like
a sign of what the UK actually is now, which
is since you also at eleven, the British were like
one of the first people who decided they were going
to bomb Godoffy. But the problem is the British, the

(03:40):
British like air Force was capable of dropping of doing
like maybe like three or four bombing runs before they
just straight up ran out of fuel. And the whole
thing was like they like they had to draw the
U West in because the British no longer like had
they had like actual build chair capability to do imperialism anymore.
So I think things are think think things are not
great in the in the sort of white supremacy factory.

(04:02):
We really we have reached like a really bizarre point
where our ruling class is divided. Like um, the whole
story of like the Dullest Brothers and the creation of
the CIA is like we are going through that inner
of us at this point. But we've had one of
the most interventionist histories of any country ever and now
our ruling class is divided between we should carry on
doing interventionism because it benefits us to be the worst,

(04:25):
most ghoulish, vampiric country conceivable, and we shouldn't do that
because it costs money. And why are we spending money
on brown people? Yeah, which just two terrible possessions, baffling out. Yeah,
it's it's fun, it's it's it's it's a good time
in the UK. So, you know, speaking of speaking of
it being a good time with the UK, I so

(04:46):
I saw, I've seen this before and I didn't like,
I didn't quite believe it. And I look at the
numbers and we were talking about this a bit before
we got on, but it looks like the UK right
now is pet projected economic performance is worse than Rusha's,
which is incredible because that is a country that is
like under just unbelievably debilitating sanctions and is also like
losing a war. And the UK's economy is more fucked

(05:09):
than a country that he's being shot with missiles. Like wow,
I mean we are we we are also losing a war,
but it's it's a war of ideas, that's true. So yeah,
I think I think we should probably when when When
When when we last left the United Kingdom on this show.
I think it was I think Liz Trust had just

(05:33):
been overthrown and we were now on UK is no
one what their second consecutive unelected prime minister? So no, no, Mia,
Mia a second consecutive Oh no, right, because I never no, no, no,
no no. They elected Boris Johnson. Right, So this is
this is a good place to stop. This is a
really good place to stop. Since Tony Blair, we haven't

(05:56):
had a Prime minister who we elected to into power
like no, sorry, since David Cameron. We did actually elect
David Cameron, but kind but only kind of like kind
of maybe so like we had we had Blair, who
is terrible and is worth getting into for a whole
discussion in a minute. And then we had Brown who
was his chancellor so kind of like vice president who

(06:18):
stepped in and then he lost to Cameron. Only Cameron
like had a coalition. That's why I say it's like
it's kind of yeah, he had the Lib Dem thing,
and the Lib Dems decided to literally go back and
everything that's ever done and the main so the main
thing that was happening with the Lib Dems was they
promised to protect student loan prices from going up, and

(06:39):
like they had got massive support from young people and
anyone who can see why it's good to be able
to offer young people an education, especially because like Blair
had this big famous speech where he was like education, education, education,
that's my excellent Tony Blair impression. Um he um. And
and that's also worth getting into as a it's a

(07:01):
very multifaceted level of parasitic fuckery his whole education thing.
But because he had focused on education, loads of people
were really passionate about it. And then the Lib Dems
were like, we're going to stop them from making university
fees nine thousand pounds a year, and that was what
got the Lib Dems an enormous amount of the vote,
and then they made a coalition with the Tories and

(07:23):
then immediately went back on it and made it. And
that's why my student loans are ridiculous. Even though I
dropped out, My student loans are higher than my partners
and I dropped out in my second year and she
dropped out after doing like six years of the same
degree because she had the lower fee, but I am.

(07:43):
So then there was Cameron again, but without the lib
Dems because everyone's sick of them, a no onimal level
of them. Ever, again, the lib Dems are just a
funny side story. There are lots of like funny and
cringe side stories in British electoral politics, where like it
doesn't matter that much because they'll never get into power,
but like the succession of absolute like clowns who've been

(08:04):
in charge of this party or that party just is
really funny. Like the lib Dems have had a homophobe,
but they had Nick Klagg. Then they had a homophobe
who said that being gay was a sin, and they
had someone called Joe what she called Swanson, Yeah, I
think I think that's sw Swinson something like this, and
she started talking this incredible like neoliberal like if you've
ever seen the thick of it, like shed She sounded

(08:27):
like a character from the thick of it. She was
talking about like people having skills, wallets and shit like this.
She also, I think killed a squirrel. There was a
whole thing about that. Boy. Then you know, analogously, there's
like the Communist Party of Great Britain, which I hope
to get into elated because that is a fascinating story.
But anyway, the Tory party is the one that matters

(08:47):
the most for now. So we had Cameron, then who
do we have Theresa May? Because Cameron bet big on
us not voting for Brexit, and then Nigel Farage and
Boris Johnson et cetera came in and were like save
the NHS migrants blah blah blah, and then we voted
for Brexit. So then we had Theresa May by default
because Cameron had left. So this is what I mean that,

(09:08):
like the Tory potty has this ongoing strategy of just
like swapping someone in and then like calling a general
election really soon afterwards, and the incumbent's gonna win. So
it's like, I don't consider that to be like someone
winning an election if they're already in through rap fockery.
Although I feel I feel like it's it's still slow.
At least there was an election for them, which is

(09:29):
more of what's happening now. Yeah, it's it's definitely devolved,
like it's definitely gotten worse, but like I think we're
on like the seventh by my account, But like, yeah,
it was like Cameron, then then May, then Boris Johnson
and then sorry, yes bars Johnson and then Liz Trust

(09:51):
and now it's uh Sunac, because like, can I get
them the wrong way around anyway? Nonac literally didn't have
an opposition in the Tory Party leadership election, like he
won by default. It's that That's how dire it's gotten.
Like they wanted Boris Johnson to come back and try again,
and he decided he wasn't going to bother and because

(10:13):
of that, there was no one to run against Sunac,
so he just won by default. Stuff. Yeah and okay,
so and Sunac's the fascinating character as well, because like
he is incredibly green and I don't mean environmentalists, I
mean like he knows fucking nothing and he's currently going
through this like there's there was a measurable phenomenon with

(10:33):
David Cameron where he was really naive and he went
through the neoliberal thing of being like I'm going to
cut the red tape. Oh no, that's not working. I
need massively authoritarian policies. Oh no, that's not working. Maybe
this is a flawed ideology and just like just towards
the end of his term he was like, maybe this
isn't working, and then they get rid of him. Sunac
is currently like very firmly in the stage of like

(10:55):
trying to do as much libertarianism as possible and realizing
that the state can only do libertarianism if they also
as authoritarian as possible. Yeah, and I think, you know,
I was going to get this in a bit, but
I think that there's a couple of things have been
happening simultaneously. One is that like, okay, so we had
there there there there was. There was the incredibly brief

(11:15):
phenomenon of trusts an omics of like there are the
British is attempt to like like actually really sort of
I don't even know it's like because because British politics
is always neoliberal, but like, dude, dude, do do a
kind of neoliberalism that like no, no nobody has seen

(11:36):
since Like I saw people conscribing it as like trying
to do reagan Omics about the dollar. But I think
it's actually stupider than that, because like eight, there are
there aren't places where you could conceivably pull off reagan
Omics about the dollar, right, but like you have to
have like kind of an economy, which is the thing
the UK no longer has after they shot themselves in

(11:57):
the foot, Like one thousand times with Bregsit. Yeah, um,
let's trust published like a plan for what she was
gonna do in terms of economic reforms, and it crashed
the pound unbelievably, like just just like people not even
the plan, like not even the policies being implemented. People
sold the plan and the pound like hobbed in value overnight. Yeah,

(12:19):
And like I there is stuff that I have seen,
like like in the wake of trusts anomics and in
the wake of like sort of rec stuartrac attempting to
piece together like even sort of functional government that like
I never thought I would see, Like I I mean,
I guess I had seen the IMF saying hold on,
you have to stop doing lesterity before, but like I

(12:41):
didn't think i'd see that for the about the UK. No,
it's pretty impressive. Yeah. Like the other thing that I've
seen that's just genuinely like I can't believe is I've
seen mainstream newspaper outlets pretty things about the economy that
you were just not allowed to say. Like I have
seen mainstream newspapers admit that economic growth was actually better

(13:02):
in the inflation racked in class war torn seventies, and
it is now which is like that is like this
single thing you were not allowed to say at all
of economics because if if you, if, if you actually
pull out the growth rate chart and point out that
economic growth was actually better in the seventies and it
wasn't any successive decade. I everyone immediately shoots you because
that because you know you can prove and what you

(13:22):
can prove in one chart that doesn't order in the
media class in the UK. And you point out that,
like the seventies was by any metric better than now,
you are no longer invited to the eyes wide shot
potties where you can like suck and fuck Boss Johnson,
and that is like the highest privilege in British society.
So you obviously want that. Yeah you can, you can,
you can, you can no longer fuck the pig. I

(13:43):
think things of this nature because bed Room quickly was
interviewed and he it was like front page kiss Tama
saying I would kiss a Tori, and I just shed it,
being like, look, we already know David Cameron fucked a pig.
Yeah god Sama saying he would kiss the Tory is
just yeah, that's just a cherry on top. Yeah, So okay,

(14:06):
I want to ask a little bit about what is
going on in the in the in the British economy,
because I have spent some time attempting to figure out
what the fuck even is the British economy and as
as as best I've been able to determine, it produces, okay,
produces financial quote unquote financial services, which seems to be
the UK sort of polite euphanism for doing money laundering

(14:26):
for like both the regular bourdoisie and for this enormous
class of like kleptocrats and petrol oligarchs who like get
their money by extracting it directly from the state. Yeah. Um,
it seems like that. It seems like you have that layer,
you're the layer below them, who are just like somehow
more landlords per capita than exists in like any other
place that has ever existed. And then below that there's

(14:48):
this quote unquote service economy thing. Yeah. I think you're
getting it. I think you're pretty much getting it. I think, okay,
there are two sides to British politics. This this economic
one that you're pointing out, which is, like, let me
put a pin in the economics right that the economy
of the UK is unbelievable and if we'll get to
it in a second. And then there's the like the

(15:09):
the electoral politics that they try to like that is
just a fast to try to like keep people from
ever looking too closely at the economics, like ever looking
with a sensible lens of the economics. The electoral politics
is just like eternal war on a set of marginalized communities,
young people, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, sex workers, trans people,

(15:34):
black and minority ethic Britain's the GT community travelers enormously
Like that was something that like a lot of people
thought that like New Labor under Blair was like so
progressive and was like ending races. It was a big
like Obama adjacent moment for us and like, but they
were horribly racist to travelers and that's escalated in recent

(15:55):
years to like if people are familiar with the police
Crimes Sentencing in Courts bill, like that got somewhat defanged,
but like one of the worst parts of the bill
still got through was just like ending the right to Rome,
which is effectively just a genocide against travelers. YEA. When
I mentioned sex workers, like a lot of British sex
workers are pushing for any kind of legal reform that

(16:16):
would be better. But like our most progressive politician like
Jeremy Corbyn literally like still supports the Nordic model like
it's um, it's a nightmare. Um. Socially, the political side
of that, the social side of the politics in the
UK is just war on as I say, like dividing
up the entire population into marginalized groups forever eternally, like

(16:40):
saving this idea of like the blue collar working class
white man who also earns like eighty thousand pounds a year,
and and that's the that's the ideal voter, even though
that's no one. Um. And then there's the economics. Okay,
so the and all of that is a smoke screen
for the economics. So like you said, um, lowest level,

(17:01):
there's the service economy, because we, like the rest of
the Imperial Corps, exported all our industrial stuff to the
imperial periphery. When our industrial sectors got unionized, we are
now a service economy. So practically all jobs in the
UK are poor people providing some kind of service for
rich people. Um. Then like you say, there's the landlords

(17:24):
above that we have we have a wild time with landlords,
and that there is there is a plus sight to that,
which is that that like our tenants unions are fantastic,
Like we have we have such a boom in tenants unions.
I've been interviewing activists and organizers for a couple of
years now, and in the US, you guys are doing
okay with tenants unions. You've got a bigger challenge because

(17:46):
pop shop with guns to evict people. So that is like,
that is a crazy time. But like we have such bigger,
stronger tenants unions and like I think the possibility of
something like a full scale rent strike happening in the
UK is actually pretty like pretty feasible. Um, the US
just don't like get that shit. Like I I had
when back back, back, back back when, back when I

(18:08):
was an incredibly naive youth. Most in the DSA we
had an entire like massive battle in my chapter about
whether about whether we should do tennis organizing, and I
was on the side of, well, yeah, obviously we should,
we should do. I'm like I had one of the
fucking Chicago DSA leadership people like in in this meeting
said to my face and I quote, how how does
building tennis unions build working class power. What what these

(18:33):
people are? Clowns absolute clowns. I just like every every
every time they walk down the street, their giant noses
go hog like a clown. I'm not I'm not gonna
be in. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna engage in
anti clowns flan here. I I do not. I think
it's very unfair on clowns to get fathom to the DS.
That's true. That's um I got. That's soling Paradise where

(18:56):
she says like, I don't want to be the head
of the local D say chapter, I just want to
be on the Digimon the movie soundtrack. I'm like, fuck yes,
okay speak speaking of the Digimon the Movie soundtrack, very nice,
very nice. Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe we'll get sponsored
by by by Digimon the movie. That was Maybe that

(19:17):
hasn't add for Digimon the movie. Yeah, yeah, I hope
it's it's gonna be fucking gold again or like we're
please okay, just like once again, other we have talked
about this on multiple shows. Now please stop dmning other
Sophie about about about the stupid gold ads. We know
they're there. Which way, Yeah, dope, buy gold. Yeah, and

(19:43):
we're back. I hope you would. I hope, I hope
you now went to digimond Uh. They got they they
got little monsters to turn into things with giant guns
bombed with digimon. The movie ADS has reshaped your brain
to the high consciousness digimon consciousness. Um, let's talk about
financial services. You mentioned this very briefly, but this is

(20:05):
actually so like, Okay, most people in the UK working
in like fucking Uber or like deliveru or some other
nightmarish service sector job. Then there's the petty bourgeois who
are so overwhelmingly landlords now and then and then there

(20:26):
are mega landlords. We have a ton of like mega
landlords who. Something really insidious about that, by the way,
is that we have a lot of like housing associations
that have claimed to be like for the good of
the tenant and claimed to be like socially progressive trying
to help people out, and they actually own like thousands
of properties, and like there are people with like through
the Tenants Union. My partner knows someone who it was

(20:47):
like raining in her flat because the leaks were so bad.
It was like rain indoors and she had like black
mold and then off her lights are working and that
was like that was a housing association. They are some
of the worst landlords. And then above them, the UK
is running one of the biggest money laundering operations in
the world, maybe the biggest I think it's don't I

(21:10):
don't know, like maybe maybe I don't. I don't even
I don't even think like the Cayman Islands or like
or the Bahamas have like that kind of like or
Panama has that kind of through points. No, we're really
familiar with like Switzerland and like you say, Panama and
the Cayman Islands, and some people are somewhat familiar with
island as being like tax havens. Yeah, but like none

(21:30):
of these actually compare to Britain because Britain like sport
all of these relationships with the entire world because it
invaded them and now it has those like the British
Empire ended in name and legal function, but did not
end in terms of financial services. Like that is our
that is our grip on power is like that we yeah,

(21:52):
we just launder a bunch of rich people's money. Um.
There's a great documentary called The Spider's Web which talks
about this and like the head of her majesty is oh,
I guess it's his majesty now the king just taking
this opportunity to say fuck the king. Um HMRC. Anyway,
the head of HMRC like literally just works for the

(22:13):
money launderers, like the people who are just trying to
bring through like billions of dollars to launder. Um. Yeah.
Like when I say about like the rest of our
politics being a smokescreen, it's because like this is everything
for the British ruling class, Like it's all about them
trying to lawn the money. And like I think that

(22:33):
like the the recent rise in like far right populism
or attempt at that in the UK, which by the way,
I don't think it's going as well as they wish
it was anymore. But like well because they did, because
they did briggs In it turns out Bridge it was
really bad idea. Yeah, Like I remember there was something
for a while a while ago, I was in some
forum thread where they were just put posting like Trump

(22:55):
supporters realized they're going to die because of Trump. Um.
It's a very similar phenomenon in the UK. Like you,
there's a lot of and I don't really delight in
it because it's just it's just like looking a lot
of working class, working class people suffering. Um. But there
is a very like, very obvious and noticeable trend of
like people who voted for Brexit realizing that it's completely
fucked everything about their life. Um. But when there was

(23:19):
this attempt at like raising far right um like false
class consciousness in a very Trumpian way, Um, that was
all like a very big attempt at the smoke screen
because like if there's have you ever seen Johnny English,
there's this fucking Rowan Atkinson film where he like is
a he winds up being like a spy. And the

(23:43):
villain in that film is French of course, because you
know the French so evil compared to Britain, I guess
and so on. Um, and uh, that guy who's played
by John Malkovich wants to get the British throne and
then sell Britain to private investors to turn the entire

(24:04):
island into a prison. And it created modern Britain. Yeah,
it's just outlining modern British politics. Yeah. So so like
in terms of social policy, like it would suit the
ruling class of Britain very very nicely. If Britain was
just one big jail because like they are only inconvenience

(24:29):
by having to cater to any kind of population. Like
if the British population just all died, the Tories would
be having such a good time, Like they would fucking
love it if there was absolutely no one to govern
over and Britain could just like on paper, have a
population of sixty million and then they could use that
for the money laundering. Yeah, but actually you go here

(24:49):
and it's just a complete like ghost island, like that
everyone is gone. Yeah, I mean it is that. It's
just it is just for money laundering. Like I think
the London Stock Exchange just the oldest stock exchange. I think,
I'm not sure, but like obviously it's had a long
time to develop and like it's yeah, the the U.
There is more fiscal capital or marks would have called

(25:12):
fictitious capital in the world now than there is like
real capital or financial capital. Um. And yeah, a huge
amount of it goes through the London Stock Exchange um
and through like yeah, through through the services of of
HMAC and through like the various schemes that it's really funny.

(25:33):
I had to um, I had to this. I don't
think this is like as insidious sounds. But I was
filling up my tax return recently and there was a
there was a question that MS like just straight basically
asked like have you participated in one or more tax
avoidance schemes? And I was like, this is a normal country.
This is a this is a really normal, normal country,

(25:56):
Like they just asked you. And like when when my
partner I saw this, because she was filling out hers,
she was like, is this just a trick question to
get you to like dob yourself into the cops. And
I was like, no, No, this is a this is
a normal question in case you are a very very
rich person who has engaged in a tax away and
you want to just report that and then the hust
will be like, cool, good job avoiding paying taxes. You

(26:22):
know when I always sort of like running through my
research for this, I remember to David Graver quote about
the British economy where he said something to the effect
of the United kingdoms chief product is the facility of
its working class, which is what allows oligarchs to just
like put their money there because they know that they're
gonna have a butler or no one's ever going to

(26:42):
steal it. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, the sort of
other side of of the graver in the UK arc is,
you know, towards the end of his life, like he
starts writing a lot about the revolt of the carrying
classes and about this sort of like he was talking
about he was talking about stuff that was happening like
Chosen eighteen nineteen. Yeah, a lot about like but the

(27:07):
shot actually too, because there's a lot of uh and
he was directly involved in some organizing and stuff the IMF.
Yeah yeah, but you know it was interesting to me
about this is like, oh, I don't want to let
it go by without saying the IMF must be destroyed
at all costs. Oh, yes, policy I have about the
like yeah, the actually demonic, real demons exist and they

(27:31):
called the International Monetary Fund. Yeah. I talked about this
in my Neoliberalism episode. And this is another sort of
grape barism thing, right, is the sort of being at
tuned to the fact that all of this sort of
like red tape cutting bullshit is actually just a smoke
screen for an incredibly sort of unbelievably violent or impressive
bureaucracy and the sort of the global wing of the
violent or impressive bureaucracy is the IMF. Yeah, and well

(27:54):
it's a really weird what I was saying before about
like Cameron realizing that neoliberalism doesn't work towards the end
of the time that he was in office, Like what
I'm referring to is that he wrote a letter to
his constituency, to his local council that he's supposed to represent,
and he said that like they'd been complaining that they
didn't have the money to do the things they needed
to do, and he was like, well, you should just

(28:14):
cut out the red tape, Like you should just clear
out the back room bureaucracy. That's the thing that's costing
you all the money. And I think with sometimes to
reflect on this, where I think he gets that idea
from is that he's seen how well it works for
the for the ruling class. He's like, the more red
tape we cut, the more we get rid of regulations,
the more money we make. And so he's like, that
is simple. Then minus red tape equals more money. And

(28:37):
they replied to him like, what the fuck are you
talking about. There is no back room bureaucracy. You cut
our budget with austerity policies. That's why there's no money.
And he was like, oh fuck, Like yeah, well, and
I you know this, this this seems to have like

(28:59):
escalated to levels the UK that are like sort of
genuinely catastrophic. I mean, you know, one thing I've sort
of been quietly going on is like the sort of
quiet privatization of the NHS. Yeah, which is yeah, the
aliens is the National Health Service or is trans people
call it a no healthcare service. I haven't had that
one before. That's very good. Yeah, but you know, okay,

(29:21):
but I'm currently a good demonstration of that. Actually, I
am currently trying to get onto the pilot scheme trans Plus,
which basically gets you to the end of the waiting list.
And if they if the pilot scheme goes well, hopefully
we'll we'll be getting rid of the hopefully, like this
is the good alternative, right And to get onto it,
I need to get my referral, which my GP told

(29:42):
me they did but didn't do. So to do that,
I need to get my current QP to write the
referral to the GIC and include a note that says
this was meant to be done in August twenty twenty
and to do that. I called up the GP office
the other day and they said I was on the
phone with the GP and I said, go to the
GICs web site, click on if the section that says
you know you're a GP and you're looking to refer

(30:03):
a patient. And she was like, oh, I can't do
that because of our computer systems. So what I'm going
to need you to do is go to the website
yourself and click on the thing that says you're a
GP even though you're not, and download that form and
then email it to our office and then call the
office and then get them to make the referral. This

(30:25):
is the good alternative. This is the good alternative compared
to just waiting for like fifteen years and then killing myself.
This is the good option for healthcare on for trans
people in the UK right now. Yeah, it's a yeah
like as as as as as as like shitty as
American trans health care is a lot of the time,
it is somehow well okay, unless you're in a place

(30:46):
that has made it illegal now, which is fun. It's
it's a lot less fucked than the UK's I really
thought we were. We were like outdoing the GOP states.
Like for for just a second there we were like
inching ahead and how much our country hates trans people,
and then like all these bands came out that were
just like taking trans kids away from their parents or whatever. Yeah,

(31:07):
it's like, okay, they clearly won. Yeah, but now anyway,
we'll see. We'll see whether you know, whether like the
Rowling Bill comes in in twenty twenty four or something
that like, yeah, it's just like execute transgenders on site.
What would not surprise me at all? The Oh god,

(31:31):
it's fun being just the scapegoat for everything it's ever
gone wrong. Ever. Hi, this is Mia in post. This
episode was recorded just days before Briennaji, is sixteen year
old trans girl, was stabbed to death in a town
near Liverpool. Um, we haven't talked about it really on
the show over the last few weeks because very little

(31:53):
of what I and what I think the rest of
the crew have had to say about Brienna GI's murder
between sort of the racking sobs that you get another
transperson taking from us is even remotely publishable. What I
can say is that some of the wealthiest and most
powerful people the institutions in the world are trying to
exterminate us and the BBC, the New York Times, JK.

(32:14):
Rowling in every major British political party, and the American
ones to have blot in their fucking hands and should
be treated accordingly. And on that pleak note. Yeah, we
can go back to the rest of the episode. Yeah,
it is wild being a country that like supposedly like
what the thing we probably have the to be the
proudest of in our entire history is creating a system

(32:38):
for socialized medicine where people have free, a point of
use healthcare. And since it was created, the ruling class
have tried as hard as possible to destroy it, and
they're finally succeeding. I'm actually having friends are telling me
recently that they're going to like hospitals, and the hospitals
are telling them that they know they're privatized, and they
like they can't they'll have to charge them because they're
not like contracted to and chests walk anymore. So that's

(33:02):
you know, that that's succeeding at that I we've probably
wandered away from the point of what we're trying to say. I. Yeah,
I have resentful feelings to do with healthcare in the UK.
I'm currently playing with my comfort knife. Yeah, I mean,
I think I I I think this is sort of
circling around to the thing I wanted to talk about next,

(33:25):
which is that, like, you know, on the one hand,
we have this sort of like just just the sort
of monumental collapse of anything that could like conceivably make
the UK a society. But on the other hand, people
whether like we live in a society, and I'm like,
if you're in the UK sharing this, you are wrong. Yeah,
you live in an economy. Yeah, it's live in an economy.

(33:48):
It's it's pretty blue. It would be fucking great to
live in a society I wish, But you know, on
the other hand, Dave Dave David Graver's final final production
has like now come true, which is that we are
now actually like the UK is now sort of starting
to see the full scale revolt of the carrying classes. Yes,

(34:09):
and that has come in the form of walk. I
I have no idea what this episode is going to
come out. Sorry, everything's chaos right now, but as of
time of recording, I guess tomorrow that something like half
a million people are going on strike and lo one
and behold who was going on People went on strike
last week? Oh? Was it last week? Yeah? Yeah, am

(34:31):
I have I Okay, I'm a dumbass, isn't well? Aren't
there more tomorrow when the episode comes out. On the
first of February, over half a million people went on
strike and there massive demonstrations and matches across the country.
It's the biggest strike and biggest matches that we've seen
in like over a decade um. We haven't seen much
as this size since protests against the Iraq War. Yeah. Yeah,

(34:55):
and well okay, so in Chalah there'll be more effective
than the rock war protest. But yeah, I mean, I
think it's interesting if you look at the people who
are who are striking, it is it is people who
do care labor. It's teachers, who's nurses, it's ambulance drivers,
people in civil sts like train and bus drivers who
are like still on strike, and various capacities. A point

(35:18):
to pull you up on there, but it agrees with
your point even more in terms of the rebellion of
the caring classes. The current drive of the strikes from
the RMT that's rail, maritime and transport workers pick up
the RMT. My boys are incredible, Nick Lynch, shout out,
love you to pieces. The current strikes are actually driven
by the janitorial staff, who are like some of the

(35:42):
worst treated and worst paid among all of the train
and transport staff like bus drivers and train drivers and
someone have joined in on it. And that, as you're saying,
is like is still part of the like rebellion of
the caring classes. But it's even more so because it's
literally like the cleaners who were like, yeah, this is fucked,
we need better wages. Yeah, And there's been one aye,
And I think like we're like postal workers are also

(36:03):
on strike, this other I'm pretty I'm pretty sure other
people are also on strike. Two that I'm leaving out here. Uh,
let's see. So ambulance strivers, civil servants, teaches, nus is
uh training workers, Yeah, like the university that's true. Yeah,
university workers there are that there are, but I do

(36:26):
not care about this. I have to assolid arity for them.
Bought an agents on strike. Strike baby, never come back
to work. You striking. We are starting the ambolition of
work with you. Congratulations you are now you have now
finally become the vanguard of the working class, it's which
which it's what is what you fucking cops have always
wanted you get to do it now. Yeah, well cops

(36:47):
is an interesting thing as well, because like h on
Red Planet every Sunday apm two eleven pm UK time,
check it out. We um we have a running prediction
to do with the with the police that like, as
their job, as class warfare becomes more naked, the police's
job is more and more obviously just what it's always been,

(37:10):
to put down the working class. But as your job
just becomes like smashing like bottled water stands that people
put up in a heat way to help homeless people,
and like trying to evict people and trying to like
stop people who are striking for better pay. And also
everyone around you constantly calls you a pig and like
degrades you and is like are you enjoying what you're doing?

(37:32):
Do you have a good life? Are you liking this job?
We'll see like lots of police quitting. And actually this
month the Telegraph, who can't really be trusted, but this
does into a larger pattern. The Telegraph reported that more
cops had quit than had been recruited in the last
month and that's what an overall pattern that has been
going on for a while. To be fair of that

(37:52):
that I don't know. In the US, every single newspaper
says that every weakness never true. So yes, I don't
know actual figures. Like it does look like the I mean,
cops quitting in the UK has been on the rise
since like like early last year, um and enormously as well.

(38:13):
And you can tell because like the Met has been
putting out loads of recruitment ads, which like is really
second No, I a little sorry about this. Actually they
have this ad in wait is it nearly time for ads?
Because I could add pivot. Yeah, I was in I
was so. I was in peck Complex Cinema, which is
Peckham Is is like a cheap community cinema. Um, it's

(38:36):
like uh yeah, it's it's they deliberately keep it cheap
so that people can enjoy it and it's an events
space and whatever, and we were about to watch a movie.
I forget what now, but like there was this ad
for the for joining the Met police that was like
this black guy talking about how he was really worried
about his sister joining the police because she's a black
woman and she's a Muslim, and he was worried she's

(38:57):
gonna face all this discrimination, but actually she's having a
great time and everyone loves her, so it was totally
okay the whole time. And now I have this personal policy,
which is if there is an ad for crypto, an
ad for joining the Met, the Army, whatever, and no
one else, and if no one is yelling at the

(39:17):
screen because they are being subjected to fascist propaganda, that
then then it's going to be me who's yelling. So
I just started yelling because like because like two weeks
earlier when I was watching this ad, like Chris Carver
had been had been shot dead by Met police officers
in South London, a black man, right, and they have
a black man here telling us that actually the Met's

(39:38):
really cool and doesn't do any racism. And I was
just yelling and yelling about it. And I was yelling
about like fucking if people aren't familiar with the case
of like Sarah Everard who was kidnapped and assaulted and
murdered by Wayne Cousins and Met police officer, like you know,
I'm just I was just going off about all this
stuff because I'm just like, I like I was just
responding directly to the ad like, how are they running

(39:59):
this shit as if we don't know all of this
and just lift listing off everything that came into mind,
because again it's my fault, it's my personal policy. I'm
not going to get any trouble for it. And someone
should be yelling when you're subjected to propaganda. Yeah. Anyway,
speaking of propaganda, here's an act joining the Washington State
Highway Patrol. And we're back from your fascist propaganda session.

(40:24):
I hope you didn't enjoy it. I hope you yelled
the whole time. Yeah, And I guess I I guess
the thing that is genuinely sort of different between the
American and British polices that the British police like the
American police is like every single American city is like
at least well, okay, so it's they're they're technically only
about forty percent police budget by volume, but that that

(40:47):
that doesn't county about by googling forty percent police, well
you will you will see a variety of things here,
but like you know, tech, technically it's it's it's it's
technically only about forty percent of the city's budget. Byvolume,
but that's because that doesn't count the amount of money
police just steal. But in the UK they actually kind
of like they were kind of stupid and they seem
to actually have kind of done neoliberalism to the cops,

(41:09):
which is very funny because it means that you get
Jeremy Corbyn like running on hiring more cops and it's
like yeah, sir, Like what no, it's yeah. Like it's
like like you've been you've been protesting like apotheide and
illegal wars and all of this stuff, like thirty five
years and you're like, we should have more cops. What
the fuck are you talking about? Man? I remember what
I was. I was watching people who like used to
be like autonomist in like fucking twenty eleven being like, no,

(41:32):
we need more cops. Like they were literally beating you up.
What the fuck is Oh my god that guy who
fractured my skull. I need more of that. Yeah, No,
it's pretty fun. There is like an enormous amount of
British brain going on where even I was like, most
progressive politicians will support support ship like that, and like
I said earlier, like the nautic model, right, like we yeah,

(41:55):
there are there are limits to the British imagination? Um? Yeah,
because we've been doing this shit a long time, we've
really perfected the brain ones. Yeah, I mean I have okay,
so my my my, my, my my my. Least progressive
theory is that there there's there, there's something. There's something
called large population island brain, which affects, it affects. The

(42:20):
UK and Japan are the two sort of models of
this where you like being being on an island and
then also running an empire drives you, makes you like
absolutely psychotic in like very very specific ways that are
like both the same. It's like you you have a
massive nonce culture, like the way you imperially similar parable

(42:42):
public nonsense is thriving recently. Gary Glitter recently got out
of president and then immediately went on as the far
right TV network gb News and said that woke cancel,
woke cancel culture is the biggest problem. Yeah, like it's it's, it's, it's.
It is a very grim state of affairs. Yeah, is

(43:04):
is what I will say about both the UK and Japan,
although I guess to be fair, to be fair to Japan,
they did just assassinate their ex prime minister and probably
the most like history, like probably the most successful historical
assassination not done by the CIA and like a hundred
years or something like really incredible work on the part
of the man with the electric blunderbuss. The UK, however,

(43:27):
not not there yet. I mean, where's that? You know,
where's our where's our homemade blunderbusses? Come on, come on,
got step it up, guy. This is not full for
leftist terrorism. I am not police. Please ignore what I
just said. I will say this thing about the British too,
Like one of the sort of British psychosis that I
think about a lot is like the specter of knife crime,

(43:47):
because it's like, okay, one hands, Like on the one hand,
like yeah, like okay, so like people get stabbed and
it sucks. On the other hand, like like having having
having grown up in the US in a country where
like all of our can gardeners are basically being trained
to like storm met like do you like human wave
attacks and mashooters? Just like how how are you guys?
Like how are you guys? Like like how is this

(44:10):
the thing that you guys are like like you have
police brain about is knife crime? Like I think no,
I think that like the knife crime thing is a
very American perspective on British politics, Like we don't actually
talk about it that much. Oh thank god. Okay, it's
really like an American conservative talking point that like if
you get rid of the guns, they'll just stab each other.
So look at the UK, they don't have guns and

(44:30):
they're just stabbing each other. Um, Like some conservatives still
care about knife crime here. That was a big wave
of caring about it when again it was like a
few years labor were like doing their races, like the
the the hush hush racist policies to try and like
brutalize the working class, especially in black neighborhoods. Um. But
like no, I mean, the cop brain is like in everything.

(44:52):
It's just it's not it's not like it's every I
think British brain is just an evolved form of cop brain.
It's like when cop brain affects everything in life, then
you then you are British. Yeah, and I get I guess.
I guess. Also it's like it's you have caught brand
and an also landlord brand at the same time. It's
just like a truly sort of dastardly come but housing.

(45:15):
That's true, I say it was my fucking well, I guess,
I guess, Okay, I I think I have I am no,
that's not true. I haven't gotten it yet, but I
am vast approaching that the two weeks since my apartment
was last flooded by sewage mark and I'm very excited
about this. Love love love love love love, landlords love renting.

(45:39):
It's we hear love landlords falling on me. Hey, at
least not up god, Oh oh boy, that's a new
Oh fun. Okay, this is this has been, This has
been the the MEA's apartment is falling apart update. Well,
should we talk more about the rebellion of the caring classes?

(46:01):
Because I think that's a really I think that's a
really pointed and worthwhile grape of prediction. I'm a big grapehead.
I have a friend who I just get onto discord
chat with and we as we put it grape out. Um.
I like to say, I'm getting the grape from beyond
the Grave of twenty four seven. But the but the

(46:22):
rebellion of the caring classes is a really poignant thing
to talk about because neoliberalism does not care about reproductive
labor in the slightest and where like where older forms
of capitalism had had that covered because women were basically
fucking slaves. Um. They now the now like reproductive labor

(46:46):
has to be done by professionals because everything must be marketized,
and of course, being the most essential labor, it's the
gonna be the one with the shittiest working conditions and
the lowest pay. That's that's neoliberalism for you. If if
every if it must happen, it must be dogshit um.
And so like this is where we see the rebellion

(47:07):
of the carrying classes now, especially with the with the
set of the service sector economy, so like within the
imperial core, everyone's being put into some kind of care
job essentially, and they're treated like shit. And now they're
starting to actually form unions and fight back, which is
really fucking cool. Yeah. I want to briefly interject here

(47:30):
with a thing everyone gets wrong about Margaret Thatcher, which
is that every every everyone in their mom will will
say that fucking quote about there is no society, there's
only the individual. Except they never they never leave out
the next part of that sentence, which they always leave
out the part of it that they always leave out
at the end is that the actual line goes. And

(47:51):
it's slightly weird because it was it was it was
in response to a question. But basically the line is
there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals
and the family. There are men and women and they're
a families as well. Yeah, because yeah, and well and
also yeah, yeah, to to be clear, to be clear,
idea Margaret Thatcher not a friend of the trans is

(48:12):
shockingly wow looking, I guess. But but but I think
I think this family parts also very important, because yeah, definitely,
you know, like like neoliberalism has these it has these
two conflicting tendencies, right, it has this one tendency that
is like what it's it's trying it's trying to use
the family to create labor in two different ways at
the same time. One is it's it's treating it's treating

(48:34):
each person in a family as an individual who can
go produce value for people. But then secondarily, right, like
you know, neoliberalism isn't in an ideology of incredible alienation
and an incredible sort of atomization. Yeah, and also it's
it's it's it's an economy based on it's you know, it,
but simultaneously it has to be able to do reproductive labor.
And the way that it sort of like bridges the

(48:57):
gap of this contradiction is with this sort of alliance
it has with the religious right and was sort of
like religious conservatism in general, because it can it can
put up this false and this is where all the
trade calf shit comes from. This is where all of
the sort of like trad wife like, oh hey you can,
you can. When she's saying there are individual men and
women and there are families, there's an implicit thing there

(49:17):
where she's saying families, like she she is leaving out
children as people because children are properties are family and
also like whatever reproductive labor has done to to make
those children into a into individual men and women, that
doesn't that's just part of the family, Like she's there's
a lot of heavy lifting happening in there are families,

(49:40):
right yeah, and and and I think the other part
of us, right it is like this is this is
the sort of like the sort of like new liberalism
has this sud of populism that it generates that's about
sort of like the family, and like the church like
this this the sites of sort of like like this
is how you resist sort of social alienation as you
do these things. But like both liberalism has like a
huge focus on consensus politics, where they they say, these

(50:03):
are the resources that are available, and you will get
a say in how they're distributed in your community. You
can come together and engage in the electoral process and
consensus politics and we all agreed on what and that's
this is all just process to manufacture consent because actually
there are infinite resources available because we lawn the money
for the rest of the entire fucking world. And if
this were like any other country that would have any

(50:24):
kind of like uh trickle down to get into the
Reaganomics effect for the rest of the population. But being Britain, uh,
you know, the country that invented concentration camps and workhouses. No,
absolutely not not a not a red scent is going
to be touched by the by the pause. Yeah, And

(50:46):
I mean that that kind of like I don't know
that that I think like that that also sort of
goes back to just like the containment of the working class.
The British working class is like a political force and
that's starting to commandow. But even then, like you know,
this is is my what one of my one of
the things that I say that guess people the most
mad at me is that like there's like, okay, one

(51:07):
in two days strikes are kind of like like, you know,
every single year, India has the largest general strike in
human history, and it's one day and it does nothing.
And the only times it hasn't done nothing other times
when people have actually like kept going on strike or
like you know mar March to farmers protests to one
two day strikes are a good practice to show that

(51:29):
we could hold out for as long as possible. They
shouldn't be like the whole thing, and you know, okay,
And like I've talked about this before when when I've
sort of like interviewed nurses on this show, and like
like there are absolutely times is especially especially in well,
I actually I don't know if this is if this
works the same way in the British nursing sector, but
like there's there's absolutely like there are absolutely technical reasons

(51:51):
why you want to do a limited duration strike is
especially in the nursing sector, that have to do with
how like how the contracts work bringing in scabs. But
like one in two days strikes are kind of like
they're more symbolic than they are sort of like, yeah,
an actual entrument of class war. And and I think
part of something that you have to engage within the
British process. And this is this is also true in

(52:14):
the US, but our unions are like there's like two
of them and they represent about seven people, so it
winds up being less of a deal unless you're like
a UC grad student on strike. But it is also
that like in Britain, the trade unions are just like
actively directly sort of like feeding into this incredibly dogshit
like yeah, political machine, which is well, okay, yeah, this

(52:37):
is an interesting question. This is an interesting like thing
to think through because so if people are familiar, we
had Thatcher bringing in the way of a neoliberalism, you know,
along with everyone's favorite guy, Ronald Mommy Reagan, and she
waged war on the minas especially, but the unions in

(52:58):
general across the UK and crushed the unions. And for
this she is forever remembered as a saint by the
ruling class and by the conservatives. But this was, as
I said earlier, like this was a part of a
trend in the imperial core where the most strongly unionized
sectors which were manufacturing and industrial and like mining were

(53:19):
those unions had to be crushed so that that label
and then that labor was outsourced to the imperial periphery, right,
and now we're jobs in sectors where there are no unions,
and there are these huge corporate unions in the UK,
like Unison that like basically claimed to be able to
represent any worker, which you know, if you're a fan

(53:40):
of the IWW, you shout out to the wobbles, like,
you know, that's that sounds pretty cool. But then no,
it's a massive yellow union. If people aren't familiar with
the yellow unions, we should hopefully be having an episode
of a Red Planet soon about just like making the
distinction so that people can tell them apart really quickly.
But like yellow unions first came into existence in ants,

(54:00):
I think, and it was this pointedly, this pointed change
from red unions who are actually fighting class warfare and
actually trying to like stop the capitalist notion of work
to a yellow union, which was like a corporate union.
And generally speaking, it would originally be like the corporation
who was having their unions, like their workers were rebelling.

(54:22):
They would form a union that was employed by the
corporation and then be like, look it's a union, guys,
you can join that and you'll get better conditions. And
it was a trap. But now we have, with the
miracle of neoliberalism, we have those that just their own
corporate entity and they're like, we can represent any worker
because we are a massive union with an entrenched corporate

(54:44):
structure who have like direct ties and constant political deals
with the with the like political establishment, which like you know,
our Labor Party should rename itself at this point, like
it is actively anti union, especially the unions that are
fighting for the actual working class, like the today, Like

(55:05):
as of recording this, like an hour and a half ago,
there is a Tory MP who used to be a
Labor MP until twenty eighteen has just been made like
the vice chair of the Tory Party and he's like
obviously a dog shit guy, but it's a really good
demonstration of how like the labor is now just the
red Tories. Um Tory now comes in red um they

(55:29):
these these massive unions. My point is like it is
again a neoliberalization of everything, and it's a neoliberalization of
unions where they get to just be a massive corporate
structure competing in like a free market of unions. Like
they're trying to like compete to offer workers the best thing,
and like, oh, we're most likely to succeeded out of

(55:50):
demands because we have the most workers behind us. But
like practically everyone knows that what they're actually going to
get for the workers who are with them is dog shit.
Like my friend was talking to a nurse at one
of these matches on the first affab and she was
just saying, like she was with Unison and then they
said that what they were like actually pushing for was

(56:11):
was still like under inflation and still like it just
just wouldn't be worthwhile at all. So she's changing to
be with the Royal College of Nursing instead. Yeah, we had,
we had enormous yellow unions in the UK. It's a
really issue facing British labor organizing. Um, we're going to
talk more about that in the Future of organizing in
the UK in the next episode. For now, this has

(56:31):
been it could Happen here. You can find us in
the usual places on Twitter and Instagram, dust the British Empire,

(56:52):
It's it could Happen Here A podcast where I think
Turf Island is legitimately my only remaining British joker. I
think I've gone through basically every other one. So yeah,
welcome book up to us talking about Turf Islands. This
is part two of our interview with Sophie from Mars
and Yeah, we're going to talk about how to make

(57:13):
the UK less shit. Yay. The US have gotten to
a point like a like a level of unionization that
decreases every year, to the point where like it's people
think of just like being in any union as like
a socialist position, and it's like, guys, I I I
have really bad nimes wish about yeah, like like it's

(57:35):
it's really not that yeah and yeah, but but but
I think there's this there's also this sort of like
I don't know, like one one one of the things
you have to deal with when when you're dealing with
the with like really very large unions, I don't do
anything like this is the thing in China and that
happens constantly is like, yeah, China technically as one of

(57:57):
the world's large largest unions. It like the last time
that union did anything was actually, weirdly, the less time
that you didn't do anything. Was in was drink tienemen
and then ever since then they have done literally jack shit.
Like every room was like, oh my fucking god, hold on,
oh no, But like yeah, you get these things that

(58:20):
are like technically unions, but you know, they don't do anything.
They cooperate with bosses. They also and this is something
you also see in the US. Well you don't really
use China. You don't see this in China because there's
they have one un trade union they have they have
a state trade union federation because she is. In the
US a lot where you get these really shitty things
where like so someone will be organizing union campaign and
like another union will come will like swoop in and
be like, ah, hey, look at these people, like well

(58:41):
we'll give you like a better cut, and and they're
doing this like basically because like the okay, there are
there are there are unions that are like actually there
are unions that are actually unions, which is to say
like there are there are unions that are sort of
instruments of the working class and organizational to us. And
then there are unions that are like we're forming a
union so we can increase our member roles. So we can,

(59:02):
like you know, like we could be in so far
is we're interested in expanding. We're interested in expanding because
if we expand, more people will pay money into our bureaucracy.
And that's a real like that that's a real issue.
And I don't know, like it's interesting. It's interesting to
me to see rather the sort of one day strikes
that have been happening in the UK kind of like

(59:25):
I don't know esco is not the right word, but well,
I if we're gonna if we're discussing what should happen,
what's gonna happen next? Um? And I mean again, you
don't know when this podcast is gonna come out, so
like it could could be who knows, it could Like
I might offer some predictions here and you might be
able to like just look at the UK use and
directly be like Sophie was full of shit. Um. But

(59:45):
like also we should talk about young people in a minute,
because that's like pretty crucial to understanding UK politics. But um,
but uh, the government right now, like I said before
about Sunac, like he's trying to put in these massively
authoritarian policies because he's realizing that like without them you
can't do neoliberalism effectively. And one of them is, like,

(01:00:06):
like I said about the pCFC bill, which was already
in the works before soon that came in, but like
now it's come you know, now it's come through, and
they're doing like a second wave of trying to do it.
They have the Online Safety Bill, which is not for
anyone to be safe online. It's trying to like control
freedom of the press basically like it's it's it's it's
most extreme proposal is basically that like people who are

(01:00:26):
anti capitalist and who are reporting on the news should
be arrested normal British momentum. And but one of these
ones is he's trying to just ban strikes, like he's
effectively trying to ban strikes. The technical mechanism of it
is that they are bringing in a bill that will
demand a minimum level of service for certain industries if

(01:00:48):
the like, and it doesn't say what those minimum levels
would be, but the MPs can decide on it later
if they want, like set it to be whatever they want,
and obviously they could a minimum to just be complete
normal service. But even if they don't, like, setting a
minimum service defeats the point of a strike, and I
think that if we're talking about what what will happen next,

(01:01:09):
we have this enough as enough movement right now. I'm
not I have mixed feelings about it. I have some
some suspicions. I am not the biggest fan of electoral politics,
and I do feel like it has the whole knox
of something that could like launch a political party at
any minute, and then it'll it'll it'll completely recuperate all
energy that it has and every other bit of energy

(01:01:30):
that will die off. But I think that the response
to legislation trying to ban strikes is probably going to
be an escalation from these one and two day strikes
into like holding out for as long as they possibly
can to demand concessions from the government and then like

(01:01:50):
once you're in that territory you're actually talking about, you know,
do a voice for you're you're actually like it's it's
it's as the as flobots would say, compassion as fast
as as you can go time. Um where I think
that the movement of union of unions and class consciousness
that's currently what rising in the UK is not going

(01:02:12):
to respond by like lying down and taking it when
the government tries to ban strikes. I think that it's
going to escalate. And speaking of escalation, is it time
for ads? Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, they're gonna look, the
Washington State Highway Patrol is going to escalate things right
into your school very quickly. So here's here's an ad

(01:02:34):
for an escalating, worsening crisis of cryptocurrency and by sophie
coin the only currency which supports the working class. And
we're back. God, this is this is reminding me of
the lib coom oxidizable currency. David Harvey NFT thing. Oh

(01:02:55):
he was so bad, incredibly funny. Not not my fault
that you're okay, that is completely that is a completely
unrelated aside. Oh yeah, well let us get back to Yeah.
Can I can I talk about young people for a man?
Because I do? Yeah. I think this is a really
important thing. That's probably going to be me just like

(01:03:17):
info dumping at you for a little bit, because I
feel very passionately about I also think it's very important
to understand the UK politics. It's that Britain hates young
people so much, like it's inconceivable to people who live
in other countries how much the media class, the political class,
like the ruling class like hates the young so fucking

(01:03:40):
much like if only under thirty fives could have voted
in any of our recent elections, every borough in the
UK would have been labor. That's less true now because
our labor is run by the fucking head of the
Crown Prosecution Service, but like when it was Corbyn, it
would have all been labor. And then if if people
I think like sixty could vote, it's like all conservative

(01:04:05):
like there is they hate young people because they know
that like social revolution will come from young people, and
they know that young people have like just a vastly
different understanding of the world. This is another Graverism, right,
if we're gonna if we're gonna grape out like Graver
said that, like that you could probably see that a
revolution has taken place if one generation and the next

(01:04:27):
generation effectively speak a different language, like if their understanding
of the world is so is completely irreconcilable. And I
think that one one interesting thing about Turf Island is
that like trans rights are a really clear manifestation of that,
where people under thirty five are entirely in supportive trans rights,
they're entirely in supportive like self idea, you know, self

(01:04:47):
determination of gender and like improving the healthcare situation and
like informed consent healthcare and everything, and then people above
that like practically entirely against it. And it's it's just
like we have this, we have this absolutely wild generational
divide in the UK, and they've been trying to reign that,

(01:05:07):
like bring that under control with various policies for a
long time. So Tony Blair must be destroyed at all courts. No,
that's the IMF. Tony Blair multiple things at the same
time should go to jail in a world where no
one else goes to jail. No, yeah, that one, that
one works. Um, Tony Blair. Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement had

(01:05:28):
this speech where he was like education, education, education, and
he was basically like, we are going to make it
so everyone goes to university. And he also did a
lot of other reforms to do with getting people into schools.
It was very it was it was it was contemporary
with and very comparable too, like bushes, no child left
behind kind of stuff. Oh god. So he did a

(01:05:49):
lot of stuff to try to like clamp down on
youth and also create a pipeline for young people to
get through high school and then go to university. Um
he Also when I speaking of about clamping down on youth,
uh Mia, are you familiar with the asbo oh, isn't
the fucking sonic gun things? We're think a lot of

(01:06:11):
different think a different deranged British thing. This is a
this is a policy measure. It's just it's not it's
not a weapon. It's um. I mean, it is a
weapon of class offer, but it's um. It's the antisocial
behavior order. And basically this is part of the UK's
system of exclusions, right, Like we have a system set
up where young people can be excluded from a career

(01:06:33):
path and then like a path to just like being
a functional human being in society uh at At Basically,
any moment, right, if a teacher takes against you, they
think you're rude, they think you're misbehaving, they can exclude you.
Then that goes onto your educational record, and then you know,
you might get a permanent exclusion, which is what we
call being expelled from school now, right, and then that

(01:06:54):
is like statistically sets people on a massive path towards
ending up in like juvenile offense centers, like because they've
been kicked out of a school, and other schools don't
want to take a kid who's been kicked out of
a school, right, and then then what are they doing
with their time? Like there are no fucking youth centers,
there are no community centers, like they've been all been
completely destroyed by new neoliberalism. Um. So like we have

(01:07:16):
the system of exclusions and and and as bo's are
a big part of that, as both sends of anti
social behavior order. And basically it's like it's not just
like a warning, it's like it comes from It's like again,
it's something that's going on to a permanent record, and

(01:07:36):
if you then commit crimes, you're going to be punished
more severely because you've been warned already. Um. It's like
it's it was, it was. It was introduced and then
like cheered on by the ghouls who run our country,
like because it was going to deal with chavs, which
was our term for young working class people, um, just

(01:07:59):
our pejorative of being young and poor. Um. But it
obviously also was there to target like young young black kids,
young brown kids, young traveler kids, um and like and
that was you know, that was Blair like clamping down
on any kind of existence outside of the pipeline that
he was setting up for just being in school. There

(01:08:19):
was also this massive focus on like attendance came in
around the same time that like schools would punish people
for for having missed any time at all. Like when
I was going to high school, we had like school
assemblies where they would tell us about the importance of attendance,
like over and over and over again, like probably a
hundred times a term. They would tell people that, Like
they would tell the kids that, like attendance is the

(01:08:42):
most important thing, and like the difference in your grades
will be enormous if you missed like a single lesson
or a single week of school. And they would like
give awards to kids who had perfect attendance that yeah, yeah,
and deranged as um and then like um, So that
was Blair, And it's continued to to kind of intensify

(01:09:03):
that same thing for a long time. But like very
recently this is again Sunax authoritarian policies. We've brought in
something called Prevent Now. Prevent is a multifaceted civilian surveillance
program where basically people can be referred to prevent, which
is capitalist, white supremacist, Western centric re education. It's a

(01:09:25):
it's a re education program. It's it's if people are
considered to be holding extremist views, expressing extremist opinions, then
they can be referred to Prevent. Now, like a lot
of the people in my kind of social circle will
like meme about prevent because like all the language is
about like making extremist content or whatever, and obviously that's

(01:09:46):
what I do for a living. But like, but people
would you know, make a tweet about how they think
that like the Prime minister's a dickhead and then be like, oh,
I'm going to get referred to prevent. And then it
was noticeable that like, actually know, none of us are
being referred to prevent, right, So like this isn't this
isn't for us. It's actually been put in place for
two specific purposes. I do know someone who's been I

(01:10:09):
do know someone who knows someone who's been referred to prevent.
And the person they know who's referred to prevent is
a is a child, right, is a teenager because she
works with trans youth, and like, being referred to prevent
is really there as a system to control Muslim populations
and young people, Like that's what it's really there to

(01:10:29):
target and trying to clamp down on young people expressing
any kind you know, the Muslim side of that, it's
it's that has its own entire discussion. You could have
to do with Islamophobia and like terror and like there's
a whole thing, like you know, the complete unwillingness of
the US and UK and all the other states from

(01:10:49):
to acknowledge that like extremist Islamic terror is right wing terror.
So then you if you merge those categories, you would
see that actually the far right is the biggest threat
to everyone all whatever. This is a whole other thing.
Young people in the UK are under constant, like bart,
under this constant barrage of like media pressure, shaming, stigmatism,

(01:11:11):
and it's because they they are expected to either get
a degree and succeed and get your hundred k a
year salary job in whatever, or you are a piece
of shit and you will go to jail. And obviously
the reality for most people is you're going to get
your degree or drop out and then you're going to
wind up working in some kind of service sector job actually, right,

(01:11:33):
or if you're lucky, a fairly easy like office job
where you can quiet quit and just doss off all day. Right,
But like the attacks on young people serves a very
specific function, and it's because they're aware of that rebellion
of the caring classes, and they're aware of the social
revolutionary potential of young people, and they're trying to stop it,

(01:11:54):
like trying as hard as they can to stop it.
And their mechanism for doing that is that there's this
pipeline from birth until the end of your university degree
and then hope and then allegedly you get a job,
but you don't really or else, as I say, you
probably wind up in jail. The university thing is also
really really interesting because Grab again, fucking everyone take a shot.

(01:12:15):
Grab pointed out that like revolution often comes out of
cases where the population isn't looking at like someone else
gets something, Like the population doesn't look at the ruling
class getting everything and then getting nothing and think that's unjust.
We should overthrow them. Right. This is how monarchy and
kingdoms was able to perpetuate for such a long time.

(01:12:38):
It's when they think that someone else who they consider
comparable is getting something and they're not getting it. That's
when they feel the injustice. And like, I think this
education education, education speech and this moment and this policy
set the neoliberalism and Blair and everyone since then has
tried to kick into kick into action is going to
turn out to be probably the biggest shooting themselves in

(01:13:00):
the foot historically that we could measure, because they've basically
made it that every person, like every young person in
the UK must try to go to university. Not wanting
to go to university is considered socially like backwards, and
like then people go to university and then we all
find that there are not jobs in the UK for
everyone who's gotten a degree, because they basically set up

(01:13:22):
the whole country to be a diploma mill. Like the
whole entire country has this pipeline if everyone's going to
get a degree and then and then what because there
aren't fucking jobs, And that's going to create that sense
that like we are not getting what we deserve. Um. Yeah,
I think that the the marketization and the like opening
up all these universities to be like profit driven diploma

(01:13:44):
mills is has radicalized an enormous number of young people,
which which I think is really interesting because a lot
of Tory policy and like you know, like like what
one of the one of the things the Tories did
right right after they came to power, like right after
two hunsand and eight was immediate imediately went to war
against sort of higher education, right, and immediately it started
to doing increasing fees, and this is you know, this

(01:14:06):
is what produces the l two thousand and ten like
student movement. And it's really interesting to me that like
it really kind of seems like, I don't know if
for them, the cure was worse than the disease, because
like you know, they they they they they survived two
thousand and eight, right, and there was a real moment
where it looked like globally that the ruling class was
not going to survive three thousand and eight and that
like they were they were all about to come down

(01:14:28):
and okay, so they survived that, but like, yeah, it
really it really feels like they've sort of this is
similar thing has happened in the US, right, which is
like it turns out if if if if you turn
an entire class of your population into just like basically
like bait, basically basically the debt peons, those people get
really really really pissed off. Yeah, it's like, you know, Okay,

(01:14:52):
so you don't have a bunch of highly educated people
who are very very very angry at people who forced
the Potaking is always pointing out have been through university,
which is a culture where they're going to be exposed
to way more leftist ideas. Yeah, I mean, like, like,
I like this is something I think about a lot,
which is like I I think I knew I knew

(01:15:13):
one openly gay person in high school, Like there were
zero trans people, and I got I got to like
the first time I was at least one, well you know,
look I I I had no idea, and a part
of reason I no idea, like like that the first
time I like met someone who was like openly trans
was like literally the first time I walked onto campus. Yeah,

(01:15:33):
and like like one of the first people I meet
was like a trans guy who fucking rips. I hope
I was having a good day. Yeah, and like like that,
like you know, and I think there's this tendency in
the US, particularly, there's this tendency to look at the
university and look at like, yeah, like obvious obviously if
if if if, if you're going to school in the US,
and also if you're going to school in the UK,
you are going to run into a Marxist professor who

(01:15:55):
tries to break your strikes, right, Like that's that's that's
the thing that's true. Like there are bunch of right
wingers on campus. Like I went to the University of Chicago.
I have seen my own fucking econ departments. Our movement,
if that is largely toughs like our Kathleen Stoker whoever,
if you're familiar, like yep, yep, yeah, our right wing
professors are almost always toughs. Yeah. But like, like you know,

(01:16:16):
and there's there's this real tendency to sort of like
completely disregard the university as like a thing that can
produce anything remotely leftist. And I and I think that's
just wrong. Like there's there's there, like there there was
a reason a whole bunch of the universities in the
US we're redesigned after sixty eight, Like they're there there,
there's there's a reason why, like one of them. If

(01:16:37):
you're doing a military coup in a Latin American country,
one of the first things you do was roll tanks
onto college campuses. Yeah, if you tanks onto the college campuses.
Those students are going to fight you until like all
of them are fucking dead. Like yeah, that's a you know,
like that that's like as as as as as much
as you know, you can even look at hippie hippies
and hot hats thing, right, Yeah, the media image the

(01:16:58):
conservatives created, I think it was Nixon, Like the hippies
and the blue collar working class are incompatible and cannot
work together. And the hippies are old, university educated effect
liberals and working class people are conservative reactionaries, and that's
like largely stuck until you get actual class consciousness building.
Like this is something we're seeing massively in the UK

(01:17:18):
right now. It's like the union, the growing union movement
like has so many university educated people involved in it
because like as soon as you start developing class consciousness,
that that notion you're talking about, like that the universities
can't produce something leftis just like flies out the window massively. Yeah,
And I think that's why the US there's like this

(01:17:39):
massive effort to sort of like I'm just gonna call
it a fucking PSI up because it is like there's
this massive PSI up to get people to like not
think that, like being a barista is like I think
there produces value, and it's like I'm going to beat
you to death with a copy of episode of these things.
It's like it's like with serial killer. Wait wait wait
if you're like if you're like, well, what's the different

(01:18:00):
it's a serial killer and a cop who kills a
bunch of people. The differences that the couple will never
be found guilty. Right, Like once you start like, once
you start looking at what you could call a SSIE up,
you're like, oh, the whole of capitalist media as a
PSI up. Like yeah, but you know, I think the
very specific thing here is like okay, if if if,
if you look at who was in the UAW right now, right,

(01:18:23):
the UAW is composed of two kinds of people. It
is composed of people the remaining people who work in
the auto industry, and it is composed of grad student unions,
right Yeah, And I think I saw statistic recently. I
think it's true of the way I wasn't able to
verify it, which is that like thirty percent by volume
of the UAWS total membership right now are from are
from workers in the university of California system, like the

(01:18:46):
you know, the the the the the actual class configuration
that that that is happening right now. It is this
very weird sort of alliance of industrial workers and then
people and then people who've been like people people who
are highly educated who've been like picked into really shitty
service jobs. And that's a real like and that's the
reason I I genuinely I think the reason you see

(01:19:06):
so much of this sort of like like the right
wing population around some of like the productive like working
classic is specifically because this is this is a genuinely
very powerful political lines. Even people like Lula, who like
Lula like fucking hate it. Like you can you can
go back and read like a million hilarious Lula quotes
about like how much he hates fucking student radicals from
like nineteen seventy three. He was just like a football

(01:19:28):
fan guy, right, like he was just yeah, but like
but even even even after becomes a labor leader like
he he he has he spends a whole bunch of
time like kicking all the student maoists out of his
out of his like strikes and stuff, and like like
he has this great line that was like this guy
walks into the door. I looked at his hands and
they were perfectly smooth, and I said, and I said
to myself, this man is a Trotskyite. But like even

(01:19:50):
you know, Lula, who was like he was like the
like has left around the world. It's very like other
Trotskyites in the room with you right now. Yeah, well
I to to to to be fair, to be fair
there he wasn't actually actually yeah, in the UK, it's
much more like all the Maoists in the room with
you right now. That's sh but like like you know,
but like like even even Lula like basically had to

(01:20:12):
abandon that completely because you know, like the it it
turns out that like you can't actually like you know,
as as as the sort of union's decayed in Brazil
as they did everywhere else. I mean, brazilso has friendly
loge unions, but like Brazil, bil the kind of industrial
stuff that like existed in Brazil and like the eighties
is gone, right yeah, and you know, it's like, well, okay,
even even now, like yeah, he's his base has a
bunch of like it has has is it has a

(01:20:34):
bunch of just like university educated people working service jobs, right,
and you know, like there's no there's no actual like
they're there. There's no version of a functional leftist political
coalition that doesn't have that. And it's obviously significant that
two of the most prominent leftist theorists of the last
like twenty years, David Graeber and Mark Fisher both walked

(01:20:56):
in education. Yeah, right, like and Glacia was pointing out
the whole like second shift stuff, kind of like we
were talking about ut before with like reproductive labor, and
he was talking about how like exhausted people are because
they do their job and then that you know, and
it's not it's it's not just women anymore. Like this,
this this labor is expected of everyone. I mean, still
disproportionately women and disproportionately women of color. But like, you know,

(01:21:16):
he was telling a story about like his colleagues working
in a high school that they that the only time
they could find to organize or first complain about their
working conditions and then organized was like when they went
to the pub after work together. Right, yeah, well, I
think it's also like I'm pretty sure it's a true,
which I know it's true, agree, but like the like
those those were both people from working class families who

(01:21:37):
went into academia, which is a very sort of like
I don't know, it's it's it's it's a very like
I guess potent combination for how how you get people
into radical politics. And I think I think this is yeah, yeah,
again going back to sort of like totally Blair shooting
himself from the foot, which is like, okay, so you
you're now you're you're now forcing a bunch of working
class people into universities, yeah, and then saddling the student debt.

(01:21:58):
And it's like I wonder, I wonder, what will understanding
of the world around you at the cost of becoming
a debt pon, which will make your understanding of the
world around you a very radical one very quickly. Yeah,
And it's like okay, like like the there there is
a certain extent to which millennials gets sort of less
radical overtime, but like if you look at the less
radical overtime, it's like they go from autonomous to corbinites. No,

(01:22:22):
and that's still not great if you're like yes, but
like yeah, it's friends conservative as the age is like
largely not affecting millennials and gen Z And like, I
think that I mean, one of the most obvious things
point to as the climate crisis, right, like previous generations
when not growing up being like the world will not
be here when I reach retirement age unless we act.

(01:22:45):
I don't think it's impossible for people to sell out
like that. There are still a limited number of sellout
jobs you could take, right, But the problem is there's
just there's there's not enough of them in order to
like actually buy people off on mass and like any
other thing, particularly was like you know, the I supposed
to make you work conservative this property ownership, I'm like,
who the fuck is going to buy a house? Like,

(01:23:05):
oh yeah, what, like I wonder under one circumstances, Yeah,
Like yeah, I am past the age when my parents
bought a house. I am past the age when my
grandparents bought a house. And I know, like one person
who's bought a house my age, who's like working for
a like a privatized rail company, and who's who's partner

(01:23:26):
like works for the police, Like, oh boy, no one's
getting houses. Yeah, I mean like my I was, I
was ausally do my friends like a who has a house,
Like I have a friend who bought a condo? Yeah,
Like but that's the thing like that, that's that that
was that was another thing that was like they got
health with their parents, and it's like health of your
parents doesn't even get you a fucking house anymore, like

(01:23:49):
a condo. I got, like I got like a little
bit of money after my dad died, and it was
enough to partially help for my my my surgery and
then like fight off like rent debt for a few months,
and that was all and it just disappeared, right, It's like, yeah,

(01:24:09):
and you know what I mean. I mean, I think,
I think, like like Britain's inflation is somebody is worse,
way worse than the US is, which is truly stunning
and makes me like want to cry because oh my god,
like yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's something else. It's
truly so economically the UK is. And again we have

(01:24:31):
to just keep on coming back to the fact that
Britain is just a smoke screen, like the whole of
British society barely barely exists and is just like a
collection of reactionary buzzwords, and then like a ton of
people who are increasingly angryer and angrier about it. I
don't know, I had a really good conversation a little
while ago with like an old woman who lives in
my like neighborhood. We met through some like community project stuff,

(01:24:55):
and she just came by while we were hanging out
on the stoop and U, yeah, we were just talking
about Boris Johnson. It was right after Boris Johnson had
come in and she was in like she was basically
getting revolution pilled, like she like she was not at
all a political person for as long as I've known her.
And then like it was just yet another of the

(01:25:16):
like revolving door, like like the Tory Party is currently
running the boss rush strategy that they just like keep
on swapping out Tory prime ministers as fast as they
can and like and and I said to her, like,
when people realize that, by definition, no one will ever
hold the office who respects what the office is allegedly for,

(01:25:39):
like serves the people or whatever. When people realize that, like,
it's not just that like coincidentally, all of our prime
ministers went to Eton and all of those like when
they were in when they were then in Oxford, they
were in like the Bullingdon Boys Club. It's not a coincidence.
It's like that's the pipeline is how you get there. Like,
when people realize that and they realize that no one
will ever hold the office of prime as to who

(01:26:00):
is there to to serve the country, They're gonna realize
that they have to take care of each other instead,
and we have to build something that we have to
we have to build society from the ground up. And
she was like yeah, she was like, yeah, I think
that's what's literally happening in our community right now. Yeah,
And I think that's sort of encouraging because like I

(01:26:21):
don't know, like just the absolute wreckage that was Corbinism
of just like the complete shit show of how that
entire project went. Yeah, Like I know it's caused some
people to sort of like basically like you know, every
every every every every successor generation of politics has like
the person who used to be a Trotskyite who is

(01:26:41):
now like a labor minister or is now like a
fucking Tory minister. You're a pee boot judge and Kamala Harris,
who are both raised by market academics. Yeah yeah, well
I mean even like like Google, I am blink Goo Google,
who build a Blasio's wife is Okay? She was she was,
she was one of the founding members. They go, he'd
be a river collective. Oh wow, yeah, like there's a

(01:27:05):
lot of shit like that. Yeah, but like yeah, you know,
but like it as much as this is a thing,
I don't know, And insofar as it seems like the
UK has the potential to be something that's not this,
it's it seems like it's cool. It genuinely seems like
it's going to be through labor and it's going to
be through sort of street actions and organizing that's that's

(01:27:27):
not taking places at the Labor Party. And I think hoping,
like practically everyone I know who was invested in Corbyn
is now like no party could possibly solve the problems
of the UK because they watched like a guy, Oh
here's a great movie recommendation, a very British coup. If
people haven't seen this, and it's it's pretty obscure, so
you probably haven't. But like it's it's just about a

(01:27:49):
guy who is on the side of the working class
becoming Prime Minister and then how the media likes like
character assassinate him and have him removed from power, and
like it's almost beat for beat what happened to Corbyn
and it was made like the nineties. Um, but like, uh,
you know, a guy comes along and floats like very
mild social Democrat policies, and the entire media class says

(01:28:11):
that he's going to like drag the country back to
the seventies, and like there's there's like um like soldier
like they're they're like units in the army doing target
practice on pictures of him, and like people openly declaring
that they will assassinate him if he comes into power
and shit like this, and it's just like and then
like people within the party work to sabotage his election.

(01:28:31):
The election in twenty seventeen was lost by like two
thousand votes, you know, and then it's pushed out and
replaced by the worst imaginable neoliberal top top cop ghoul
Kia Starma um. And like that spectacle has radicalized people
so hard. Like I don't know, yeah, I don't think
I know anyone who who who who supported Corbyn who

(01:28:55):
now thinks that our problems can be solved without mass
rising or at least like without union power basically like
kicking the shit out of the government. I don't like, yeah,
I don't really the the UK is we are we
are don't vote pilled, I think, yeah, which which I

(01:29:19):
think is yeah, I don't know like it. It strikes
me in my sort of like I don't know my
cursory knowledge of British history that like the most effective
sort of British left wing political movements in a long
time was the poll tech stuff in the nineties, which
was defeated like into almost entirely by accommodation of street

(01:29:41):
movements and like non party organizing. Yeah, and you know,
I don't know that the UK's did a very weird
position where it's like I don't know if there's a
way it could have been different, but it's like it
very much looked like the like like the sort of
just like the incredibly furthest right, like just like absolute
most shit parts of British society. We're going like far
right parts of praciety, We're gonn the empower forever. But

(01:30:01):
then somehow they managed to do the thing that social
democratic governments always do, which is like they they managed
to produce a series of of like changes in in
the UK's class structure such that like they produced an
entire like like they they like they you know, well
I mean they they got their worst nightmare, which that
they actually got into power and got to do all
their policies. It turns out if you actually do all

(01:30:23):
of their policies, the entire world implodes. And with with that,
with that, with that, with with without some kind of
functional opposition to make sure if they don't literally like
press press to destroy the economy button. They were article
that was like Sunak is going to raise energy bills
like forty percent in April, and I just like, I
just being like, they're just daring the working class to

(01:30:45):
overthrow them at this point, Like, yeah, it's not that,
but like I've seen the same take. Um. The leftist
journalist Owen Jones said a little while like when lisz
Trust was in he was like, I'm pretty sure she's
actually an undercover Trutskit trying to initiate revolution by doing
the worst policies possible. Like it really feels like that sometimes.
But it is just like, as you say, the nightmare
of their politics that like they can't they are just

(01:31:08):
um incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing.
And speaking of being incapable of conceiving of the harm
that they're doing, here's an ad for Raytheon. I don't
know something. So when I said before about like the
generational divide and how reactionary like older people in the
UK are, that applies to some of our like our

(01:31:30):
older leftists as well. So there is this like offshoot
of the of CPGB, the Communist Potty of Great Britain
called CPGB mL the Communist Ploty of Great Britain Marxist Leninist.
Oh boy, they are fascinating. So basically so basically there
was let me just let me just let me just
refresh my memory. But like there was, um, there was

(01:31:52):
a split from the from from CPGB a couple decades ago,
I think where people were just like where where basically
it was it was to do with the politics of
like supporting North Korea, and like there was some Maoists
involved and shit like this. Um, there are some people
who involved who have done some like wild stuff in
leftist terms, Like there was someone who was involved with

(01:32:17):
the Spanish Civil War and then like moved to China
and took like positions in Mao's government during the Cultural Revolution,
like a boy who is like now, I think the
Honorary President of CPGBML. That's um Isabel Crook. But basically
what happened was um when the when cpgb kind of
split apart in the sixties, one of the splinter groups

(01:32:39):
was called the Revolutionary Marxist Leninist League and then and
then that immediately splintered as well, and they and then
they had a thing called the Association of Communist Workers
and that was founded by Harpell bra Now this is
bear in mind the Bras for a second b R
A R because this is really interesting. So basically Harpell

(01:33:02):
bra Um, Yeah, he's he's old as dirt now he's
still kicking around. He does some like um like vaud
chats with like everyone's favorite real definitely real communist Caleb
morpen Um and the Bras because of their role in
this like splinter group and then the founding of CPGBML,

(01:33:25):
it's kind of like a dynastic family of communists. Like
so Harpall Bra is the father of Joeti bra who's
like a notorious tough communist and and like she isn't
officially in charge of CpG BML, but like apparently nothing,
nothing is allowed that goes against her. So it's like

(01:33:45):
they've they've actually put a dynasty in place. Oh boy. Yeah. Um.
But as I say, that's all, that's all part of
the fact that like them, the older people in the
UK are just like shockingly reactionary. It's good stuff. It's
good stuff. Like they're trying to do like working class
organizing around how much they hate trans people. It's really good.

(01:34:08):
Oh yeah. I mean that's the one thing I'll say
about the US, which is that like, like we don't
have as many like there are lib Turfs, but like
the lib Turfs don't really sort of like like that
they're they're they're kind of walled off from like toism
is a very British thing I don't like. I yeah,

(01:34:31):
like I've seen Americans worry about it a lot. I
don't think it's going to take off with you guys,
because we have a politics of British exceptionalism, which is
directly contrasted to US politics. Like it's very similar to
like how can like Canadian liberals work where like everything
every place where we can be progressive. We try to
pride ourselves on not being as bad as the US,

(01:34:51):
and so like the specter of the GOP not only
like does not only do toffs literally receive money from
far right evangelical Christian groups from the US, but like
the fact that the GP, the GOP is there, gives
like supposed feminists in the UK this cover to pretend
they're still progressives because like this, they support abortion until

(01:35:15):
the candidate comes along who hates trans people, who also
wants to know to make abortion illegal. Um, I don't
think that. I don't know, I could be proven wrong
about this, but I don't think that, like, uh, turfs
get a foothold in the US in the same way
because you're like reactionaries just function a bit a bit differently,

(01:35:35):
And like the trying to like, um, divide the progressive
left with turfs is a very conscious strategy that's kind
of like been designed and constructed for the UK, Like
it's it's yeah, it's it's liberals who are like, we
are so progressive because we're not the US, who are
then amenable to tough talking points in the UK who

(01:35:58):
are really really out of touch. And again there's like
the general rational thing. But like I think that I
think that tough Island will continue to be notoriously tough Island.
Like I think that tough ism will continue to be
a very very very British phenomenon. I have seen what
you're talking about with like swafs in the US because like, yeah,
I mean, I will say, like the other cultry I

(01:36:19):
think is particularly really bad with this in Mexico has
an enormous turf problem, like in ways that are incredibly
dangerous for about this on this podcast. But yeah, it's
very bleak. Um. Yeah, I don't know. The US, Yeah,
the US, the dangers mostly from the far right and
also from people like who who are like libs but
who are like really like like I don't know, like

(01:36:43):
New New York Times collaborator types. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
mean it's the same thing here we have like I
don't know if you know the comedian Rob Delaney, Um,
he's American, but he moved to the UK and he
has been, you know, fighting for a long time alongside
like union movements. I think he's like mostly a liberal,
Like he calls himself a socialist, but I don't think
he's I don't think he would call himself a communist

(01:37:04):
or anything like this. Um, But like he said that
when he moved to the UK, he was like, you're
always pointing to American media by being like, look how
bad Fox News is, but truly every outlet of the
UK media is Fox News, Like yeah, yeah, the UK

(01:37:25):
media is like somehow more fucked than the American media,
which really amazing. That has to do with that, that
that that that ties in really strongly with out without
a tradition of I was gonna say the lovable public
nonsens again, No, that's not it. The bad thing, the
evil thing, Tony Blair there it is, um Yeah, Tony

(01:37:45):
Blair was so close with Rupert Murdoch that he literally
fucked Rupertmodock's wife. He's literally like she's the godfather of
Rupertmodock's kids or the other way around. I remember, like
he is he is like that with Rupert. There's a
famous picture of like Blair reading the Sun and fuck
the Sun reading the Sun newspaper and like the headline
is like we love Blair or whatever. Sidebar. Briefly, my

(01:38:08):
uncle died in the Hillsborough disaster. If people aren't familiar
with that, I explained the whole thing. But like the
passion with which I want the Sun newspaper destroyed in
the most literal sense possible, Yeah, fucking come and arrest me.
I will I will stand up in court and say
this is on behalf of my goddamn family. I am
allowed to have this opinion. But but like the way

(01:38:34):
that like new Labor was able to tie it all
together as this, like the progressive newspapers and the reactionary newspapers,
it's all working for the ruling class, and then like neoliberalism,
you know, benefits them enormously. So like we have where
before we had the kind of faintest illusion of their
being like a left wing media and a right wing media.

(01:38:55):
Now it's like there's the ruling class media, and then
there are like tiny, tiny, tiny independent leftist media sources. Right,
there's like yeah YouTubers like me. There's like Novara Media,
there's Owen Joey. Yeah, they're like they're like Trotskyites, like
making newspapers to fund their like well mostly to fund
making more newspapers, to be honest, but like you know, um,

(01:39:18):
you know, and and they're they're just these tiny little
crumbs and the rest of the media is just fucking
dog shit to the point where like it's actually quite funny,
Like it's gotten to the point where they're complacent because
they're so not used to dealing with anything that represents
the working class that they like. They recently had Mike Lynch,
the head of the RMT union, on a bunch of
different like UK talk shows where they were they were

(01:39:41):
expecting to be able to like gotcha him with the
most transparent bullshit m Yeah. Richard Madley said to him, like,
what about the spirit of Christmas, your stripes ability to
go home and see their family? And he was like,
what about workers getting paid better? Dick head? And it
was just like it was just like game over me really,
like they are so not used to talking to anyone

(01:40:02):
who cares about the working class that when someone like
it just not even an especially radical just like a
union leader comes on to their show, he just owns them,
like he just butts that goddamn biscuits like it's it's amazing. Yeah.
We we had this with the rail strike. We're like,
I remember, how was it businesses that are it was
it was one of the business press guys had had
someone they were like they were talking to like a

(01:40:24):
rail worker. Yeah, and you can see on air this
guy realizing that these people have zero days off a
year and going what the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, sort of
like like even even the like business class guys were
like wait, hold on, like what do you mean you
have zero days off a year? Like what It's like, Yeah,
there's like a human empathy that like that they are

(01:40:47):
not expecting to be a problem for them because like
they're all parasitic fucking goals. And then like they come
into contact but that they've been lied to about the
lives that the working classes have to live. Yeah, and
then a working class class and comes on and just
tells them like, oh no, it's like this, and they're like, oh,
we should do something about the Yeah. It's like yeah,
And that's sort of like I don't know that that's

(01:41:08):
that's sort of that sort of shield, Like it's kind
of the kind of installation that gets built up just yeah,
do you do you have anything else you want to say? Stuff?
Fuck the police? Uh um, listen to Red Planet. Yeah, okay,
I'm plugging stuff. I'm going to say I'm spy from US.

(01:41:28):
I make video essays on YouTube about politics, philosophy, sometimes
about media. I did a little bit of about Yay
going on info Wars and all his anti semitism and stuff.
Pretty recently, I'm doing something about climate doumerism and how
I believe that the world is not ending. It's just
the collapse of the imperial core. And people are projecting
the inability to get Starbucks and Deliverux as the apocalypse. Um,

(01:41:54):
that should be out sometime soon ish. But what I
really want you it could happen here. Listener to check
out is Red Planet because I think you'll really like it.
It's a it's a weekly leftist round table where we
talked about how to make the world a better place. Um,
it's every Sunday eight pm to eleven pm UK time.
Please Google to figure out what that is for you.
It's on Twitch dot tv slash red Planet Live, and

(01:42:16):
we also have a podcast feed if you want to
catch up on all the archive. Episodes should be available
wherever podcasts are sold. Um, it's called Red Planet, and
it's a good time. And we also, I mean we
have a lot of we have some some some solid
overlap where it could happen to year. Actually, we recently
interviewed maya crime you as well, so you know, if

(01:42:36):
you want to content, we had a good chat with
that and I can't imagine you don't because she's delightful,
wonder wonderful person, wonderful, wonderful little kitty cat. Uh yeah,
this has been It can happen here. You can find
us in the places. You can wage a tonal war
against the British imperialist ruling class. You can do this

(01:42:57):
from your home. Yep, I've cool. I've been, Sophie. I've
been playing with a Browning three six four switch blade,
only in my house where it is legal to have it.
And I apologize again to Daniel for all the clicking noises.

(01:43:26):
Hello everyone, and welcome. It could happen here once again,
hosted by myself Andrew along with the rest of the crew,
Mea and James. All right, and today I want to
take a minute to talk about Ubuntu, and not the
Linux software, but the African philosophy. Ubuntu is philosophical concepts

(01:43:52):
for those who don't know, derived from some of the
diverse and disposed indigenous traditions of the roughly three hundred
and sixty million and band To speaking peoples of Africa. Bantu,
coming from the Zulu wood for people, is a language
family spoken by approximately four hundred distinct ethnic groups and
splinter approximately four hundred and forty six eighty distinct languages

(01:44:13):
slash dialects born as a result of the great band
to migrations that I could in two major waves about
three thousand and two thousand years ago across Central, East
and South Africa. Contrary to the maxim I think. Therefore,
I am Ubuntu, roughly translated from the Guni Bantu languages

(01:44:36):
like Osa and Zulu, means humanity and more specifically humanity
towards others. I am because you are. There are of course,
various names to the concept from language to language and
ethnic group to ethnic group, including Boto, Muntu, Mundu, Batu, Utu, etc.

(01:44:58):
But Ubuntu is definitely the mo was prominent and internationally recognized.
According to the African Journal of Social Work, Buntu is
a collection of values and practices the people of Africa
or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. Rather,
nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups,

(01:45:20):
they all point to one thing. An authentic individual human
being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental,
and spiritual world. This, of course, is not unique to Africa.
What's any specific culture or any specific ethnic group. I
think we're finally sort of mirroring ideas in a variety

(01:45:44):
of contexts, because I think it really is something that's
fundamentally human. But I think it is good to look
at how these ideas have manifested in those more specific contexts.
I mean, in the aura literature of South Africa with
Buon Tursman existence. From as early as the mid nineteenth century,

(01:46:08):
the reported translations for the term have covered the field
of human nature, humanness, humanity, virtue, goodness, and kindness, and
so it's meant to be a sort of a parallel
to the abstract idea of humanity as a philosophy or
as a world view. Of Puntu really was popularized in

(01:46:29):
the beginning of the nineteen fifties, most of them being
the writings of Jordan Cushion Gabane published in the African
Drum magazine. From then into the nineteen seventies, bunt began
to be used as a specific form of African humanism, because,
of course, in that sixties and seventies period you had
a lot of afrocentric and pan African and black power

(01:46:53):
ideas coming to prominence around the world. This is, of
course all so coincided with the period of decolonization, or
rather formal political independence was taken place in nineteen sixties,
and this desire for these newly independent countries to pursue Africanization,

(01:47:15):
to sort of let go of some of the symbolic
aspects of colonial rule. Of course, that process has not
really been completes and in many ways the post colonial
status is equivalent to the colonial status. But in some
ways some leaders were trying to pursue sort of a

(01:47:39):
new African specific humanism as a philosophy for the Bushoning
countries at the time. This is a part of the
episode where we tell everyone to read Fano again. Of
course read Fano and reads is there? But I found
interested is that this this term Buntu's idea of Ubuntu
particularly found it's It was basically picked up in Zimbabwe

(01:48:04):
and in South Africa in a very specific context where
there was a transition to majority rule. In nineteen eighty,
ubuntu Ism or hun who is um was presented as
the political ideology of newly independent Zimbabwe. A guy named

(01:48:27):
Stan lack Ajwt Sam Kange published treatise basically on hun
who is Ambunduism or zimbabwe Indigenous political philosophy, and he
was basically trying to outline what the three major maxims
that she this philosophy should be. Of course, I would

(01:48:49):
note that his interpretation being a statesman was notably hierarchical,
but for the reasons I will go into a bit later,
I don't believe that makes the core of unto necessarily hierarchical.
But the three maxims that he had in mind for
Untuism or who who is um was that to be

(01:49:09):
human is to affirm one's humanity by recognizing humanity of others,
and on that basis establish in respectful human relations with them.
The second maxim means that if and when one is
faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation
of life of another human being, that one should up
for the preservation of life. And then the third maxim

(01:49:32):
says that the king owed his status, including all the
powers associated with it, to the will of the people
under him. As I think that's where you get most
prominently the sense of hierarchy that would pervade Cittain interpretations
of UBUNTU, This idea of a sort of a benevolent
rulership that these benevolent statesmen and kings and prime ministers

(01:49:56):
of presidents that they would they were just exercising the
will of the people. And of course this is a
mythology that is interpreting, reinterpreted across various different regimes. In
South Africa, in the nineteen nineties, boon two as a
concept was used as sort of a guiding ideal for

(01:50:20):
the transition from a part time to majority rule. I
think around this time is when the international community started
to hear more about the term ubun two, particularly as
it appears in the epilogue of the Interim Constitution of
South Africa published nineteen ninety three. There's a need for understanding,
but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not

(01:50:41):
for retaliation. I need for uboon two, but not for
victimization end quote. Of course, as we see in South
Africa today, that didn't play out very well. The understanding
has not reached that points, reparations has not fully been achieved. Um.

(01:51:04):
And there's a I would say distinct lack of ubuntu. Yeah,
they kind of brought in Bank of America instead, which
it didn't go great. Right, Yeah, they do. It's very um,
it's very big. In Kinya Rwanda, Ubu Muntu I think. Um,
but like you'll see the phrase or that that were

(01:51:25):
a lot around Rwanda, and like if you go to
the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum, you'll see it a lot there, right,
Like that is the country that has with some authoritarian issues,
like has quite aside the differences which would previously allowed
the genocide to happen. I guess that's fair to say. Yes, yes,

(01:51:47):
that's what the Tutsi and the Hutu. Yeah, yeah, and
the tire you often get missed out. Um yeah, but
yeah they Yeah, that's actually yeah, terrible terrible thing. If
people ever go to Rwanda, would highly recommend going to Rwanda,
Like the Kigali genos erb or a museum is an
important thing. It's a very very well curated museum of Yeah,

(01:52:11):
like you said, a terrible terrible thing that happened in
South Africa. The transition to democracy and announcement Dal's presidency
in nineteen eighty four, like I said, really brought the
term to more well known outside the use and one
of the people who was a main main proponent of

(01:52:32):
that was Desmond Tutu, who was the chairman of the
South Africa and Truth and Reconciliation Commission and also a preacher.
He sort of advocated a Ubuntu theology that was really
formative in the development of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

(01:53:01):
He sort of moved the idea of Untu from simply
an African philosophy based on African values or community and
kinship to Christian values and identity with the Creator God.
It was a sort of a strategy in an attempt
to recover from the pains and brokenness of apartheid, you know,
anchoring Uuntu into these into the Christian ideals of forgiveness

(01:53:24):
and reconciliation as gifts from God for peaceful communal coexistence.
And I hopefully not being tweet offensive when I say
this to me, that's a quintessential example of how Christian

(01:53:45):
pacification hampers to colonization efforts, because I've seen often that
Christian notion of forgiveness and reconciliation two ins the blame
onto the victims for not forgiven and expects little to
nothing from the offender Excepaian and apology offense, not even
any restitution or reparations. And so for all the talk

(01:54:07):
of Ubuntu theological Ubuntu and otherwise situations, South Africa is
still very much whack. And I think that that idea
that oh well this is is in the past, it's over,
get over it kind of thing is problematic, and it's
so then it needs to be resolved the things so
that the colonization is going to take place. Right, So,

(01:54:31):
putting aside the theological applications some one problematic theological applications,
the UBUNTU wild view is echoed in some senses worldwide,
you know, social ecology when vv or mutually all these
concepts point to our interconnected us as people and really
point to the interconnectness that we have as people that

(01:54:52):
our systems I'm certainly not built to support. We say
that we see that in capitalism, you know, and doesn't
embrace the interconnectness of all people. It places us in
opposition with another. It atomizes us, it individualizes us. It
alienates us from people, from ourselves and from others, so
we must compete and stuff for the sake of survival. Alienation,

(01:55:16):
of course, in a capitalist contexts referring to our separation
of our abilities from ourselves, making us into the mere
tools for the use and benefit of our bosses. I know,
the workplace is definitely not something that we have. Is
that it is based on mutual aid or woundtu you know,
rather than working together, working harmoniously, having access to the

(01:55:37):
means of production and sharing in an equally place, in
situation of a feud, of competition, of struggling constantly and
being squeezed and wrung out for whatever our bosses can
get from us. Yeah, it's when you said, like earlier,

(01:56:00):
that one of the key tenants was right, Like recognizing
humanity and other people affirms your own humanity. And I
might be paraphrasing that, but like that's exactly what capitalism
doesn't do. It just sees people as like a tool
to create more capital, to create more more income. Like
it doesn't recognize humanity. It sees you as a means,

(01:56:20):
not an ends, right exactly, And I mean unlike in
a communal system where your service to others, you know,
it's mutual, it's reciprocal, it's voluntary. We find ourselves in
a situation where we must give away our labor, our time,
and really our whole lives just to survive. But that
giving is not done out of the goodness of our

(01:56:41):
hearts or or as part of a system, a sort
of a network of supports, a safety nets or anything.
It's just clawing towards survival, you know, disconnected from the
well being of the whole. Yeah, very much. Everything around
us has been you know, manufactured, it's been transport, has

(01:57:04):
been assembled and sold by other people, right, people just
like us, workers, just like us. M Those people have
lives just like our words. They have all the same
struggles that we do. But instead of relating to these people,
instead of freely sharing the fruit to our labor, relating
to the things that we have to buy, or we

(01:57:25):
don't see the work in people behind them. Yeah. I
think another aspect of it is that which I find
particularly strange about, you know, the hundhu is Am or
Buntoism that some Kang was trying to advocate, is that
I don't believe that UBUNTU or mutual lead, or any

(01:57:48):
of the principles that are Bunto exposes is something that
this stage is compatible with. M I don't think this
STA is compatible with the acknowledgment of one's responsibility to
their fellow humans and the world around them. You know,
the state has built an exclusion on domination and deprivation
and the hierarchical division of the state, generating this sort

(01:58:09):
of inequality and decision making power and influencing about over
own affairs. It's about depriving certain people and elevating others,
whereas UBUNTU is supposed to be about the importance of
the humanity of both the individual in the community and
about how all people are connected in a way that

(01:58:30):
is meant to support and add to and contribute and
clean and service one another. If that makes sense. You
don't like the idea of this sort of community where
everyone is giving and sharing and taking and everybody has
something to contribute to this human whole. I feel like

(01:58:53):
there's something that's lost when that whole is disrupted by
certain people being elevated to a start, to us of
having more power over others. I mean, part of that
humanity has to entail freedom to self organized, freedom to
ls who, freedom to disassociate, decision making power, autonomy, you know, Otherwise,

(01:59:14):
what kind of humanity is that? Really? How can people
access their full humanity in themselves if they're being deprived
by others on how can those others who are depriving
people have access their full humanity when they're depriving others.
If you get what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, I think
that's perfectly right. Yeah, And I mean pretty much the

(01:59:34):
same thing with the system I mean with the capitalism,
with the state, I mean patriarchy, which also elevates some
people above others and denies those marginalized others full access
to humanity. All of us are restricted in some ways
from understanding ourselves, in ourselves and through others by the

(01:59:56):
ideology and system of patriarchy. And of course the schools
are out saying, but what could be more incompatible with
the Buntu than clunialism. You know, it doesn't simply deny
the humanity of those that exploit. It also strips the
humanity the exploiters. I mean, as a Missa my referenced

(02:00:17):
earlier wrote in Discourse and Cluinalism, colonization works to decivilize
the colonizer, to brutalize him in the sentence of the
in a true sense of the wood, to degrade him
and to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race, hatred,
and more relativism. And we must show that each time

(02:00:37):
a head is cut off or an eye put out
in Vietnam and in France, they accept the fact each
time a little girl is assaulted, and in France they
accept the fact. Each time a Madagascar is tortured, and
in France they accept the fact. Civilization acquires another deadweight,
a universal regression takes place, a gang green sets in,

(02:01:00):
a center of infection begins to spread. And that at
the end of all these treatise treaties that have been violated,
all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive
expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have
been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have
been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride
has been encouraged, all the boostfulness that has been displayed,

(02:01:21):
a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe,
and slowly, but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery. Powerful
words as usual from that great Yeah, that's very good. Yeah. So,
I mean, I think there's a lot of potential in

(02:01:42):
the interpretation of a boon too, right, which is both
a flaw and a strength. And when I get into
the criticism a bit more you'll see why. But regardless,
of course, there's value to be clean from dios understandings
there's power in finding our roots to secure our future.
And whether a partnership and affinity group, an organization, a community,

(02:02:03):
or beyond. This basic principle of recognizing the authentic individual
human being as part of a larger and more significant relational,
communal society, of environmental and spiritual world is vital process
of social revolution, of confronting the powerful, to protests and
occupations and reclamations and expropriations, in refusing to cooperate with

(02:02:26):
the powers of being through strikes and boycotts and mutinies
and other forms of interaction, and then building new institutions
like cooperatives and popular assemblies and libraries of things. All
of those things, all those aspects of social revolution allow
us to assert ourselves, to recognize the mutual and ecality

(02:02:47):
and connection of all people. You know, a police smithly
boone two is open and available to others. Its a
flaming to others. I feel threatened that others are able
and good, and so by recognizing with the boons you know,
recognize and it, you're part of a greater whole. That
whole is diminished when others are humiliated, or diminished when

(02:03:10):
others are tortured or oppressed, and so someone with boon
to someone who recognizes the interconnectness of all humanity is
someone who has to be engaged in some form of
social revolution, who has to be engaged in trying to
free people, help people free themselves so that they can
engage in their own humanity and so add to your

(02:03:32):
own humanity in turn. And when it comes to the commons,
common ownership, you know, the reversal of the enclosure movement, socialization,
what if you want to call it, that is also
something that ultimately is about the bonds between people, about
the distribution of the means of production and of the

(02:03:55):
fruits of all of our labor so that all can enjoy,
so it all can have a vested interest in our
collective prosperity. When it comes to you know, community work,
you know, unto is about this idea that we can

(02:04:16):
work together, you know, in growing our food and distributing
when we need. This idea that being a mother or
being a father, being a parent, it's not just about
being that to your own biological children, but rather in
recognizing that we are all connected in that way. It's

(02:04:38):
it's like a it's like an understanding that there should
not be this idea of or funds right, this idea
that we're all meant to look out for each other,
that no person is meant to be cut off from
the sort of care it is necessary for caring into

(02:05:03):
a fully realized person. I mean, even in the realm
of education, you see potential applications if we're gountu in
recognizing that everyone has different skills and strengths, that people
are not isolated, and that through mutual support they can
help each other to complete themselves. As Ortry Tang argues,
I mean, I think there needs to be an education

(02:05:25):
that recognizes the importance of community, society, and environmental well being,
one that emphasizes the connection between all those things, one
that involves interaction, participation, recognition, respect, and inclusion as core

(02:05:46):
tenants of the learning process, of students learning from facilitators
and the facilitators learning from students. Of recognizing that we
hold both positions, and that those positions are held from
the moment we're born to the moment we eventually pass
on as rich as the potential of unto. Maybe I

(02:06:10):
don't want to put it out as if it's some
sort of like flawless and perfect philosophy. Right, it's not
above critique. It's not immune, as I mentioned before, to
hierarchical interpretations and applications. It's very much right for liberal sensibilities,
as we've seen Departments of State speaking of Untu diplomacy

(02:06:34):
and unto foreign policy and that sort of thing. Some
Kang's idea that you know, part of UBUNTUO is that
the king always a status including all the powers associated
with it to build the people under him. I mean
right now and for a while now, Boons has not
had a single solid framework of what exactly entails, what

(02:06:58):
it makes up, what it doesn't. There's still a lot
of fuzziness and inconsistency within different people's interpretations of the
definition of Untu. As one scholar in Yasha and Booti
has noted, there's an interpretation, So an interpretation of a

(02:07:19):
Buntu that sea is Africans has you know, naturally interdependence
and harmony is seeking that humanity is given to a
person buying through of the persons. But there's a sort
of a trap in that because humanity is also pretty messy.
The relationships between between people can also be very messy.

(02:07:39):
It's not all sunshine and rainbows. You know, a broken
relationship is as authentically human as a harmonious relationship. You know,
a broken relationship can also be more ethical than a
harmonious relationship. Booti points to, for example, the freedom that
follows from a break from a pressure that follows from

(02:08:01):
a break from a relationship of domination to want of freedom.
And of course this idea that harmony's relationships are incapable
of being oppressive is false. You know, a harmonious relationship
can be quite oppressive. In the Dynamics team, people that
are hidden under that veal of Honkey dory, you know. So,

(02:08:27):
I mean there's a lot of there's a lot too ubuntu,
there's a lot of good to be cleaned, a lot
of potential pitfalls to be avoided. So you know, take
what's the value, leave what's not, engage critically, what's your plans,
and have a good dye. Hi everyone, welcome to it

(02:09:02):
could happen here. A podcast which Bipopular Demand today is
about livestock as we will be going forward. It's me,
It's Garrison, and we're talking about species of sheep. Don't
not really, We're not talking about species of sheep, much
to my disappointment. Not yet, but that will be coming.
We're going to be getting into clined texuls mules that
kind of think big sheep stuff. But now today we're

(02:09:22):
actually joined by John, and John has been subjected to
my weight introduction, but we're not We're not talking about
sheep today. We're talking about active transport infrastructure and we're
talking about how cities tend to build that in certain
communities and not in others. So welcome to the show, John, Yeah,
thanks for having me. I'll say that my partner would

(02:09:43):
have been overjoyed if the podcast was actually about species
of sheep, So she's tired of hearing me talk about bikes,
I'm sure, so, but here we are. Yeah, thanks for
having me, John Stalin. I'm an assistant professor at University
of North Carolina, Greensboro. Great. Yeah, So I think to
start off with if if you could kind of outline

(02:10:08):
what sort of like I guess, I guess people might
not be familiar at all with bike infrastructure, certainly if
they live in some parts of the US or like
more rural areas, and sort of what it looks like
and what cities have been doing in the last few
years building bike infrastructure, and then how that relates to
the I guess the income disparities within cities. Yeah, I

(02:10:29):
mean that's a that's a big question, something that I
tackled in my book, which came out in twenty nineteen.
But then I haven't haven't kept up with it quite
as much. I've been trying to start work working on
other projects. But you know, I keep I keep tabs
on things a little bit um. I mean, basically, if
we're talking about the the standard rundown of infrastructure, the

(02:10:54):
the I would say, the most common thing that people
think about and probably the most common thing that's built
in part because it's quite cheap, especially over they say
the last twenty years, is the bike lane. You know,
a bike lane is usually about three to five feet wide,

(02:11:15):
and it's in to the far right of the roadway
if you're in the United States or you know, if
you're driving on the right tends to be where glass collects,
tends to be where car doors are it. And so
that nevertheless was you know, very common in places that

(02:11:36):
we're building bicycle infrastructure. That's what was being built in
I would say the last ten to fifteen years, there's
been a push to do more what people might call
Dutch style protected bike lanes. Either they're protected by a
buffer of kind of plastic post that don't prevent an

(02:12:02):
emergency vehicle from kind of getting where it needs to go,
but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the
bike lane. Really, so you'll see those and then you
know parking protected bike lanes. So the protected bike lanes
started became the big demand from bicycle infrastructure planning practitioners,

(02:12:27):
especially in cities like Portland's, you know, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago,
New York City, etcetera, etcetera. Something that was actually protected
by a curb usually really usually it's still like some
kind of a plastic curb right or cars right, and
you're not seeing a lot of you know, concrete or

(02:12:50):
brick curb work like you'll see in the Netherlands or
something like that. And then, interestingly enough, another piece of
infrastructure that there was a funny kind of maya culpa
or not mea culpa, but a reevaluation of it was
the sharrow, which is just a sort of a chevron
symbol in the middle of a car lane intended to

(02:13:13):
remind drivers that cyclists are allowed to be there, but
sort of put cyclists in the location where they would
sort of garner the most hatred. And there was a
recent recent editorial from Dave Snyder, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
It was a big, big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure.
I interviewed him for my dissertation and he talked about

(02:13:37):
how they don't work. That was a mistake. It was
mistake kind of splitting the difference, making it seem like
you didn't have to take any space away from cars
in order to fit pikes into the roadway. So I
don't know if that's kind of more than you wanted
from that. No, No, that's great because I think a
lot of folks might not have seen all these different things. Certainly,
Like if you're like me and you wrote your bike

(02:13:59):
every day, you know each of these different things, and
some of them make you feel safer for some of
them don't, and some of them are just kind of tokenistic.
I think a lot of this kind of gets to
a bigger discussion, which which is one waybe we can
touch on, which is like who the city is for?
When we're building cities in this country, certainly it seems
like we've built them around cars. With a few exceptions

(02:14:20):
like older cities and stuff, and increasingly, like if you
ask for space that and you are not a car,
then you know to include people wanting to live on
the streets, right that cars have free places to go
at night, but people don't. And so like this reallocation
of space I think gets to a bigger question, which is, yeah,

(02:14:41):
maybe something you can speak to. Yeah, So I mean
the question of I think you can think of who
both in terms of the mode of transport, it's very
car dominant society, right, and car car driving is even
on the rise in places like Copenhagen. Right, there's kind

(02:15:02):
of a lot of fretting among my supply advocates in
Copenhagen about the rise of car usage. So there's the
quite the sort of the mode of transport. But you know,
cars aren't people, right, as you sort of pointed out
just then and then so there's another layer to it
that intersects with it, which is cities being increasingly sort
of oriented towards attracting higher income residents, right, kind of

(02:15:29):
creating an attractive urban environment. There's a there's a kind
of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of
high tech or creative or knowledge intensive types of jobs, right,
your software programmers, you know, I think it was Chicago

(02:15:50):
mayor Roman Manuel. I use this in lectures all the time.
He said something like, um, you can't be for a
high tech, a creative city economy and not be pro byte. Right.
So there's this there's this idea that you know, maybe
a little bit spurious, or it might be kind of

(02:16:13):
loose causality, but there's this idea that the kinds of
workers that you want in your city that are either
going to take high paying jobs and increase the property
tax base or themselves create new startups, entrepreneurial energy, arts,
culture and uh and things like that, right that they

(02:16:36):
are they are attracted by bicycle infrastructure or bicycling or
bicycle culture in some respects. So there's that that kind
of the the irony, of course, is that those workers
you know, guilty I have a car, right, typically bring
cars with them, right, And so yes, maybe they don't

(02:17:00):
want to use them on a daily basis, like I
don't use my car on a daily basis. I don't
use my car to get to work, right, But they
you know, are often kind of having it both wings,
right in a lot of ways in terms of you know,
buildings will be built with garages, right, and that's only
recently starting to be eroded, right as just a you know,

(02:17:23):
a one to one parking ratio and a transit connected building. Yeah,
and so when we're talking about it, the combination of
these two things, right, like affluent areas or cities trying
to attract affluent people and cities trying to build bike infrastructure.
And something I've observed where I live, which is San Diego,
is that we've built a lot of bike lanes, but

(02:17:44):
only connecting privileged communities to places where people do high
income work. And it seems like increasingly like riding your
bike safely is a privilege that it's only afforded to
a certain group of people. Is that something that's broader
than just in my town, I'd say so. I mean,
I think you see this in in where I did

(02:18:07):
a lot of my research in the San Francisco Bay area,
also did research in Philadelphia and Detroit and Austin as well.
That's not in the book, but yeah, that's it's common,
and there's a few different There's kind of a there's
a degree of cumulative causality as we would say in
economic geography, right, you have going back to say the

(02:18:32):
nineteen nineties, you had bicycle advocates primarily recreational, primarily middle class,
largely white, recreational cyclists, or and you start to seem
participants in by squad becacy organizations also being kind of
bicycle commuters. The kinds of jobs that were growing in

(02:18:58):
urban centers in the nineteen nineties, in two thousands or
you know, the first decade of this millennium, right, are
the kinds of you know, if not high tech, the
sort of professional technical type of employment right, growing in
urban centers. And there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods

(02:19:27):
that makes it feasible and desirable actually that you could
you could, you know, find a fairly affordable house and
be able to bike to work right two to three miles, right,
rather than the commute in from the suburbs or the
commute out from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs. Right. Um,

(02:19:51):
So I think that you get a lot of the
initial energy around the bicycle movement if you look at
critical mass, if you look at the San Francisco Bicycle
Coalition and its early days Again, these are things I'm
familiar with a lot of this sort of the political
mobilization is around making those types of journeys easier, more doable. Right.

(02:20:15):
You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are
getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic
innermost streetcar suburbs developed around one hundred years ago, fairly
walkable themselves. They have a mix of commercial and residential.
They aren't buy in large industrial neighborhoods, right, the industrial

(02:20:37):
neighborhoods where you still have a lot of truck traffic,
where in industry be got more industry or de industrialization
really hollowed out the economic base where you have you know,
large roadways, you have you know disinvestment and kind of
a mix of small retail or um lower income population.

(02:21:04):
Those were not um. Those were not areas where there
were that were attracting the kinds of people who would
be listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure. Right, there's
still lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods. UM in a
place like East Oakland or um uh North Philadelphia or

(02:21:28):
something like that, right where there are a lot of
people who ride bicycles, but they don't they're not organized politically,
uh under the sort of the block of of of cyclists. Um.
And so there's this sort of paradox or in the
way that I came around to this project was I

(02:21:49):
was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia, and I
was sort of one of those white hipsters on fixies.
Right at the same time, I spent a lot of
my day speaking Spanish, talking with and helping people fix
their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as

(02:22:12):
dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart because it's
what they could afford, even though they knew that they
were crapped, they just couldn't afford anything better, trying to
get the most out of those bikes. And so there's
this funny dichotomy. On the one hand, it's like you
have the cool bike already creative scene that is sort

(02:22:35):
of trying to be encouraged maybe, And on the other hand,
a lot of the people who are actually making do
on bicycles are not sort of part of that vision,
I guess for the city. Right when I think about
things in spatial terms as well, right, if you imagine

(02:22:55):
going back to the journeys to work from a sort
of close in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot
of turnover, a lot of middle class you know, mostly white,
but not necessarily exclusively white, in migrants, the types of
journeys that a lot of you know, I'll take Durham

(02:23:16):
for example, where I live now, which is not there's
not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure. There's a little
there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, but there's
some job growth in the downtown area. There's certainly a
lot of job growth in the sort of the suburbs.
But in terms of the kinds of jobs that, um,

(02:23:39):
you know, working class jobs that are being created at
Amazon fulfillment centers, those are at the urban periphery, right,
They're not places that even in a kind of a
gentrifying neighborhood, even if bicycle infrastructure were created. This sort
of the directionality of the feasible commute kind of runs

(02:24:00):
against the feasible bicycle community, sort of runs against the
very kind of spread out and scattered commutes in the
sort of retail, wholesale, warehousing, manufacturing, etc. Etc. The sectors
that are experiencing job sprawl rather than a sort of

(02:24:22):
a concentrated, concentrated job growth in in the sort of
the urban center, right, So that's another aspect to it
as well. Bike advocacy is very interesting to me. Like
I was a bike messenger, I was a bike racer
like these, I've made my living riding a bike. I've
also just ridden my bike to get to work. And
bike advocacy really hasn't reflected a broad swath of cyclists

(02:24:46):
for a very long time. Do you think that's why
we don't see like better infrastructure in some of these
like d industrializing areas for instance, And does that lead
directly to it being dangerous, Like you would be to
ask of their statistics to show that, like it's more
dangerous to ride your bike. So I'll say a couple

(02:25:08):
of things. The the the directionality or the causality is
a little bit complicated. I would say, certainly there was
some evidence that bicycle advocates weren't in the early days,
and there was a big sort of cultural shift in
bicycle advocacy in the nineteen nineties. Part of the nineteen nineties.

(02:25:29):
You have a lot of cyclists who are actually opposed
to bicycle infrastructure we still have. They are still a
loud being a rish voice in San Diego. Yeah, exactly.
The vehicular cyclists, right, yeah, yeah, could you explain that? Sure?
So vehicular cyclists. It was a philosophy expounded by John

(02:25:52):
Forrester might have his book right here, Yeah, in the book,
and it's not in the book Effective Cycling. Um. Where
it was the idea was that cyclists should be riding
like cars, right, which means riding fast, center of the lane,

(02:26:13):
behaving exactly like a car. And they were very opposed
to any infrastructure that would sort of create be created
especially for bicyclists, on the basis which there was maybe
some slight truth to this, that that cyclists would be
banned from roads that didn't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure. There

(02:26:37):
was a little bit of concern that was there was
I think I remember reading about a little bit of
actual talk among legislators and planners that bicyclists would be
kept off of main roads. And I think their to
their credit, they saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at

(02:27:00):
that time as basically designed to get cyclists out of
the way of motorists, right, and so it was mainly
to advance the interests of motorists, right, but they were
very hostile to um, they're very hostile to a sort
of a Dutch style model, which like, you know, these

(02:27:23):
were guys who like to ride fast and like you don't.
You can't ride fast in the Netherlands. Yea, not everyone's
physically able nor really wants to go forty miles an
hour on a road next to cars, exactly, right. So
it was very much around a strong, fit, confident cyclist

(02:27:46):
who knew all the laws of the road, road really fast.
Was very assertive. Um. It obviously lent itself towards a
sort of a boomer type, right, a sort of adventurous type.
And it was very much that we that bicycl advocates

(02:28:09):
should advance the interests of cyclists, not try to grow
the number of people cycling, right. And so the shift
towards that maybe the critical mass moment is not the
only thing, but this is that's sort of a good
moment to kind of tag it to the nineteen ninety
two first critical mass era, but you know Earthday vehicle

(02:28:32):
for a small planet, all this sort of growing interest
in bicycling. Yeah, the shift towards more people should be
doing this. Yeah, can you explain critical mass to people
who haven't like participated, because I think it's quite a
unique and interesting phenomenon. Sure, yeah, absolutely so. Critical mass
began in San Francisco in I think the first critical

(02:28:58):
mass was nineteen ninety two, and it was began sort
of as like a group of people working, you know,
broadly working office jobs who were sort of kind of
culturally anarchistic or you know, had these sort of anarchist

(02:29:18):
or situation as kind of ideas and who were kind
of organizing months themselves to ride home as a group, right,
And they started getting this idea of sort of having
these monthly ride together um happenings, right, they called it.

(02:29:38):
They didn't call them protests, and they weren't organized rides.
They were uh, sort of rolling festivals, was the idea.
I think the first the first name that they came
up with, which mercifully didn't stick, was like the commute
clot right. So it was also about kind of jamming

(02:29:59):
up the regularity of the Friday evening commute, so it
would be like the first Friday of every month at
commute time. Right. Um. Some of these I think still
happen in Portland, Oh, yeah, Yeah, it's it's the critical
Mass still happens. Um. There's a you know, one of
the chapters in my book, I sort of trace this

(02:30:20):
arc of critical Mass through to the more kind of
bike party oriented exactly the slow role type of model,
which I think is interesting because it's a little bit
it's consciously less confrontational. It's not held at a time

(02:30:41):
that would clog up, um sure, clog up evening traffic. Uh.
It's designed to attract kind of families, people who aren't
trying to have confrontations with drivers or police. Right. One
of the things that sort of really put um put
bicycle infrastructure on the agenda in San Francisco was this
mass arrest of Critical Mass in nineteen ninety seven, supposedly

(02:31:08):
because the mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown at the time,
got stuck in one in his limo and was like
furious and so asked the police to crack down next time.
It was a huge it was. It backfired massively politically,
but it also created this opening for the the San
Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which actually was an organization. Critical Mass

(02:31:32):
was not an organization, right, It gave them this opportunity
to say, well, what cyclists want is, you know, to
actually build out the bike plan that supposedly exists, but
nobody has been doing anything about it, right, So I
mean that's probably maybe more than you wanted to know.
But sort that that arc of critical mass as this

(02:31:52):
sort of countercultural moment that created this opening for a
more formal bicycle planning uh an advocacy organization or a
set of organizations to emerge, right, Um, and maybe it's unfair.
I think I probably do it in the book. It's
a little bit unfair probably to call it a kind
of depoliticization, but there was certainly a degree of kind

(02:32:15):
of like explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city
more broadly from a kind of left perspective that does
disappear somewhat in the sort of the rhetoric of the
bike movement. Yeah, it's definitely it's definitely lost some of
that like radical edge where these types of these types
of you know, when when when like a hundred or

(02:32:36):
two hundred people on bikes takeover streets in Portland every
once in a while, it is way more in the
form of like a big party, it's like it's it's
it's like it's like a it's like a roving block party.
It does not have that same level of like, yeah,
almost like situationist creating a happening or creating a situation
that that that affects the regular politics and affects the
regular way that the city functions. Yeah, I mean, yeah,

(02:32:59):
that being said, the sort of the successors, like bike
Party in San Jose was a huge one, and this
that bike party model kind of spread throughout California were
often much bigger than Critical Mass, right, Um, a lot
of times more diverse as well. Right, So there's there's
a really interesting kind of politics around. Is the is

(02:33:22):
the politics in the sort of explicit slogans or is
the politics in sort of like showing people that there
is a kind of collectivity that they might be part
of simply by virtue of like moving through urban space
in a different way. And for a lot of people
it was their first time riding a bike in the

(02:33:43):
city because they were so afraid of cars otherwise. Right,
he had safety in numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely, Um,
I know for a lot of people that was the case.
Like I've done some critical masses, I mean the UK,
we had reclaimed the streets as well, like a similar
vibe I remember in the Earth, I guess the first
decade of this century, like there would be critical mass

(02:34:04):
rights before antig eight protests, like I remember in Octorado
in Scotland and things not into before that, and like
before rather G eight protests would be mass rights. And
it's a very different scene to like bike advocacy now, right, yeah, yeah,
And you saw this a little bit with like the
Occupy movement, the at least my experience of them, the

(02:34:30):
sort of early wave of the Black Lives Matter movement
in twenty fourteen with the killing of Trayvon Martin, there
were a lot the bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest
mode for many people, and that's probably sort of some
of the cultural political tools of critical mass that sort

(02:34:52):
of surface here and there. But I think for the
twentieth anniversary, Chris Carlson, who was one of the early organizers,
called it talks about critical mass all over the world,
and that San Francisco felt kind of like the hole
in the middle of the donut, right, like it sort
of created this reverberation, but then it actually withered to

(02:35:15):
a degree in in the center and often the narrative is, well,
you're you're getting like you're winning, right, so critical mass
is no longer necessary because you're getting bike lanes, you're
getting um you know, you're getting investment, you're getting attention
from planners, etc. Etc. Right. Obviously, Yeah, the gains, whatever

(02:35:39):
they are, are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed. And that
kind of relates back to how we kind of started
by talking about how, you know, some cities are putting
more development into bike infrastructure, but how it's being developed
is not actually serving people who like I have to
use a bike to commute because they don't owe a
car and they can't afford a car, Like it's it's
it's getting used to people who actually already have a

(02:36:01):
lot of resources. And like an interesting case and point
in this is the belt Line in Atlanta, which like
started off in the you know as an idea in
nineteen ninety nine with wanting to create like a giant
loop using like public transit, having having rail going around
the city, having bike having bike paths going all around
the city, being able to like connect the city with

(02:36:24):
these with these like spaces for like green space and
affordable housing, and instead the project kind of manifested as
this like like is this project that was had up
by real estate companies to replace a whole bunch of
low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of like expensive
restaurants and luxury condos and you know, putting putting the

(02:36:48):
belt line and as a path to to create these
like expensive, like gentrifying areas around the city. And it's
how like these ideas can start off so good and
that when they get like, you know, actually done, it's
manifested in a way that is actually like not helpful
to people who need this type of thing at all. Yeah, yeah,

(02:37:10):
I mean the belt Line. I don't know enough about it.
I've read I've read a little bit of the sort
of academic literature, and I've been there, and it is
really kind of interesting how it is. This It is
this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure right to

(02:37:31):
sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it,
right sort of old rail, old industrial infrastructure. And that's
something that I don't think that you can you're ever
you know, people there are studies here and there that
try to demonstrate the kind of the economic value of

(02:37:52):
bicycle infrastructure. The contribution to tax, tax receipts, etc. Etc.
But it gets pretty hard to parse the causality, um,
especially when you're you know, especially when compared to something
that is really sort of overhauling the space, right, I

(02:38:13):
don't you know the belt belt line is it's I
think probably it's success from a sort of financial perspective
has to do with it being a multi use path,
right yea, rather than it being bicycle infrastructure, um, and
sort of being being framed as this much broader type

(02:38:37):
of thing, right rather than um, a bike lane on
a street, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not great
to write down, like at least on the weekend, because
you'll just be slow, full of full of people. It's
full of Like when I when I when I was
visiting last year during the start of summer, I went
with a friend to the area by Ponce City Market,

(02:38:59):
which is kind of a great example of the gentrifying
force of of the belt Line, but also like, yeah,
there's people who's trying, people who are trying to ride
bikes around, but there's like kids on rollers, kids everywhere.
There's it's it's it's pretty packed. It's getting it's it's
getting pretty pretty warm um. But there's other parts that
are like you know that are that are more isolated

(02:39:20):
where it is much more of like a of like
a commute path. But it's it's interesting. It's just like
it like weaves in and out of these like retail
and luxury apartment um, you know pop up exactly, and
and all that stuff is is relative, is like relatively
new for all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding
the surrounding like the construction of the belt line. Yeah,

(02:39:42):
and I mean the um, I think that you maybe
see this just a little bit with like you know,
the direction that I've taken this thinking about it is
more the sort of the types of urban strategies that
have begun to incorporate bicycle infrastructure, right, or active transportation
more generally as the kind of big driving forces, rather

(02:40:07):
than like is this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's
usually it's often the other way around, right. Bicycle infrastructure
sort of emerges as a result of gentrification, right or
as a result of the in migration of people who
are going to be listened to right because of their status,

(02:40:30):
because of their income, because they have kind of existing
capacities in organizing for these types of things, right, It's
I think what's interesting is one of the one of
the positions I've sort of come around to, right is

(02:40:52):
thinking more about um not like should we do bicycle
infrastructure because it might kind of create the perception of
gentrification or cause gentrification or something like that, and instead,
like you know what, one of the things that gentrification
results from when you're thinking about amenities that sort of

(02:41:12):
lead to the revalorization of urban space is that they
are in some way special, right. And so if the
question is the specialness of this particular place, you know, Garrison,
as you said, what makes say, you know, the kinds
of places where you can safely ride a bike are

(02:41:33):
fairly unique, right, They're not well distributed, right, And so
from my perspective, it's sort of the more routine they
become as an as as you know, including them into
urban space, the less special the places where they are

(02:41:54):
built become. Right. And it's so routine that it wouldn't
be worth mentioning, right, It's like mentioning that there is
a sewer line, right, Like it's like mentioning that it
has connection to city water, which okay, yeah, and you know,
at the at the urban edge where I live. Um,
I don't live at the urban edge, but at the

(02:42:16):
urban edge in the southeast. Um, you know there isn't
always connection to the city water. Um. Yeah, like trying
to get it normalized to the point where it's like
obvious that it's something that is like a part of
the city. It's like yeah, like right, of course, it's
it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or a
road or like a power line, which when fair. I
don't have any sidewalks on my street, and most of

(02:42:38):
the streets around me have a sidewalk on on one side.
Only Portland. Portland also has very has very few sidewalks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you have this. Yeah. I lived in Belgium for a
while when I was racing. It like, I lived in
a town that was very much just to look, lots
of Belgium is shitty, gray coal mining towns. I left Belgium.
But this is the thing, and like, yeah, they would
never have beat you know. The bike infrastructure is unremarked.

(02:43:00):
It was just a thing that everyone used to go
to the shops to go to school. It wasn't right
lest like selling point for a branch restaurant yeah, and
I think it's this kind of thing where it's bigger
than just the infrastructure. Right. A lot of the places
where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right are these
sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the densest areas,

(02:43:26):
right where everything was in walking distance, but the area
is kind of just beyond there, right where where there
are you know, shops, places of employment, services, etc. Etc.
All sort of within reasonable biking distance or maybe long

(02:43:46):
walking distance, right, but too short to really merit a
trip on a bus or a train, right, and you know,
short enough that maybe some of us would feel a
little bit silly getting in the car to go do it. Right,
So that that kind of zone is also not terribly
common in the United States, right. A lot of those

(02:44:09):
places got destroyed to build highways, right, or got destroyed
to build kind of suburban style shopping malls, and so
that's part of their part of their specialness. But going
back to the idea of you know, people in the
places where people were really relying on bicycles, right, that

(02:44:32):
there isn't necessarily infrastructure. It's partially a data issue. Going
back to your data question, right, the way that we
collect data on bicycling is people people bicycling to work. Right.
If people aren't in the workforce or they happen to
not have a job, that is not counted in the census, right,

(02:44:56):
even if you bicycle to the train like I do.
Like if I get to fill out the census, I'm
going to fill out train, right, because that's the bulk
of my journey when I commute. And so it skews
your perception of where infrastructure might be needed if you're
using data toward places that where people are commuting by bicycle, right,

(02:45:23):
rather than you know, commuting is only a quarter to
a third of all trips, right, rather than all the
other trips that we don't know about. Right. And sometimes
we measure them with passive measurement, like pressure sensors in
the streets. Sometimes active measurement like people doing bicycle counts
on particular days. Right, there's a whole history of that.
Now we're using Strava. But then we're getting a small

(02:45:47):
like we're getting a very rich data set about a
small subset of cyclists and hoping that that extends to most,
if not all cyclists. And then to your question started,
I'll pause right to your question about the the the
data question, right, how how deadly or how dangerous are

(02:46:13):
various streets that don't have bike lanes. There is a
big problem of the missing denominator. Right, We don't know
how many people cycles, so we don't know the rates
of injury on these particular roadways in the way in
the same way that we do know car volumes and
can have a better sense of the rates of injury

(02:46:37):
based on collisions. Right, But you do see clusters of
collisions in places where you know where they're large roads
meeting where basically no very few if any traffic engineers
would sign off on taking away some of that car
capacity to create more safety for cycle. And of course

(02:47:01):
those those kind of compound. Those factors kind of compound, Right.
You maybe have an industrial area, it's a big interface
with a large urban arterial or an off ramp to
a highway. Right, these kind of all go together with
um with potentially sort of lower lower income area are

(02:47:25):
sort of a lower um less pressure to improve that
that area. Yeah, So I'm thinking when I think about
like how the bike movement missed an opportunity to be better,
I always think about like this moment in twenty twenty
when this man called Dijon Kizzie was killed by police

(02:47:47):
in LA and the incident which led to the cops
shooting him began because the cops tried to pull him
over for running a stop sign on a bike, right,
which is a thing that tenth of thousands of white
dudes into Dex do every single day. In this kind
of not a word was spoken by the bike movement,
at least that I saw by bike folks, you know,

(02:48:09):
in sort of solidarity or a position to what had happened. Right,
It just it was just another thing that went mourned
to buy thousands of people and ignored by others. So like,
it made me think about it how we build Maybe
it's wrong to think about how we build a better
bike movement, and maybe it's better to think about how

(02:48:30):
we make it unremarkable that you bike, right, we make
it like not an identity thing. But how do we
make cities where people are safe riding bikes I guess,
regardless of whether they're wearing spandex or they're just trying
to get to the shop ups. Yeah, I mean that's
a really kind of an important question. And in my research,
a lot of people were grappling with that. There was

(02:48:51):
an incident that mercifully didn't result in someone being killed
or seriously injured. But you know, a guy was pulled
off of his bike by a police beaten up in
San Francisco, and there was a big march afterwards, and
some of the some bisuple advocates did show up, but
it was not framed as this is something that you

(02:49:12):
know is affecting us as cyclists, right, this is or
that affecting some of us as cyclists, right, and an
injury to one as an injury at all. Right, that's
not that's not it was not the kind of the
frame that that people were using to mud from what
I could tell, right, Um, and you had bicycle you know,

(02:49:33):
black bicycle advocates in East Oakland who didn't really frame
themselves as bieula advocates necessarily in the traditional um or
the mold that is sort of determined by the sort
of the hegemonically kind of white middle class advocacy organizations. Right,
But they were very much bicycle advocates who you know, um,

(02:49:54):
a lot of were a lot of a lot of
what they did was sort of like teaching people to
ride correctly so that they would have fewer interactions with police,
right or um kind of managing interactions with with police
and you know, hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists

(02:50:15):
that they weren't kind of subject to the kinds of
interactions that you know where people police end up killing somebody. Right. Um,
Now that I live in a place where very few
people bicycle to work or for much of anything, right,
I'm thinking a bit more holistically about uh, you know,

(02:50:37):
it's now kind of a buzz buzzword, but you know,
a kind of a more car optional um city right
where you don't need to have a car to do
various things. You know, I'm I'm involved with bicycle advocates here,
but like when I when I look around, I see
like a bus stop that is a stick in a

(02:51:00):
median right. There's no bench, there's no sidewalks to get
to it, there's no crosswalks or anything like that. And
I mean, I think that one of the bigger one
of the bigger questions is to make a place that's
safe for cyclists, safe for people walking, safe for people

(02:51:21):
walking their bikes, or safe for people walking to transit.
Right is reducing the kind of the space and the
way that space and speed go together, right, that are
devoted to cars, and a lot of that is like

(02:51:41):
reducing the the the distances that people need to travel
right for various things. Right. This gets into this sort
of the fifteen minute city stuff, which is that it's
been really wild to see it being turned into this
like QAnon type, you know, Agenda twenty one, und black
helicopters type of conspiracy theory, right, because I think of

(02:52:05):
it as a very kind of milk toast type of
policy framework that's honored in the breach, right, sort of
like complete streets there's a carve out for unless the
traffic engineer says it's not really feasible, and then we
won't really question that judgment. We just won't do it, right. So,
I mean, I do think it's bigger than modes of

(02:52:25):
transport are really bigger than people's individual decisions or even
like what the sort of once you are in your
mode of transport, what the sort of behavioral matrix is? Right,
It's sort of like what what is your life consist of? Right? Um,
what what do you do to like preserve your dignity

(02:52:48):
with your coworkers? Right? All of these kinds of things
that feed people towards towards driving, except in you know,
very specific places that you know have become special in
the United States. I mean there's a lot, there's a
lot to say, right. It is really it's much bigger
than than bicycling. Um, it's the sort of the built environment.

(02:53:11):
And I think one of the things that what I
land on in the book, maybe belatedly, right because these
these these things take years, is is this the way
that bicycling is still kind of this interstitial solution, Right.
It's sort of like kind of picking up scraps here

(02:53:33):
and there in the built environment. Right, It's like picking
up some of the loose ends right in how cities
are organized that makes them frustrating difficult to navigate, right. Um.
And you know, I think a lot of the energy,
not exclusively certainly, And bicycle advocacy has become much more

(02:53:53):
diverse in part through like listening to a lot of
the voices of advocates of color and women advocates, and
you know, um, kind of thinking beyond that sort of
stereotypical you know, not just the middle aged man in
micro but like the the sort of middle aged guy

(02:54:14):
on us early. Right, you know that that maybe successor
to the middle aged man in micro right, and certainly
calling myself out, but the it's still very kind of
an interstitial thing, right, Um. It's and the thing about
the urban transportation systems in the United States is that

(02:54:38):
they leave a lot of interstices, right, There's a lot
of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars,
and honestly poorly served by cars. You know, in Oakland
you had people a lot of the sort of the
maybe not anger but certainly annoyance at bicycle advocacy and
bicycle infrastructure would and I think you see this in

(02:55:02):
Portland too, where it's like we've been asking for sidewalks,
We've been asking the city to to like fill these potholes,
and instead there's these bike lanes that people who just
got here are asking for, right, And so maybe that's
a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know, people
moving to a neighborhood. They they're like, why is it

(02:55:22):
so torturous to get somewhere by bike? Rather than kind
of maybe stopping and saying, all right, what what what
have people been demanding here before I got here? Right? Um?
And how can I sort of contribute to that as well?
And sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially. Um,
but it is this sort of it's a it's an

(02:55:43):
interstitial um solution, right. And so from for me, you know,
the bigger the bigger questions are sort of what what
role will bicycles play when we start to really take
seriously the kind of broader urban structure, So you don't

(02:56:06):
have these sort of islands of bike ability inside a
sea of automobility. Right, Um, do you have a situation
where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take
transit than it is to bike, right? I would call
that a that a win, right? And I think you know,
there's a there's a there's a degree to which we
can get fixated on the particular mode of transport, I

(02:56:28):
think because we all kind of like fell in love
with bicycles and that was the sort of the the
gateway drug into thinking about like transport and cities and
how people move around and the sort of the history
of urban planning. Right. So I mean these are all
I don't know if I really kind of offered anything
that sort of puts it all together nicely, right, Um,

(02:56:51):
But the idea that it really does need to become
normalized and if it actually sort of disappears in a
process of being normalized and it stops being a signifier
of environmental rectitude or something like that. And you know,
if I could walk to a grocery store instead of

(02:57:11):
having a bike to a grocery store, I would prefer that,
honestly where I am right now, right, even though I
love cycling, right and it's something that I'll never stop doing. Right.
So I think kind of thinking more holistically about what
kinds of cities we need to have to move beyond,
move beyond automobility, both from a climate perspective and a

(02:57:34):
social justice perspective and just almost like a thermodynamic perspective.
So I mean that maybe that's the moving up to
the level of physics is where one kind of place
to end. Yeah, I think that's very good. Yeah. Is
there anything you'd like to plug? Maybe people where people

(02:57:58):
can find your book, where people can follow you online,
and I think like that any sort of projects you're
interested in, sure, Yeah, So, um My, you can find
me on Twitter. I'm at jo st e h l
i N. My book is now, it's few years old.
It's twenty nineteen with University of Minnesota Press. It's all.
It's called Cyclescapes of the Unequal City, and my latest

(02:58:23):
work I'm actually looking at, um the politics of highway removal.
So maybe scaling up in terms of infrastructure, thinking about
sort of bigger the kind of the great clanking gears
of urbanism rather than you know, this little tiny stretch
of pavement on the side that's that's full of glass

(02:58:46):
and car doors and stuff like that. So, but of
course they all kind of fit together through what are
the what how does the fabric of the built environment
have to change in order to grapple with climate change,
inequality and sort of making a sort of a more
human type of city. Yeah, I think it's great. I
think it's a wonderful place. Tran, thank you so much

(02:59:08):
for giving us some of your afternoon. John. Yeah, thank you.
I really appreciate you taking the time, and it was
a really fun conversation. Hi podcast fans, it's me. It's Jones.
And it's just a tiny little pickup that I wanted
to add to the end of this episode because I'm
neglected to mention that Si Klista Zene did call out
the police killing of Dijon Kizzy very explicitly and had
an excellent peace on it, as they do on lots

(02:59:30):
of other things. They are incredibly wonderful and you can
find them at si KLISTA zene c y c l
I s t A z i ne dot com. They
are not representative of the rest of the bike media,
so well worth looking at if you like bikes and
not the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay,

(02:59:51):
thanks bye, welcome too. It could happen here a podcast
about things falling apart and sometimes putting things back together.

(03:00:18):
And you know, today we're doing an episode that's kind
of more on the intellectual and emotional end of a
very specific set of things falling apart, and rather than
clumsily try to introduce it myself, I'm going to bring
on the person who who I think some of the
thoughts that have kind of been going through my head,

(03:00:38):
I know they've been going through the heads of a
lot of the folks that we have here at cool
Zone for quite some time now. Thoughtslime, you are a
YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does a number of videos.
Some of your recent ones are thoughts on ai art,
A timeline of Elon's Twitter mistakes. You did a really
fun video on the QAnon Queen of Canada, who is

(03:01:03):
a pretty problematic character. Welcome to the show, Thanks for
having me, Happy to be here. Do you want to
just kind of start by reading us that thread? Because
you posted this on Twitter the other day and I
started chatting with it, and then we moved over to
DMS and decided we should kind of do a little
more formal thing. Yeah. So basically I said that I'm

(03:01:25):
constantly considering making a Why I Left the Left video
about how my views have not changed one iota, but
I've become completely disillusioned about my role in communicating them.
Part of the reason I shifted my focus to trying
to be just entertaining is because deep down, I don't
really see a lot of value in getting people on
my side anymore. I don't think it does anything or

(03:01:45):
means anything. But the best I can do is give
you information and hopefully a laugh. I used to feel
like I was participating in something bigger than I think
A lot. Then I think I really am that I
was helping in some small, in some small way towards
a sort of shift towards more revolutionary mass consciousness. I
think that was a bit of a childish fantasy. In retrospect,
sometimes people will say, you made me an anarchist, and like, Buddy,

(03:02:08):
I don't even think it matters that I myself am
an anarchist, and I regret that that sort of we're
fighting the good fight mentality has allowed some of the
worst grifters on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's
passions for their own weird, petty reasons. I think what
I do has a lot of value, but I'm just
saying that I think I perceive that value to be
is a lot different than what I thought it was
a few years ago. Is basically what I had to say, Yeah,

(03:02:31):
that I think does such a good job of nailing
the problem that I've been kind of dealing with emotionally
as well, which is it's it's not It'd be easy
to sum it up as like I no longer believe in,
you know, trying to transmit you know, leftist ideas or
political analysis, or that I don't believe in the value

(03:02:52):
of like trying to inform people about the world, because
that's not how I feel. But there is there has
been a shift, and I think probably the high point
for the version of me that was optimistic about the
ability to use mass media to build power and the
ability to take effective action on the left. I think
that kind of crescendoed I'm gonna, I'm gonna say June

(03:03:15):
of twenty twenty, um, and it had a pretty sharp
drop after that point. And I both think it's it's
valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened
in twenty twenty was. For all of its flaws and
all of the really messy fallout from it, we saw
an ups an uprising of unprecedented scale. And part of

(03:03:38):
why the crackdown in response has been so narly is
that it scared the hell out of a lot of
really unpleasant people. Um. And the media had a significant
role to play in that, both in the fact that
there were a lot of people who were who were
kind of already organizing and radicalized when the ship started

(03:03:58):
to hit the fan, and that as things happened, um,
you know, the what was happening in the streets, what
the police were doing, the different kind of marches and
and different campaigns that were being started got spread to people.
And I do think that you know, folks, you know,
like you and me were a part of that. Although
it never is far from my mind that the most

(03:04:20):
influential piece of media that was that was recorded and
disseminated during twenty twenty was the video of George Floyd
being murdered, which was filmed by you know, someone who
just happened to be nearby and had the courage to
film it. Not a professional journalist, not a not an influencer,
not a not somebody who was a professional political thinker,

(03:04:42):
and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video. Yeah,
I think that that kind of gets to the heart
of it, right, is that like we we express support
for ideas, and thus people tend to treat us as
though we are the progenitors of those ideas, or the
the guardians of those ideas, or the leaders of a
kind of decentralized proxy party of some kind. Yeah, it's

(03:05:08):
it's it's both, because I think, thankfully there's that. I mean,
there's there's always going to be every everyone who makes
popular media gets forms a little cult, and so there's
always going to be a number of people who, you know,
take any given person in the media more seriously than
they deserve, and that that includes the both of us.

(03:05:30):
And that's that's not attempting to be that's not attempting
to be like Humble or anything. That is simply a
fact of how mass media works. Um. I do think
we've seen. I think there's been a mix of a
healthy pushback against looking at people who are doing creating
popular media as more than what they are and more
than what that media is capable of being. I think

(03:05:52):
there has been a pushback against that in the last
couple of years. It's been healthy, and I think there's
been a pushback that's been unhealthy. People have forgotten some
of the lessons of like one. I think a good
example would be there was a very justified backlash against
and when I say streamers here, I'm referring to people
who are actually in the streets streaming during riots and

(03:06:13):
protests and whatnot, right and that, and the justified part
of that backlash was due to the fact that past
a certain point, particularly those video those streams were primarily
being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on
people and to just to know where folks were as
an intelligence gathering method. And I think that the backlash,
which was understandable, and there was a lot of ugly behavior,

(03:06:35):
including people who kind of got in after the early
portions of that in order to make shitloads of money
by you know, streaming people getting the shit beat out
of them by the cops, and that was I think
very justified, a pretty aggressive social response to that, but
I think it's also caused a lot of people to
forget that. A huge part of why things kicked off

(03:06:56):
in twenty twenty and why so many people got involved
was Nico from Uniform Corn on the ground every night
in Minneapolis doing one of the most impressive pieces of
citizen journalism that I think we've seen in this country.
And so I do think that some of what's frustrating
here is that it's difficult for people. It's difficult for
us as a community to take some of the proper

(03:07:19):
lessons from these things that are happening from the push
and pull of the conflict that we all find ourselves in,
in part because the nature of the way people express
their understanding of these lessons via social media is very
geared towards flattening them and making it a very simple
matter of this is bad or this is good, and
not well in this period of time, this worked and

(03:07:41):
then it didn't. You know, there's no real sense of
proportionality in these discussions. It isn't just a matter of like, hey,
you fucked up. You should probably take this down, or
this could be dangerous if you leave this up, or
if you continue to do this. It's more so like
what are you a cop? What are you some kind
of cop doing this? Yeah, you know, let's let's spread

(03:08:02):
that rumor around and it I mean, yeah, the cop
jacketing thing is is kind of one part of the problem.
But I want to focus a little bit on what
you were talking about in terms of what do you
think as you're kind of looking at you know, and
we're all kind of staring twenty twenty four as it approaches,
what do you think is useful from media that that

(03:08:25):
attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are that are
left wing, that are anarchists inclined. What do you think
is actually the value that can be added to attempts
to achieve greater justice in our society. Well, I think
the answer is twofold. I think firstly, anything that drives

(03:08:48):
people to like real life organizing and taking action outside
of online spaces is obviously useful. UM. Beyond that, though, like,
I think there is some value to just exposing people
to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But
I think that, um, that a lot of that has

(03:09:11):
been accomplished now. I feel like a lot of people
are more familiar with with kind of the leftist the
leftist idehology one on one type of content that people
might expect in that way. So yeah, I would say
those are the two value propositions. I wonder if you
think a lot about because one thing that concerns me obviously, UM.

(03:09:33):
Any community develops a language that is to some extent
its own, UM, and that's that's a that's part of politics,
you know, political analysis, if you're looking at things with
a Marxist analysis, or if you're analyzing things you know
based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy.

(03:09:53):
There's terms that you're going to use that that other
thinkers have created, that are the terms that people use
to discuss those ideas. But it is sometimes kind of
a thin line between that and the thing that colts
do where they come up with a bunch of specific
terms that no one else uses in order to separate
a community from the rest from everyone else. And obviously

(03:10:13):
I don't think there's any intentionality there. I don't think
people who are talking about you know, the dialectic or
whatever are attempting to separate their listeners from the mass
of humanity. But I do think that happens sometimes. And
when I listen sometimes to conversations on the left about justice,
in particular about social justice, I wonder, like, well, how

(03:10:35):
is somebody who isn't like reading all this shit going
to interpret this? Is it just going to like sound
like nonsense to them? And I think maybe like part
of the purpose, the positive purpose of mass media that
looks at things from the left is trying to communicate
with folks who are not going to sit down or
at least who have not yet sat down and done

(03:10:56):
a whole bunch of reading on the history and the politics,
but whose heart are in the right place, and who
I would like to be able to engage in conversations
with folks who maybe kind of get their heads a
little bit too full of specific terminology. Sometimes I think
it's it's a specific balancing act because on the other hand,

(03:11:18):
like you also have to give your audience a little
credit that they're absolutely but I think that like you
have to be able to meet people where they're at.
But at the same time, like, if someone has expressed
this idea in a way that's already sufficient, like it's it's, uh,
why do the work of like trying to re explain that,

(03:11:38):
you know. But that being said, I think there is
a tendency to just assume people already are on our
side or understand ideas to the level of complexity that
we might like and that people are on board with,
like what even something as simple as what capitalism means.
You know, all the time you see people online who

(03:11:59):
will say that, Like a musician will post their band
campage and people will be like, oh, I thought you
were anti capitalist. You know. Yeah, it's it's like you know,
but like you also can't get caught up in the
kind of um weaponized ignorance that the people you know

(03:12:21):
like you. You can't make someone understand something if they
have a particular reason not to want to. So I
absolutely agree that, like there's the danger of that that
group in speak, uh, but it's it's a it's a
difficult problem to solve. I think the kind of approach
I take to it most of the time is that

(03:12:43):
I tend to write my scripts as the as though
I am uh just the like like a child. Like
I try to write as though I'm speaking to a
five year old, you know, Yeah, I mean, and I
think I also I think a lot about and this
is something you know here at cool Zone I've brought

(03:13:05):
we brought on a couple of years ago, people who
you know, are now making podcasts for the team who
when we brought them on had a lot less experience
writing scripts and making media for mass consumption. And one
of the things that I found it was kind of
like my job to do repeatedly was to point out,

(03:13:26):
like Okay, stop, go actually go back to that term
because you you just you know, said a term that
I think means a specific or you just referenced a
thing from history that I think that people are interested
in and should know about. But you do have to
like go in and explain it and walk people through it.
And that's kind of part of That's really one of
the challenges I find, particularly with um with Behind the

(03:13:49):
Bastards right where we're talking sometimes about these complicated social
movements and moments in history, and it's this kind of
tug of war between you want to respect the intelligence
of the audience and you want to give them enough
detail that they have contexts and that that can maybe
understand multiple sides of it. But also you can't get
bogged down in every detail otherwise you're never going to

(03:14:10):
finish the damn thing. And we can't all be Dan
Carlin making ten hour long podcasts unfortunately. I do like
there's a degree to which I'm quite jealous of his work,
the way he set up his workload. But I would
just never be able to think of that many boxing analogies. Yeah,
I don't. I don't know very much about boxing. I

(03:14:31):
would probably just like throw in a whole lot of
balls mahoney analogy, Yeah, a lot of For me, it
would be a lot of super punch out references. Like
hell yes, stan Lee would always say to comic book
writers that every comic is somebody's first comic, and so
you kind of have to consider that, like every piece
of messaging you do might this might be like the

(03:14:52):
first time someone is stepping out of a completely different
ideological bubble than you might expect, and so you know,
it kind of has the messaging kind has to stand
on its own. But I think that's also like a
unique problem to mass media because it also means that,
in a sense, it's much harder to like build on
previous work. It's harder to go from your one on

(03:15:13):
one content and then get to the more advanced subjects,
because someone could just start at the more advanced part
and get lost. I think that's a really apt way
of describing what I also find as one of the
central problems, because a ton of the episodes of Bastards,
especially the stuff when we focus on fascists, builds on itself.

(03:15:34):
Right you, your understanding of fascism in Romania will be
influenced and is to some degree. You don't really you
can't understand fascism in Romania without understanding fascism and vimar
fascism in Italy, fascism in the United States during the
same period, and vice versa. And so my hope is

(03:15:54):
that the people who catch all of the episodes are
building a really complex and durable understanding of the problem
through it. But it's also the struggle of like, well,
a lot of people who are just going to be like,
oh shit, I know Hitler, but I maybe I'm not
interested in hearing about romania, you know, and I'm not
going to click on those episodes. And there's nothing against people.

(03:16:14):
Like when I listen to podcasts, I find myself doing
the same thing where it's like there's a million episodes
of this show, I'm not going to listen. I don't
I don't have the time to listen to all of them. Sure. Yeah,
And that touches on another problem, which is that, you know,
the subjects that people like us tend to cover are
biased towards what we think people will find interesting, yeah,

(03:16:35):
you know, and beyond that, like what we ourselves find
interesting to research, Yeah, and what in what you can
And this is a thing that I try to point
out on my subreddit sometimes when people are like I
can't believe you haven't done this guy or that guy,
and it's like, well, that doing that research is going
to fuck me up, and like, so I'm not going
to do it yet. I'm gonna do this thing. That's funny.
I'm gonna read about the liver king this week. I

(03:16:56):
need I need a break. So the liver king is
who we're talking about. Yeah, everybody needs a liver king
in their life at some point. Yeah, it's like, um,
I read the Turner Diaries for one video. Yeah, And
I've been constant. People have been constantly like, oh, you
should read Camp of the Saints, you should read Siege.
And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to.

(03:17:18):
First of all, I don't even know if I want
those things on my hard drive. Yeah. Yeah, Camp of
the Saints is a little easier, but yeah, maybe maybe
one of those a year and no more. That's like
the most I would recommend from like a mental health standpoint.
It's also like you don't need to read the full
text of all of those. I mean, that's part of

(03:17:40):
the thing is that like you can get a lot
by checking in some exerpts and reading scholarly papers analyzing
this stuff, and they're there always will be that, um,
and I think to a significant standpoint, like it's more
important to understand, you know. And this isn't true for everybody,
because there's some people who you know, are scholars of

(03:18:00):
this stuff, and you do need to to to do
the deep reading. But if you want to understand the
degree to which Siege and the Turner Diers Diaries influence
the mass shootings that we see in the United States
state that are carried out by the far right. You
don't need to read those books to do that, right.
There's plenty of really good scholarly analysis and that's part
of what you and I try to do for people.

(03:18:20):
Um and what what other you know, folks who are
creating this kind of media other journalists do for folks. Yeah,
I will. I would say that I strongly balk at
the I don't consider myself a journalist. Um yeah, I mean,
and I don't consider that's something people talk about as well.
On the subreddit, I get a lot of like comments

(03:18:43):
on people appreciating the journalism in the series, and we
do in some of our shows, like you know we
did we went to the Border, mean mar last year.
Garrison just got back from cop City. But like Bastards,
isn't journalism, you know, sometimes it's like celebrating journalism, but
it's it's it's inner detainment that I hope has like
an educational quality to it. Yeah, it's I don't. I

(03:19:05):
don't say this to belittle myself. I just don't see
that as as the function of my job. I think,
like like I have I have in the in the
course of my work, occasionally done journalism by accidents. I
did a long interview where I had like about the
chas and and kind of the misconceptions that people had,
and I had some you know, talks with people within

(03:19:27):
and like that is technically, on its face a piece
of journalism for sure. You know, absolutely it's not what
I consider my uh strength or role to be well.
And I honestly this goes back to what we were
talking about with the young woman who filmed the video
of of George Floyd. Um. Journalism is a profession, but

(03:19:49):
it's also just like a set of tools, and that
you know, sometimes you will use those tools in order
to do other things. You know that that's that's certainly true.
I'm curious you and I. You and I both kind
of uh like make our our our work work uh differently.
M Mine's ad supported obviously, So my conversation with fans,

(03:20:11):
you know, outside of like when I'm doing a live
show is primarily through we have a subreddit and we
have Twitter, um, and that's uh, you know, there's some
difficulty there. For one thing, like every single guest we have,
there are people who will be like, this is the
best guests you've ever had? And this person is the
worst guest you've ever had, and there's absolutely no way
to make decisions based on that, right, it's just so much. Um.

(03:20:35):
You you've got a different relationship, or at least a
different method of I think communicating. I imagine it's different,
um because because your your Patreon supported I'm interested in
how have I if at all? Have you seen kind
of the conversations about what people want from you and
you know the way in which you've been talking with
your fans. How have you seen that change since twenty twenty? Well, Um,

(03:20:59):
I think one of the major ways is since I've
kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content,
it's a lot of people have kind of encouraged me
to go more in that direction, and I have seen
like a big drop in my support as a result.
I think that it's it's a tricky balance to strike again.

(03:21:22):
Many of these things are like such a balancing act
because I always am careful to remind people that, like, hey,
you can support me on Patreon if you like what
I'm doing and want there to be more of it,
but please don't operate under the assumption that doing so
is activism or contributes to activism, because it is not

(03:21:47):
you are not like making the revolution more than exactly
you know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm
going to put at the end of my video, like
that's that's the value proposition here, Yeah, and I think that,
you know, it's it's a I don't The reason I
don't accept ad ad reads on Thoughtslime I do on

(03:22:08):
scaredy Cats is because I don't want the perception that
my views are going to be limited or held back
by you know, the desire to seek out advertisers, which,
whether or not I would have the integrity to withstand
like it, it would create the illusion. But that creates
the problem of well, now I kind of have to

(03:22:30):
do what I think that my audience will want, and
that's its own kettle of fish, Like I am I
pushing people to donate more than than they might be
comfortable with, and so that's you know, I don't I
don't really know like the the ethics of it, to
be perfectly frank, there have been times when people have
made big donations and I've had to message them and

(03:22:52):
say like, hey, I think you should you should probably
take this money back. You probably weren't thinking straight when
you sent me this money. I think you should probably
have it back. Yeah, that's such an interesting thing for
me because it also you know, I've I've thought about
that myself quite a lot. You know. I had a
decision to make when we first started doing these shows
about how it was going to be done, and I

(03:23:13):
took the ad supported corporate route, and I've been very
happy with that so far. There's a lot of things
that's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, um,
you know, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol.
But um, you know, it's one of those things. I
made a comment, and this is part one of the
one of the frustrating things about making media for a

(03:23:35):
large audience is there's always going to be people who
will like read into what you've said something you never meant.
I made a comment once about like, you know, because
we get people asking, well, why don't you do a
Patreon or whatever? Why do you do it this way?
And I just made a comment like expressing what you
had just expressed, like, well, you know, I feel weird
sometimes asking for money and if I can just like

(03:23:56):
get money from a big company and you know, hire
my friends and do my work. I feel okay doing that.
It's how most of my career has worked. So that's
what I'm most comfortable doing. And yes, there were people
who took from that, like well, Robert doesn't think it's
ethical to have a Patreon. It's like half of my
friends make their living son Patreon. I do not have
an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will

(03:24:19):
say that when I heard you mentioned that in an episode,
and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No,
I mean I think like Cody Johnston, who I've worked
with for what fifteen years now, has a massive Patreon.
Tom and Dave Boyd lived with some of my best friends.
You know, yeah, like it's I think it's perfectly it's
it's certainly no less ethical, and you can make a

(03:24:41):
case people do that it's more ethical than being ad supported.
It's just like, I mean, some of it just comes
down to like what kind of stuff are you making
and what kind of like person are you and what's
going to work best with you as like a creative
method in a way of interacting with fans. And they
have downsides and they have positives. You know, it's also
like a matter of of what you're able to do

(03:25:03):
to certain extents, because like, I don't know how to
get advertisers. Yeah, any advertisers that I've ever gotten on
my my horror channel have just reached out to me,
and like, I don't know if I'm getting as much
money out of them as they should be. I have
no idea. I just I just kind of wing it.
You know, like if you have that background in radio
or broadcasting or what have you, like it, can you

(03:25:24):
know that it's it's a much more viable option for
some people than it is for others. Yeah. Yeah, I
Mean a lot of why it works for me the
way that it does is because I've had a fifteen
year career in not in broadcasts, but you know, in
comedy writing and whatnot. And so I mean that's how
I got the I got my podcast hosted on my
Heart in the first place, and that's like a thing.

(03:25:46):
And this is actually one of the things that concerns
me most about the ship that's happening with AI right now,
because you know, there's this, Uh, the folks that kind
of I came into making media for all of us
started as fairly a political comedy. I mean that's Cody
Johnston write some more news. Cody was making videos about
like chat roulette and penises when we when we all

(03:26:07):
started working together, very funny videos, but like we were
making silly things. Um, and everyone has kind of uh
moved into making like, you know, pretty pretty serious fact
based media. Um. You know, Cody does a very popular,
very political kind of current events show. And we were

(03:26:31):
able to get good at making the kind of media
that we made and build the connections that we built
and build the audiences that we built because we had
years of time where you could make a decent living
writing stuff for the Internet. And I see the kind
of shit that I'm afraid AI is going to do
to these jobs where people would get their start as

(03:26:54):
writers and whatnot. Maybe it wasn't the best, you know,
it's not that you're not doing the best writing you're
ever going to do the jobs that get replace by AI.
But it's a foot in the door, and I keep
feeling I feel like I keep seeing the room for
people to put their foot in the door get smaller
and smaller every year, and that's that worries me a lot.
I definitely know what you mean. I also feel that

(03:27:15):
like there's a fear among some people that like, you
get crowded out of these spaces the more people there
are doing this sort of thing, and I kind of
feel like that's not the case. I'd like the AI stuff.
I definitely share your concerns, but yeah, the the institutional

(03:27:36):
barriers and people's way, like I think that like to
be frank, like, I started doing this on a shitty
two hundred dollars computer and a completely legal video editing software,
but I love video editing software. I found it in
a dumpster and I used that, so you know, and

(03:27:58):
then like through that, I was able to be able
to afford a fancy camera in some lights and you know,
but like I didn't know what I was doing, Like
it was all self taught. And I think there has
to be that kind of DIY attitude, yeah, for people.
And it is something I try to encourage in people,
is that like, just just do it like I did it,

(03:28:19):
you can do it. Yeah, you know. I think that's
a great point because I am coming at this from
the old man dumerist perspective of somebody who like the
world has changed from the way it was when I'm
young when I was young, and people don't get their
career started that way anymore. And your point is very
valid that while changes in the industry have closed specific doors,

(03:28:42):
they've also created some and I think probably in the
long run, it is better for people to get their
foot in the door doing what you did than rewriting
a bunch of press releases about tech gadgets for a
shady website that takes advantage of the Google algorithm, which
has always started my career. I think that's actually a
really valid I think, Yeah, I don't. I don't. I

(03:29:03):
don't think that's a It depends on your end goal too, right,
But I think like the thing that becomes incumbent on
on people like me is to like help people, you know,
Like I've experienced a certain amount of success and so,
and I attribute that largely to the fact that, like
when I was just starting out, like I had no
idea how to make people see my shit. I'd like,

(03:29:24):
I did not know what I was doing. Yeah, and
a bigger creator just reached down and it's like, hey,
can I share your video? I think it's really good,
And it kind of snowballed from there. So my philosophy
has always been like you take these uh you know,
you you make space for to lift people up with you.
And in doing so, it's not an entirely selfless gesture either,

(03:29:47):
because in doing so, if if there's an extremely talented
person who succeeds partially because you help them, now you
have a connection to an extremely talented person. You know, yeah,
Like that's that's a sen for lack of a better term,
mutual aid in a very yeah, loose sense. I suppose

(03:30:07):
that reminds me of something a good friend of mine
and a colleague at Cracked who now helps run the
Small Beans podcast network said to me years and years
ago when he was directing a video, which is, I
want to spend the rest of my career getting hired
and fired by my friends. Which is I think a

(03:30:28):
nice way of looking at it. And there's a degree
to which it's a very old Hollywood way of looking
at it, But it doesn't. It also works very well
in this It can work very well in this new,
this new kind of ecosystem that is still being put together.
And I do think that it's because I see a
lot and I don't. I'm not someone who does a

(03:30:49):
lot of time like I like to watch. I watch
like the stuff that you put together, the stuff h
Bomber guy puts together where it's actual like videos on topics,
and I'm learning something this stuff that that Dan Olsen
puts together. You know, I'm not so much into And
this is not I'm not attacking anybody. I'm not like
trying to shoot on the field. But personally I don't
watch like the just kind of like stream stuff a lot,

(03:31:11):
and I it does seem like there's a lot of
conflicts between people in that, and I'm wondering, you know,
my hope is that there's more people building connections to
create resiliency between the people who are are trying to
make good shit and trying to make stuff that people
enjoy and that has an impact on people and that
even changes people in positive ways. And it sounds like

(03:31:35):
from what from what you're talking about, you know, honestly
from what I experience too, I do think that's more
the case than like the drama that that goes viral
on Twitter from time to time. Yeah, I think, you know,
I hope I hope so too. I think that that
it's it's very easy to piss people off and it's
much harder to get people's attention by being kind. But

(03:31:58):
you know, I like, look, you know, how many nice
comments do I gain in a day? Can't count? But
like the one shitty comments will always stick out. It's
the same way like if if I have a thousand
pleasant interactions with someone else, uh, nobody notices. But if I,
you know, get into if I pick a fight with somebody,
you know, it's people are going to remember forever. I

(03:32:21):
think that's the thing that unsettles me most. And this
isn't actually even just like this isn't about streaming media
or left wing media or whatever. This is a problem
of social media that You're right, it's the it's the
fights that always get most of the attention as opposed
to them. I mean not entirely, because some of like
the big moments is particularly in recent left wing media

(03:32:43):
things like um, you know, people doing these giant streams
that raise huge amounts of money for a cause. So
that that certainly is a thing that happens and does
get a lot of attention when it does happen. But
you are fighting against and I think we have to
be consciously fighting against this system that does to engender conflict. Yes,
it's also kind of difficult and I and you know,

(03:33:06):
keep in mind this is this is perhaps coming from
a bias perspective when there are individuals and I'm not
going to name names who do see that as an
easy source of generating attention. Uh, it's it's very easy
to the same way that, like, if I'm going to
make a video on a subject, I will frame it

(03:33:26):
as like I'm disagreeing with Ben Shapiro or I'm disagreeing
with Jordan Peterson. It's very easy to go look at
thought slime, there's a big piece of shit because he
thought this when when actually this is the truth. That's
more attention grabbing than just you know, a kind of
neutrally positioned argument. Yeah, so it's a it's a it's

(03:33:47):
a tricky problem. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the
ones that, um that I think on quite a lot. Well, um,
I think that's most of what I wanted to talk
about today. Did you want to like throwing anything else
or if not, we can go to plugs. Yeah, I mean,
I'm good, that's pretty much it. I will say that

(03:34:07):
one of the things that tends to bother me the
most is people will occasionally say to me that they'll
send a message thing you seem like a really good person,
and I will say thank you. But please don't feel
that way about content creators, because why would I make
a work that portrayed myself as a bad person? And

(03:34:29):
while I, in my mind think I am a good person,
I think it sets the dangerous precedent that you could
allow yourself to be emotionally manipulated by someone else who
might not be well the name of the game. When
you are creating media, particularly when you're creating media that's
meant to make people feel things, part of that is manipulation, right.

(03:34:50):
Manipulate is not an inherently negative term. You know, Stanley
Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie.
I'm trying to persuade you, Yeah, you do it does
It is incumbent upon the audience for their own protection
to keep that in mind. And it's incumbent upon ethical
people who make stuff to not create cults, at least

(03:35:10):
not create too many cults. Yeah, as much as you
can avoid it, for sure. Yeah, all right, you want
to plug your plugables. Sure, you can find my work
at YouTube dot com. Slash Thoughtslime or thoughtslime dot com.
You also find my horror content at YouTube dot com
slash Scaredycats TV. Scaredycats was taken. That's me, That's what

(03:35:33):
I do. I make videos about fartsand or butts. Well,
thank you so much for coming on the show. That
is going to be it for us today. We will
be back probably tomorrow. Hey, we'll be back Monday with
more episodes every week from now until the heat death
of the Universe. It Could Happen Here as a production

(03:35:55):
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It
Could Happen Here, updated monthly at Coolsonemedia dot com slash sources.
Thanks for listening.