It Could Happen Here Weekly 73

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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? 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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

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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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. 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, 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.

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, 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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. 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 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

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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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. 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,

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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,

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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,

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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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

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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, thanks bye, welcome too. It could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting things back together.

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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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

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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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, 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 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,

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, 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 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

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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.