The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1059
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 29 minutes
Words per Minute
179.0645
Summary
In this episode, we talk about the fall of the House of Asad, the rebel coalition fighting against the Assad regime, the return of the mammoths from the dead, and what will happen next for the war in Syria.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to the podcast the low seaters for monday the 9th
00:00:13.080
of december 2024 i'm joined by stelios and josh and today we're going to be talking about the fall
00:00:18.580
of the house of asad the woke right and bringing back mammoths from the dead so we can have juicy
00:00:25.640
mammoth burgers and other things and other things well we can have other thing burgers as well
00:00:30.300
not bugs yeah no i mean to be honest with you there's something kind of hyper carnivore about
00:00:36.340
it that i really appreciate so look i don't just eat meat i bring things back from extinction to
00:00:40.700
eat them you know well i also like the idea of the bigger the animal you're eating in your burger the
00:00:46.680
more of a man you are yeah there is something about that too um anyway right so uh before we begin
00:00:52.120
though we have finally uh got the ability on the website for to allow you to purchase premium
00:00:59.020
subscriptions for other people i realize this is taking a long time but now we have that and you
00:01:04.160
can purchase it as a you can purchase whatever lover you want as a gift subscription and give it to
00:01:09.160
someone else just in time for christmas so if you'd like to support us say you'd like to give someone a
00:01:13.780
subscription to the website so they can enlighten their mind with our premium content uh do go and
00:01:18.940
do that uh right away anyway let's get into the news right things have been nothing's been happening
00:01:24.980
i understand right so in the past a few weeks there has been a cataclysmic series of events that
00:01:31.500
has led to the downfall of of bashar al-assad he has fled syria and he has been given asylum by russia
00:01:38.660
and everyone is now asking what is going to be the next day for syria and what will also that mean
00:01:44.480
for europe and the world at large but before we say more about this you can visit our website we
00:01:49.920
have a suggestion to make if you want to buy someone a christmas present and you don't know
00:01:55.140
exactly what to what to buy we we have this good option you can buy them a subscription on our website
00:02:01.760
i think this doesn't apply for people who are already it's not a subscribe for themselves it's a
00:02:07.860
subscribe for other person yes so so definitely visit our website and consider that that option
00:02:14.320
right so back to our topic the war in syria is a very complex war the conflict has started since
00:02:24.840
2011 and it has led into it has gone through several phases and there was a sort of balance
00:02:32.500
up until recently that balance was resting on a on an agreement that the president of turkey
00:02:41.760
rozef erdogan had with bashar al-assad they had a ceasefire agreement but now this balance has been
00:02:49.260
completely disrupted and all hell broke loose for assad and his regime fell so what happened here is
00:02:58.100
that the the previous balance had lots of kurds controlling the northwest northeast part of syria
00:03:08.640
there have been several turkish back forces in the in the north fighting the fighting the syrians
00:03:15.960
there is also a a rebel coalition here named hts i think it's called the organization for the
00:03:24.440
liberation of the levant and uh assad was controlling most of syria and uh but all this
00:03:32.280
fell like a deco like a house of cards collapsed over the weekend yeah so the question is why did
00:03:38.400
this balance get disrupt disrupted there are several reasons
00:03:43.100
part of it has to do with uh the with the transitional period in the u.s trump hasn't been sworn in but he has
00:03:52.320
been vocally against um meddling into the affairs of syria we will talk about this but i think
00:03:59.400
the main reason has to do with the war in israel and especially israel in lebanon attacking hezbollah
00:04:07.120
and iran so what what's going on is that the assad regime was backed mainly by russia iran and also
00:04:15.220
hezbollah the attacks of israel in lebanon made lots of uh hezbollah supporters and hezbollah members
00:04:24.820
as well as iran to focus their attention and their forces on lebanon and a lot of people said well this
00:04:32.740
is right now the opportunity to to make gains so we have hts in the northwest they cap they launched a
00:04:41.540
surprise offensive they captured several villages and provinces of aleppo they blocked the m5 highway
00:04:48.340
which connects aleppo to damascus which is the capital here in the in the south and everyone
00:04:55.300
started making advances because it was evident that assad had lost the the backing of the army his army
00:05:05.220
wasn't particularly enthusiastic and also russia who is his main ally was his main ally it has all its
00:05:13.940
focus on ukraine they're a bit committed elsewhere yes so what happened was that they started they
00:05:19.700
took aleppo they took hama the a lot of rebel coalitions in the in the south attacked damascus
00:05:27.460
from the from the south they captured southern provinces then we have some other forces here
00:05:33.140
backed by the us who attacked damascus from the north then they can the hts continued attacking
00:05:42.100
continued its advanced south in home we had also the the turkish backed forces making advances also
00:05:49.620
the kurds making advances so literally everyone now is competing for a pie of assad's previous uh grounds
00:05:57.620
listen i've got about 3 000 hours in rome total war here's how assad can still win this right
00:06:01.860
i hope that translates because i've got an embarrassing amount of hours and total i know
00:06:08.980
right so here we the as we say assad is leaving and everyone is focusing now attention on
00:06:16.580
the leader of hds who is called al jolani i think he looks like uh zelensky with a tan a little bit
00:06:23.140
and a beard i think that's on purpose as well he's he's kind of jihadi camo right so what happens
00:06:31.060
here is that they essentially as they say the military since early in the civil war had depended
00:06:37.380
heavily on outside forces to reinforce its lines iran and the syrian regime rolling militias from
00:06:43.060
lebanon iraq and afghanistan russia had provided warplanes their defenses and military advices
00:06:48.420
yet as assad dialed for help from foreign governments in his last house as syria's leader
00:06:53.620
he found here run out of allies and military allegiance and i think late this saturday he left he fled
00:07:00.180
syria he went to russia right so here rebel sees damascus and there are several considerations about
00:07:09.220
what is going to happen the rhetoric in some groups seems a bit more friendly towards christians let's
00:07:15.780
say but this is always something to be aware about we have you can see this is trending there is anxiety
00:07:22.580
about what was going to happen we have people essentially saying that they these people are
00:07:29.220
islamists and that's bad news for christians and however much people blamed assad assad was someone who
00:07:36.100
could hold this area under under control and he also could be good for the for the christian population
00:07:45.860
of syria so people can scroll down here and look at all the other videos that we have yet
00:07:55.380
personally i'm very worried i have to say that i'm very worried and i don't uh i don't accept i don't
00:08:01.940
sympathize with lots of the statements coming from the eu and the west about how this is a brand new day
00:08:08.340
and an excellent day and everything is just rosy it's it's not yeah if we let's pause on that for a
00:08:13.860
minute go ahead i was just gonna say well there's lots of potential for some unfortunate circumstances
00:08:20.420
at least assad was a stabilizing force whereas we we don't know whether there's going to be a
00:08:26.020
significant radical islamic terror group establishing itself i think we do because the guy who we'd
00:08:33.380
previously um just looked at is a terrorist well it's more um as if obviously obviously there are lots
00:08:42.660
of different um groups competing and we don't know which one is going to ultimately triumph and so
00:08:48.340
that's what i was getting at here but with the kurds as well they've obviously uh got history with
00:08:53.860
communism and liking it which i don't like so we we've got this wonderful blend of do we do we get
00:09:00.020
communists do we get islamists um i mean whatever happens whatever the outcome is i don't think it's
00:09:06.420
going to be good for our side of politics personally and the people celebrating it are
00:09:12.980
very naive so they're very premature just to think i'm not even worried about our side of politics what
00:09:17.460
like syria is essentially a kind of artificial state right it's a kind of you know something that
00:09:25.220
i don't doubt the western powers essentially carved up and now we're trying to stitch together a bunch
00:09:30.500
of people who just don't want to be in a political state with one another right the i think aristotle's
00:09:35.540
right being the base of the state's friendship and these people don't have that and so you've got
00:09:40.020
these dramatically competing groups and we're just we're just going to be like okay well assad's gone
00:09:47.860
there are a bunch of um people who i'm just going to describe as jihadis taking over as well as
00:09:53.460
other ethnic interests who are also ideological like this is going to become a real just i don't want
00:10:01.300
to swear it's going to go very badly it's not going to be good no i i don't think if i would
00:10:06.900
phrase it in the exact way but i think that one of the interesting things to look at here is whether
00:10:11.940
in this case in this area of the world religious identity matters more than ethnic identity some
00:10:17.700
people show themselves as syrians other view themselves as muslims or yeah but the thing is
00:10:23.380
there's also the like there's like ethno-religious identities where certain tribes are certain kinds
00:10:30.260
of that paradigm of religion right and so you know you've got different particularities where you
00:10:39.460
can't just say oh well it's just one abstract these are christians these are this these are that and
00:10:43.860
therefore this all maps conveniently to a kind of philosophical framework is it's not that simple it's
00:10:49.940
all about relations because it's all tribal war yeah exactly yeah and now one of the considerations
00:10:54.740
has to do with how are all these people going to coexist and one of the persons who has put himself
00:11:00.420
forward as the potential leader of the of the new coalition of forces is abu muhammad al jolani i
00:11:07.700
think he was born in 1982 in saudi arabia and he has been associated with al-nusra a lot of people say he
00:11:15.460
founded it yeah or and if he wasn't alone he was one of the founders yeah and al-nusra was supposed to
00:11:22.260
be closely affiliated to al-qaeda but a lot of people are saying that he has at least rhetorically
00:11:30.660
tried to take some distance from it okay okay but let's pause there right so you've got a foreign
00:11:35.620
ideological leader who's been leading a jihadi insurgency against the syrian regime for what goal well
00:11:44.020
it's not for the benefit of syrians no it's going to be the benefit for any a dogmatic islamic regime
00:11:49.060
right and it's not like we haven't seen this before so it's just like okay but why would you
00:11:53.380
want that guy like if you were a syrian why would you want that guy i mean he's literally a terrorist
00:11:58.820
he's not allowed to enter britain he would have been arrested and as you've got there well maybe
00:12:02.500
maybe we'll take him off of it so so what the taliban coming off the terrorist list i mean like
00:12:08.340
is all that is required to not become a terrorist anymore is knock off the government
00:12:12.740
and now you're not a terrorist like yeah well objectively yes exactly right but but the point
00:12:20.900
is and the fact that the west is essentially a massage his reputation in the west like well you
00:12:26.420
know look guys i know he's a part of al-nusra and al-qaeda and all this but you know he's literally
00:12:30.420
a terrorist but he is diversity friendly and it's like oh come on yeah this is the
00:12:36.980
over extension of the quiz for palestine rhetoric very much so yeah now it expands throughout the
00:12:42.820
middle east sure but what it what it demonstrates is that the islamic jihadis are not only not native
00:12:50.260
syria um like they weren't in iraq or afghanistan um but they are also being used by this sort of neocon
00:12:59.220
establishment in the west as a way of knocking off allies of russia and iran now i'm not saying we can't
00:13:04.900
knock off allies of russia or iran or anything like that but i want us to be honest about it
00:13:08.900
and not be like oh yeah well actually these are the good guys like no they're just a convenient
00:13:13.620
political tool that we're using to attack our enemies that's fine just be honest so i've got a
00:13:19.380
couple of things um to add first of which i don't think that we should intervene this is none of our
00:13:24.660
business or america's really and i also think one thing that is likely to happen is that israel is
00:13:30.740
going to try and hoover up a lot of territory um of what was formerly syria and it's probably going
00:13:36.900
to continue to take more because that it's going to be relatively disorganized and they can capitalize
00:13:42.340
being an organized force against a disorganized mixture of groups i'm sure that a lot of people are
00:13:48.420
like turkeys probably eyeing up territory in the north i would imagine so yeah yeah but this is what
00:13:53.700
happens when a kind of inauthentic state like syria ends up collapsing right so here what do we default
00:13:59.700
back to if not the kind of nationalistic construct of the you know late 19th early 20th century well
00:14:07.220
we go back to ethnic tribal groups okay well maybe it should have been carved up that way in the beginning
00:14:12.660
i agree well it may i think that it may lead towards that unfortunately it may lead to work towards this
00:14:21.300
yeah but is it unfortunate or is it essentially a kind of well the restoration probably the means
00:14:27.300
with which sure people are going to lead towards that is is going to be the unfortunate oh yeah i
00:14:32.660
mean it's i don't think they're going to wake up one day and say okay fine take this area take that
00:14:36.660
other area and we're going to live in peace because a lot of the the ideology a lot of a lot of these
00:14:43.140
groups have is very expansionist and it seems to be directly opposite to something a solution of the
00:14:49.940
story but but also like the we're just going to see the same effect that removing saddam had which
00:14:57.060
is okay you've killed the bloodthirsty dictator but you've left a massive power vacuum and the people
00:15:02.500
the dictator was persecuting weren't also good people like they weren't like liberal democrats who
00:15:08.420
were like who were like yeah we just want democracy and political representation and constitutionalism guys
00:15:12.980
no they were also they were actually worse than the dictator in many ways there are some parts of the
00:15:16.900
the world where everyone is bad yeah well not even necessarily just everyone is bad it's just
00:15:20.820
the political factions are worse so like i remember a few years ago reading a book about the the beginning
00:15:27.220
on the rise of isis and these guys were just mental absolutely mental no way yeah no i know you
00:15:33.620
struggle to believe it but basically um a career criminal uh was converted in prison like not converted
00:15:39.140
but radicalized in in some sort of jordanian prison and he was an insane thug who would go around
00:15:46.100
raping men and things like this right and then suddenly oh well we're gonna have like a provisional
00:15:52.260
government in iraq it's like you know you know what you're gonna get is like incredibly devoted bands
00:15:58.740
of really bad men going around doing terrible things and that's what they did for years and it's the same
00:16:05.380
sort of environment is being created in syria and right now it's like okay this is just again i'm not
00:16:11.620
like some humanitarian i don't really care what happens in syria but you're going to get a lot of
00:16:15.940
terrorism coming out of this that's it so um donald trump issued a statement and he sort of echoes
00:16:22.660
joshua's sentiment he says that the us should have nothing to do with it this is not a fight let it play
00:16:28.340
out do not get involved suffice it to say that the the us is backing the kurds but i will say that
00:16:36.660
the this this seems to me to be there seems to me to be something behind this i really don't think
00:16:43.860
that this is as simple as he says yeah i don't and i i really doubt that the us is going to pull
00:16:49.140
out as trump says well just a quick thing on that then okay so there seems to be quite a lot of
00:16:54.580
evidence at this point and keith woods actually did a really good thread showing that the israelis
00:16:59.460
have been giving aid and sucker to the jihadis in syria and they have been for years so okay well i mean
00:17:04.820
again they're not doing it because they're sympathetic to the cause they're doing it because
00:17:08.100
they're a useful tool is that okay well who gives all of this money and material to israel to be able
00:17:13.300
to do that well it's the united states and the rest of the west so okay this is our problem actually
00:17:19.220
you will see where my segment is heading because you have anticipated some of the stuff i'll show towards
00:17:23.620
the end jd van says uh the same thing he also says i'm nervous because the last time this that uh
00:17:30.980
people were celebrating in about things like that in syria we saw the mass slaughter of christians
00:17:36.740
and a refugee crisis that destabilized europe so now we have a lot of people from a lot of syrian
00:17:45.300
nationals who are across europe cheering here we have them in germany in england in belgium in greece
00:17:51.540
they're everywhere well they can all go home now can't they because you know the oppressor asad is gone
00:17:56.660
and they can have their islamic utopia so i look forward to seeing every single one of them step
00:18:01.460
on a plane and never come back some of them are some of them are fighting in in the uk no this is
00:18:08.500
a meme okay yeah oh no it's a real thing of course it is why did i i mean it makes sense because if if
00:18:16.500
if countries import people from uh areas in conflict well a lot of these uh loyalties don't get suddenly
00:18:24.660
erased that's why they can't be replicated fighting on the streets too many greeks i'm joking
00:18:31.460
yeah so basically what i wanted to say is that the fighter groups now are saying that
00:18:38.980
israel is next i'll take that with a pinch of soul yeah right when do they ever attack israel i'll take
00:18:45.620
that with a pinch of soul that you've got a page but as you'll see you'll see where this segment is
00:18:51.140
going right so the israelis now are airstriking targets in syria in the south and also in damascus
00:18:57.860
because they want to destroy equipment so that it doesn't fall into the hands of the rebels and
00:19:06.340
what i there should have been a link here but there isn't but anyway so what what what the issue is
00:19:13.140
here that we are trying to think of what is going to happen now in syria first of all i don't think
00:19:19.300
that it's going to be peaceful i'm not saying that i don't want peace there i want but i sadly think
00:19:26.900
that there won't be any peace the major players now are going to be the kurds in the north east
00:19:33.780
and the and lots of turkish-backed forces in syria now turkey and israel are having a sort of a feud
00:19:43.780
because erdogan is saying that netanyahu is essentially a war criminal and a
00:19:52.180
someone who is a satanic state represents a satanic state that's what erdogan says netanyahu says is that
00:20:02.900
he who doesn't stop lying about israel slaughters the kurds in his own country and denies the
00:20:07.620
terrible slaughter of the armenian people who shouldn't preach to israel erdogan stop lying so
00:20:12.980
just a quick thing it always cracks me up when middle eastern regimes try to morally grandstand
00:20:17.860
against each other just own it yeah yeah just guys guys you're all awful i just say yeah i killed
00:20:24.740
them and i'm happy about it like come on man just so what's gonna what i think is going to happen
00:20:32.340
now is the following that the israelis are going to try to form an alliance with the kurds maybe
00:20:40.500
the turks want to hurt the kurds and they will they also want to project might in the region and they
00:20:48.740
are already somehow backing the hts i think that this is going to continue so if if the hts controls
00:20:57.380
syria and the hts has really strong ties to turkey then the borders between turkey and israel are
00:21:05.060
yeah they're really close they're not as far as they used to be trump says that he's going to stop
00:21:11.460
backing the kurds and stop backing people in the region i don't believe that if israel says that they're
00:21:18.500
going to form an alliance with the with the kurds i think trump is going to aid israel and also aid the
00:21:24.580
kurds yeah and here i have the i just found this which i think confirms that there are some tendencies
00:21:32.900
for this israel's foreign minister calls for ties with kurds and other minorities in the middle east
00:21:39.620
they're saying they're natural allies for israel as relations with turkey sour but we need to also
00:21:45.060
remember it isn't just with turkey that kurds are bordering with it's also iran yeah and iran is
00:21:54.180
yet another enemy of israel so it seems to me that we are going to look at a lot of conflict there
00:22:02.660
it isn't going to stop most probably the there are going to be extra migration flows to europe and
00:22:10.660
uh it seems to me that uh everyone who is cheering is cheering really prematurely yeah i think it's
00:22:18.260
crazy somehow it's going to be my tax dollars and my tax dollars shooting each other uh again but um
00:22:24.900
yeah no i think nothing good comes of any of this actually and uh brilliant what a wonderful development
00:22:31.780
for the uh end of 2024 um glee says uh as someone who's racked up thousands of hours of hearts of iron
00:22:39.460
i can conclude that assad used the wrong occupation garrison template well i think assad's problem
00:22:44.740
really was relying on syrian troops and the syrians have always been terrible soldiers or else would he
00:22:49.860
get them from well i mean foreign mercenaries i don't know like machiavelli wouldn't have advised
00:22:55.860
it but if your choice is between syrians and foreign mercenaries i think there's a long and storied
00:22:59.860
history isn't there yeah there is but the thing is there's a long and storied history of the syrians not
00:23:03.540
being great warriors so we were talking about this before as well yeah where i i could have sworn that
00:23:10.180
the syrian archers in in for rome were quite good it might just be because in rome too they're some of
00:23:16.660
the best units although again they may there may have been a small unit of auxiliary archers from syria
00:23:22.180
who were notable um but that's not an army that's true it's not an army but anyway um dragon
00:23:30.420
like yeah again my run two experience um dragon lady chris says i remember the libyan slave markets
00:23:35.860
came back after gaddafi was overthrown this feels like sort of repeat yeah well this is the point
00:23:39.300
isn't it like because okay yeah i'm not like a fan of middle eastern dictators but at least gaddafi had swag
00:23:45.380
no i'm joking he did but like the the point being what the what the secular dictators did
00:23:52.740
is persecute the jihadis who want to literally start cutting off people's heads because that's
00:23:58.660
what the prophet muhammad would have done or some stupid nonsense like that and so like we're looking
00:24:02.820
oh look at all these syrian refugees in europe hey why are they refugees why was a sad person
00:24:07.380
cute oh right they were they were well it's it's um a ridiculous sort of notion that all of these
00:24:16.740
american uh foreign office people think that if you get rid of the secular dictatorship you'll get
00:24:23.300
liberal democracy but what you actually get is islamic theocracy yeah your choice is between
00:24:28.820
secular dictatorship or islamic theocracy you can't really have oh phuk here like and i'm not entirely
00:24:35.300
against us either he says i'm for a dogmatic islamic regime in syria like yeah okay fair
00:24:41.460
enough i mean that's you know if if that's what is going to happen i'm not necessarily even against
00:24:46.740
it it might not be inappropriate for the region or something like that but like the the the reason
00:24:53.620
that the west demonizes the secular arab dictators is just because they're allied with people like
00:24:58.580
russia right we were big fans of saddam hussein right up until the point where he was like no i don't
00:25:03.380
want to have any of it and then we overthrow him it's like it's it's not like i'm sick of this oh
00:25:08.180
look at the human rights violations it's like oh shut up you know we don't care about that no that's
00:25:13.620
that's a total cover it's like we didn't have to pay for it and we didn't have to take the the
00:25:17.620
refugees i wouldn't care what was going on in syria it's not a problem they don't care either which
00:25:22.020
is why they were allied with him while he was doing these terrible things you know and so it's it's all
00:25:26.900
such a a flimsy front for everything and i'm just like look you know it's all just naked self-interest
00:25:34.420
between different ethnic groups in the middle east fine whatever just solve it just just you know
00:25:38.980
resolve it however you want i don't care it's not my business anyway let's move on
00:25:46.260
so there has been a um upset between the classical liberals and uh the woke right quote unquote um
00:25:55.540
that we have seen play out mostly on twitter obviously uh but that's where all the interesting
00:26:01.060
discourse is actually happening and it's been going on throughout 2024 and it kind of came to a head
00:26:05.540
recently i thought it was just worth actually talking it out a bit and trying to un uh examine
00:26:11.380
some of the underpinnings of the discussion um because i think there is actually quite something
00:26:15.940
quite substantive here so i mean we can begin in february 2024 when constant kissin wrote a substack
00:26:22.740
article just called tucker carlson and the woke right where he's describing what he thinks uh the
00:26:28.100
woke right is in contrast to classical liberals and how uh tucker carlson fulfills that um i personally
00:26:35.860
didn't respond to any of this because i was just like i don't know if i'm woke right i don't think i'm
00:26:42.260
woke right um and this kind of bubbled on the back burner andrew doyle wrote something similar
00:26:48.660
in november and james lindsay decided to uh push this to the fore by um essentially tricking
00:27:00.100
a christian nationalist publication uh that i'd never heard of in by rewriting large sections of
00:27:08.100
the communist manifesto and rewriting them in great detail as well so you would have to i mean to be
00:27:14.020
fair it should never have got past their sort of uh smell test because there are some obvious uh
00:27:20.660
allusions to the communist manifesto in it and they should have known they were being essentially ragged
00:27:29.220
bits that he had interpreted weren't promoting communism they were promoting christian nationalism
00:27:34.820
and that's why they published it um and james when challenged on this had to default back to well
00:27:40.260
it's the same logical structure it's like well the logical structure is there is something we don't
00:27:46.100
like and we should change it therefore yeah you could apply that to literally anything i mean liberals
00:27:51.220
would be fine with that and so this uh this kicked up a huge mouth stink and back in october um
00:28:00.420
connor had written an article saying well look there is no work right and what this really is and i think
00:28:05.380
he's right on this is cracks showing in the woke coalition charges of wokeness are being leveled by
00:28:11.620
various at various figures by politically homeless liberals the problem with the term work rises it'll
00:28:16.500
define self-contradictory and a tactical blunder for an anti-work coalition to use and so i think this
00:28:21.220
is um something worth talking about because there is essentially the argument being made from the liberal
00:28:29.060
side of the liberal side of this that okay the problem with the woke left is that it's woke and not that
00:28:36.580
it's left right that's i think really the issue because what they they would summarize woke as being um
00:28:45.780
a uh systematic critique of power relations in society and drawing attention to oppressions and
00:28:55.860
injustice now the the average liberal should have no real problem with that concept because that is
00:29:02.820
of course what liberalism itself was founded on there's the purpose of liberalism was to critique
00:29:07.700
the aristocratic regimes under which they lived point out they had no moral justification according
00:29:13.140
to a different moral analysis and well frankly bring about revolutions which is what the american and
00:29:19.220
french revolutions were about and instantiate a new liberal order and so to say well
00:29:24.420
well we can't have a systematic critique of power and injustices is kind of off the table for the
00:29:32.420
liberal the liberal has to admit that they're fine with that because that is of course the very nature
00:29:36.500
of liberalism disagree at all yet i disagree yeah well what do you respectfully on on that on that critique
00:29:42.420
what do you disagree okay so i think i heard that someone said that the problem with a woke left is that
00:29:51.620
it's woke not that it's left i think that this isn't this isn't accurate the the the criticism is and
00:30:00.420
when i say the criticism right now i'm essentially arguing for my own view because it's not that
00:30:07.940
someone instantly has to say you know you're with this person or with the other person right now let
00:30:13.700
let me just rephrase the whole thing well hang on before we go on but did you did you object to my
00:30:20.740
my characterization of liberalism yes why because liberalism has a political dimension which manifests
00:30:30.340
in historically in constitutional monarchy and republicanism classical republicanism mainly these two
00:30:37.620
areas and they do have they do have they do tend to come with a realistic critique of how power works
00:30:46.500
sure a lot of people are criticized when they talk about liberalism they're either criticizing deranged
00:30:51.860
leftism or a caricature of libertarianism which is okay just the state should have nothing to do with
00:30:59.460
essentially something close to to ancap sure but if if being woke is defined as applying a
00:31:06.660
structural critique of power relations that from my understanding to identify injustice from my
00:31:12.740
understanding of this conversation it isn't just the applying the systematic critique because for
00:31:19.620
instance realism which we could see a lot of the u.s founding fathers and uh also burke and his
00:31:27.620
critique of the french revolution they were using the issue isn't that there there is a systematic
00:31:34.820
critique of of um social phenomena the issue is that there are some overlaps and that this systematic
00:31:43.460
critiques take some some particular forms and what lindsay and kissin are saying and a lot of
00:31:50.740
people is that for instance the same way lots of people on the left are saying well it's the way
00:31:56.740
the white straight male who's responsible for everything they say for instance that a lot of
00:32:01.860
people are saying this for for the jewish people or lots of people are saying this for the classical
00:32:06.900
liberals so what they're trying to do is they're trying to say that there are lots of you know
00:32:12.580
attitudinal overlaps between the way these two people these two camps think and they have lots more
00:32:19.940
in common than they would like to think sure but the the drilling down into it is the point i'm trying
00:32:25.540
to make is the idea of just labeling a systematic critique as a woke position which i've a lot of
00:32:33.300
people are doing and we'll get to in a minute how other people are doing well if that's woke then
00:32:39.620
liberalism itself was always woke then everything is woke yeah almost everything except but not
00:32:45.860
not necessarily everything but the everything in modern politics then by their standard right there
00:32:51.460
are definitely political views that aren't systematic critiques of things but liberalism began
00:32:56.340
as a systematic critique of the way that society and the justified forms of yeah it was essentially saying
00:33:03.780
that human beings occupy the same position in the great chain of being and the feudal system was
00:33:10.260
based on the idea that some people are naturally superior yeah and so it's it's it is in and of
00:33:15.380
itself it has to be that so if the classical liberals say well it's being woke is the problem
00:33:21.060
then well are you really a classical liberal then because classical liberalism has that baked into it
00:33:26.660
but the the point being i think is the issue that actually it's the systematic critique from the left
00:33:31.780
rather than one from a centrist or right-wing perspective i think it's when it takes particular
00:33:36.900
forms it's not the it's not that's what i'm saying the problem isn't that there is a systematic
00:33:41.540
critique the problem is when we have very low resolution analysis so for instance i don't
00:33:47.220
know i don't even think it's that i think the problem is the impulse that underpins the nature
00:33:52.660
of the critique why are you leveling a critique that renders straight white men as the enemy of
00:33:57.540
civilization when like you say they're responsible for everything they're kind of the authors of
00:34:01.700
civilization actually so why is the critique being leveled from that perspective the idea of the critique
00:34:07.300
itself is fine and so that's not the issue with being woke the issue with being woke is attacking
00:34:14.660
the majority population of the country yes yeah right so that's the point i was trying to drill down
00:34:21.060
to like the the classical liberal has to concede that there is of course a critique of power and
00:34:26.340
structure contained within liberalism so that's not what they're objecting to um and i've noticed that the
00:34:31.780
the point that they want though is to arrive at oh well i'm happy with like the 90s liberal
00:34:38.660
you know establishment consensus and so if you are to say uh go any further than that and engage with
00:34:46.740
critiques made from the left by what i think are quite brilliant left-wing thinkers whether you like
00:34:53.300
them or not you have to concede their skills then suddenly they view this as oh that's communism
00:35:01.700
okay well look the the reason you're afraid of this because you don't properly understand it and
00:35:06.420
you feel like you have no defense against it right i personally am never going to become a frankfurt
00:35:12.100
school communist because i'm not any kind of communist i'm for hierarchy i'm not against it i'm not
00:35:18.580
trying to achieve their goal but after reading various members of the frankfurt school for me it's
00:35:23.460
marcuso hawkheimer and dorno i can't deny that these are brilliant thinkers and that they have incisive
00:35:29.700
critiques of the world whether you like them or not and i know you don't like them i they are
00:35:35.700
impressive thinkers well there's a reason that the left have captured these institutions right
00:35:40.180
exactly there's a reason that we live in the shadow of these people and everyone's running around
00:35:45.460
screaming like they're satan and so i mean like in in this um marquis is one dimensional man right it is
00:35:54.180
a good critique of what liberal democracies end up unconsciously doing to themselves go and watch
00:35:58.500
my book club on on the website and in fact gift a subscription to someone else so they can watch it
00:36:04.260
too right because i spent literally like a month studying this book trying to properly understand it
00:36:10.020
and he is right that there is a kind of totalizing perspective within enlightenment and liberal democracy
00:36:17.620
as in it feels that it has to and it not even feels it has to it can't help but disenchant the world
00:36:25.300
and make no space for the legitimacy of non-rational thinking right there's just no question of that so
00:36:33.220
first of all i i'm a i'm a rationalist so when you're talking about the legitimacy of non-rational
00:36:39.140
thinking yeah okay count count me in yeah well i'm totally against you yeah same we will fight
00:36:46.580
right go yes so when it comes to what you're talking about the disenchantment of the world i would
00:36:51.620
say that a lot of people who are critiquing who are suddenly discovering the internet and they can
00:36:57.780
talk about they can talk about everything instantly the disenchantment of the world has lots of reasons
00:37:06.020
lots of causes behind it most of it are technological they have to and they have to do with metaphysical
00:37:12.340
positions yes for instance like materialism i'm not a materialist but materialism is or it's a completely
00:37:19.380
orthogonal view on this i don't know if it is and i don't want to get into the long debate of it now
00:37:24.660
the point being it is a worthwhile debate to be had yes definitely mark hughes was making an incisive
00:37:31.380
critique of what was happening but just what one one sentence what i find insufferable about
00:37:38.820
yeah what i what i find insufferable is they're constantly talking about problems without offering
00:37:43.940
solutions so constantly they say okay instrumental reason is destroying all the world and all these you know
00:37:49.220
bad people yeah do you have do you have the guts to actually go back to traditionalism in metaphysics
00:37:57.060
traditionalism in philosophy and do it they didn't i know they didn't i know but the i know i know they
00:38:02.900
constantly spoke about the problem lamenting i know but they didn't have the guts to go back to antiquity
00:38:08.900
i know and the the i like i don't want to get into it but like yeah the the the they don't they're
00:38:16.740
essentially just it's a one long big lament that communism is never really going to come about
00:38:20.820
right that's all all of this is and like you said they don't have the guts to actually accept that
00:38:26.740
a slightly uh i guess we just call it traditional frame actually has legitimacy blah blah blah and
00:38:32.340
it's actually funny in in this where marcuser goes well the the problem with um instrumentalizing
00:38:38.580
high culture is that you destroy it and a true high culture requires an aristocratic class that can
00:38:44.580
separate it from the everyday material world and it's like that you're looking at me yeah well
00:38:48.900
no the thing is and he he reluctantly admits that that has to be the case or else you get like you
00:38:55.460
know you listen to bach or mozart in the elevator with elevator music so there's no transcendental
00:39:00.100
experience when you're enjoying it there's nothing there's nothing new there's nothing that takes you
00:39:03.700
out of the world and it becomes just just melded into the one dimensional you know you're sat in your
00:39:10.100
fluorescent lit office listening to something that does nothing to you and brings you no new experiences
00:39:16.020
and it's just like everything gets mushed down into the same layer it's a great critique it's
00:39:20.980
very incisive i would argue that a lot of these things a lot of the the magic of the modern world is
00:39:25.380
the proletariat proletariatization of the world in that everything is very accessible to well that's
00:39:32.580
the lowest common denominator and i think that's terrible i don't want it to be that's exactly his
00:39:37.220
critique he's like look these things can only essentially be magical when they're not freely
00:39:41.700
available to everyone when they're not just played in the elevator do do do do you know like it has to
00:39:46.660
be something special and uh held back and so that it you know am i woke right for thinking that i have no
00:39:54.740
idea you know you're not you're not i don't think i am either but also you're not according to the most
00:40:00.660
of the definitions well putting forward well let's let's get to definitions of woke right because i think
00:40:05.780
the the the issue here is that the classical liberals are just essentially afraid of the
00:40:11.540
intellectual development the the the philosophical culture has made throughout the 20th century they
00:40:17.460
don't want to engage with it they don't want to accept it and they want to kind of just default back
00:40:21.540
to something that you know john stuart mill would have been happy with okay i think that what is going
00:40:27.300
on here is that in a lot of people in let's say on the right or in lots of classical liberals let's say
00:40:36.100
they are worried that a lot of people especially on social media are adopting the no enemies to the
00:40:43.940
right tactic and they are pandering to audiences of people without drawing red lines yeah so what's what
00:40:51.540
happens is that they are trying to propose where to draw the red line do i agree with i agree that
00:40:58.580
a red line has to be drawn but obviously there is a question to be had as to where it has to be drawn
00:41:05.860
sure and so i that's that's what i think is is happening here sure and we've got it we've got a line
00:41:12.100
drawn here by james lindsay uh the woke right uh modern day fascists in exactly the same way the woke left
00:41:18.180
a modern day communist well there's an interesting interesting admission that like fascism's left
00:41:23.140
wing but uh sorry gone woke left modern day communists there's overlap there sure but
00:41:32.740
they are definitely communists but like it's it's like saying you know my my childhood self is me
00:41:39.220
and i'm the modern day version of my childhood self it's like yeah there's a i feel like it's
00:41:46.340
unsatisfactory yeah it's a terrible definition yeah because communist conjures up can the notion
00:41:52.900
of a conventional communist like lenin mao um karl marx and it's ideologically distinct even though
00:42:00.340
there is crossover i don't know if i'd say it was ideologically distinct um the the the woke left
00:42:06.820
are descendants of those people because people like lenin were like okay why hasn't the communist
00:42:11.700
revolution come about and a lot of people uh p and then he he of course is instrumental in the
00:42:17.940
russian revolution but then you have people like gramsci being like okay well why didn't it come
00:42:20.820
about in the west and then you've got a very long and autistic history of people looking at the concept
00:42:27.780
of ideology and saying right it's the things that the west believes and instantiates into itself that
00:42:33.300
prevents communism coming about and therefore you've got kimberly crenshaw who directly picks up
00:42:37.860
gramsci's uh argument that we would need a war of position rather than a war of maneuver against
00:42:44.180
the um establishments and governments of the west in in order to dissolve the cultural fabric of our
00:42:51.460
societies which is exactly the point of intersectionality and so it's not that they're
00:42:56.580
not communists what they are a communist sort of like oh we failed there we failed there we failed
00:43:00.660
there we need a tactic in order to win so they are communists they're doing exactly what the communists
00:43:05.700
have always done if marx had lived in this day and age rather than back in the 19th century he would
00:43:09.780
have done this exactly the same thing because he would just have been he would have been given access
00:43:13.940
to the intellectual equipment and tools that our modern communists have so you know it is true they
00:43:19.940
are modern day communists but it's not really describing yeah what has happened i mean to to sort of
00:43:26.500
give the devil its due here i think the closest thing that the woke is to communist is as you said the the use
00:43:33.380
of intersectionalism to create these divisions and and basically divide and conquer isn't it
00:43:38.100
except rather than it being on a class basis it's on lots of different demographic details and therefore
00:43:43.620
it's more effective no no because what what what the communists want is the the dissolution of society
00:43:48.900
right because it is in society itself that inequality and hierarchy are formed that's what i mean yeah but
00:43:54.580
that's but that's intersectionality is just a tool to continue on down that path the the idea behind
00:44:01.540
this uh demarcation isn't that they are exactly the same is that they have sufficiently sufficient
00:44:08.740
commonalities that are corrosive of society yeah i think what we can agree on is we don't like them
00:44:14.500
and we want to crush them politically no matter whether they're woke or communists but the um but the
00:44:21.380
point being like say these are just modern day fascists and it's like okay but the the fascists are not
00:44:29.060
what the dissident right are because fascism again is it's itself like a rationalistic philosophy
00:44:36.260
whereas the dissident right are more in the sort of burkean tradition so post-modern burkeanism
00:44:41.380
frankly where it's it's not that they have like a a single structured plan for the entire world and
00:44:46.660
then you get the christian nationalists i don't think it's fair to call them fascist i think they i'm
00:44:52.100
not saying they're not going to be authoritarian but they're going to be theocratic which obviously
00:44:57.060
fascism wasn't so but the the question here is whether you think that this is desirable or not
00:45:03.780
because for instance fast as you said fascism as a rationalistic view i think fascism was precisely
00:45:10.740
anti-rationalistic that's why they prioritized irrational stuff like blood it no no i well no
00:45:17.780
fascism didn't prioritize blood it prioritized statehood it was nazism prioritize blood but anyway it's
00:45:24.980
it's like i'm actually kind of tired of people saying oh fashion was just irrational it's like
00:45:30.100
well yeah but it wasn't though so okay on some level yes but on other levels no okay so except
00:45:35.700
of the liberal construction of the state okay so sorry gone no i would say that temperamentally
00:45:41.940
sure what there are some people who say okay i'm bored of constantly listening to
00:45:47.860
the problems of fascism and also the mustache guy yeah me too right uh the i think we should
00:45:55.220
constantly listen to this but also we should constantly listen to stalin so for for me it's
00:46:00.420
important one of the one of the things that lead to totalitarianism is slow habituation into viewing
00:46:07.940
violence as something that is more acceptable than it should be in in society so when when particular
00:46:15.300
views are constantly desensitizing people with respect to this then you you have lots of people
00:46:22.580
who forget so my point is yeah the the it it may be boring but i think people should constantly be
00:46:30.500
reminded this from both sides not just one and say well i don't like hearing constantly about the
00:46:36.260
about one of the guy or i don't like constantly hearing about the other okay well moving on uh constantin
00:46:41.140
decided he was going to uh withdraw the term woke right which is fine now again i i never felt
00:46:46.500
attacked by it i don't know what it's supposed to characterize if you mean christian nationalist just
00:46:51.060
say christian nationalist i don't i don't i just don't see the point of creating an other rising term
00:46:58.260
which as you pointed out when we were talking about this before um that's what this is it's a way of
00:47:02.020
just saying enemies yeah compared to friends which pure schmidtianism which is fine i mean there's
00:47:07.540
nothing wrong with doing that you have to draw the line and remember that a lot of the criticisms
00:47:12.340
of classical liberals is that they haven't been drawn lines sure that's definitely a left-wing
00:47:17.300
criticism of classical liberals um but the the point being he says okay well look provide me a better
00:47:23.300
term and this is essentially the definition that he's trying to get to right and i think
00:47:27.380
this is perfectly fine for us to discuss says um thinking the west is bad and siding with its enemies
00:47:33.620
right so i don't think there are any groups on the right that think the west is bad i think what
00:47:39.060
there are groups on the right that at worst think that the regime that controls the west is bad as
00:47:44.820
in they're against liberalism and internationalism and therefore they like people like assad and putin
00:47:51.540
because they see in assad and putin a kind of totemic force against global homogenization of the
00:47:58.580
entire world and so it's not that these people are necessarily uh desperate for the russians to
00:48:06.260
take over the west and replace the western population with russians or something like that
00:48:11.060
what they see is just anti-liberalism well i i would say one of the very few things uniting all of
00:48:16.820
the right is a certain sense of western chauvinism isn't it yes it's it's the west is the best and
00:48:23.300
it is undeniably yeah an absolute sort of aggressive parochialism my issue with this is that
00:48:30.820
there are many conceptions of the west so some people view west entirely as biological and others
00:48:37.140
view it culturally others view it as christianity others view it as a strand of christianity it's it's
00:48:43.300
it's a very vague statement i think vague statements do lead to confusion um sure um i think constantin would
00:48:52.980
argue though that it essentially means the anglosphere and europe yeah but what about them
00:48:59.780
because if you constantly that they change the mix of the population let's say in in in those areas you
00:49:07.140
you basically destroy the west you don't yeah no i agree but the i know i know but the point is
00:49:11.940
someone in woke right would have to think the west is bad and siding with its enemies um so again i
00:49:16.980
don't think that people are against the west as we've defined it there what it is they're against the
00:49:22.580
regimes that control the west such the european union the democrat party the you know international
00:49:27.860
deep state whatever it is right so there's that i think essentially makes these criteria essentially
00:49:34.900
don't refer to anyone that's the problem so the next one is playing identity politics on the basis
00:49:39.940
that their group is oppressed by a secret invisible force controlled by another group slash groups it's
00:49:45.220
like okay well i mean to say that identity is and concerns of identity make you woke right like
00:49:55.700
because what this is a very very specific and narrow definition that would carve out a very small
00:50:00.340
constituency of hysterical people on twitter but to suggest that say um identity politics that represent a
00:50:08.500
group as being oppressed by not even a secret force just any invisible force that's controlled by the
00:50:13.220
groups well that's obviously true right so the example being um left-wing uh activists who staff
00:50:23.220
our institutions again they're not secret or invisible but they are actively discriminating against
00:50:28.500
straight white men which take the example for the um air force recently they're like oh we're just
00:50:33.860
getting useless straight white men applying as pilots we're not going to get them so okay so we you know
00:50:38.500
there is definitely a group of people who have a particular ideological agenda who are discriminating
00:50:44.340
and oppressing therefore using state power and institutional power the majority population i mean
00:50:51.780
there was a there was an example of the police force in like cheshire where this guy had wanted to
00:50:55.940
become a cop his entire life he was like the perfect candidate and he got refused and then sued them
00:51:00.580
and proved that they had racially discriminated against him so it has to be true that there are identity
00:51:07.620
politics based on group oppression or else why would we complain about woke there won't be borders if
00:51:14.980
there were in the case exactly what would the people woke then if that wasn't true you know i have
00:51:19.860
particular objections from this coming from constantin kissin because of course he was the person who
00:51:27.300
was was telling the victim of the grooming gangs uh not to talk about identity and i think that that
00:51:34.500
really left a sour taste in my mouth and and to be honest i think that was an identitarian issue
00:51:38.660
there was a particular yeah pressing someone else because they belong to another group and i think
00:51:42.980
that you can't close pandora's box now if you want to raise the the issue of ethnic identity um the way
00:51:50.260
in which you avoid getting taken advantage of is to stand up for yourself and i don't think that um telling
00:51:57.780
people that engaging in identitarianism is now bad because if we don't do this we will be taken for a
00:52:05.860
ride as we are we will have to pay benefits for foreigners and other people because we can't
00:52:10.740
distinguish the the the native british population say or the native whichever country it is from the
00:52:17.620
people who've come here the taking advantage of us basically and that but also it means you can't
00:52:24.180
apply a structural critique about the problems that the left has created so if the left institutionalizes
00:52:30.660
a load of minoritarian based anti-majoritarian racial ethnic gender sexuality um policies then okay but
00:52:41.940
to be able to root them out we have to be able to at least identify them and say well look this this
00:52:48.180
group is oppressing this group for xyz reasons so like that that is us having to look at the identity
00:52:56.260
politics and address it even if you and you know even if you want to be a pure formal proceduralist
00:53:02.660
about it you you have to accept that the structural critique is valid otherwise what are we even doing
00:53:08.660
and otherwise what you've done is allow the left to drag our institutions radically to the left and
00:53:14.340
they go right okay guys this is where we're staying we're staying neutral now it's like no we don't
00:53:18.900
want to be neutral now that's not the that's not the future i want you know i don't want my children
00:53:22.820
being institutionally discriminated against because of their race and so we have to accept that there's
00:53:28.100
a critique anyway um having an obsession with group-based victimhood and grievance well it depends
00:53:33.220
on how much it's affecting your direct personal life like why is it my children i try the the the
00:53:39.220
teachers in my schools are trying to get my children to go to mosques and bow in prayer as a
00:53:45.940
as a way of like you know sharing their culture with us but the the muslim children are never brought
00:53:51.140
to a church and they engage in prayer in a church right but like this this matters this you're right
00:53:58.100
on this and i fully agree with you here and here is where i think that they are going very astray yeah
00:54:03.700
let's trade with this because you philosophically speaking identity politics well you can carve
00:54:09.700
identity in all sorts of ways in the same way you can do that with west there are all sorts of of
00:54:16.340
friends and enemies and you everyone is drawing the red line somewhere yeah so depending on whether you
00:54:22.980
draw the road the red line you have at least two identities that matter i agree i i totally agree but the
00:54:30.500
point and it's also very abstract because you know we shouldn't just examine it in the abstract it's
00:54:36.100
just we're talking about a society a society with particular problems that have arisen historically so
00:54:42.660
could it be that could it be that group-based victimhood has arisen for group-based reasons if
00:54:51.140
yes then people should view it and also the the nature of victimhood doesn't have to be an
00:54:56.660
like it doesn't have to be a grooming gang right it can it can be something that's more subtle that
00:55:02.020
you don't want to call being a victim but is in some way sort of a sandpaper effect to the culture
00:55:10.340
you could say anything relating to a two-tier society yeah yeah yeah something like that and
00:55:15.300
this is a problem we live in now so again like to say well being concerned about that essentially puts
00:55:20.660
you in the work right is is to say no i'm fully committed to the atomic liberal perspective on what a human
00:55:26.100
being is and actually i don't think that's correct and i can see in my real life everyday life how
00:55:32.740
this is not going to solve the problems that are being imposed on us from the left um but there are
00:55:38.500
strong yeah there are you know various other things revising and perverting history to fit an
00:55:42.500
ideological narrative well i mean history is a set of lies agreed upon so that's anyone is guilty of
00:55:47.540
that frankly i agree with napoleon on that one to be honest uh reacting to disagreement with name
00:55:52.500
calling ostracism and bullying well who who has done that james lindsay who's been calling people
00:55:58.260
woke right as an otherizing term like sorry you know when tim paul came out i was like well that
00:56:03.300
makes james lindsay and the classical liberals the woke right the right hand of the left yeah well that's
00:56:08.340
true by this own definition sorry you know and then creating a culture of fear among more center
00:56:13.300
leaning people to prevent criticism so well i don't think there should be a culture of fear obviously
00:56:16.980
what amazes me though is why people react so much against this why is it that people react as if
00:56:23.140
they're like demons and you throw and you throw garlic or holy water in them well this is you know i
00:56:28.820
made i made the post and yeah a lot of the people that now are you know are trashing uh lindsay they
00:56:37.300
they did the same to me and even worse yeah i know so i think it's just the nature i'm just asking
00:56:42.660
myself why why did why did they not ignore it i mean it's the same with like like the james lindsay
00:56:49.540
fans calling me a communist because i was like no i i think that actually these people had good
00:56:55.780
critiques of modern society and we should take them seriously because they're highlighting our
00:56:58.980
weaknesses that we can solve and they're like oh right you're a full communist now it's like that's
00:57:02.900
right comrade you know collectivize the means of production i'm only a business owner yeah i want
00:57:07.460
my i want the state to take over my business idiots can i say something yeah go ahead confession
00:57:14.180
that's funny but when you debated with you and connor debated phil labonte and oh yeah on liberalism i
00:57:23.220
posted and said phil if you need help with these commies call me i mean just of all the things to
00:57:30.420
call me a communist is so funny anyway we'll leave that there because i know i've been going on for quite
00:57:35.460
a time uh some time but basically you know what are we even trying to do here right it's it's fine
00:57:40.580
to have structural critiques it's fine to have an identity and it's fine to want to protect that
00:57:44.980
identity and that might not be most doctrinaire liberal position but sorry we live in the world
00:57:50.820
in which we live we don't live in homogenous 90s societies things have changed we have to change with
00:57:56.180
them um just going to read a couple of uh comments uh super chats quickly uh the engaged view says i
00:58:02.660
agree with stelis's arguments but it'd be easier to support his positions if you ran a comb through
00:58:05.860
his hair yeah stelis i didn't want to bring it up right i don't like any haircut oh it like i hate
00:58:13.300
getting a haircut i can tell honestly and oh it's because they're all turkish barbers isn't it
00:58:18.820
i've actually found non you know i found yeah please oh you tell me afterwards um
00:58:25.060
secret don't shut down this is a nice philosophical discussion but it doesn't dissuade me from my belief
00:58:30.180
that communists need to be driven back to hell with a flaming sword well that's what we're trying
00:58:33.380
to explain is necessary um matthew says a great thinker james lindsey thinks he is then why is he
00:58:39.380
having such a hard time making the complex understandable about what he really means by
00:58:43.300
work right because if he said that what he really meant by work right he would essentially have to
00:58:48.260
admit that in his most fundamental presuppositions he's a communist look forward to that being clipped
00:58:53.780
i also think that simple people try and sound smart and smart people try and sound simple
00:58:59.060
i've watched a bunch of james lindsey's sophistry on twitter the other day he was like well look
00:59:03.540
they're they're putting their ethos under their logos ethos means ethics it's like no ethos means
00:59:09.860
authority that's how these are aristotle's three methods of persuasion you've got logic authority
00:59:15.620
and persuasion and emotion and uh james lindsey just didn't even do the basic using it's just
00:59:21.700
jargon is one of the most pathetic things to my mind i've i've been through the whole thing where
00:59:26.580
i've had to read neuroscience papers and it's just a lot of a lot of work to understand words but if
00:59:32.660
you're willing to put it in you anyone can do it so it's not impressive it doesn't make you look
00:59:37.620
smart and it makes you a bad communicator it's a gatekeeping mechanism that's what it is and it's
00:59:41.540
a way of bamboozling people who don't properly understand the subject that's why i i wasn't
00:59:46.180
impressed with lindsey's arguments but anyway we'll leave there and uh we'll move on okay so we might
00:59:53.540
be bringing some animals back from extinction very soon and this is obviously quite controversial and
01:00:00.260
i'm going to be talking about the ethics of this and and i i know carl as the resident luddite you
01:00:05.540
might have some reservations no i want mammoths to come back all right well i agree but i think that
01:00:13.460
part of um our duty on this planet to sound a little bit like an environmentalist i have talked
01:00:19.380
about environmentalism on my show before but i have a very different view than that that of the
01:00:23.940
left i i sort of really like the biblical view of stewardship over the land you're you're sort of
01:00:30.020
like a shepherd to all of of life on earth and you have a duty um that no animals go extinct under
01:00:38.580
your watch and i think that that's a fair thing to say um and i think that if they have gone extinct
01:00:44.580
they should be um reintroduced into the wild if they went extinct because of modern human action
01:00:51.700
so i i don't necessarily mean here i don't necessarily mean like you know we should bring
01:00:56.900
back dinosaurs i don't want your answer of that but i'm not in favor of reintroducing wolves into
01:01:02.100
the english countryside well wolves haven't gone extinct from the planet have they no but they weren't
01:01:06.420
extinct from england who cares about that then there's plenty of we've got no shortage of wolves okay
01:01:11.940
just checking i i just i think that the loss of an animal species is like the burning of a sacred
01:01:17.220
piece of art it's it's a real travesty it's a real loss to the experience of life on planet earth i
01:01:24.100
don't know i think when we exterminate like eye worms from the congo or something it's in the congo who
01:01:30.180
cares exactly see i don't know i i think yeah but i'm on about europe oh right okay and north america okay
01:01:36.900
places where we actually have the capacity to wipe it's certain kinds of animals right it's animals that we
01:01:41.780
personally find aesthetically pleasing or have a significant role in the ecosystem for example
01:01:47.300
so i'm going to ask a question um if tapeworms go extinct we're not going to cry about it oh i
01:01:52.340
don't care about tapeworms horrible creatures um so just because we can do it doesn't mean we we
01:01:58.340
should because may i remind you both of the quote um from jeff goldblum's character in jurassic park
01:02:05.140
your scientists were so preoccupied with whether um or not they could they didn't stop to think if they
01:02:10.740
should yes do you agree with this in this context yes you do hang on a minute sorry could
01:02:17.060
you please repeat it basically no just because we could bring back um extinct versions of tapeworms
01:02:24.740
should we well i don't mean tapeworms no no i do i want to use the worst possible example
01:02:31.300
right i should bring back historical personalities well no the the point is it forces you to be
01:02:37.700
uh more specific with what you're saying um yeah okay all animals yeah okay not all animals but some
01:02:43.460
animals that are noble and otherwise aesthetically pleasing to us uh or you know fun to hunt or something
01:02:49.780
like that uh that that that's fine tapeworms for my enemies fluffy animals for me
01:02:57.380
prehistoric kittens for me sure yeah although they'd probably be pretty lethal so one animal is
01:03:03.700
this is the pyridion ibex obviously incredibly impressive we should definitely bring it so i'm
01:03:11.620
going to use this as a little story to introduce people into the concept of how this would go about
01:03:16.420
and then i'm going to talk about a few other animals that what was that sorry i'd like to hunt
01:03:20.500
one yeah well we need to bring them back first so it was found in the mountains of northern spain
01:03:25.940
and portugal and southern france surprise surprise that's where the pyrenees are and it went extinct on
01:03:31.300
january 2000 when a falling tree landed on the last surviving member of the species might explain why
01:03:37.220
they weren't extinct um they're at the top of a mountain in a fallen tree i know it's bad isn't it
01:03:43.860
but anyway um less than a year before she died this final um example of the species biologists took
01:03:50.260
skin biopsies of from her ears and put them into cold storage because believe it or not when you
01:03:56.260
have the last of something you try and preserve it don't you and this allows for the sequencing of
01:04:00.820
their genome and there's a company called advanced cell technology working with the spanish government
01:04:06.420
and other researchers which have sought to revive this species of ibex and reintroduce it and um
01:04:13.300
what they do need for this though is a species that is closely related that is able to carry
01:04:19.060
the embryo to term and this is a massive issue with renewing the populations of white rhinoceros
01:04:26.420
for example and also the babies need a similar gestation period and also birth weight as well
01:04:33.220
because of course they've got to be born and also you need to implant the embryo at just the right
01:04:38.740
moment and so there's lots of different factors and then they i think they got to the point where
01:04:45.220
they produced 500 cloned embryos and they implanted 154 into various female ibexes that were related to
01:04:52.260
this species and only five ended up pregnant and then only one managed to give birth and then it had
01:04:58.340
a normal heartbeat its eyes were wide open it was actively kicking its legs uh she just couldn't breathe and
01:05:04.580
and it died and so it's one of the few species that actually has gone extinct twice
01:05:10.020
um so researchers learned that the cloned goat had been born with an extra lobe in her left lung
01:05:15.780
which took up too much space in her chest and kept the lung from inflating properly
01:05:19.860
and so they were relatively close um but this is directly from the researchers physical defects in
01:05:25.620
the lung as well as in other organs have been reported in neonatal cloned sheep that have failed to
01:05:29.300
to survive as well and so this seems to be one of the problems that they need to crack
01:05:34.260
and they said at present it can be assumed that cloning is not a very effective way to
01:05:38.340
preserve endangered species however in species such as the bocado cloning is only possible to avoid its
01:05:44.740
complete disappearance and i think that's another name for this ibex so they've advised taking tissue
01:05:50.900
and cell samples from endangered species to make sure that when we do have the technology in the future
01:05:55.780
we can revive them if they do go extinct and i very much support that even though you know my
01:06:02.340
um opinions on cloning particularly people i feel like there's got to be some very strong
01:06:07.860
ethical constraints on this otherwise it could go down a worrying direction i want a clone i want
01:06:14.260
a clone of myself so he can do half the work i do that would be nice wouldn't it i have thought about
01:06:18.740
that before you want a meanie me yeah yeah i do a lot of work and i deserve a day off that's all i'm saying
01:06:25.460
so if you want to uh fund carl's clone program you can sign up to our website but what you can also
01:06:31.940
do now this is a new feature that we have released today well at the time of recording anyway um you
01:06:38.980
can purchase and gift subscriptions to people and um if you want to know how to do the process it is
01:06:45.380
very simple um it's right at the top of our faq which is on uh right at the bottom um on our website
01:06:52.740
so there's a video showing you how to do it so there's no excuse you've got to got to send out
01:06:58.500
those gifts because carl needs his clone yeah i can't get close if you want more carls in this world
01:07:03.140
you need to sign up to our website imagine how much content if i'd if i was battery cloning
01:07:07.780
like me by the end of the by the end of this like 90 percent of youtube don't do it too much you
01:07:13.700
you still need some variety of you know opinions you still need say employees oh yeah sure good
01:07:19.860
point good point we're gonna call josh next oh that works to be fair quite in demand these days anyway
01:07:27.540
let's have a look at something else um i believe there should be a picture there samson would you
01:07:35.700
be able to pull it up um so rather than spoiling that so i think we're both familiar with the tasmanian
01:07:42.580
tiger yeah um so there should be a photograph here there we go um this is the tasmanian tiger last
01:07:49.380
photograph this is the final one in 1933 obviously this has been colorized um so europeans in tasmania
01:07:57.060
basically blamed them for killing sheep and chickens and things and they believed that they
01:08:00.580
were interfering with livestock maybe they were who knows um but they exchanged their pelts for
01:08:06.500
government bounties and this meant that thousands of them were slaughtered and they became extinct
01:08:11.540
because it turns out if the government interferes even in nature it causes problems there's something
01:08:17.060
of a cryptid now actually because i've seen uh you know videos of people oh i've seen those
01:08:22.340
tasmanian tiger or something like that and australia is a big place
01:08:24.980
you know so maybe well these are tasmanian so no no but they they could be on it could be in
01:08:30.180
australia too so you know they're saying oh in the australian outback something there's still them
01:08:34.740
who knows i don't know but so just quick thing i'm not that synthetic i think if something goes extinct
01:08:40.340
it's kind of kind of sucked but it went extinct because we deliberately targeted it and obviously
01:08:48.260
if we deliberately target anything eventually we'll make it extinct so i feel like we have a duty to
01:08:54.740
to look after these animals i think god created these animals and it's not up to you to kill them
01:08:59.700
okay we should bring dinosaurs back after they were your atheist rationalistic mind yeah no i'm a bit
01:09:06.100
more nietzschean on this i'm like no i'm darwinian it's the survival of the fittest and if you look if
01:09:11.700
you died off then you didn't deserve to survive this is my view on politics but but when it comes to
01:09:16.900
animals i have a different view i'm a hypocrite humans have the capacity to survive in in these
01:09:26.580
circumstances animals don't but it was tasmania's apex predator and so it occupied a very important
01:09:34.020
niche in controlling certain populations and things would be better if they were knocking about again
01:09:40.180
but anyway colossal biosciences a company that's texas based announced it plans to bring it back
01:09:46.020
they made this announcement in august of 2022 they also plan to bring back the woolly mammoth and
01:09:50.660
they've also received significant funding apparently just for this project alone they've received five
01:09:54.740
million australian dollars from one donor and haven't disclosed how much they've received from
01:09:59.380
other people as well um but previous attempts to bring it back were quite underfunded relative to
01:10:05.380
this one so it seems like it's going to be successful and at the point they said they're
01:10:10.740
in the process of sequencing the genome um it's also not an easy thing to do as well because we only
01:10:17.540
recently sequenced the human genome and of course there's no shortage of humans um i am one uh despite um
01:10:25.700
popular belief um josh's mark zuckerberg moment i was human once well normally the allegations are
01:10:33.140
sort of vampire or otherworldly creature which you know smidgen of truth but anyway um they've almost
01:10:42.020
completed this was october of this year um the genome which is quite impressive because they took the
01:10:48.980
genome um i believe from uh just a museum sample and they said the genome is more than 99.9 complete
01:10:57.460
with just 45 gaps which will soon be closed which is very impressive actually and they said the next
01:11:04.980
goal is to have a de-extincted phylocene-ish thing that's their words that's that's what the lab has said
01:11:12.100
very scientific yeah the thing is there's there is this kind of again the sort of the jurassic park
01:11:17.380
thing was this wasn't really a dinosaur well this is a kind of modern interpretation of a dinosaur
01:11:22.260
well what they said is it might be 90 phylocene though the ultimate goal eventually through breeding
01:11:28.900
will be 99.999 phylocene again it's always going to be slightly inauthentic ever so slightly but then
01:11:37.540
again there's there'll be enough um you know inauthentic dna that with enough generations of
01:11:44.500
breeding it will disappear eventually and what their plan is is that eventually they'll get to
01:11:48.820
a point where they can breed around 100 individuals and that's enough genetic diversity to release them
01:11:54.020
back into the wild and not have too many problems they're not all going to be cousins and what have
01:11:58.420
you supposedly i don't know yeah something something will happen i'm not um like woolly mammoths roaming
01:12:04.020
siberia again that'd be cool speaking of which um the woolly mammoth apparently this same lab
01:12:10.660
is working on it and i'm going to read a quote here ben lamb co-founder and ceo of colossal bioscience
01:12:15.460
told live science the company aims to produce its first mammoth lookalike calves by 2028 so it's only
01:12:23.700
about three years away now it's highly likely that one could see another species before then as well
01:12:28.820
so this seems to be coming about now that we're going to be able to bring animals back from extinction
01:12:35.380
um so the way that it works here is that they insert mammoth genes into the genome of asian
01:12:40.340
elephants its closest living relative and they've also fully sequenced the asian and african elephant
01:12:45.860
genomes as well so that's another roadblock out of the way so it seems to be coming along and we can
01:12:50.500
finally have our mammoth burgers because of course it's similar to um how hunting promotes the
01:12:55.860
preservation of animals because the hunters have a vested interest well farming you know one of the most
01:13:01.780
populous animals in in the world are chickens and that's because we like eating them cows yeah pigs
01:13:07.380
there definitely weren't this many cows and pigs around before we started husbanding them if you
01:13:11.140
want more mammoths start eating them yeah no i no no but that's true and i think that's a cool thing
01:13:15.780
you know we have a mammoth range go hunt yourself a mammoth eat it don't apply that to people if you're
01:13:21.460
concerned about human birth rates though don't start eating elon stop the papi new guineans have
01:13:26.500
already got that covered we don't need any more of that um but it also seems to be the case that
01:13:32.820
the dodo is going to come back this is from march of 2022 um apparently there was a small slice of
01:13:38.420
fragment of the dodo um which they could extract dna from the natural history museum so our 19th century
01:13:45.460
um eccentrics collecting animal specimens have actually sort of helped us out here so the anglo
01:13:51.380
autism has has led to a rejuvenation of animal life there we go quick thing on the dodo though
01:13:57.860
apparently they tasted awful really yeah well i don't know eat one then yeah because aren't they
01:14:03.540
closely related to pigeons and pigeons are great i i've never had pigeon but the the reports at the
01:14:08.980
time were just that it was really like fatty and not really edible is it a bit like duck no no no
01:14:15.140
well yeah but duck's nice but apparently the dodo was just really not not good to eat and this is
01:14:20.580
from like 17th century standards imagine the guy you know so like and they were probably like
01:14:25.380
starving on exactly yeah yeah exactly they were like oh great a bird uh so apparently yeah no we
01:14:31.060
can bring back dodos but only as a comic relief keep them in zoos or as pets or something i guess
01:14:37.940
and uh apparently um the closest living relative there's a little diagram here explaining how it
01:14:43.460
works for the dodo is the nicobar pigeon and which it diverged from 43 million years ago so that's
01:14:49.460
quite a distance but apparently they're um going to slowly introduce dna into some select uh in
01:14:56.420
captivity pigeons obviously and then eventually um you'll get to the point where there's enough code
01:15:02.820
in one of the embryos that it can be carried by a chicken surrogate um which is sounding very
01:15:08.420
convoluted it's a bit mad scientist-esque now cheeto chicken carried the genome at dodo
01:15:14.020
cheeto yeah cheeto so yeah i'm quite i i prefer like the other approach which is reverse engineering
01:15:22.020
uh the sort of the latent dna in chickens to give them teeth and stuff like that i reverse engineer
01:15:27.620
a dinosaur i have a chicken that's good i'm all for that yeah i mean it's probably incredibly
01:15:33.700
unethical to do these things but i i am sort of curious just to see what monsters we can create even
01:15:39.140
though i don't think it's probably a good thing for humanity and it could be our you know aren't
01:15:43.860
doing bringing back aliens will come back to our planet and see well what happened to all these
01:15:48.100
humans that we're knocking about and it turns out we genetically engineered a super chicken that killed
01:15:52.980
us all or something like that but obviously it's in its infancy i don't think it's as much of a danger
01:15:59.940
quite yet as ai unless you get squashed by a woolly mammoth but they're probably all going to be in
01:16:04.500
siberia anyway so who cares and then the final thing i wanted to touch on is the passenger pigeon
01:16:09.460
and i think this is one of the ones that is probably the best candidate for bringing back because it's
01:16:15.300
it was very very populous and it was explicitly brought to extinction by human hunting so what is
01:16:21.940
a passenger pigeon uh one of those oh right okay it's just a kind of pigeon so it was once the most
01:16:28.260
abundant bird in north america and this this was crazy to me the flocks were so vast that they took
01:16:33.940
days to pass overhead and they blocked out the sun so the cumulative beat of their wings was so
01:16:40.180
powerful that the ground beneath them chilled underneath them and it's estimated that they
01:16:44.980
numbered in the billions um before human beings started hunting them all right and we just shot
01:16:50.100
them we just shot that we had competitions where we just shoot but there are billions of them well
01:16:56.580
that's what they thought and look what happened um so they went extinct before any meaningful effort
01:17:02.420
could be um begun to save them and the last individual in captivity called martha died in
01:17:08.340
cincinnati zoo on the first of september 1914 so um there were many museum specimens to actually extract
01:17:17.220
dna from and they're very genetically similar to the band-tailed pigeon which is another common
01:17:22.740
species of pigeon so this one should be quite easy to bring back and might be one of the candidates for
01:17:27.620
the most likely and also the least objectionable because they're a pigeon yeah they'll fly about
01:17:33.860
but i would be curious to see these these massive clouds of pigeon i wouldn't want to stand underneath
01:17:38.740
it yeah no not without an umbrella um but what do you think now i've laid it out you think we need to
01:17:46.340
bring these animals back yeah i think i think we should i know you want dinosaurs carl well i mean
01:17:52.180
push the dinosaurs out there are definite ethic ethical questions but like be interesting
01:17:58.980
do you do you not feel the obligation to bring these things back the humanity wiped out and it was
01:18:03.860
our our actions our irresponsible attitude towards the natural world that's brought this about
01:18:09.700
well again i'm more of a ruthless darwinian when it comes to this sort of stuff but why can't you
01:18:14.180
be more like that in politics leave the poor innocent animals out of it they've not done anything
01:18:19.700
human beings deserve it sure but i don't know i'm like i'm joking by the way if if an animal can't
01:18:25.700
survive in the modern world then it's not fit for survival so but also if we applied that attitude to
01:18:31.620
all living things we'd be the only living thing other than maybe bacteria i don't agree there are
01:18:36.100
loads of animals that fit for survival that's why we farm them i mean carl i think the most resilient
01:18:41.700
resilience isn't necessarily an indication of worth because for instance if there is a nuclear holocaust
01:18:47.620
and things get destroyed i think the only two species that are going to survive are going to be
01:18:52.580
cockroaches and crocodiles i wouldn't want to be a cockroach i'm not saying you you're going to become
01:18:58.900
a cockroach what what i'm saying is uh absent a nuclear holocaust um a thing has to be able to exist
01:19:06.340
and be able to get along on its own and if it's silly you know because the thing is we can't just hand
01:19:11.220
hold every species exactly that's why we don't want them to go extinct no no well you don't people
01:19:17.300
like these pigeons were just firing into the the big crowds and just wiping them out for sport in a
01:19:22.580
sort of sadistic evil well there are a billion of them and we still killed them that's bad 75
01:19:30.420
billion chickens per year do we that's a lot of chickens i contribute my my fair share i think
01:19:36.340
but yeah i mean i'm not against them doing this um you know no do with interesting animals i'd love
01:19:41.700
to see a mammoth you know that'd be cool so massive like you know they're genuinely gargantuan uh so
01:19:47.860
that'd be an interesting thing i want to bring back saber-toothed tigers and have them patrolling the
01:19:51.460
coastline along like greece and italy just to keep the migrant caravans out maybe introduce the
01:19:57.700
saber-toothed tower do you know it's a barbary lion to take out a few something that's really
01:20:02.260
interesting about the saber-toothed tigers they keep evolving it's like things turning into crabs
01:20:06.820
and tortoises turtles like the the body shape just keeps evolving and so there are three different
01:20:12.900
unrelated species of what we call saber-toothed tigers and they just evolved into that yeah they
01:20:17.700
just keep evolving these giant sabers and because apparently they're useful to have a couple of
01:20:22.420
massive daggers i suppose it's why there's a came and an alligator and a crocodile right
01:20:26.180
yeah they're all basically that's applying the same body shape just keeps coming back same with
01:20:30.580
crabs there are loads of things we call crabs that aren't crabs they just look like crabs and
01:20:35.220
so it's just like okay well i didn't realize this there's this great crab conspiracy but anyway
01:20:39.860
same with turtles like there are things that become turtles because it's a good body shape for
01:20:44.980
survival but i i feel like i survive better as a person than a turtle
01:20:49.220
you're not you know 100 million years old i just sound like i'm doubting evolution now but
01:20:56.100
anyway the point i'm trying to make here is that this is going on um whether you like it or not it
01:21:02.980
seems to be happening and maybe we can bring back some extinct species from beyond the grave and have
01:21:08.900
some nice mammoth burgers dragon lady christmas great point remember this when you extinct device
01:21:13.380
the gray squirrel yeah we're going to bring the red cam for bringing the red squirrel back because
01:21:17.300
i think peanut buck adorable yeah franken peanut yeah um right let's uh let's go to the video comments
01:21:29.460
um charlie uh also says uh uh by the way i personally see as sad as a modern joseph tito
01:21:36.020
a dictator that was able to rule multi-athletic multi-religious state and just as what happened when
01:21:40.020
tito died i suspect the same will happen now sad has gone yeah doubtless um nothing good's coming
01:21:46.100
here i hope to see um i hope this means sorry that we get the american carrier pigeon back i'd love to
01:21:51.700
see the massive flocks of them flying in the world well there we go they presage what i was going to
01:21:55.540
talk about by this logic we should bring back the neanderthal um i think we've already got the french
01:22:00.900
so we don't really need to double up on them were sophisticated and probably the reason that we're
01:22:06.980
like you know intelligent and creative i think we could give ourselves a bit more credit than that
01:22:12.820
but i i i want to i want to reclaim the the good name of neanderthals i do know that neanderthals um
01:22:19.460
ozzy osborne has a disproportionate amount of from them so before he dies they need to extract his dna
01:22:26.260
ozzy osborne 32 neanderthal i think he was something like seven or eight percent which is a lot
01:22:32.340
the average european's like two or three percent yeah yeah maybe brummies are just the lost tribes
01:22:38.340
of neanderthals it would make so much sense that's very funny let's get the first video coming
01:22:46.260
we can't hear it samson the onion stellios you you've got a strange looking face yeah
01:22:52.180
that is what is this i have good here yeah i have good here yeah silence there's there's no
01:22:58.820
one of deception yeah they're meant to be audio no but that's the onion of deception very clearly
01:23:06.260
it looks very sacred thanks yeah for such a uh unholy artifact why does it look so godly
01:23:14.100
because it is godly it always looks good that's the point ah yeah good point let's go to the next
01:23:22.180
one vox populi chat wanted me to do redwood tree week and that's coming soon first some groundwork
01:23:28.420
there are just three extant species coast redwood is the most famous one everyone knows it has the
01:23:33.940
biggest range from coastal california up into oregon giant sequoia live in a narrow range opposite the
01:23:40.180
other side of the valley within california only last is the dawn redwood which was only confirmed
01:23:45.700
to exist in the 1960s due to its extreme rarity and it's native to china oh i didn't expect that to
01:23:54.580
be native to china well there we go at least it's the least populous one talking about invasive species
01:24:01.620
like that we're being racist to foreign trees you need to step up your racism game carl you need to
01:24:07.620
be racist against trees now let's get the next one the old bridge of biddeford dates back in its
01:24:12.660
original wooden construction to 1280 being rebuilt in stone during the 1500s despite the new material
01:24:18.740
the uneven width of each of the arches was retained likely due to the known footings of each base local
01:24:24.260
parishes were required to contribute to the upkeep for each arch so poorer ones could be assigned smaller
01:24:28.900
spans widening and reconstruction have always taken care to leave the previous structures visible
01:24:34.340
the trust is a delightful story of a strange annual payment of 10 shillings 50p for the right to drive
01:24:40.100
sheep over the bridge last exercised in 2012. very cool i uh went through biddeford to play golf this
01:24:48.420
summer um so that was the last time i was there but yeah north devon uh that's where part of my family
01:24:54.340
comes from so very soft spot for me let's go to the next one do you have any idea how much diesel they
01:25:02.340
have to burn to mix that much concrete or make that steel and haul this out here and put it together
01:25:07.620
with a 450 foot crane you want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that thing or winterize it
01:25:13.380
in its 20 year lifespan it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it and don't get me started on
01:25:18.580
solar panels and the lithium in your tesla battery and never mind the fact that if the whole world
01:25:24.180
decided to go electric tomorrow we don't have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the
01:25:28.900
cities always winterize your wind turbines uh something i'm very concerned about yeah the the giant
01:25:39.780
um phallic symbols of vanity aren't they really of the eco people i might i might be sold on if they
01:25:46.500
were i think they're just crap yeah they're ugly and disgusting and a waste of time they're just
01:25:52.180
and the thing is they're just crap oh it's not windy today no electricity for you uh funny we've got the
01:25:56.820
nuclear power plant let's say something very controversial but i think the the old-timey
01:26:01.860
coal power plants look quite cool and you know having these big things billowing smoke out it's still
01:26:07.860
pretty cool and i don't mind seeing them over seeing wind turbines ruining lovely country views
01:26:14.020
turn turn the cities into horrible smoky hellholes like they used to be they use most of the power
01:26:18.500
anyway make them do it let's go to the next one
01:26:24.660
at least that makes me feel very good about myself now that i'm actually trying to learn how to draw
01:26:30.900
i'm loving the lotus eaters daily that's a really great idea and i just need to keep practicing so
01:26:37.620
i can draw some furry pawn and send it to stellio so i can traumatize him further you don't need to
01:26:44.900
be scared of my comments still is i i don't bite unless you want me to but that's fine your comments
01:26:52.580
always bite sophie okay let's go to the next one now that the asset regime has been removed
01:27:02.260
i assume all these people will be returning home and any new applications from syria will be rejected
01:27:10.660
uh apparently yes uh austria and germany have refused new applications of course there there's
01:27:15.780
going to be a wave of people who are fleeing jihadis shortly i imagine um is there another
01:27:20.500
one something there is blimey all right on the left side of my screen i have the california electoral
01:27:26.500
votes uh for trump v harris and on the right i have in orange all the harris votes or people who intend
01:27:33.700
to vote for harris if they were able to vote in the u.s election and all the blue ones are for trump
01:27:38.180
and i have to go all the way down to romania before i find an equivalent to california that is insane the
01:27:45.060
only ones that are willing to vote for trump over harris are russia serbia georgia hungary
01:27:49.220
bulgaria moldova slovakia slovenia that's it see i think the republicans should definitely be looking
01:27:56.180
at california and new york and not blue states like six million trump votes so you can get on the ground
01:28:03.380
get something do something about it you know come on like if i were the for the democrats i'd be like
01:28:08.820
christ why are we why have we lost 40 of the votes well you should be looking for complete
01:28:14.660
victory like any state being blue is a failure yeah exactly yeah get in there do deal with them
01:28:22.820
um kevin says alnustra appears to be biden and starmer's middle eastern blm they'll use them when
01:28:28.340
it's convenient to remove someone they can't control and then deny having ever liked them when the people
01:28:32.500
they put in charge show the true colors yeah that's basically how they're going to be used and um
01:28:36.580
it's not gonna be good um right let's go for one last comment uh maria says middle east has been
01:28:41.620
is and will continue to be too riven uh to be riven with tribal and religious conflicts the west should
01:28:47.860
treat any islamic land or grouping as a potential enemy um i don't know if we necessarily have to
01:28:52.020
treat them as an enemy but i think we should definitely just assume that they're going to be
01:29:01.380
too parochial to try and build into coalitions frankly that's how i'd be it anyway we are out of
01:29:07.540
time there folks so thank you so much for joining us uh we will be back tomorrow at the same time
01:29:12.580
and in the meantime if you want to support us go and buy someone a gift subscription to the website