Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 73

Episode Date: March 4, 2023

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn't trust the British in the dark. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that holds that the only good American tradition is rebellion against the British. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to be talking about the happenings in the perfidious Albion. Joining me live from one of the most accursed states currently in existence is Sophie from Mars, the co-host of Red Planet, a weekly leftist roundtable who does many other wonderful things that involve anarchism and organizing and stuff. Sophie, how are you hanging in there in this sort of increasingly failed state in the West?

That was a very good introduction. I do think that Britain is largely out of God's sight and by consequence outside of his love. So I think you summed it up pretty well. I mean, I'm okay. I had experienced a minor hate crime today, so it's another normal day of being a trans person in the UK. Some guy tried to film me on his phone, and I was like, hey, I can see that you're filming me, and he didn't like argue and be like, no, I wasn't, so I know that he was. It was very cool. Yeah, it's like...

Yeah, Turf Island continues to be incredibly normal, and by incredibly normal I mean this look. At the end of World War II, lots of states were divided into pieces. The UK should have been one of them. Well, we're working on it now. Oh, that's true. And by we, I mean trans people. That's true. We are working on destroying the Union.

Yeah, this is... Aw, man. Incredible stuff coming. I really thought it was going to be Brexit that that finally destroyed... No, it was hatred of trans people that finally did it. Truly incredible stuff. So you want to ask me what it's like to be British? You know.

Okay, so... Should we both do accents for this one? Should we both be like, oh, I governor, let's have some tea and crumpets. So I want an eel pie and some mashed peas. Okay, so I spent some time looking at British export charts and as much stuff in the British economy. And none of them at any point had Britain's chief export, which is jokes about Britain. No wonder your economy is in shambles. I think primary export is white supremacist war crimes.

That's true, but the thing is the UK's ability to export white supremacist war crimes is at an all-time low. It's really funny. I was in Armenia fairly recently for surgery and I went to a talk by someone who used to work in DC and now works with the Armenian government. And they were talking about what kind of external support they could expect for the conflict with Azerbaijan. And someone brought up Britain and he was just like, Britain's not really a player on the international stage anymore. It's not that funny, but it's kind of like a sign of what the UK actually is now. Since 2011, the British were one of the first people who decided they were going to bomb Gaddafi.

But the problem is the British Air Force was capable of doing maybe three or four bombing runs before they just straight up ran out of fuel. And the whole thing was they had to draw the US in because the British no longer had the actual military capability to do imperialism anymore. So things are not great in the white supremacy factory. We have reached a really bizarre point where our ruling class is divided. The whole story of the Dulles Brothers and the creation of the CIA is we are going through that in reverse at this point. But we've had one of the most interventionist histories of any country ever and now our ruling class is divided between we should carry on doing interventionism because it benefits us to be the worst, most ghoulish, vampiric country conceivable.

And we shouldn't do that because it costs money and why are we spending money on brown people? Which just two terrible positions battling it out. Yeah, it's fun. It's a good time in the UK. Speaking of it being a good time in the UK. I saw this before and I didn't quite believe it and I look at the numbers and we were talking about this a bit before we got on. But it looks like the UK right now is projected economic performance is worse than Russia's, which is incredible because that is a country that is under just unbelievably debilitating sanctions and is also losing a war. And UK's economy is more fucked than a country that is being shot with missiles.

I mean, we are also losing a war, but it's a war of ideas. That's true. So yeah, I think we should probably, when we last left the United Kingdom on this show, I think it was, I think Liz Truss had just been overthrown. And the UK is now under what their second consecutive unelected prime minister. Oh, no, no, Mia, Mia, Mia, second consecutive. Oh, no, right, because they never, no, no, no, no, they elected Boris Johnson, right? Okay, no, this is a good place to stop. This is a really good place to stop. Since Tony Blair, we haven't had a prime minister who we elected to get into power.

Like, no, sorry, since David Cameron, we did actually elect David Cameron, but only kind of, like, kind of maybe. So like, we had Blair, who is terrible and is worth getting into for a whole discussion in a minute. And then we had Brown, who was his chancellor, so kind of out of, like, vice president, who stepped in. And then he lost to Cameron. Only Cameron, like, had a coalition. That's why I say it's like, it's kind of maybe. But he had the Lib Dem thing, and the Lib Dems decided to literally go back at everything they'd ever done. So the main thing that was happening with the Lib Dems was they promised to protect student loan prices from going up. And like, they had got massive support from young people and anyone who can see why it's good to be able to offer young people an education,

especially because, like, Blair had this big, famous speech where he was like, education, education, education, that's my excellent Tony Blair impression. And that's also worth getting into, it's a very multifaceted level of parasitic fuckery, his whole education thing. But because he had focused on education, loads of people were really passionate about it, and then the Lib Dems were like, we're going to stop them from making university fees £9,000 a year. And that was what got the Lib Dems an enormous amount of the vote. And they made a coalition with the Tories, and then immediately went back on it. And that's why my student loans are ridiculous, even though I dropped out.

My student loans are higher than my partners, and I dropped out in my second year, and she dropped out after doing like six years of the same degree, because she had the lower fee. So then there was Cameron again, but without the Lib Dems, because everyone's sick of them, and no one will ever vote for them ever again. The Lib Dems are just a funny side story. There are lots of funny and cringe side stories in British electoral politics, where it doesn't matter that much, because they'll never get into power. But the succession of absolute clowns who've been in charge of this party or that party just is really funny. The Lib Dems have had a homophobe, but they had Nick Clegg, then they had a homophobe who said that being gay was a sin.

And then they had someone called Jo... was she called Swanson? Yeah, I think that's great. Swinson? Something like this. And she started talking about this incredible neoliberal... If you've ever seen The Thick of It, she sounded like a character from The Thick of It. She was talking about people having skills wallets and shit like this. She also, I think, killed a squirrel. There was a whole thing about that. What? Oh boy. Then, you know, analogously, there's like the Communist Party of Great Britain, which I hope to get into a bit later, because that is a fascinating story. But anyway, the Tory party is the one that matters the most for now.

So we had Cameron, then who do we have? Theresa May, because Cameron bet big on us not voting for Brexit, and then Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, etc. came in and were like, save the NHS, migrants, blah, blah, blah. And then we voted for Brexit. So then we had Theresa May by default, because Cameron had left. So this is what I mean, that the Tory party has this ongoing strategy of just swapping someone in and then calling a general election really soon afterwards, and the incumbent's gonna win. So it's like, I don't consider that to be someone winning an election if they're already in through ratfuckery. Although, I feel like it's still... at least there was an election for them, which is more of what's happening now. Yeah, no, it's definitely devolved. It's definitely gotten worse, but I think we're on the 7th under this Prime Minister, by my count.

But yeah, it was Cameron, then May, then Boris Johnson, and then... sorry, yes, Boris Johnson, and then Liz Truss, and now it's Sunak, because... did I get them the wrong way around? Anyway, Sunak literally didn't have any opposition in the Tory party leadership election. Like, he won by default. That's how dire it's gotten. They wanted Boris Johnson to come back and try again, and he decided he wasn't gonna bother, and because of that, there was no one to run against Sunak, so he just won by default. Really incredible stuff. Yeah, and Sunak's a fascinating character as well, because he is incredibly green. And I don't mean environmentalists. I mean, like, he knows fucking nothing, and he's currently going through this like...

There was a measurable phenomenon with David Cameron, where he was really naive, and he went through the neoliberal thing of being like, I'm gonna cut the red tape. Oh no, that's not working. I need massively authoritarian policies. Oh no, that's not working. Maybe this is a flawed ideology, and just like, just towards the end of his term, he was like, maybe this isn't working, and then they got rid of him. Sunak is currently like, very firmly in the stage of like, trying to do as much libertarianism as possible, and realizing that the state can only do libertarianism if they are also as authoritarian as possible. Yeah, and I think, you know, I was gonna get this in a bit, but I think that there's a couple of things that have been happening simultaneously. One is that like, okay, so we had, there was the incredibly brief phenomenon of trussonomics of like, the British's attempt to like, like actually really sort of, I don't even know how to describe it, like, because British politics is always neoliberal,

but like, do a kind of neoliberalism that like, nobody has seen since like, I saw people describing it as like, trying to do Reaganomics without the dollar, but I think it's actually stupider than that, because like, there are places where you could conceivably pull off Reaganomics without the dollar, right? But like, you have to have like, kind of an economy, which is the thing the UK no longer has after they shot themselves in the foot like, 1,000 times with Brexit. Yeah, let's trust publish like, a plan for what she was gonna do in terms of economic reforms, and it crashed the pound unbelievably hard, like, just like, not even the plan, like not even the policies being implemented, people saw the plan and the pound like, halved in value overnight. Yeah, and like, there is stuff that I have seen, like, in the wake of trussonomics and in the wake of like, sort of, the pseudo-ack attempting to piece together like, an even sort of functional government that like, I never thought I would see like,

I mean, I guess I had seen the IMF saying, hold on, you have to stop doing austerity before, but like, I didn't think I'd see that about the UK. No, it's pretty impressive, yeah. Like, the other thing that I've seen, that's just genuine, like, I can't believe is, I've seen mainstream newspaper outlets print things about the economy that you were just not allowed to say. Like, I have seen mainstream newspapers admit that economic growth was actually better in the inflation-reacting class war-torn 70s than it is now, which is like, that is like, the single thing you are not allowed to say at all in economics, because if you actually pull out the growth rate chart and point out that economic growth was actually better in the 70s than it was in any successive decade, everyone immediately shoots you because you can prove in one chart that it doesn't work. If you're in the media class in the UK and you point out that like, the 70s was by any metric better than now, you are no longer invited to the eyes wide shut parties where you can like, suck and fuck with Boris Johnson. And that is like, the highest privilege in British society, so you obviously want that.

Yeah, you can no longer fuck the pig, I think things of this nature. It was interviewed and it was like front page Kea Stammer saying, I would kiss the torii, and I just shared it being like, look, we already know David Cameron fuck the pig. Stammer saying he would kiss the torii is just, that's just a cherry on top. So, okay, I want to ask a little bit about what is going on in the British economy, because I have spent some time attempting to figure out what the fuck even is the British economy. And as best as best as I've been able to determine, it produces okay, produces financial quote unquote financial services, which seems to be the UK sort of polite euphemism for doing money laundering for like, both the regular bourgeoisie and for this enormous class of like kleptocrats and petrol oligarchs who like get their money by extracting it directly from the state. It seems like you have that layer, you have the layer below them who was just like, somehow more landlords per capita than exists in like any other place that has ever existed. And then below that, there's this quote unquote service economy thing.

Yeah, I think you're getting it. I think you're pretty much getting it. Okay, there are two sides to British politics. There's this economic one that you're pointing out, which is like, let me put a pin in the economics, right? The economy of the UK is unbelievable, and we'll get to it in a second. And then there's the like, the electoral politics that they try to, like, is just a fast to try to like keep people from ever looking too closely at the economics, like ever looking with a sensible lens at the economics. The electoral politics is just like eternal war on a set of marginalized communities. Young people, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, sex workers, trans people, black and minority ethnic Britons, the GRT community travelers enormously. Like that was something that like a lot of people thought that like new labor under Blair was like so progressive and was like ending races. It was a big like Obama adjacent moment for us. And like, but they were horribly racist to travelers.

And that's escalated in recent years to like, if people are familiar with the police crimes sentencing in courts bill, like that got somewhat defanged. But like one of the worst parts of the bill still got through was just like ending the right to Rome, which is effectively just a genocide against travelers. When I mentioned sex workers, like a lot of British sex workers are pushing for any kind of legal reform that would be better. But like our most progressive politician like Jeremy Corbyn literally like still supports the the Nordic model. Like it's it's a nightmare. Um, socially, the political side of that the social side of politics in the UK is just war on, as I say, like dividing up the entire population into marginalized groups forever eternally like saving this idea of like the blue collar working class white man who also earns like 80,000 pounds a year. And and that's the that's the ideal voter, even though that's no one.

And then there's the economics. Okay, so the and all of that is a smokescreen for the economics. So like you said, lowest level, there's the service economy, because we like the rest of the Imperial Corps exported all our industrial stuff to the Imperial periphery when our industrial sectors got unionized. We are now a service economy. So practically all jobs in the UK are poor people, providing some kind of service for rich people. Then, like you say, there's the landlords above that we have. We have a wild time with landlords and that there is there is a plus side to that, which is that like our tenants unions are fantastic. Like we have we have such a boom in tenants unions. I've been interviewing activists and organizers for a couple of years now.

And in the US, you guys are doing okay with tenants unions. You've got a bigger challenge because the cop shop guns to evict people. So that is like that is a crazy time. But like we have such bigger, stronger tenants unions. And like I think the possibility of something like a full scale rent strike happening in the UK is actually pretty like pretty feasible. The US people just don't like get that shit. Like I I had back back back back back when back when I was an incredibly naive youth was in the DSA. We had an entire like massive battle in my chapter about whether about whether we should do tenants organizing.

And I was on the side of like, well, yeah, obviously we should we should do. I'm like, I had one of the fucking Chicago DSA leadership people like in in in this meeting said to my face and I quote, How does building tenants unions build working class power? What? What? These people are clowns. Absolute clowns. Just like every every every time they walk down the street, the giant noses go hog like a clown.

I'm not going to be in. I'm not going to I'm not going to engage in anti clown slander here. I do not. I think it's very unfair on clowns to compare them to the DSA. That's true. That's true. There's an angel wing paradise where she says like, I don't want to be the head of the local DSA chapter.

I just want to be on the Digimon the movie soundtrack. I'm like, fuck yes. Okay. Speaking of the Digimon the movie soundtrack. Very nice. Very nice. Maybe maybe maybe maybe we'll get sponsored by Digimon the movie. Yeah.

Maybe he has an ad for Digimon the movie. Yeah. Yeah. I hope it's going to be fucking gold again. Or like we're going to bring. Please. Okay. Just like once again.

Other we have talked about this on multiple shows now. Please stop DMing other Sophie about about the Super Gold ads. We know they're there. Which way? Yeah. Don't buy gold. Yeah. And we're back.

I hope you I hope I hope you're now into Digimon. They got they got little monsters to turn into things with giant guns. I hope that you being carpet bombed with Digimon the movie ads has reshaped your brain to a higher consciousness. Digimon consciousness. Let's talk about financial services. You mentioned this very briefly, but this is actually so like, okay. Most people in the UK working in like fucking Uber or like Deliveroo or some other nightmarish service sector job. Then there's the Petit Bourgeois who are so overwhelmingly landlords now.

And then and then there are mega landlords. We have a ton of like mega landlords who something really insidious about that by the way is that we have a lot of like housing associations that are claimed to be like for the good of the tenant and claimed to be like socially progressive trying to help people out. And they actually own like thousands of properties and like there are people with like through the tenants union. My partner knows someone who it was like raining in her flat because the leaks were so bad. It was like rain indoors and she had like black mold and none of her lights were working and that was like that was a housing association. They are some of the worst landlords and then above them the UK is running one of the biggest money laundering operations in the world. Maybe the biggest. I think it's I don't I don't know like maybe maybe I don't I don't even I don't even think like the Cayman Islands or like the Bahamas have like that kind of like or Panama has a kind of throughput.

No, we're really familiar with like Switzerland and like you say Panama and the Cayman Islands and some people are somewhat familiar with Ireland as being like tax havens. Yeah. But like none of these actually compare to Britain because Britain like forged all of these relationships with the entire world because it invaded them. And now it has those like the British Empire ended in name and legal function but did not end in terms of financial services like that is our that is our grip on power is like that we do. Yeah, we just launder a bunch of rich people's money. There's a great documentary called the spiders web which talks about this and like the head of her majesty is right. Oh, I guess it's his majesty now. Oh, the king just taking this opportunity to say fuck the king. HMC anyway the head of HMC like literally just works for the money launderers like the people who are just trying to bring through like billions of dollars to launder. Yeah, like when I say about like the rest of our politics being a smokescreen it's because like this is everything for the British ruling class like it's all about them trying to to launder money and like I think that like the the recent rise in like far right populism or attempt at that in the UK which by the way I don't think is going as well as they wish it was anymore. But like well because they did because they did Brexit it turns out Brexit was really bad idea.

I remember there was something for a while ago I was in some forum thread where they were just posting like Trump supporters realize they're going to die because of Trump. It's a very similar phenomenon in the UK like you there's a lot of and I don't really delight in it because it's just it's just like looking a lot of working class working class people suffering. But there is a very like very obvious and noticeable trend of like people who voted for Brexit realizing that it's completely fucked everything about their life. But when there was this attempt at like raising far right like false class consciousness in a very Trumpian way that was all like a very big attempt at the smokescreen because like if there's have you ever seen Johnny English. No what is what is Johnny English there's this fucking Rowan Atkinson film where he like is a he winds up being like a spy and the villain in that film is French of course because you know the French so evil compared to Britain. Baguette and so on and that guy who's played by John Malkovich wants to get the British throne and then sell Britain to private investors to turn the entire island into a prison. So it's really modern Britain. Yeah it's just outlining modern British politics yeah so um so like he um in terms of social policy like. It would suit the ruling class of Britain very very nicely if Britain was just one big jail because like they they are only inconvenienced by having to cater to any kind of population like if the British.

Population just all died the Tories would be having such a good time like they would fucking love it if there was absolutely no one to govern over and Britain could just like on paper have a population of 60 million. And then they could use that for the money laundering yeah but actually you go here and it's just a complete like ghost island like that everyone is gone. Yeah I mean it is that it's just it is just for money laundering like I think the London Stock Exchange is the oldest stock exchange I think. I'm not sure but like obviously it's had a long time to develop and like it's yeah the the there is more fiscal capital or Marx would have called fictitious capital in the world now than there is like real capital or financial capital. And yeah the huge amount of it goes through the London Stock Exchange and through like yeah through through the services of of HMRC and through like the various schemes that it's really funny I had to. I don't think this is like as insidious as it sounds but I was filling out my tax return recently and there was a there was a question that HMRC like just straight-facedly asked like have you participated in one or more tax avoidance schemes and I was like. This is a normal country this is a this is a really normal normal country. When my partner saw this because she was filling out hers she was like is this just a trick question to get you to like dog yourself into the cops and I was like no no.

This is a this is a normal question in case you are a very very rich person who has engaged in a tax avoidance scheme and you want to just report that and then the HMRC will be like cool good job avoiding paying taxes. You know when I was sort of like running through my research for this I remember to David Graver quote about the British economy where he said something to the effect of the United Kingdom's chief product is the is the facility of its working class which is what allows oligarchs to just like put their money there because they know that they're gonna have a butler or no one's ever gonna steal it. But towards the end of his life like he starts writing a lot about the revolt of the caring classes and about the sort of like he was talking about he was talking about stuff that was happening like 2018 2019 yeah yeah a lot about like. But the shot actually too because there's a lot of yeah. And he was directly involved in some organizing yeah and stop the IMF yeah yeah and but you know it was interesting to me about this is like. Oh I don't want to let it go by without saying the IMF must be destroyed at all costs. The policy I have about.

The like yeah the. Actually demonic real demons exist and they're called the International Monetary Fund. Yeah I talked about this my neoliberalism episode when this is another sort of graverism thing right is the sort of being attuned to the fact that all of the sort of like red tape cutting bullshit is actually just a smoke screen for an incredibly sort of. Unbelievably violent or oppressive bureaucracy and the sort of the global wing of the violent or oppressive bureaucracy is the IMF. Yeah and well it's a really weird what I was saying before about like Cameron realizing that neoliberalism doesn't work towards the end of the time that he was in office like. What I'm referring to is that he wrote a letter to his constituency to his local council that he's supposed to represent. And he said that like they had been complaining that they didn't have the money to do the things they needed to do. And he was like well you should just cut out the red tape like you should just clear out the back room bureaucracy that's the thing that's costing you all the money.

And I think what's the time to reflect on this where I think he gets that idea from is he's seen how well it works for the for the ruling class. He's like the more red tape we cut the more we get rid of regulations the more money we make. And so he's like that is simple then minus red tape equals more money. And they replied to him like what the fuck are you talking about. There is no back room bureaucracy. You cut our budget with austerity policies. That's why there's no money. And he was like oh fuck. This seems to have escalated to levels in the UK that are sort of genuine and catastrophic. One thing that's been quietly going on is the sort of quiet privatization of the NHS. The NHS is the national health service or as trans people call it the no health care service.

I haven't heard that one before. That's very good. Yeah but you know okay but I'm currently a good demonstration of that actually. I'm currently trying to get onto the pilot scheme trans plus which basically gets you to the end of the waiting list. And if the pilot scheme goes well hopefully we'll be getting rid of the hopefully like this is the good alternative right. And to get onto it I need to get my referral which my GP told me they did but didn't do. So to do that I need to get my current GP to write the referral to the GIC and include a note that says this was meant to be done in August 2020. And to do that I called up the GP office the other day and they said I was on the phone with the GP and I said go to the GIC's website. Click on the section that says you're a GP and you're looking to refer a patient.

And she was like oh I can't do that because of our computer systems. So what I'm going to need you to do is go to the website yourself and click on the thing that says you're a GP even though you're not. And download that form and then email it to our office and then call the office and then get them to make the referral. This is the good alternative. This is the good alternative compared to just waiting for like 15 years and then killing myself. This is the good option for healthcare for trans people in the UK right now. As shitty as American trans healthcare is a lot of the time it is somehow okay unless you're in a place that has made it illegal now which is fun. It's a lot less fucked than the UK's. For a hot sack I really thought we were like outdoing the GOP states.

For just a second we were inching ahead in how much our country hates trans people. And then like all these bans came out that were just like taking trans kids away from their parents or whatever. They clearly won for now anyway. We'll see whether the rowling bill comes in in 2024 or something. It's just like execute trans genders on site. Would not surprise me at all. It's fun being just the scapegoat for everything that's ever gone wrong ever. Hi this is Mia in post. This episode was recorded just days before Brianna Jai, a 16 year old trans girl, was stabbed to death in a town near Liverpool.

We haven't talked about it really on the show over the last few weeks because very little of what I and what I think rest of the crew have had to say about Brianna Jai's murder. Brianna Jai's murder between sort of the racking sobs that yet another trans person taking from us is even remotely publishable. What I can say is that some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the institutions in the world are trying to exterminate us. And the BBC, the New York Times, JK Rowling and every major British political party and the American ones too have blotted their fucking hands and should be treated accordingly. And on that bleak note, yeah we can go back to the rest of the episode. Yeah it is wild being a country that supposedly, like the thing we probably have to be the proudest of in our entire history is creating a system for socialised medicine where people have free at point of use healthcare. And since it was created the ruling class have tried as hard as possible to destroy it. And they're finally succeeding. I'm actually having friends are telling me recently that they're going to like hospitals and the hospitals are telling them that they're privatised.

And they'll have to charge them because they're not like contracted to do NHS work anymore. So that's, you know, they're succeeding at that. We've probably wandered away from the point of what we were trying to say. I have very resentful feelings to do with healthcare in the UK. I'm currently playing with my comfort knife. I think this is sort of circling around the thing I wanted to talk about next, which is that like, you know, on the one hand we have this sort of like, just the sort of monumental collapse of anything that could like conceivably make the UK a society. But on the other hand... A lot of people share the joke of me whether like we live in a society and I'm like, if you're in the UK sharing this, you are wrong. You live in an economy. Yeah, it's living in an economy.

It would be fucking great to live in a society. I wish. But you know, on the other hand, David Graber's final prediction has like now come true, which is that we are now actually like... The UK is now sort of starting to see the full scale revolt of the caring classes. Yes. And that has come in the form of... I have no idea what this episode is going to come out. Sorry, everything's chaos right now. But as of time of recording, I guess tomorrow that something like half a million people are going on strike and lo and behold, who was going on strike? Oh, half a million people went on strike last week. Oh, was it last week?

Yep. Am I? Have I? Okay, I'm a dumbass. Aren't there more tomorrow? Irrespective of when the episode comes out on the 1st of February, over half a million people went on strike. And there were massive demonstrations and marches across the country. It's the biggest strike and biggest marches that we've seen in like over a decade. We haven't seen marches this size since protests against the Iraq war. Yeah.

Yeah, and well, okay, so inshallah, they'll be more effective than the Iraq war protests. But I, yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting if you look at the people who are striking, it is people who do care labor. It's teachers, it's nurses, it's ambulance drivers, people in civil service, like train and bus drivers who are like still on strike in various capacities. A point to pull you up on there, but it agrees with your point even more in terms of the rebellion of the caring classes. The current drive of the strikes from the RMT, that's rail, maritime and transport workers, pick up the RMT. My boys are incredible. Mick Lynch, shout out, love you to pieces. The current strikes are actually driven by the janitorial staff who are like some of the worst treated and worst paid among all of the train and transport staff.

Bus drivers and train drivers and so on have joined in on it, and that, as you're saying, is still part of the rebellion of the caring classes. But it's even more so because it's literally like the cleaners who were like, this is fucked, we need better wages. Yeah, and there's been, well, yeah, and I think like what, like postal workers are also on strike. I'm pretty sure other people are also on strike too that I'm leaving out here. Let's see, so ambulance drivers, civil servants, teachers, nurses, trains. Oh, student workers. Yeah, university workers. Yeah, university workers.

There are, but I do not care about this and have no solidarity for them. Border agents on strike right now. I stay on strike, baby. Fuckin' never come back to work. Just keep fucking striking. We are starting the abolition of work with you. Congratulations, you have now finally become the vanguard of the working class. It's what you fucking cops have always wanted.

Yeah. You get to do it now. Yeah. Well, cops is an interesting thing as well because like on Red Planet every Sunday, 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. UK time, check it out. We have a running prediction to do with the police that like as their job, as class warfare becomes more naked, the police's job is more and more obviously just what it's always been to put down the working class. But as your job just becomes like smashing like bottled water stands that people put up in a heat wave to help homeless people and like trying to evict people and trying to like stop people who are striking for better pay

and also everyone around you constantly calls you a pig and like degrades you and is like, are you enjoying what you're doing? Do you have a good life? Are you liking this job? We'll see like lots of police quitting. And actually this month, the Telegraph, who can't really be trusted but this does fit into a larger pattern, the Telegraph reported that more cops had quit than had been recruited in the last month. And that's what an overall pattern that has been going on for a while.

To be fair, that I don't know. In the US, every single newspaper says that every week and it's never true. So I don't know. I mean, to be fair, yeah. The actual figures when it does look like the I mean, cops quitting in the UK has been on the rise since like like early last year and enormously as well. And you can tell because like the Met has been putting out loads of recruitment ads, which like is really second.

No, I have a little story about this actually. They had this ad in wait. Is it nearly time for ads because I can add pivot. Oh yeah, we have. Yeah, this is incredible. So I was in Peckham Plex Cinema, which is Peckham is like a cheap community cinema. It's like, yeah, they deliberately keep it cheap so that people can enjoy it. It's an event space and whatever.

And we were about to watch a movie. I forget what now, but like there was this ad for the for joining the Met police. That was like this black guy talking about how he was really worried about his sister joining the police because she's a black woman and she's a Muslim and he was worried she's going to face all this discrimination. But actually she's having a great time and everyone loves her. So it was totally okay the whole time. And now I have this personal policy, which is if there is an ad for crypto and ad for joining the Met,

the army, whatever, and no one else. And if no one is yelling at the screen because they are being subjected to fascist propaganda, then it's going to be me who's yelling. So I just started yelling. Because like two weeks earlier when I was watching this ad, Chris Carver had been shot dead by Met police officers in South London, a black man, right? And they have a black man here telling us that actually the Met's really cool and doesn't do any racism. And I was just yelling and yelling about it.

And I was yelling about like fucking, if people aren't familiar with the case of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and assaulted and murdered by Wayne Cousins, a Met police officer. I was just going off about all this stuff because I was just responding directly to the ad. How are they running this shit as if we don't know all of this and just listing off everything that came to mind? Because again, it's my personal policy. I'm not going to get any trouble for it and someone should be yelling when you're subjected to propaganda. Anyway, speaking of propaganda, here's an ad for joining the Washington State Highway Patrol. And we're back from your fascist propaganda session.

I'd hope you didn't enjoy it. I hope you yelled the whole time. Yeah, and I guess the thing that is genuinely sort of different between the American and British police is that the British police, like the American police is like every single American city is like at least, well, okay, so they're technically only about 40% police budget by volume, but that doesn't count. You can check that out by Googling 40% police. Well, you will see a variety of things here. But technically, it's technically only about 40% of the city's budget by volume,

but that's because that doesn't count the amount of money the police just steal. But in the UK, they actually kind of, they were kind of stupid and they seem to actually have kind of done neoliberalism to the cops, which is very funny because it means that you get Jeremy Corbyn running on hiring more cops and it's like, sir, like what? No, it's like, you've been protesting like apartheid and illegal wars and all of this shit for like 35 years and you're like, we should have more cops. What the fuck are you talking about? Man, I was watching people who like used to be like autonomous to like fucking 2011 being like,

no, we need more cops. They were literally beating you up. What the fuck is wrong with you? Oh my God. That guy who fractured my skull, I need more of that. Yeah, no, it's pretty fucked. There is like an enormous amount of British brain going on where even our, our like most progressive politicians will support support shit like that. And like I said earlier, like the Nordic model, right?

Like we, yeah, there are, there are limits to the British imagination. Yeah, because we've been doing this shit a long time. We've really perfected the brain worms. Yeah, I mean, I have, okay, so my least progressive theory is that there's something called large population island brain, which affects, it affects the UK and Japan are the two sort of models of this where you like being on an island and then also running an empire drives you, makes you like absolutely psychotic in like very, very specific ways that are like both the same. It's like you have a massive nonce culture.

Like the way you do imperialism is similar. Yeah, how international and global public nonces is thriving. Yeah, you know what I mean. Gary Glitter recently got out of prison and then immediately went on to far right TV network GB News and said that woke cancel, woke cancel culture is the biggest problem. Yeah, like, oh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it is a very grim state of affairs. Yeah. Is what I will say about both the UK and Japan.

Although I guess to be fair, to be fair to Japan, they did just assassinate their ex prime minister and probably the most like a story, like probably the most successful historical assassination not done by the CIA in like 100 years or something. Like really incredible work on the part of the man with electric blunder bus. The UK, however, not, not there yet. Yeah, I mean, where's our, you know, where's our, where's our homemade blunder buses? Come on. Come on, guys, step it up, guys. This is not a call for a leftist terrorism. I am not.

No police. Please ignore what I just said. I was going to say what the British to like one of the sort of British psychosies that I think about a lot is like the specter of knife crime. Because it's like, like on the one hand, like on the one hand, like, yeah, like, okay, so like people get stabbed and it sucks. On the other hand, like, like having, having, having grown up in the US in a country where like all of our kindergartners are basically being trained to like storm mat, like do like human wave attacks and mass shooters is like, how, how are you guys like, how are you guys like, like, how is this the thing that you guys are like, like you have police brain about is knife crime? Like, I think that, no, I think that like the knife crime thing is a very American perspective on British politics.

Like we don't actually talk about it that much. Oh, thank God. Okay. It's really like an American conservative talking point that like if you get rid of the guns, they'll just stab each other. So look at the UK. They don't have guns and they're just stabbing each other. Like some conservatives still care about knife crime here. There was a big wave of caring about it when again, new labor were like doing their race, like their, their, their hush hush racist racist policies to try and like brutalize the working class,

especially in black neighborhoods. But like, no, I mean, the, the cop brain is like in everything. It's just, it's not, it's not like it's every, I think British brain is just an evolved form of cop brain. It's like when cop brain affects everything in life, then you, then you are British. And I guess, I guess, I guess also it's like, it's you have cop brain and also landlord brain at the same time. It's just like a truly sort of dastardly combination. What is a landlord but a cop for housing? That's true.

I say it was my fucking, well, I guess, okay. I think I have, I'm, no, that's not true. I haven't gotten there yet, but I am vast approaching the two weeks since my apartment was last flooded by sewage mark. And I'm very excited about this. Love, love, love, love landlords, love renting. We hear on this podcast, love landlords. Is my ceiling still falling on me? At least not up.

Oh God. Oh, oh boy, that's a new, oh, fun. Okay. This has been, this has been the, the Mia's apartment is falling apart update. Well, should we talk more about the rebellion of the caring classes? Yeah. I think that's a really, I think that's a really pointed and worthwhile Grape prediction. I'm a big Grape head.

I have a friend who I just get onto discord chat with and we, as we put it, grave out. I like to say I'm getting the grave from beyond the grave 24 seven. But the, but the rebellion of the caring classes is a really poignant thing to talk about because neoliberalism does not care about reproductive labor in the slightest. And where like, where older forms of capitalism had had that covered because women were basically fucking slaves. They now the now like reproductive labor has to be done by professionals because everything must be marketized. And of course, being the most essential labor, it's the going to be the one with the shittiest working conditions and the lowest pay. That's that's neoliberalism for you. If every if it must happen, it must be dog shit.

And so like this is where we see the rebellion of the caring classes now, especially with the with the set of the service sector economy. So like within the Imperial Corps, everyone's being put into some kind of care job, essentially, and they're treated like shit. And now they're starting to actually form unions and fight back, which is really fucking cool. I want to briefly interject here with a thing. Everyone gets wrong about Margaret Thatcher, which is that every everyone in their mom will say that fucking quote about there is no society. There's only the individual, except they never they never leave out the next part of that sentence, which they only leave out. The part of it that they always leave out at the end is that the actual line goes and it's slightly weird because it was in response to a question. But basically, the line is there's no such thing as society.

There are only individuals and the family. There are men and women and there are families is what she says because yeah. Well, also, yeah, yeah, to be clear, to be clear, Margaret Thatcher, not a friend of the trans is shockingly. Wow. But I think I think this family part is also very important because yeah, definitely, you know, like like neoliberalism has these it has these two conflicting tendencies, right? It has this one tendency that is like it's trying to use the family to create labor in two different ways at the same time. One is it's treating it's treating each person in a family as an individual who can go produce value for people. But then secondarily, right?

Like, you know, neoliberalism is an ideology of incredible alienation and incredible sort of atomization. And also, it's an economy based on it, you know, it but simultaneously, it has to be able to do reproductive labor. And the way that it sort of like bridges the gap in this contradiction is with the sort of alliance it has with the religious right and with sort of like religious conservatism in general, because it can put up this false and this is this is where all the trad calf shit comes from. This is where all of the sort of like trad wife like, oh, hey, you can you can. And she's saying there are individual men and women and there are families. There is an implicit thing there where she's saying families like she is leaving out children as people because children are properties of family. Long to the parents and also like whatever reproductive labor is done to brought to make those children into into individual men and women that doesn't that's just part of the family.

Like she's there's a lot of heavy lifting happening in there are families, right? Yeah. And I think the other part of us right is like this is this is the sort of like the sort of like neoliberalism has this pseudo populism that it generates. That's about sort of like the family and like the church's like this this the sites of sort of like, like this is how you resist sort of social alienation as you do these things. But like, yeah, neoliberalism has like a huge focus on consensus politics where they they say these are the resources that are available and you will get a say in how they're distributed in your community. You can come together and engage in the electoral process and consensus politics. And we all agreed on what and this is all just process to manufacture consent because actually there are infinite resources available because we want the money for the rest of the entire fucking world. And if this were like any other country that would have any kind of like trickle down to get into the Reaganomics effect for the rest of the population. But being Britain, you know, the country that invented concentration camps and workhouses. No, absolutely not.

Not a not a red cent is going to be touched by the by the pause. Yeah. And I mean that that kind of like, I don't know. I think that like that that also sort of goes back to just like the containment of the working class, the British working class is like a political force and that's starting to come on. But even then, like, you know, this is my what what what what if I what are the things that I say that gets people the most mad at me? Is that like there's like, OK, one in two day strikes are kind of like, like, you know, every single year, India has the largest general strike in human history. And it's one day and it does nothing and the only times it hasn't done nothing at the times when people have actually like kept going on strike or like, you know, marched a farmer's protest to one day strikes are a good practice to show that we could hold out for as long as possible. They shouldn't be like the whole thing.

And, you know, OK, and like we I've talked about this before when we when I've sort of like interviewed nurses on the show. And like, like there are absolutely times, especially, especially while I actually I don't know if this is if this works the same way in the British nursing sector. But like there's there's absolutely like there are absolutely tactical reasons why you want to do a limited duration strike, especially in the nursing sector that have to do with how like how the contracts work at bringing in scabs. But like one in two day strikes are kind of like they're more symbolic than they are sort of like, yeah, natural instrument of class war. And I think part of something you have to engage with the British process. And this is this is also true in the US, but our unions are like there's like two of them and they represent about seven people. So it winds up being less of a deal unless you're like a UC grad student on strike.

But it is also that like in Britain, the trade unions are just like actively directly sort of like feeding into this incredibly dog shit like yeah, political machine, which is OK. Yeah, this is an interesting question. This is an interesting like thing to think through because so if people aren't familiar, we had Thatcher bringing in the wave of neoliberalism, you know, along with everyone's favorite guy, Ronald mommy Reagan and she waged war on the miners especially but the unions in general across the UK and crush the unions and for this she is forever remembered as a saint by the ruling class and by the conservatives. But this was, as I said earlier, like this was a part of a trend in the imperial core where the most strongly unionized sectors which were manufacturing and industrial and like mining were those unions had to be crushed so that that and then that labor was outsourced to the imperial periphery. Yeah, right. And now we're all in jobs in sectors where there are no unions and there are these huge corporate unions in the UK like unison that like basically claim to be able to represent any worker, which, you know, if you're a fan of the IWW shout out to the wobblies like, you know, that's that sounds pretty cool. But then no, it's a massive yellow union if people aren't familiar with the yellow unions. We should hopefully be having an episode of Red Planet soon about just like making the distinction so that people can tell them apart really quickly but like yellow unions first came into existence in France, I think. And it was this pointedly this pointed change from red unions who are actually fighting class warfare and actually trying

to like stop the capitalist notion of work to a yellow union which was like a corporate union and and and generally speaking it would originally be like the corporation who was having their unions, like their workers were rebelling. They would form a union that was employed by the corporation and then be like look it's a union guys you can join that and you'll get better conditions and it was a trap. But now we have with the miracle of neoliberalism. We have those that just are their own corporate entity and they're like we can represent any worker because we are a massive union with an entrenched corporate structure who have like direct ties and constant political deals with the with like political establishment which like you know our labor party should rename itself at this point like it is actively anti union especially the unions that are fighting for the actual working class like the today like as of recording this like an hour and a half ago the there is a Tory MP who used to be a labor MP until 2018 has just been made like the vice chair of the Tory party and he's like an obviously a dog shit guy but it's a really good demonstration of how like the labor is now just the red Tories Tory now comes in red they these these massive unions my point is like it is again a neoliberalization of everything and it's a neoliberalization of unions where they get to just be a massive corporate structure competing in like a free market of unions they're trying to like compete to offer workers the best thing and like oh we're most likely to succeed at other man's because we have the most workers behind us but like practically everyone knows that the what they're actually going to get for the workers who are with them is dog shit like my friend was talking to a nurse at one of these marches on the first of Feb and she was just saying like she was with unison and then they said that what they were like actually

pushing for was was still like under inflation and still like it just wouldn't be worthwhile at all so she's changing to be with the Royal College of Nursing instead yeah we had we had enormous yellow unions in the UK it's a real issue facing British labor organizing we're going to talk more about that in the future of organizing in the UK in the next episode for now this has been a kid up in here you can find us in the usual places on Twitter and Instagram that's the British Empire during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys because the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his house with like a lot of guns he's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart and now he's left defending the Union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast it's it could happen here a podcast where I think turf island is legitimately my only remaining British show I think I've gone to basically every other one

so yeah welcome welcome to us talking about turf islands this is part two of our interview with Sophie from Mars and yeah we're gonna talk about how to make the UK less shit yay the US has gotten to a point like a level of unionization that decreases every year to the point where like it's people think of just like being in any union as like a socialist position and it's like guys I have really bad news I wish about yeah like it's really not that yeah and yeah but I think there's this there's also this sort of like I don't know like one of the things you have to deal with when you're dealing with like really very large unions I don't do anything like this is the thing in China that happens constantly is like yeah China technically is one of the world's largest unions it like the last time that union did anything was actually weirdly the lesson that you did anything was in between Tiananmen and then ever since then they have done literally jack shit like everyone was like oh my fucking god hold on oh no but like yeah you get these things are like technically unions but you know they don't do anything they cooperate with bosses they also and this is in the US well you don't really see this in China you don't see this in China because there's they have one in trade union fed like they have they have a state trade union federation you see this in the US a lot where you get these really shitty things were like so someone will be organizing union and like another union will come like swoop in and be like hey look at these people like what will give you like a better cut and then they're doing this like basically because I like the the the okay there are there are unions that are like actually unions which is to say like there are unions that are sort of instruments of the working class and the sort of organizational tools and then there are unions that are like we're forming a union so we can increase our member roles we can like you know like in so far as we're interested in expanding we're

interested in expanding because if we expand what people will pay money into our bureaucracy and that's a real like that that's a real issue and I don't know like it's interesting it's interesting to me to see whether the sort of one day strikes that have been happening in the UK kind of like I don't know as close not the right word but well I if we're going to if we if we're discussing what should happen what's going to happen next and I mean again you don't know when this podcast is going to come out so like you could be those it could like I might offer some predictions here and you might be able to like just look at the UK news and directly be like Sophie was full of shit but like also we should talk about young people in a minute because that's like pretty simple to understanding UK politics but but the government right now like I said before about Sunak like he's trying to put in these massively authoritarian policies because he's realizing that like without them you can't do neoliberalism effectively and one of them is like like I said about the PCSC bill which was already in the works before soon I came in but like now it's come you know now it's come through and they're doing like a second wave of trying to do it they have the online safety bill which is not for anyone to be safe online it's trying to like control freedom of the press basically like it's it's it's it's most extreme proposal is basically that like people who are anti capitalist and who are reporting on the news should be arrested normal British moment and but one of these ones is he's trying to just ban strikes like he's effectively trying to ban strikes the the technical mechanism of it is that they are bringing in a bill that will demand a minimum level of service for certain industries if the like and it doesn't say what those minimum levels would be but the MPs can decide on it later if they want like set it to be whatever they want and obviously they could set at minimum to just be

complete normal service they but but even if they don't like setting a minimum service defeats the point of a strike and I think that if we're talking about what will happen next we have this enough is enough movement right now I'm not I have mixed feelings about it I have some some suspicions I am not the biggest fan of electoral politics and I do feel like it has the whole not so something that could like launch a political party at any minute and then it'll it'll it'll completely recuperate all energy that it has and every other bit of energy that will die off but I think that the response to legislation trying to ban strikes is probably going to be an escalation from these one and two day strikes into like holding out for as long as they possibly can to demand concessions from the government and then like once you're in that territory you're actually talking about you know do a voice for you'll you're actually like it's it's it's as the as flowbots would say compassion as fast as you can go time where I think that the movement of unions and class consciousness is currently what rising in the UK is not going to respond by like lying down and taking it when the government tries to ban strikes I think that it's going to escalate and speaking of escalation is it time for ads yeah cool yeah look the Washington State Highway Patrol is going to escalate things right into your skull very quickly so here's a here's an ad for an escalating worsening crisis of cryptocurrency and buy Sophie coin the the only currency which supports the working class and we're back on this this is reminding me of the the the the the Libcom oxidizable currency David Harvey NFT thing oh he was so bad incredibly funny not not my fault that you're so okay that is completely that is a completely unrelated aside oh yeah so let us get back to yeah can I talk about young people for a minute because I do yeah

I think this is a really important thing that is probably going to be me just like info dumping at you for a little bit because yeah I feel very passionately about I also think it's very important to understand the UK politics it's that Britain hates young people so much like it's inconceivable to people who live in other countries how much the media class the political class like the ruling class like hates the young so fucking much like if only under 35s could have voted in any of our recent elections every borough in the UK would have been labor that's less true now because our labor is run by the fucking head of the crown prosecution service but like when it was Corbyn it would have all been labor and then if people over I think like 60 could vote it's like all conservative like they're they hate young people because they know that like social revolution will come from young people and they know that young people have like just a vastly different understanding of the world this is another graver graverism right if we're going to if we're going to talk about like graver said that like the that you could probably see that a revolution has taken place if one generation and the next generation effectively speak a different language like if their understanding of the world is so it's completely irreconcilable I think that one one interesting thing about tough island is that like trans rights are really clear manifestation of that where people under 35 are entirely in support of trans rights are entirely in support of like self idea you know self determination of gender and like improving the health care situation and like informed consent health care and everything and then people above that are like practically entirely against it and it's it's just like we have this we have this absolutely wild generational divide in the UK and they've been trying to reign that like bring that under control with various policies for a long time so Tony Blair

must be destroyed at all costs no that's the IMF Tony multiple things at the same time should go to jail in a world where no one else goes to jail no yeah that one that one works Tony Blair Margaret Thatcher's greatest achievement had this speech where he was like education education education and he was basically like we are going to make it so everyone goes to university and he also did a lot of other reforms to do with getting people into schools it was very it was it was it was contemporary with and very comparable to like bushes no child left behind kind of stuff so he did a lot of stuff to try to like clamp down on youth and also create a pipeline for for young people to get through high school and then go to university he also like when I speak about clamping down on youth do you Mia are you familiar with the ASBO Oh is that the fucking sonic gun things I think what a different this is a this is a policy measure it's just it's not it's not a weapon it's I mean it is a weapon of class warfare but it's it's the antisocial behavior order and basically this is part of the UK system of exclusions right like we have a system set up where young people can be excluded from a career path and like a path to just like being a functional human being in society at at basically any moment right if a teacher takes against you they think you're rude they think you're misbehaving they can exclude you then that goes on to your educational record and then you know you might get a permanent exclusion which is what we call being expelled from school now right and then that is like statistically sets people on a massive path towards winding up in like juvenile offense centers like because they've been kicked out of a school and other schools don't want to take a kid who's been kicked out of a school

and then what are they doing with their time that like there are no fucking youth centers there are no community centers like they've been all been completely destroyed by neoliberalism so like we have the system of exclusions and and and ASBOs are a big part of that so ASBO stands for antisocial behavior order and basically it's like it's not just like a warning it's like it comes from it's like it again is something that's going on to your permanent record and if you then commit crimes you're going to be punished more severely because you've been warned already it's like it's it was it was it was introduced and then like cheered on by the ghouls who run our country like because it was going to deal with chaps which was our term for young working class people just our pejorative for being young and poor but it obviously also was there to target like young young black kids young brown kids young traveler kids and like and that was you know that was black like and on any kind of existence outside of the pipeline that he was setting up for just being in school there was also this massive focus on like attendance came in around the same time that like schools would punish people for having missed any time at all like when I was going to high school like school assemblies where they would tell us about the importance of attendance like over and over and over again like probably a hundred times a term they would tell people that like they would tell the kids that like attendance is the most important thing and like the difference in your grades will be enormous if you missed like a single lesson or a single week of school and they would like give awards to kids who had perfect yeah yeah so it's less deranged and then like so that was Blair and it's continued to kind of intensify that same thing for a long time

but like very recently this is again Sunax authoritarian policies we've brought in something called prevent now prevent is a multi faceted civilian surveillance program where basically people can be referred to prevent which is capitalist white supremacist western centric it's a it's a reeducation program it's it's people are considered to be holding extremist views expressing extremist opinions and they can be referred to prevent now like a lot of the people in my kind of social circle will like meme about prevent because like all the language is about like making extremist content or whatever and obviously that's what I do for a living but like the people would you know make a tweet about how they think that like the prime minister's a dickhead and then be like oh I'm going to get referred to prevent and then it was noticeable that like actually no none of us are being referred to prevent right so like this isn't this isn't for us it's actually been put in place for two specific purposes I do know someone who's been I do know someone who knows someone who's been referred to prevent and the person they knew has been referred to prevent is a is a child right is a teenager because she works with trans youth and like being referred to prevent is really there as a system to control Muslim populations and young people like that's what it's really there to target and trying to clamp down on young people expressing any kind you know the Muslim side of that it's it's that has its own entire discussion you could have to do with Islamophobia and like terror and like there's a whole thing like you know the the complete unwillingness of the US and UK and all the other states from to acknowledge that like extremist Islamic terror is right wing terror so then you if you merge those categories you would see that actually the far right is the biggest threat to everyone all the time whatever this is a whole other thing young people in the UK are under constant like barrage under this constant barrage of like media pressure shaming stigmatism and it's because they they are expected to either get a degree and succeed and get your hundred K a year salary job and whatever

or you are a piece of shit and you will go to jail and obviously the reality for most people is you're going to get your degree or drop out and then you're going to wind up working in some kind of service sector job actually right or if you're lucky a fairly easy like office job where you can quiet quit and just docile all day right but like the attacks on young people serves a very specific function and it's because they're aware of that rebellion of the caring classes and they're aware of the social revolutionary potential of young people and they're trying to stop it like trying as hard as they can to stop it and their mechanism for doing that is that there's this pipeline from birth until the end of your university degree and then hope and then allegedly you get a job but you don't really or else as I say you probably wind up in jail and the the university thing is also really really interesting because graver again fucking everyone take a shot graver pointed out that like revolution often comes out of cases where the population isn't looking at like someone else gets some like the population doesn't look at the population class getting everything and then getting nothing and think that's unjust we should overthrow them right this is how monarchy and kingdoms was able to perpetuate for such a long time it's when they think that someone else who they consider comparable is getting something and they're getting it that's when they feel the injustice and like I think this education education education speech and this moment and this policy set that neoliberalism and Blair and everyone since then has tried to kick into like kick into action is going to turn out to be probably the biggest shooting themselves in the foot historically that we could measure because they've basically made it that every person like every young person in the UK must try to go to university not wanting to go to university is considered socially like backwards and like then people go to university and we all find that there are not jobs in the UK for everyone who's gotten a degree because they basically set up the whole country to be a diploma mill like the whole entire country has this pipeline of everyone's going to get a degree and then and then what because there aren't fucking jobs

that's going to create that sense that like we are not getting what we deserve. Yeah I think that the marketization and the opening up all these universities to be like profit driven diploma mills is has radicalized an enormous number of young people. Yeah which I think is really interesting because a lot of Tory policy and like one of the things that Tories did right after they came to power like right after 2008 was immediately went to war against sort of higher education right and immediately started to do increase increase in fees and this is you know this is what produces the luck 2010 like student movement and it's really interesting to me that like it really kind of seems like I don't know if for them the cure was worse than the disease because like you know they they they they they survived 2008 right and there was a real moment where it looked like globally that the ruling class was not going to survive 2008 and that like they were they were all about to come down and okay so they survived that but like yeah it really feels like they've sort of this is something that's happened in the US right which is like it turns out if you turn it entire class of the population into just like basic like basic basically the debt pions those people get really really really pissed off. Yeah it's like you know okay so you don't have a bunch of highly educated people who are very very very angry at people who force them to take all these long as concerned as always pointing out have been through university which is a culture where they're going to be exposed to way more leftist ideas. Yeah I mean like like this is something I think about a lot which is like I I think I knew I knew one openly gay person in high school like there were zero trans people and I got I got to like the first time well that was the least one. Well you know look I had no idea and the part of reason I had no idea like like the first time I like met someone who was like openly trans was like literally the first time I walked on to campus.

Yeah and like like the first people I meet was like a trans guy who fucking rips. Yeah I hope he's having a good day. Yeah and like that like you know and I think there's this tendency in the US particularly there's this tendency to look at the university and look at like yeah like obviously if you're going to school in the US and also if you're going to school in the UK you are going to run into a Marxist professor who tries to break your strikes right. Like that's a thing that's true like there are a bunch of right wingers on campus like I went to the University of Chicago I have seen my own fucking econ department. Our movement of that is largely toughs like Kathleen Stark or whoever if you're familiar like yep yep yeah our right wing professors are almost always toughs. Yeah but like you know and there's this real tendency to sort of like completely disregard the university is like a thing that can produce anything remotely left and I think that's just wrong like there's like there was a reason a whole bunch of the universities in the US were redesigned after 68 like there's a reason why like one of the if you're doing a military coup in a Latin American country one of the first things you do is roll tanks onto college campuses. Yeah if you don't roll tanks onto the college campuses those students are going to fight you until like all of them are fucking dead. Like yeah that's a you know like that that's like as much as you know you can even look at the hippies and hard hats thing right. Yeah the media image the conservatives created I think it was Nixon like the hippies and the blue collar working class are incompatible and cannot work together and the hippies are all university educated effect liberals and working class people are conservative reactionaries and that's like largely stuck until you get actual class consciousness building like this is

something we're seeing massively in the UK right now is like the Union the growing Union movement like has so many university educated people involved in it because like as soon as you start developing class consciousness that that notion you're talking about like that that universities can't produce something left is just like flies out the window and massively. Yeah and I think that's why the US there's like this massive effort to sort of like I'm just going to call it a fucking Psyop because it is like there's this massive Psyop to get people to like not think that like being a barista is like a thing that produces value and it's like I'm going to beat you to death with a copy of. Psyop is one of these things it's like it's like with serial killer where you wait wait if you're like if you're like well what's the difference between a serial killer and a cop who kills a bunch of people the difference is that the cop will never be found guilty right like once you start like once you start looking at what you could call a Psyop you're like oh the whole of capitalist media is a Psyop. But you know I think that the very specific thing here is like okay if you look at who is in the UAW right now the UAW is composed of two kinds of people it is composed of people the remaining people who work in the auto industry and it is composed of grad student unions right yeah and I think I saw a statistic recently that I think it's true although I wasn't able to verify it which is that like 30% by volume of the UAW is total membership right now are from are from workers in the University of California system like you know the actual class configuration that is happening right now is this very weird sort of alliance of industrial workers and then people who have been like people who are highly educated who have been like kicked into really shitty

service jobs and that's a real like and that's the reason I genuine like I think the reason you see so much of this sort of like like the right wing populism around sort of like the productive like working class thing specifically because this is this is a genuinely very powerful political alliance even people like Lula who like Lula like fucking hate it like you can you can go back and read like a million hilarious Lula quotes about like how much he hates fucking student radicals from like 1973 he was just like a football fan guy right like he was just like even even even after he becomes a labor leader like he he has he spends a whole bunch of time like kicking all the student Maoist out of his out of his like strikes and stuff and like like he has this great line that was like this guy walks into the door I looked at his hands and they were perfectly smooth and I said and I said to myself this man is a trotskyite like even Lula who was like he was like the like left around the world there's the it's very like other trotskyites in the room with you right now yeah to be to be to be to be fair to be fair there was he was actually there are loads of trots actually yeah in the UK it's much more like other Maoists in the room with you right now that's true but like you know but like even even Lula like basically had to abandon that completely because you know like it turns out that like you can't actually like you know as as as the sort of unions decayed in Brazil as they didn't have where else I mean Brazil still has fairly large unions but like Brazil Brazil the kind of industrial stuff that like existed in Brazil and like the 80s is gone right yeah and you know it's like well okay even even now like yeah his his base has a bunch of like it has it has a bunch of just like university educated people working service jobs right and you know like there's no there's no actual like there's no

version of a functional leftist political coalition that doesn't have that and it's obviously significant that two of the most prominent leftist theorists of the last like 20 years David Graber and Mark Fisher both worked in education yeah like Fisher was pointing out the whole like second shift stuff kind of like we were talking about before with like reproductive labor and he was talking about how like exhausted people are because they do their job and then that you know and it's not it's it's not just women anymore like this this this labor is expected of everyone I mean still disproportionately women and disproportionately women of color but like you know he he was telling a story about like his colleagues working in a high school that they that the only time they could find to organize or first complain about their working conditions and then organize was like when they went to the pub after work together right yeah well I think it's also like I'm pretty sure it's true I know she would agree but like those those were both people from working class families who went into academia which is a very sort of like I don't know it's it's it's a very like I guess potent combination for how how you get people into radical politics and I think this is yeah again going back to sort of like Tony Blair shooting himself in the foot which is like okay so you you're now you're now forcing a bunch of working class people into universities yeah and then saddling the student debt and it's like I wonder I wonder what understanding of the world around you at the cost of becoming a debt peon which will make your understanding of the world around you a very radical one very quickly yeah and it's like okay like I like there is a certain extent to which millennials get sort of less radical over time but like if you look at the less radical over time it's like they go from autonomous to Corbinites no and that's still not great if you're like yes but like yeah it's as far as it happens it's like coming back right as the age is like largely not affecting millennials

and Gen Z and like I think that I mean one of the most obvious things to point to is the climate crisis right like yeah previous generations were not growing up being like the world will not be here when I reach retirement age unless we act I don't think it's impossible for people to sell out like there are still a limited number of sell out jobs you could take right the problem is there's just there's not enough of them in order to like actually buy people off on mass and like anything particularly was like you know the thing that's supposed to make you more conservative is property ownership and like who the fuck is going to buy a house like oh yeah what like under under what circumstances like yeah I am past the age when my parents bought a house I am past the age when my grandparents bought a house and I know like one person who's bought a house my age who's like working for a like a privatized rail company and who's who's partner like works for the police like no one's getting houses yeah I mean like my I was I was listening to my friends like who has a house like I have a friend who bought a condo yeah like but that's the thing like that that that that that that was that was another thing that was like they got help for their parents and it's like help from your parents doesn't even get you a fucking house anymore like no I got like a little bit of money after my dad died and it was enough to partially help for my my my surgery and then like fight off like rent debt for a few months and that was all and it just disappeared right it's like yeah and you know I mean I mean I think I think like like Britain's inflation is somehow is worse way worse than the US is which is truly stunning and makes me like want to cry because oh my god like yeah yeah yeah it's it's something else it's truly so economically

economically the UK is again we have to just keep on coming back to the fact that it Britain is just a smokescreen like the whole of British society barely barely exists and is just like a collection of reactionary buzzwords and then like a ton of people who are increasingly angry or an angrier about it I don't know I had a really good conversation a little while ago with like an old woman who lives in my like neighborhood we met through some like community project stuff and she just came by while we were like hanging out on the stoop and um yeah we were just talking about Boris Johnson it was right after Boris Johnson had come in and she was in like she was basically getting revolution pilled like she like she was not at all a political person for as long as I'd known her and then like it was just yet another of the like revolving door like like the Tory party is currently running the boss rush strategy that they just like keep on swapping out Tory prime ministers as fast as they can and like and and and I said to her like when people realize that by definition no one will ever hold the office who respects what the office is allegedly for like serves the people or whatever when people realize that like it's not just that like coincidentally all of our prime ministers went to eat and and all of those like when they were in when they were then in Oxford they were in like the Bullington boys club it's not a coincidence it's like that's the pipeline is how you get there like when people realize that and they realize that no one will ever hold the office of prime minister who is there to serve the country

they're gonna realize that they have to take care of each other instead and we have to build something that we have to we have to build society from the ground up and she was like yeah she was like yeah I think that's what's literally happening in our community right now yeah and I think that's kind of encouraging because like I don't know like just the absolute wreckage that was Corbinism just like the complete shit show of how that entire project went yeah like I know it's caused some people to sort of like basically like you know every every every every every successor generation of politics has like the person who used to be a Trotskyite who is now like a labor minister or is now like a fucking Tory minister you're a peepoo to judge and Kamala Harris who are both raised by malice academics yeah I mean even like Google who Bill de Blasio's wife is okay she was she was one of the founding members of the Gohimi River Collective oh wow yeah like there's a lot of shit like that I yeah but like yeah you know but like as much as this is a thing I don't know

and so far as it seems like the UK has the potential to be something that's not this it seems like it's going it genuinely seems like it's going to be through labor and it's going to be through sort of street actions and organizing that's that's not taking place inside the Labour Party and I'm hoping like practically everyone I know who was invested in Corbin is now like no party could possibly solve the problems of the UK because they watched like a guy oh here's a great movie recommendation a very British coup if people haven't seen this and it's pretty obscure so you probably haven't but like it's it's just about a guy who is on the side of the working class becoming Prime Minister and then how the media like as like character assassinate him and have him removed from power and like it's almost beat for beat what happened to Corbin and it was made in like the 90s but like you know a guy comes along and floats like very mild social democrat policies and the entire media class says that he's going to like drag the country back to the 70s and like there's there's like like soldier like there are like units in the army doing target practice on pictures of him and like people openly declaring that they will assassinate him if he comes into power and shit like this

and it's just like and then like people within the party work to sabotage his election the election in 2017 was lost by like 2000 votes you know and then it's pushed out and replaced by the worst imaginable neoliberal top cop ghoul kia-stama and like that spectacle has radicalized people so hard like I don't know yeah I don't think I know anyone who who who who supported Corbin who now thinks that our problems can be solved without mass uprising or at least like without union power basically like kicking the shit out of the government I don't I like yeah I don't really the UK is we are we are don't vote pilled I think yeah which I think is yeah I don't know like it strikes me in my sort of like I don't know my cursory knowledge of British history that like the most effective sort of British left wing political movements in a long time was the poll tax stuff in the 90s which was defeated like into almost entirely by a carnation of street movements and like non-party organizing yeah and you know I don't know the UK is in a very weird position where it's like I don't know if there's a way it could have been different but it's like it very much look like the like like the sort of just like the incredibly furthest right like just like absolute most shit parts of British society we're going like far right parts per society we're going to be in power forever but then some somehow they managed to do the thing that social democratic governments always do which is like they managed to produce a series of like changes in the UK's class structure such that like they produced an entire like

they got their worst nightmare which is that they actually got into power and got to do all their policies and it turns out if you actually do all of their policies the entire world implodes without some kind of functional opposition to make sure if they don't literally like press the destroy the economy button today there was a news article that was like Sunak is going to raise energy bills like 40% in April and I just like I said it just being like they're just daring the working class to overthrow them at this point like yeah it's not that but like I've seen the same the leftist journalist Owen Jones said a little while like when this trust was in he was like I'm pretty sure she's actually an undercover Trotsky trying to initiate revolution by doing the worst policies possible like it really feels like that sometimes but it is just like as you say the nightmare of their politics that like they can't they are just incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing and speaking of being incapable of conceiving of the harm that they're doing here's an ad for racion something so when I said before about like the generational divide and how reactionary like older people in the UK are that applies to some of our like our older leftists as well so there is this like offshoot of the of CPGB the Communist Party of Great Britain called CPGB ML the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist they are fascinating so basically so basically there was let me just let me just let me just refresh my memory but like there was there was a split from the from CPGB a couple decades ago I think where people were just like where basic it was it was to do with the politics of like supporting North Korea and like there was a Maoist involved and shit like this there are some people who involved who have done some like wild stuff in leftist terms like there was someone who was involved with the Spanish Civil War and then like move to China and took like positions in Mao's government during the Cultural Revolution like boy who is like now I think the honorary president of CPGB ML that's Isabel Crook but basically what happened was

when the when CPGB kind of split apart in the 60s one of the splinter groups was called the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League and then and then that immediately splintered as well and they and then they had a thing called the Association of Communist Workers and that was founded by Harpal Bra. Now this is bear in mind the bras for a second BRAR because this is really interesting. So basically Harpal Bra yeah he's he's old as dirt now he's still kicking around he does some like like like VOD chats with like everyone's favorite real gen definitely real communist Caleb Maupin and the bras because of their role in this like splinter group and then the founding of CPGB ML that it's kind of like a dynastic family of communists like so Harpal Bra is the father of Joti Bra who's like a notorious turf communist and and like she isn't officially in charge of CPGB ML but like apparently nothing nothing is allowed that goes against her so it's like they've they've actually put a dynasty in in place oh boy yeah but as I say that's all that's all part of the fact that like the the older people in the UK are just like shockingly reactionary it's good stuff it's good stuff like they're trying to do like working class organizing around how much they hate trans people it's really good yeah I mean that's the one thing I'll say about the US which is that like like we don't have as many like there are Lib turfs but like the Lib turfs don't really sort of like like they're kind of walled off from like tough is a very British thing I don't like I yeah like I've seen Americans worry about it a lot I don't think it's going to take off with you guys because we have a politics of British exceptionalism which is directly contrasted to US politics like it's very similar to like how can like Canadian Liberals work where like everything every place where we can be progressive we try to pride ourselves on not being as bad as the US and so like the the the specter of the GOP not only like does not

not only do turfs literally receive money from far right evangelical Christian groups from the US but like the fact that the GP the GOP is there gives like supposed feminists in the UK this cover to pretend they're still progressive because like this they support abortion until a candidate comes along who hates trans people who also wants you know to make abortion illegal I don't think that I don't know I could be proven wrong about this but I don't think that like turfs are gonna get a foothold in the US in the same way because you you're like reactionaries just function a bit a bit differently and like the trying to like divide the progressive left with turfs is a very conscious strategy that's kind of like been designed and constructed for the UK like it's it's yeah it's Liberals who are like we're so progressive because we're not the US who are then amenable to tough talking points in the UK who are really really out of touch and again there's a generational thing but like I think that I think that tough island will continue to be notoriously tough island like I think that toughism will continue to be a very very very British phenomenon I have seen what you're talking about with like turfs in the US because like yeah I mean I will say like the other question I think is particularly really bad with this in Mexico has enormous turf problem like in ways that are incredibly dangerous for this on this podcast but yeah it's very bleak yeah I don't know the US yeah the US the thing is mostly from the far right and also from people like who are like lives before like really like like I don't know like New York Times collaborator types yeah yeah yeah I mean it's the same thing here we have like I don't know if you know the comedian Rob Delaney he's American but he moved to the UK and he's been you know fighting for a long time alongside like union movements I think he's like mostly a liberal like he calls himself a socialist but I don't think he's I don't think he would call

himself a communist or anything like this but like he said that when he moved to the UK he was like you're always pointing to American media by being like look how bad Fox News is but truly every outlet of the UK media is Fox News yeah yeah the UK media is like somehow more fucked in the American media which is really amazing that has to do with that that ties in really strongly with our tradition of I was gonna say lovable public nonces again no that's not it are the bad thing are the evil thing Tony Blair there it is um yeah Tony Blair was so close with Rupert Murdoch that he literally fucked Rupert Murdoch's wife he's literally like he's the godfather of Rupert Murdoch's kids or the other way around I remember like he is he is like that with Rupert Murdoch there's a famous picture of like Blair reading the sun and fuck the sun um reading the sun newspaper and like the headline is like we love Blair or whatever um sidebar briefly my uncle died in the Hillsborough disaster if people aren't familiar with that I won't explain the whole thing but like the passion with which I want the the sun newspaper destroyed in the most literal sense possible fucking come and arrest me I will I will stand up in court and say this is on behalf of my god damn family I am allowed to have this opinion um but like but like the the the way that like new labor was able to tie it all together as this like the progressive newspapers and the reactionary newspapers it's all working for the ruling class and then like neoliberalism you know benefits them enormously so like we have where before we had the the kind of faintest illusion of there being like a left wing media and a right wing media now it's like there's a ruling class media and then there are like tiny tiny tiny independent leftist media sources right there's like yeah youtubers like me there's like Novara media there's Owen Jones fucking libs by the way yeah there are like there are like Trotskyites like making newspapers to fund their like well mostly to fund making more newspapers to be honest but like you know

um you know and they're just these tiny little crumbs and the rest of the media is just fucking dog shit to the point where like it's actually quite funny like it's gotten to the point where they're complacent because they're so not used to dealing with anything that represents the working class that they like they recently had Mick Lynch the head of the RMT union on a bunch of different like UK talk shows where they were they were expecting to be able to like gotcha him with with the most transparent bullshit yeah Richard Maitley said to him like what about the spirit of Christmas your strikes are making people's ability to go home and see their family and he was like what about workers getting paid better dickhead and it was just like it was just like game over immediately like they are so not used to talking to anyone who cares about the working class that when someone like it just not even an especially radical just like a union leader comes on to their show he just owns them like he just butters their goddamn biscuits like it's it's amazing yeah we had this with the rail strike we're like I remember how was it businesses that it was was one of the business press guys had had someone they were like they were talking to like a rail worker yeah and you can see on air this guy realizing that these people have zero days off a year and going what the fuck yeah there's like a human empathy that like that they are not expecting to be a problem for them because like they're all parasitic fucking ghouls and then like they come into contact but they've been lied to about the lives that the working class yeah and then a working class person comes on and just tells them like oh no it's like this and they're like oh shit we should do something about that yeah it's like yeah and that that's sort of like I don't know that that's that's that's sort of the sort of shield like it's kind of the kind of insulation yeah it's built up just yeah do you do you have anything else you want to say

fuck the police listen to red planet yeah okay I'm plugging stuff I'm gonna say I'm Sophie from ours I make video essays on YouTube about politics philosophy sometimes about media I did a little bit about yay going on info wars and all his anti-semitism and stuff pretty recently I'm doing something about climate demerism and how I believe that the world is not ending it's just the collapse of the imperial core and people are projecting the inability to get Starbucks and Deliveroo as the apocalypse that should be out sometime soonish but what I really want you it could happen here listener to check out is red planet because I think you'll really like it it's a it's a weekly leftist round table where we talk about how to make the world a better place it's every Sunday 8pm to 11pm UK time please Google to figure out what that is for you it's on twitch.tv slash red planet live and we also have a podcast feed if you want to catch up on all the archive episodes should be available wherever podcasts are sold it's called red planet and it's a good time and we also I mean we have a lot of we have some some some solid overlap with it could happen here actually we recently interviewed Maya crime you as well so you know if you want to have a good time we had a good chat with us and I can't imagine you don't because she's delightful wonder wonderful person wonderful wonderful little kitty cat huh yeah this is what could happen here you can find us in the places you can wage a war against the British imperialist ruling class etc etc you can do this from your home yep I've cool I've been Sophie I've been playing with a browning 364 switchblade only in my house where it is legal to have it and I apologize again to Danil for all the clicking noises

yeah grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse like a lot of guns he's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price

two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories

but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart and now he's left defending the Union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts Hello everyone and welcome to it could happen here once again hosted by myself Andrew along with the rest of the crew Mia and James Alright and today I want to take a minute to talk about Ubuntu and not the Linux software but the African philosophy

Ubuntu is a philosophical concept for those who don't know derived from some of the diverse and disposed indigenous traditions of the roughly 360 million Bantu speaking peoples of Africa Bantu coming from the Zulu word for people is a language finally spoken by approximately 400 distinct ethnic groups and split into approximately 440 and 680 distinct languages slash dialects born as a result of the great ban to migrations that occurred in two major waves about 3000 and 2000 years ago across Central East and South Africa to the maximum I think therefore I am Ubuntu roughly translated from the guiniband to languages like Osa and Zulu means humanity and more specifically humanity towards others I am because you are There are of course various names with the concept from language to language and ethnic group to ethnic group including Boto, Muntu, Bantu, Bato, Utu etc but Ubuntu is definitely the most prominent and internationally recognized

according to the African Journal of Social Work Ubuntu is a collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings rather nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups they all point to one thing an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world this of course is not unique to Africa what's any specific culture, what's any specific ethnic group I think we'll find these sort of mirroring ideas in a variety of contexts because I think it really is something that's fundamentally human but I think it is good to look at how these ideas have manifested in those more specific contexts I mean in the oral literature of South Africa, Ubuntu has been in existence from as early as the mid-19th century

the reported translations for the tomb have covered the field of human nature, humanist, humanity, virtue, goodness and kindness and so it's meant to be a sort of a parallel to the abstract idea of humanity as a philosophy or as a worldview, Ubuntu really was popularized in the beginning of the 1950s most notably in the writings of Jordan Kush Ngubane published in the African drum magazine from then into the 1970s, Ubuntu began to be used as a specific form of African humanism because of course in that 60s and 70s period you had a lot of Afrocentric and Pan-African and Black power ideas coming to prominence around the world this of course also coincided with the period of decolonization or rather formal political independence that was taking place in 1960s and this desire for these newly independent countries to pursue Africanization to sort of let go of some of the symbolic aspects of colonial rule

of course that process has not really been complete and in many ways the post-colonial status is equivalent to the colonial status but in some ways some leaders were trying to pursue sort of a new African specific humanism as a philosophy for the burgeoning countries at the time Is this a part of the episode where we tell everyone to read Fanon again? Of course, read Fanon, read Cesare. What I found interesting is that this term Ubuntu's idea of Ubuntu particularly found it was specifically picked up in Zimbabwe and in South Africa in a very specific context where there was a transition to majority rule. In 1980, Ubuntuism or Hunhuism was presented as the political ideology of newly independent Zimbabwe a guy named Stan Lake JwT Samkange published a treatise basically on Hunhuism or Ubuntuism or Zimbabwe Indigenous political philosophy and he was basically trying to outline what the three major maxims that she, this philosophy, should be of course I would note that his interpretation being a statesman was notably hierarchical but for the reasons I will go into a bit later

I don't believe that makes the core of Ubuntu necessarily hierarchical but the three maxims that he had in mind for Ubuntuism or Hunhuism was that to be human is to affirm one's humanity by recognizing humanity of others and on that basis establish respectful human relations with them the second maxim means that if and when one is faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation of life of another human being then one should opt for the preservation of life and the third maxim says that the king owed his status including all the powers associated with it to the will of the people under him I think that's where you get most prominently the sense of hierarchy that would pervade certain interpretations of Ubuntu this idea of a sort of a benevolent rulership that these benevolent statesmen and kings and well prime ministers of presidents that they would they would just exercise in the will of the people and of course this is a mythology that is interpreted and reinterpreted across various different regimes in South Africa in the 1990s Ubuntu as a concept was used as sort of a guiding ideal for the transition from apartheid to majority rule I think around this time is when the international community started to hear more about the term Ubuntu particularly as it appears in the epilogue of the interim constitution of South Africa published 1993 there's a need for understanding but not for vengeance a need for reparation but not for retaliation a need for Ubuntu but not for victimization

end quote of course as we see in South Africa today that didn't play out very well the understanding has not reached that point reparations is not fully been achieved and there's a I would say distinct lack of Ubuntu they kind of brought in Bank of America instead which didn't go great they do it's very it's very big in Kenya Rwanda it's Ubuntu I think but like you'll see the phrase or that word a lot around Rwanda and like if you go to the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum you'll see a lot there and like that is the country that has with some authoritarian issues like has put aside the differences which had previously allowed the genocide to happen I guess I think that's fair to say yes yes that's with the tootsie and the who to yeah yeah and the toa you often get missed out that yeah but they yeah that's actually yeah terrible terrible thing if people ever go to Rwanda highly recommend going to Rwanda like the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum is an important thing to it's a very very well curated museum of like you said a terrible terrible thing that happened in South Africa the transition to democracy and Nelson Mandela's presidency 1994 like I said really brought the term to more well known outside use and one of the people who was a main main proponent of that was Desmond Tutu who was the chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and also a preacher he sort of advocated an Ubuntu theology that was really formative in the development of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

he sort of moved the idea of Ubuntu from simply an African philosophy based on African values of community and kinship to Christian values and identity with the Creator God it was a sort of a strategy in an attempt to recover from the pains and brokenness of apartheid you know anchoring Ubuntu into the Christian ideals of forgiveness and reconciliation as gifts from God for peaceful communal coexistence I'm hopefully not being too offensive when I say this to me that's a quintessential example of how Christian pacification hampers decolonization efforts because I've seen often that Christian notion of forgiveness and reconciliation turns the blame onto the victims for not forgiving and expects little to nothing from the offender except maybe an apology often not even a new restitution or reparations all the talk of Ubuntu theological Ubuntu and otherwise the situation in South Africa is still very much wack and I think that that idea that oh well this is in the past it's over get over it kind of thing is problematic and it's so then it needs to resolve the thing sort of decolonization is going to take place right so putting aside the theological applications someone problematic theological applications the Ubuntu worldview is echoed in some senses worldwide you know social ecology when we view your mutual aid all these concepts points to our interconnectedness as people and really point to the interconnectedness that we have as people that our systems are certainly not built to support we say that we see that in capitalism you know capitalism doesn't embrace the interconnectedness of what people it places us in opposition with another it atomizes us it individualizes us it alienates us from people from ourselves and from others so we must compete and stuff for the sake of survival

alienation of course in a capitalist context referring to our separation of our abilities from ourselves making us into mere tools for the use and benefit of our bosses I know the workplace is definitely not something that we have is that is based on mutual aid or Ubuntu you know rather than working together working harmoniously having access to means of production and sharing in an equally place in situation of feud of competition of struggling constantly being squeezed and run out for whatever all bosses can get from us when you said like earlier that one of the key tenants was like recognizing humanity and other people affirmed your own humanity and I might be paraphrasing that but like that's exactly what capitalism doesn't do it just sees people as a tool to create more capital or to create more income like it doesn't recognize humanity it sees you as a means not an end right exactly and I mean unlike in a communal system where you serviced others you know it's mutual it's reciprocal it's voluntary we find ourselves in a situation where we must give away our labor our time and really our whole lives just to survive but that giving is not done out to the goodness of our hearts or as part of a system of a sort of a network of support or safety net or anything it's just clawing towards survival you know disconnected from the well being of the cool yeah very much everything around us has been you know manufactured it's been transported has been assembled and sold by other people right people just like us workers just like us those people have lives just like ours they have all the same struggles that we do but instead of relating to these people instead of really sharing the fruits of our labor we're relating to the things that we have to buy or we don't see the working people behind them

yeah I think another aspect of it is that which I find physically strange about you know the junhuism or Ubuntuism that Sam Kang was trying to advocate said I don't believe that Ubuntu or mutual aid or any of the principles that Ubuntu exposes is something that the state is compatible with I don't think the state is compatible with the acknowledgement of one's responsibility to their fellow humans and the world around them you know the state has built an exclusion on domination and deprivation and the hierarchical division of the state generating the sort of inequality in decision making power and influence our own affairs it's about depriving certain people and elevating others whereas Ubuntu is supposed to be about the importance of the humanity of both the individual in the community and about how all people are connected in a way that is meant to support and add to and contribute and glean and service one another if that makes sense you know like the idea of this sort of community where everyone is giving and sharing and taking and everybody has something to contribute to this human whole I feel like there's something that's lost when that whole is disrupted by certain people being elevated to a status of having more power over others I mean part of that humanity has to entail freedom to self organize freedom to associate freedom to disassociate decision making power autonomy you know otherwise what kind of humanity is that really how can people access their full humanity in themselves if they're being deprived by others on how can those others were depriving certain people have access their full humanity when they're depriving others if you get what I'm saying yeah yeah I think that's perfectly right yeah and I mean pretty much the same thing with the system I mean like the capitalism with the state I mean with this heteropatriarchy which also elevates some people above others and denies those marginalized others full access to their humanity

all of us are restricted in some ways from understanding ourselves in ourselves and through others by the ideology and system of patriarchy and of course this goes out saying but what could be more incompatible with Ubuntu than colonialism you know doesn't simply deny the humanity of those that exploit but also strips the humanity the exploiters I mean as MS is there my reference earlier wrote in discourse on colonialism colonization works to de-civilize the colonizer to brutalize him in the sentence of the in the true sense of the word to degrade him and to awaken him to buried instincts to covetousness violence race hatred and moral relativism I do must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact each time a little girl is assaulted and in France they accept the fact each time a Madagascar is tortured and in France they accept the fact civilization acquires another deadweight a universal regression takes place a gangrene sets in a center of infection begins to spread and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated all these lies that have been propagated all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated all these patriots who have been tortured at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged all the boastfulness that has been displayed a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and slowly but surely the revolution proceeds towards savagery powerful words as usual from sincere that was great yeah that's very good yeah so I mean I think there's a lot of potential in the interpretation of a wound to right which is both a flaw and a strength and when I get into the criticism a bit more you'll see why but regardless of course there is value to be gleaned from a disunderstandings there's power in finding our roots to secure future and whether in a

partnership and affinity group and organization and a community or beyond this basic principle of recognizing the authentic individual human being as part of a larger and more significant relational communal societal environmental world is vital process of social revolution of confronting the powerful to protest and occupations and reclamation and expropriations and refusing to cooperate with the powers to be through strikes and boycotts and mutinies and other forms of interaction and then building new institutions like cooperatives and popular assemblies and libraries of things all of those things all those aspects of social revolution allow us to assert ourselves to recognize the mutual and material and connection of all people you know a person with a boon to is open and available to others as to filming to others and feel threatened that others are able and good and so by recognizing that with a boon to recognizing that you're part of a greater whole that whole is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished when others are tortured or oppressed and so someone with a boon to someone who recognizes the interconnectedness of all humanity is someone who has to be engaged in some form of social revolution who has to be engaged in trying to free people help people free themselves so that they can engage in their own humanity and so add to your own humanity in turn and when it comes to the commons common ownership you know the reversal of the enclosure movement socialization whatever you want to call it that is also something that ultimately is about the bonds between people about the distribution of the means of production and of the fruits of all of our labor so that all can enjoy so that all can have a vested interest in our collective prosperity.

When it comes to, you know, community work, you know, boon to is about this idea that we can work together, you know, incurring our food and distributing when we need this idea that being a mother or being a father being a parent, it's not just about being that to your own biological children but rather in recognizing that we are all connected in that way. It's, it's like a second understanding that there should not be this idea of orphans right this idea that we're all meant to look out for each other that no person is meant to be cut off from the sort of care that is necessary for Korean to fully realize person. I mean, even in the realm of education, you see potential applications of a boon to in recognizing that everyone has different skills and strengths that people are isolated and that through mutual support they can help each other to complete themselves. As Audrey Tang argues, I mean, I think they need to be an education that recognizes the importance of community society and environmental well being one that emphasizes the connection between all those things. The one that involves interaction, participation, recognition, respect and inclusion as coordinates of the learning process of students learning from facilitators and the facilitators learning from students of recognizing that we hold both positions and that those positions are held from the moment we're born to the moment we eventually pass on.

As rich as the potential of a boon to maybe I don't want to put it out as if it's some sort of like flawless and perfect philosophy. Right. It's not above critique it's not immune, as I mentioned before to hierarchical interpretations and applications. It's very much right for liberal sensibilities as we've seen departments of state, speaking of a boon to diplomacy and boon to foreign policy and that sort of thing. Some kind of his idea that, you know, part of a boon to is that the king always has status, including all the powers associated with it to do with other people under him. Of what exactly entails what it makes up what it doesn't. One scholar Nyasha and Booty has noted there's an interpretation, a certain interpretation of a boon to that sees Africans as you know naturally interdependent and harmony seeking that humanity is given to a person by and through the persons but there's a sort of a trap in that because humanity is also pretty messy the relationships between between people can also be very messy it's not all sunshine and rainbows, you know, a broken relationship is as authentically human as a harmonious relationship,

you know, a broken relationship can also be more ethical than a harmonious relationship. Booty points to, for example, the freedom that follows from a break from oppression that follows from a break from a relationship of domination to want a freedom. And of course, this idea that harmonious relationships incapable of being oppressive is false, you know, a harmonious relationship can be quite oppressive in the dynamics team people that are hidden under that veil of hunky dory, you know. So I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot to a boon to, there's a lot of good to be gleaned a lot of potential pitfalls to be avoided. So, you know, take what's of value, leave what's not engage critically, what's your plans and have a good night. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast which, by popular demand today, is about livestock as we will be going forward. It's me, it's Garrison, and we're talking about species of sheep.

Not really, we're not talking about a species of sheep much to my disappointment. Not yet, but that will be coming. We're going to be getting into clings, texels, mules, that kind of thing, big sheep stuff. But today we're actually joined by John, and John has been subjected to my weird introduction, but we're not talking about sheep today. We're talking about active transport infrastructure, and we're talking about how cities tend to build that in certain communities and not in others. So welcome to the show, John. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'll say that my partner would have been overjoyed if the podcast was actually about species of sheep. She's tired of hearing me talk about bikes, I'm sure. But here we are. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm John Stalen. I'm an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Great. So I think to start off with, if you could kind of outline what sort of, I guess, people might not be familiar at all with bike infrastructure. Certainly, if they live in some parts of the US or like more rural areas, sort of what it looks like and what cities have been doing in the last few years building bike infrastructure and then how that relates to the, I guess, the income disparities within cities. Yeah, I mean, that's a big question. It's something that I tackled in my book, which came out in 2019, but then I haven't kept up with it quite as much. I've been trying to start working on other projects, but you know, I keep tabs on things a little bit. I mean, basically, if we're talking about the standard rundown of infrastructure, the, I would say, the most common thing that people think about and probably the most common thing that's built in part because it's quite cheap, especially over the, say, the last 20 years is the bike lane. You know, a bike lane is usually about three to five feet wide and it's in to the far right of the roadway. If you're in the United States or, you know, if you're driving on the right tends to be where glass collects tends to be where car doors are. And so that nevertheless was, you know, very common in places that were building bicycle infrastructure. That's what was being built.

In, I would say the last 10 to 15 years, there's been a push to do more what people might call Dutch style protected bike lanes. They're protected by a buffer of kind of plastic posts that don't prevent an emergency vehicle from kind of getting where it needs to go, but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the bike lane really. So you'll see those and then, you know, parking protected bike lanes. So the protected bike lanes sort of became the big demand from bicycle infrastructure planning practitioners, especially in cities like Portland's, you know, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, New York City, et cetera, et cetera, something that was actually protected by a curb. Usually, really usually it's still like some kind of a plastic curb, right, or cars, right? And you're not seeing a lot of, you know, concrete or brick curb work like you'll see in the Netherlands or something like that. And then interestingly enough, another piece of infrastructure that there was a funny kind of mea culpa, or not mea culpa,

but a reevaluation of it was the Sherrow, which is just a sort of a Chevron symbol in the middle of a car lane, intended to remind drivers that cyclists are allowed to be there, but sort of put cyclists in the location where they would sort of garner the most hatred. And there was a recent editorial from Dave Snyder of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. It was a big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure. I interviewed him for my dissertation and he talked about how they don't work. That was a mistake. It was a mistake kind of splitting the difference. Making it seem like you didn't have to take any space away from cars in order to fit bikes into the roadway. So I don't know if that's kind of more than you wanted from that. No, no, that's great, because I think a lot of folks might not have seen all these different things. Certainly like if you're like me and you rode your bike every day, you notice each of these different things and some of them make you feel safer.

Some of them don't and some of them are just kind of tokenistic. I think a lot of this kind of gets to a bigger discussion, which is one maybe we can touch on, which is like who the city is for. When we're building cities in this country, certainly it seems like we built them around cars with a few exceptions like older cities and stuff. And increasingly, like if you ask for space and you are not a car, then to include people wanting to live on the streets, right? Cars have free places to go at night, but people don't. So like this reallocation of space I think gets to a bigger question, which is, yeah, maybe something you could speak to. Yeah, so I mean the question of, I think you can think of who both in terms of the mode of transport, right? It's very car dominant society, right?

And car driving is even on the rise in places like Copenhagen, right? There's kind of a lot of fretting among bicycle advocates in Copenhagen about the rise of car usage. So there's the sort of the mode of transport, but cars aren't people, as you sort of pointed out just then. And then so there's another layer to it that intersects with it, which is cities being increasingly sort of oriented towards attracting higher income residents, right? Kind of creating an attractive urban environment. There's a kind of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of high tech or creative or knowledge intensive types of jobs, right? Your software programmers, you know, I think it was Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I use this in lectures all the time. He said something like, you can't be for a high tech creative city economy and not be pro bike, right?

So there's this idea that, you know, may be a little bit spurious or it might be kind of loose causality, but there's this idea that the kinds of workers that you want in your city that are either going to take high paying jobs and increase the property tax base, or themselves create new startups, entrepreneurial energy, arts, culture, and things like that, right? That they're attracted by bicycle infrastructure or bicycling or bicycle culture in some respects. So there's that kind of the irony, of course, is that those workers, you know, guilty, I have a car, right? They typically bring cars with them, right? And so, yes, maybe they don't want to use them on a daily basis, like I don't use my car on a daily basis. I don't use my car to get to work, right?

But they, you know, are often kind of having it both ways, right? In a lot of ways in terms of, you know, buildings will be built with garages, right? That's only recently starting to be eroded, right, as just a, you know, a one to one parking ratio and a transit connected building. Yeah. And so when we're talking about it, the combination of these two things, right, like affluent areas or cities trying to attract affluent people and cities trying to build bike infrastructure. And something that I've observed where I live, which is San Diego, is that we've built a lot of bike lanes, but only connecting privileged communities to places where people do high income work. And it seems like increasingly like riding your bike safely is a privilege that's only afforded to a certain group of people. Is that something that's broader than just in my town?

I'd say so. I mean, I think you see this in, in where I did a lot of my research, the San Francisco Bay Area also did research in Philadelphia and Detroit and Austin as well. That's not in the book, but yeah, that's, it's common. And there's a few different, there's kind of a, there's a degree of cumulative causality, as we would say, in economic geography, right? You have, going back to say the 1990s, you had bicycle advocates, primarily recreational, primarily middle class, largely white recreational cyclists, or, and you start to see participants in bicycle advocacy organizations also being kind of bicycle commuters. The kinds of jobs that were growing in urban centers in the 1990s and 2000s, or, you know, the first decade of this millennium, right? Or the kinds of, you know, if not high tech, the sort of professional technical type of employment, right, growing in urban centers. And there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods that makes it feasible and desirable, actually, that you could, you could, you know, find a fairly affordable house and be able to bike to work, right, two to three miles, right, rather than the commute in from the suburbs, or the commute out from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs, right? So the, I think that you get a lot of the initial energy around the bicycle movement. If you look at critical mass, if you look at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition in its early days, again, these are the things I'm familiar with.

A lot of this sort of the political mobilization is around making those types of journeys easier, more doable, right? You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic, innermost streetcar suburbs developed around 100 years ago, fairly walkable themselves, they have a mix of commercial and residential, they aren't by and large industrial neighborhoods, right? The industrial neighborhoods where you still have a lot of truck traffic where industry begat more industry or deindustrialization really hollowed out the economic base, where you have, you know, large roadways, you have, you know, disinvestment and kind of a mix of small retail, et cetera, et cetera, lower income population. Those were not areas where they were attracting the kinds of people who would be listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure, right? There are still lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods in a place like East Oakland or North Philadelphia or something like that, right? Where there are a lot of people who ride bicycles, but they're not organized politically under the sort of the block of cyclists. And so there's this sort of paradox or in the way that I came around to this project was I was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia, and I was sort of one of those white hipsters on Fixies, right? At the same time, I spent a lot of my day speaking Spanish, talking with and helping people fix their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart, because it's what they could afford, even though they knew that they were crap, they just couldn't afford anything better, trying to get the most out of those bikes.

And so there's this funny dichotomy on the one hand, it's like you have the cool bike already creative scene that is sort of trying to be encouraged, maybe. And on the other hand, a lot of the people who are actually making do on bicycles are not sort of part of that vision, I guess, for the city, right? When I think about things in spatial terms as well, right, you imagine going back to the journeys to work from a sort of close in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot of turnover, a lot of middle class, you know, mostly white but not necessarily exclusively white in migrant, the types of journeys that a lot of, you know, I'll take Durham, for example, where I live now, which is not, there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, there's a little, there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, but there's some job growth in the downtown area, there's certainly a lot of job growth in the sort of the suburbs. But in terms of the kinds of jobs that, you know, working class jobs that are being created at Amazon fulfillment centers, those are at the urban periphery, right, they're not places that even in a kind of a gentrifying neighborhood, even if bicycle infrastructure were created, the sort of the directionality of the feasible commute kind of runs against, the feasible bicycle commute sort of runs against the very kind of spread out and scattered commutes in the sort of retail, wholesale, warehousing, manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera, the sectors that are experiencing job sprawl, rather than sort of a concentrated, concentrated job growth in the sort of the urban center, right, so that's another aspect to it as well.

Bike advocacy is very interesting to me, like I was a bike messenger, I was a bike racer, like these, I've made my living riding a bike, I've also just ridden my bike to get to work in. Bike advocacy really hasn't reflected a broad swath of cyclists for a very long time. Do you think that's why we don't see like better infrastructure in some of these like deindustrializing areas, for instance. And does that lead directly to it being more dangerous, like you would be the person to ask are there statistics to show that like it's more dangerous to ride your bike. So I'll say a couple of things. The directionality or the causality is a little bit complicated. I would say certainly there was some evidence that bicycle advocates weren't in the early days and there was a big sort of cultural shift in bicycle advocacy in the 1990s. Part of the 1990s, you have a lot of cyclists who are actually opposed to bicycle infrastructure. They are still a loud, boomerish voice in San Diego.

Yeah, exactly. The vehicular cyclists, right? Yeah. Can you explain that? Sure. So vehicular cyclists, it was a philosophy expounded by John Forrester. He wrote a book right here in the book effective cycling, where it was the idea was that cyclists should be riding like cars, right? Which means riding fast, center of the lane, behaving exactly like a car. And they were very opposed to any infrastructure that would sort of be created, especially for bicyclists, on the basis, which there was maybe some slight truth to this, that cyclists would be banned from roads that didn't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure.

Okay. A little bit of concern that was, I think I remember reading about a little bit of actual talk among legislators and planners that bicyclists would be kept off of main roads. And I think to their credit, they saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at that time as basically designed to get cyclists out of the way of motorists, right? And so it was mainly to advance the interests of motorists, right? But they were very hostile to, they're very hostile to a sort of a Dutch style model, which like, you know, these were guys who like to ride fast. And like, you don't, you can't ride fast in the Netherlands. Yeah. Not everyone's physically able, nor really wants to go 40 miles an hour on a road next to cars.

Exactly, right? So it was very much around a strong fit, confident cyclist who knew all the laws of the road, road really fast, was very assertive. It obviously lent itself towards a sort of a boomer type, right? Yeah. A sort of adventurous type. And it was very much that we, that bicycle advocates should advance the interests of cyclists, not try to grow the number of people cycling, right? And so the shift towards that, maybe the critical mass moment is not the only thing, but this is, that's sort of a good moment to kind of tag it to the 1992 first critical mass era. But you know, Earth Day, Vehicle for a Small Planet, all of this sort of growing interest in bicycling.

The shift towards more people should be doing this. Yeah. Can you explain critical mass to people who haven't like participated? Because I think it's quite a unique and interesting phenomenon. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So critical mass began in San Francisco in, I think the first critical mass was 1992. And it was, began sort of as like a group of people working, you know, broadly working office jobs who were sort of kind of culturally anarchistic or, you know, had these sort of anarchist or situation as kind of ideas.

And who were kind of organizing amongst themselves to ride home as a group, right? And they started getting this idea of sort of having these monthly ride together happenings, right? They didn't call them protests and they weren't organized rides. They were sort of rolling festivals was the idea. I think the first, the first name that they came up with, which mercifully didn't stick was like the commute clot, right? So it was also about kind of jamming up the, the regularity of the Friday evening commute. So it would be like the first Friday of every month commute time, right? Some of these I think still happen in Portland.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's critical mass still happens. There's a, you know, one of the chapters in my book, I sort of trace this arc of critical mass through to the more kind of bike party oriented. Exactly. The slow roll type of model, which I think is interesting because it's a little bit, it's consciously less confrontational. It's not held at a time that would clog up. Sure.

Clog up evening traffic. It's designed to attract kind of families. People aren't trying to have confrontations with drivers or police, right? One of the things that sort of really put, put bicycle infrastructure on the agenda in San Francisco was this mass arrest of critical mass in 1997. Supposedly because the mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown at the time got stuck in one in his limo and was like furious and so asked the police to crack down next time. It was a huge, it was it backfired massively politically, but it also created this opening for the, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which actually was an organization. Critical mass was not an organization, right? It gave them this opportunity to say, well, what cyclists want is, you know, to actually build out the bike plan that supposedly exists, but nobody's been doing anything about, right? So, I mean, that's probably maybe more than you wanted to know, but the sort of that arc of critical mass as this sort of counter cultural moment that created this opening for a more formal bicycle planning and advocacy organization or a set of organizations to emerge, right?

And maybe it's unfair. I think I'd probably do it in the book. It's a little bit unfair, probably to call it a kind of depoliticization, but there was certainly a degree of kind of like explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city more broadly from a kind of left perspective that does disappear somewhat in the sort of the rhetoric of the bike movement. Yeah, it's definitely lost some of that like radical edge where these types of, you know, when like 100 or 200 people on bikes take over streets in Portland every once in a while, it is way more in the form of like a big party. It's like, it's like a roving block party. It does not have that same level of like, yeah, almost like situationist creating a happening or creating a situation that affects the regular politics and affects the regular way that the city functions. Yeah. I mean, that being said, the sort of the successors like bike party in San Jose was a huge one and this that bike party model kind of spread throughout California were often much bigger than critical mass, right? Sure, sure. A lot of times more diverse as well, right? So there's, there's a really interesting kind of politics around is the, is the politics in the sort of explicit slogans or is the politics in sort of like showing people that there is a kind of collectivity that they might be part of simply by virtue of like moving through urban space in a different way. And for a lot of people, it was their first time riding a bike in the city, because they were so afraid of cars otherwise, right? You have the safety and numbers. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I know for a lot of people that was the case, like I've done some critical masses in the UK, we had reclaimed the streets as well, like a similar vibe.

I remember in the early, I guess, the first decade of this century, like, there will be critical mass rights before anti G8 protests, like I remember in Okta Rada in Scotland and things, or not in Okta Rada before that and like, before other G8 protests have been mass rights and it's a very different scene to like bike advocacy now, right? Yeah. And you saw this a little bit with like the Occupy movement, the, at least my experience of the sort of early wave of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 with the killing of Trayvon Martin. There were a lot that the bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest mode for many people and that's probably sort of some of the cultural political tools of critical mass that sort of surface here and there. But I think for the 20th anniversary, Chris Carlson, who was one of the early organizers called it, talked about critical mass all over the world and that San Francisco felt kind of like the hole in the middle of the donut, right? Like it sort of created this reverberation, but then it actually withered to a degree in the center and often the narrative is, well, you're getting, like you're winning, right? So critical mass is no longer necessary because you're getting bike lanes, you're getting, you know, you're getting investment, you're getting attention from planners, et cetera, et cetera, right? Obviously, the gains, whatever they are, are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed. And that kind of relates back to how we kind of started by talking about how, you know, some cities are putting more development into bike infrastructure, but how it's being developed is not actually serving people who like,

like have to use a bike to commute because they don't own a car and they can't afford a car. Like it's getting used to people who actually already have a lot of resources. And like an interesting case in point in this is the Belt Line in Atlanta, which like started off as an idea in 1999 with wanting to create like a giant loop using like public transit, having rail going around the city, having bike paths going all around the city, being able to like connect the city with these, with these like spaces for like green space and affordable housing. And instead, the project kind of manifested as this, like, like is this project that was had up by real estate companies to replace a whole bunch of low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of like expensive restaurants and luxury condos and, you know, putting the Belt Line as a path to create these like expensive, like gentrifying areas around the city. And it's how like these ideas can start off so good and that when they get like, you know, actually done, it's manifested in a way that is actually like not helpful to people who need this type of thing at all. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the Belt Line, I don't know enough about it. I've read, I've read a little bit of the academic literature and I've been there. And it is really kind of interesting how it is this, it is this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure, right, to sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it, right,

sort of old rail, old industrial infrastructure. And that's something that I don't think that you can, you're ever, you know, people, there are studies here and there that try to demonstrate the kind of the economic value of bicycle infrastructure, the contribution to tax, tax receipts, etc, etc. But it gets pretty hard to parse the causality, especially when you're, you know, especially when compared to something that is really sort of overhauling the space, right? I don't, you know, the Belt Line is, it's, I think probably its success from a sort of financial perspective has to do with it being a multi-use path, right, rather than it being bicycle infrastructure and sort of being, being framed as this much broader type of thing, right, rather than a bike lane on a street, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not great to ride down at least on the weekend because you'll just be slowly. No, it's full of people, it's full of, like, when I was visiting last year during the start of summer, I went with a friend to the area by Ponce City Market, which is kind of a great example of the gentrifying force of the Belt Line, but also like, yeah, there's people who are trying to ride bikes around, but there's like kids on roller skates everywhere, there's, it's pretty packed, it's getting pretty warm.

But there's other parts that are like, you know, that are, that are more isolated where it is much more of like a, of like a commute path. Right. But it's interesting, it just like, it like weaves in and out of these like retail and luxury apartment, you know, pop-ups. Restrooms all along it. Exactly, and all that stuff is, is, is, is like relatively new for all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding, surrounding like the construction of the Belt Line. Yeah. And I mean, the, I think that you maybe see this just a little bit with like, you know, the direction that I've taken this, the thinking about it is more the sort of the types of urban strategies that have begun to incorporate bicycle infrastructure, right? Yeah.

And I think transportation more generally as the kind of big driving forces rather than like, is this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's usually, it's often the other way around, right, bicycle infrastructure sort of emerges as a result of gentrification, right? So there, as a result of the in-migration of people who are going to be listened to, right, because of their status, because of their income, because they have kind of existing capacities in, in organizing for these types of things, right? It's, I think what's interesting is one of the, one of the positions I've sort of come around to, right, is thinking more about not like, should we do bicycle infrastructure because it might kind of create the perception of gentrification, or cause gentrification or something like that, and instead like, you know, what, one of the things that gentrification results from when you're thinking about amenities that sort of lead to the revalorization of urban space is that they are in some way special, right? And so if the question is this specialness of this particular place, you know, Garrison, as you said, what makes a, you know, the kinds of places where you can safely ride a bike are fairly unique, right? They're not well distributed, right? And so from my perspective, it's sort of the more routine they become as an, as, as, you know, including them into urban space, the less special the places where they are built become, right?

And it's, and so routine that it wouldn't be worth mentioning, right? It's like mentioning that there is a sewer line, right? Like, it's like mentioning that it has connection to city water, which, okay, yeah. And, you know, at the, at the urban edge where I live, I don't live at the urban edge, but at the urban edge in the southeast, you know, there isn't always connection to city water. Yeah, like trying to get it normalized to the point where it's like obvious that it's something that is like a part of the city. It's like, yeah, like, of course, it's, it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or a road or like a power line. Which to be fair, I don't have any sidewalks on my street. And most of the streets around me have a sidewalk on one side only. Portland, Portland also has very, has very few sidewalks. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I lived in Belgium for a while when I was racing at like, I lived in a town that was very much just like in lots of Belgium, a shitty gray coal mining towns. I love Belgium, but this is a thing. And like, yeah, they would never have beat, you know, the bike infrastructure was unremarkable.

It was just a thing that everyone used to go to the shops or go to school. It wasn't, you know, less like selling point for a brunch restaurant. Yeah. And I think it's this kind of thing where it's bigger than just the infrastructure, right? A lot of the places where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right? Are these sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the densest areas, right? Where everything is in walking distance, but the area is kind of just beyond there, right? Where, you know, shops, places of employment, services, et cetera, et cetera. All sort of within reasonable biking distance or maybe long walking distance, right? But too short to really merit a trip on a bus or a train, right? And, you know, short enough that maybe some of us would feel a little bit silly getting in the car to go do it, right? So that kind of zone is also not terribly common in the United States, right? A lot of those places got destroyed to build highways, right? Or got destroyed to build kind of suburban style shopping malls.

And so that's part of their, part of their specialness. But going back to the idea of, you know, people in the places where people were really relying on bicycles, right? That there isn't necessarily infrastructure. It's partially a data issue going back to your data question, right? The way that we collect data on bicycling is people bicycling to work, right? If people aren't in the workforce or they happen to not have a job, that is not counted in the census, right? Even if you bicycle to the train like I do, like if I get to fill out the census, I'm going to fill out train, right? Because that's the bulk of my journey when I commute. And so it skews your perception of where infrastructure might be needed if you're using data toward places that where people are commuting by bicycle, right? Rather than, you know, commuting is only a quarter to a third of all trips, right? Rather than all the other trips that we don't know about, right? And sometimes we measure them with passive measurement, like pressure sensors in the street, sometimes active measurement, like people doing bicycle counts on particular days, right? There's a whole history of that. Now we're using Strava, but then we're getting a small, like we're getting a very rich data set about a small subset of cyclists.

And hoping that that extends to most, if not all, cyclists. And then to your question, sorry, then I'll pause, right? To your question about the data question, right? How deadly or how dangerous are various streets that don't have bike lanes? There is a big problem of the missing denominator, right? We don't know how many people cycle. So we don't know the rates of injury on these particular roadways in the same way that we do know car volumes and can have a better sense of the rates of injury based on collisions, right? But you do see clusters of collisions in places where there are large roads meeting, where basically very few, if any, traffic engineers would sign off on taking away some of that car capacity to create more safety for cyclists. And of course, those kind of compound, those factors kind of compound, right? You maybe have an industrial area, it's a big interface with a large urban arterial or an off-ramp to a highway, right? These kind of all go together with potentially sort of lower income area or sort of a lower, less pressure to improve that area. Yeah. So I'm thinking, when I think about how the bike movement missed an opportunity to be better, I always think about this moment in 2020 when this man called Dijon Kizzi was killed by police in LA.

And the incident which led to the cops shooting him began because the cops tried to pull him over for running a stop sign on a bike, right? Which is a thing that tens of thousands of white dudes in Spandex do every single day in this country. And not a word was spoken by the bike movement, at least that I saw by bike folks in sort of solidarity or opposition to what had happened, right? It was just another thing that was mourned by thousands of people and ignored by others. So maybe think about how we build, maybe it's wrong to think about how we build a better bike movement and maybe it's better to think about how we make it unremarkable that you bike, right? We make it like not an identity thing, but how do we make cities where people are safe riding bikes, I guess, regardless of whether they were in Spandex or they're just trying to get to the shops? Yeah. I mean, that's a really kind of an important question. And in my research, a lot of people were grappling with that. There was an incident that mercifully didn't result in someone being killed or seriously injured. But, you know, a guy was pulled off of his bike by a police beating up in San Francisco. And there was a big march afterwards. And some of the, some bicycle advocates did show up, but it was not framed as this is something that, you know, is affecting us as cyclists, right? This is, or that affecting some of us as cyclists, right? And an injury to one is an injury to all, right? That's not, that's not, was not the kind of the frame that people were using from what I could tell, right?

And you had bicycle, you know, black bicycle advocates in East Oakland who didn't really frame themselves as bicycle advocates necessarily in the traditional or the mold that is sort of determined by the sort of the hegemonically kind of white middle class advocacy organizations, right? And there were very much bicycle advocates who, you know, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of what they did was sort of like teaching people to ride correctly so that they would have fewer interactions with police, right? Or kind of managing interactions with, with police and, you know, hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists that they weren't kind of subject to the kinds of interactions that, you know, where police end up killing somebody, right? Now that I live in a place where very few people bicycle to work or for much of anything, right? I'm thinking a bit more holistically about, you know, it's now kind of a buzzword but, you know, kind of a more car optional city, right? Where you don't need to have a car to do various things. You know, I'm, I'm involved with bicycle advocates here, but like when I, when I look around, I see like a bus stop that is a stick in a median, right? There's no bench. There's no sidewalks to get to it. There's no crosswalks or anything like that. And I mean, I think that one of the bigger, one of the bigger questions is to make a place that's safe for cyclists, safe for people walking, safe for people walking their bikes or safe for people walking to transit, right? Is reducing the kind of the space and the way that space and speed go together, right, that are devoted to cars? Well, and a lot of that is like reducing the distances that people need to travel, right, for various things, right? This gets into the sort of the 15 minute city stuff, which is that it's been really wild to see it being turned into this like QAnon type, you know,

Agenda 21 UN Black Helicopters type of conspiracy theory, right? Because I think of it as a very kind of milk toast type of policy framework that's honored in the breach, right? Sort of like complete streets. There's a carve out for, unless a traffic engineer says it's not really feasible, and then we won't really question that judgment, we just won't do it, right? So, I mean, I do think it's bigger than, modes of transport are really bigger than people's individual decisions, or even like what the sort of once you are in your mode of transport, what the sort of behavioral matrix is, right? It's sort of like, what is your life consist of, right? What do you do to like preserve your dignity with your coworkers, right? All of these kinds of things that feed people towards driving, except in, you know, very specific places that, you know, have become special in the United States. I mean, there's a lot to say, right? It is really, it's much bigger than bicycling. It's sort of the built environment. And I think one of the things that what I land on in the book, maybe belatedly, right? Because these things take years, is this the way that bicycling is still kind of this interstitial solution, right? It's sort of like, kind of picking up scraps here and there in the built environment, right? It's like picking up some of the loose ends, right, in how cities are organized that makes them frustrating, difficult to navigate, right? And, you know, I think a lot of the energy, not exclusively, certainly, and bicycle advocacy has become much more diverse in part through like listening to a lot of the voices of advocates of color and women advocates and, you know, kind of thinking beyond that sort of stereotypical, you know, not just the middle-aged man in Lycra, but like the sort of middle-aged guy on a surly, right?

You know, that maybe successor to the middle-aged man in Lycra, right? I'm certainly calling myself out. But the, it's still very kind of an interstitial thing, right? It's, and the thing about the urban transportation systems in the United States is that they leave a lot of interstices, right? There's a lot of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars. And honestly, poorly served by cars. You know, in Oakland, you had people, a lot of the sort of the, maybe not anger, but certainly annoyance at bicycle advocacy and bicycle infrastructure would be, and I think you see this in Portland, too, where it's like, well, we've been asking for sidewalks. We've been asking the city to like fill these potholes. And instead, there's these bike lanes that people who just got here are asking for, right? And so maybe that's a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know, people moving to a neighborhood. They're like, why is it so torturous to get somewhere by bike rather than kind of maybe stopping and saying, all right, what have people been demanding here before I got here, right? And how can I sort of contribute to that as well and sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially. But it is this sort of, it's an interstitial solution, right? And so for me, you know, the bigger questions are sort of what role will bicycles play when we start to really take seriously the kind of broader urban structure. We don't have these sort of islands of bike ability inside a sea of automobility, right? Do you have a situation where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take transit than it is to bike, right?

I would call that a win, right? And I think, you know, there's a degree to which we can get fixated on the particular mode of transport. I think because we all kind of like fell in love with bicycles and that was the sort of the gateway drug into thinking about like transport and cities and how people move around and the sort of the history of urban planning, right? So, I mean, these are all, I don't know if I really kind of offered anything that sort of puts it all together nicely, right? But the idea that it really does need to become normalized and if it actually sort of disappears in the process of being normalized and it stops being a signifier of environmental rectitude or something like that. And, you know, if I could walk to a grocery store instead of having to bike to a grocery store, I would prefer that, honestly, where I am right now, right? Even though I love cycling, right? And it's something that I'll never stop doing, right? So I think kind of thinking more holistically about what kinds of cities we need to have to move beyond, move beyond automobility, both from a climate perspective and a social justice perspective and just almost like a thermodynamic perspective. So, I mean, maybe that's moving up to the level of physics is where one kind of place to end.

Yeah, no, I think that's very good. Yeah, is there anything you'd like to plug? Maybe people can find your book where people can follow you online and I think like that, any sort of projects you're interested in? Sure, yeah. So you can find me on Twitter. I'm at J-O-S-T-E-H-L-I-N. My book is now it's a few years old. It's 2019 with the University of Minnesota Press. It's called Cyclescapes of the Unequal City. And my latest work, I'm actually looking at the politics of highway removal. So maybe scaling up in terms of infrastructure, thinking about sort of bigger kind of the great clanking gears of urbanism rather than, you know, this little tiny stretch of pavement on the side that's full of glass and car doors and stuff like that. But of course, they all kind of fit together. How does the fabric of the built environment have to change in order to grapple with climate change, inequality, and sort of making us sort of a more human type of city? Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much for giving us some of your afternoon, John.

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time and it was a really fun conversation. Hi, podcast fans. It's me, it's John. And it's just a tiny little pickup that I wanted to add to the end of this episode because I neglected to mention that Ciclista Zien did call out the police killing of Dijon Kizzy very explicitly and had an excellent piece on it as they do on lots of other things. They are incredibly wonderful and you can find them at Ciclista Zien, C-Y-C-L-I-S-T-A-Z-I-N-E.com. They are not representative of the rest of the bike media, so well worth looking at if you like bikes and not the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay, thanks. Bye. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting things back together. And today we're doing an episode that's kind of more on the intellectual and emotional end of a very specific set of things falling apart. And rather than clumsily try to introduce it myself, I'm going to bring on the person who I think some of the thoughts that have kind of been going through my head. I know they've been going through the heads of a lot of the folks that we have here at CoolZone for quite some time now.

Thought Slime, you are a YouTuber and a good YouTuber who does a number of videos. Some of your recent ones are thoughts on AI art, a timeline of Elon's Twitter mistakes. You did a really fun video on the QAnon Queen of Canada, who is a pretty problematic character. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Do you want to just kind of start by reading us that thread you posted? Because you posted this on Twitter the other day and I started chatting with it and then we moved over to DMs and decided we should kind of do a little more formal thing. Yeah, so basically I said that I'm constantly considering making a why I left the left video about how my views have not changed one iota, but I've become completely disillusioned about my role in communicating them.

Part of the reason I shifted my focus to trying to be just entertaining is because deep down I don't really see a lot of value in getting people on my side anymore. I don't think it does anything or means anything, but the best I can do is give you information and hopefully a laugh. I used to feel like I was participating in something bigger than I think a lot than I think I really am that I was helping in some small in some small way towards a sort of shift towards a more revolutionary mass consciousness. I think that was a bit of a childish fantasy in retrospect. Sometimes people will say you made me an anarchist and like buddy, I don't even think it matters that I myself am an anarchist. And I regret that that sort of we're fighting the good fight mentality has allowed some of the worst grifters on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's passions for their own weird petty reasons. I think what I do has a lot of value, but I'm just saying that I think I perceive that value to be is a lot different than what I thought it was a few years ago is basically what I had to say. Yeah, that I think does such a good job of nailing the problem that I've been kind of dealing with emotionally as well, which is it's not it'd be easy to sum it up as like, I no longer believe in, you know, trying to transmit, you know, leftist ideas or

political analysis or that I, I don't believe in the value of like trying to inform people about the world because that's not how I feel. But there is there has been this shift and I think probably the high point for the version of me that was optimistic about the ability to use mass media to build power and the ability to take effective action on the left. I think that kind of crescendoed. I'm going to say June of 2020. And it had a pretty sharp drop after that point and I, I, I both think it's, it's valuable to still acknowledge kind of how remarkable what happened in 2020 was for all of its flaws and all of the really messy fallout from it. We saw an unprecedented an uprising of unprecedented scale. And part of why the crackdown and response has been so gnarly is that it scared the hell out of a lot of really unpleasant unpleasant people. The media had a significant role to play in that both in the fact that there were a lot of people who were who were kind of already organizing and radicalized when the shit started to hit the fan and that as things happened, you know, the the what was happening in the streets, what the police were doing, the different kind of marches and different campaigns that were being started got spread to people. And I do think that, you know, folks, you know, like you and me were a part of that, although it never is far from my the most influential piece of media that was that was recorded and disseminated during 2020 was the video of George Floyd being murdered, which was filmed by, you know, someone who just happened to be nearby and had the courage to film it. Not a professional journalist, not a, not an influencer, not a, not somebody who was a professional political thinker and everything else combined didn't have the influence of that video.

Yeah, I think that that kind of gets to the heart of it right is that like we we express support for ideas and thus people tend to treat us as though we are the progenitors of those ideas or the the guardians of those ideas or the leaders of a kind of decentralized proxy party of some kind. Yeah, it's it's it's both because I think, thankfully, there's that. I mean, there's there's always going to be every everyone who makes popular media gets forms a little cult and so there's always going to be a number of people who, you know, take any given in the media more seriously than they deserve and that that includes the both of us and that's that's not attempting to be that's not attempting to be like humble or anything that is simply a fact of how mass media works. I do think we've seen, I think there's been a mix of a healthy pushback against looking at people who are doing creating popular media as more than what they are and more than what that media is capable of being I think there has been a pushback against that in the last couple of years that's been unhealthy. And I think there's been a pushback that's been unhealthy. I think people have forgotten some of the lessons of like what I think a good example would be, there was a very justified backlash against. And when I say streamers here I'm referring to people who are actually in the street streaming during riots and protests and whatnot right and that and the justified part of that backlash was due to the fact that, past a certain point, particularly those video those were primarily being used by law enforcement, both to get charges on people and to just to know where folks were as an intelligence gathering method. And I think that the backlash which was understandable and there was a lot of ugly behavior

including people who kind of got in after the early portions of that in order to make shitloads of money by, you know, streaming people getting the shit beat out of them by the cops and that was, I think, very justified a pretty aggressive social response to that. But I think it's also caused a lot of people to forget that a huge part of why things kicked off in 2020 and why so many people got involved was Nico from Unicorn Riot on the ground every night in Minneapolis, doing one of the most impressive pieces of citizen journalism that I think we've seen in this country. And so I do think that some of what's frustrating here is that it's difficult for people it's difficult for us as a community to take some of the proper lessons from these these things that are happening from the push and pull of the conflict that we all find ourselves in, in part because the nature of the way people express their understanding of these lessons via social media is very geared towards flattening them and making it a very simple matter of this is bad or this is good and not good for people in this period of time this worked and then it didn't, you know, there's there's no real sense of proportionality in these discussions. It isn't just a matter of like, hey, you fucked up you should probably take this down or this could be dangerous if you leave this up or if you continue to do this. It's more so like, what are you a cop? What are you some kind of cop doing this? Yeah, you know, let's let's spread that rumor around. Yeah, we the cop jacketing thing is kind of one part of the problem but I want to focus a little bit on what you were talking about in terms of, what do you think, as you're kind of looking at, you know, and we're all kind of staring 2024 as it approaches, what do you think is useful from media that attempts to analyze and share perspectives that are that are left wing that are anarchist inclined. What do you think is actually the value that that can be added to attempts to achieve greater justice in our society.

Well, I think the answer is two fold. I think firstly, anything that drives people to like real life organizing and taking action outside of online spaces is obviously useful. Beyond that, though, like I think there is some value to just exposing people to ideas that they might not have found otherwise. But I think that that a lot of that has been accomplished. Now, I feel like a lot of people are more familiar with with kind of the leftist, the leftist ideology, one on one type of content that people might expect in that way. So, yeah, I would say those are the two value propositions. I wonder if you think a lot about because one thing that concerns me, obviously, any community develops a language that is to some extent its own. And that's that's a that's part of politics, you know, political analysis if you're looking at things with a Marxist analysis or if you're analyzing things, you know, based on your understanding of generations of anarchist political philosophy, there's terms that you're going to use that that other thinkers have created that are the terms that people use to discuss those ideas. But it is sometimes kind of a thin line between that and the thing that cults do where they come up with a bunch of specific terms that no one else uses in order to separate a community from the rest from everyone else. And obviously, I don't think there's any intentionality there. I don't think people who are talking about, you know, the dialectic or whatever are attempting to separate their listeners from the mass of humanity. But I do think that happens sometimes. And I when I listen sometimes to conversations on the left about justice in particular about social justice, I wonder like, Well, how is somebody who isn't like reading all this shit going to

separate this is it just going to like sound like nonsense to them. And I think maybe like part of the, the purpose, the positive purpose of mass media that looks at things from the left is trying to communicate with folks who are not going to sit down or at least who have sat down and done a whole bunch of reading on the history and the politics but whose hearts are in the right place and who I would like to be able to engage in conversations with folks who maybe kind of get their heads a little bit too full of specific terminology sometimes. I think it's a specific balancing act. Because on the other hand, like you also have to give your audience a little credit that that they're absolutely absolutely. But I think that like, you have to be able to meet people where they're at but at the same time like if someone has expressed this idea in a way that's already sufficient like it's why do the work of like trying to re explain it you know, but that being said I think there is a tendency to just assume people already are on our side or understand ideas to the level of complexity that we might like, and that people are on board with like what even something as simple as what capitalism means, you know, all the time you see people online who will say that like a musician will post their bandcamp page and people will be like, oh I thought you were anti capitalist. You know, yeah, it's like, you know, but like you also can't get caught up in the the kind of weaponized ignorance that, you know, like you can't make someone understand something if they have a particular reason not to want to. So I absolutely agree that like there is the danger of that that group in speak. But it's it's a it's a difficult problem to solve I think the kind of approach I take to it.

Most of the time is that I tend to write my scripts as though as though I am just the like like a child like I tried to write as though I'm speaking to a five year old, you know, yeah, I mean and I think I also I think a lot about and this is something you know here at cool zone I brought we brought on a couple of years ago, people who, you know, are now making podcasts for the team who, when we brought them on had a lot less experience writing scripts and making media for mass consumption. And one of the things that I found it was kind of like my job to do repeatedly was to point out like, Okay, stop, go actually go back to that term, because you just, you know, said a term that I think means a specific or you just referenced a thing from history that I think that people are interested in and should know about but you do have to like go in and explain it and walk people through it. And that's kind of part of that's really one of the challenges I find particularly with with behind the bastards right where we're talking sometimes about these complicated social movements and moments in history. And it's this kind of tug of war between you want to respect the intelligence of the audience and you want to give them enough detail that they have context and that they can maybe understand multiple sides of it. You can't get bogged down in every detail otherwise you're never going to finish the damn thing and we can't all be Dan Carlin making 10 hour long podcasts. Unfortunately, I do like I there's a degree to which I'm quite jealous of his work, his the way he set up his workload but I would just never be able to think of that many boxing analogies.

Yeah, I don't I don't know very much about boxing. I would probably just like throw in a whole lot of balls Mahoney analogies. I have a lot of for me would be a lot of super punch out references. Hell yes. Stan Lee would always say to comic book writers that every comic is somebody's first comic. And so you kind of have to consider that like every piece of messaging you do might this might be like the first time someone is stepping out of a completely different ideological bubble than you might expect and so you know it kind of has the messaging kind of has to stand on its own. But I think that's also like a unique problem to mass media because it also means that in a sense it's much harder to like build on previous work. It's harder to like go from your 101 content and then get to the more advanced subjects because someone could just start at the more advanced part and get lost.

I think that's a really apt way of describing what I also find as one of the central problems because a ton of the episodes of bastards especially the stuff when we focus on fascists builds on itself, right? Yes. Your understanding of fascism in Romania will be influenced and is to some degree you don't really you can't understand fascism in Romania without understanding fascism in Weimar fascism in Italy fascism in the United States during the same period and vice versa. And so my hope is that the people who catch all of the episodes are building a really complex and durable understanding of the problem through it. But it's also the struggle of like, well, but a lot of people are just going to be like, oh shit, I know Hitler, but maybe I'm not interested in hearing about Romania, you know, and I'm not going to click on those episodes. And there's nothing against people like when I listen to podcasts, I find myself doing the same thing where it's like, there's a million episodes of this show. I'm not going to listen. I don't have the time to listen to all of them. Sure. Yeah. And that touches on another problem, which is that, you know, the subjects that people like us tend to cover are biased towards what we think people will find interesting. Yeah. You know, and beyond that, like what we ourselves find interesting to research.

Yeah. And what in what you can and this is a thing that I try to point out on on my subreddit sometimes when people are like, I can't believe you haven't done this guy or that guy. And it's like, well, that doing the that research is going to fuck me up. And like, so I'm not going to do it yet. I'm going to do this thing that's funny. I'm going to read about the liver king this week. I need I need a break. So the liver king is who we're talking about. Yeah. Everybody needs a liver king in their life at some point. Yeah, it's like I read the Turner Diaries for one video. Yeah. And I've been constant people have been constantly like, oh, you should read Camp of the Saints, you should read Siege. And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to. First of all, I don't even know if I want those things on my hard drive. Yeah. Yeah. Camp of the Saints is a little easier. But yeah, maybe maybe one of those a year and no more. That's like the most I would recommend from like a mental health standpoint. It's also like, you don't need to read the full text of all of those. I mean, that's part of the thing is that like, you can get a lot by checking in some excerpts and reading scholarly papers, analyzing this stuff. And there there always will be that. And I think to to a significant standpoint, like it's more important to understand, you know, and this isn't true for everybody because there's some people who, you know, are scholars of this stuff and you do need to do the deep reading.

But if you want to understand the degree to which Siege and the Turner Diaries Diaries influence the mass shootings that we see in the United States today that are carried out by the far right. You don't need to read those books to do that, right? There's plenty of really good scholarly analysis. And that's part of what you and I try to do for people. And what what other, you know, folks who are creating this kind of media other journalists do for folks. Yeah, I will. I would say that I strongly balk at the. I don't consider myself a journalist. Yeah, I mean, and I don't consider that's something people talk about as well on the subreddit. I get a lot of like comments on people appreciating the journalism in the series and we do. In some of our shows, like, you know, we did we went to the border Myanmar last year Garrison just got back from Cops City, but like bastards isn't journalism, you know, sometimes it's like celebrating journalism but it's it's it's entertainment that I hope has like an educational quality to it. Yeah, I don't I don't say this to belittle myself. I just don't see that as as the function of my job.

I think like like I have I have in the in the course of my work occasionally done journalism by accident. I did a long interview where I had like about the chas and kind of the misconceptions that people had and I had some, you know, talks with people within and like that is technically on its face a piece of journalism. For sure, you know, absolutely. It's not what I consider my strength or role to be. Well, honestly, this goes back to what we were talking about with the young woman who filmed the video of George Floyd. Journalism is a profession, but it's also just like a set of tools. And, you know, sometimes you will use those tools in order to do other things, you know, that that's that's certainly true. And I'm curious, you and I, you and I both kind of like make our work work differently. Mine's ad supported, obviously, so my conversation with fans, you know, outside of like when I'm doing a live show is primarily through we have a subreddit and we have Twitter. And that's, you know, there's some difficulty there for one thing, like every single guest we have, there are people who will be like, this is the best guest you've ever had and this person is the worst guest you've ever had.

And there's absolutely no way to make decisions based on that, right? It's just a bunch of straight. You've got a different relationship or at least a different method of, I think, communicating. I imagine it's different because because you're your Patreon supported. I'm interested in how have if at all, have you seen kind of the conversations about what people want from you and, you know, the way in which you've been talking with your fans? How have you seen that change since 2020? Well, I think one of the major ways is since I've kind of taken a step back from this explicitly political content, it's a lot of people have kind of encouraged me to go more in that direction. And I have seen like a big drop in my support as a result. I think that it's a tricky balance to strike again. Many of these things are like such a balancing act because I always am careful to remind people that like, hey, you can support me on Patreon if you like what I'm doing and want there to be more of it. But please don't operate under the assumption that doing so is activism or contributes to activism because it is not.

You are not like making the revolution more than exactly, you know, you are getting a little drawing that I'm going to put at the end of my video like that's that's the value proposition here. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's, it's of, I don't, the reason I don't accept ad, ad reads on Thoughtslime. I do on scaredy cats is because I don't want the perception that my views are going to be limited or held back by, you know, the desire to seek out advertisers, which whether or not I would have the the integrity to withstand like it, it would create the illusion. But that creates the problem of, well, now I kind of have to do what I think that my audience will want. And that's its own kettle of fish, like am I, am I pushing people to donate more than than they might be comfortable with. And so that's, you know, I don't I don't really know like the the ethics of it to be perfectly frank. There have been times when people have made big donations and I've had to message them and say like, hey, I think you should, you should probably take this money back.

You probably weren't thinking straight when you sent me this money. I think you should probably have it back. Yeah, that's such an interesting thing for me because it also, you know, I've thought about that myself quite a lot. You know, I had a decision to make when we first started doing these shows about how it was going to be done. I took the ad supported corporate route and I've been very happy with that so far. There's a lot of things it's let us do. There's certainly downsides to it, you know, including occasionally advertising for the Washington State Highway Patrol. But, you know, it's one of those things I made a comment.

And this is part one of the one of the frustrating things about making media for a large audience is there's always going to be people who will like read into what you've said something you never meant. I made a comment once about like, you know, because we get people asking, well, why don't you do a Patreon or whatever? Why do you do it this way? And I just made a comment like expressing what you had just expressed. Like, well, you know, I feel weird sometimes asking for money and if I can just like get money from a big company and, you know, hire my friends and do my work. I feel okay doing that. It's how most of my career has worked. So that's what I'm most comfortable doing.

And yes, there were people who took from that, like, well, Robert doesn't think it's ethical to have a Patreon. It's like half of my friends make their living son Patreon. I do not have an ethical problem with supporting yourself that way. I will say that when I heard you mention that in an episode and it did send a chill down my spine briefly. No, I mean, I think like Cody, Cody Johnston, who I've worked with for about 15 years now has a massive Patreon. Tom and David lived with some of my best friends, you know? Yeah, I think it's perfectly, it's certainly no less ethical and you can make a case people do that it's more ethical than being ad supported. It's just like, I mean, some of it just comes down to like what kind of stuff are you making and what kind of like person are you and what's going to work best with you as like a creative method in a way of interacting with fans.

And they have downsides and they have positives, you know? It's also like a matter of what you're able to do to a certain extent because like, I don't know how to get advertisers. Sure. Any advertisers that I've ever gotten on my horror channel have just reached out to me and like, I don't know if I'm getting as much money out of them as they should be. I have no idea. I just kind of wing it, you know? Like if you have that background in radio or broadcasting or what have you, like it can, you know, it's a much more viable option for some people than it is for others. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of why it works for me the way that it does is because I've had a 15 year career in not in broadcast, but you know, in comedy writing and whatnot. And so I mean, that's how I got the, I got my podcast hosted on I Heart in the first place. And that's like a thing. And this is actually one of the things that concerns me most about the shit that's happening with AI right now because, you know, there's this, the folks that kind of I came into making media for all of us started as fairly a political comedy. I mean, that's Cody Johnson, right? Some more news.

Cody was making videos about like chat roulette and penises when we, when we all started working together. Very funny videos, but like we were making silly things. And everyone has kind of moved into making like, you know, pretty, pretty serious fact based media. You know, Cody does a very popular, very political kind of current event show. And we were able to get good at making the kind of media that we made and build the connections that we built and build the audiences that we built because we had years of time where you could make a decent living writing stuff for the internet. And I see the kind of shit that I'm afraid AI is going to do to these jobs where people would get their start. Get their start as writers and whatnot. Maybe it wasn't the best, you know, it's not, you're not doing the best writing you're ever going to do the jobs that get replaced by AI, but it's a foot in the door.

And I keep, I feel like I keep seeing the room for people to put their foot in the door, get smaller and smaller every year. And that's, that worries me a lot. I definitely know what you mean. I also feel that, like, there's a fear among some people that, like, you get crowded out of these spaces, the more people there are doing this sort of thing. And I kind of feel like that's not the case. The AI stuff, I definitely share your concerns, but the institutional barriers and people's way, like, I think that, like, to be frank, like, I started doing this on a, shitty $200 computer and a completely legal video editing software. I love legal video editing software.

I found it in a dumpster and I used that. So, you know, and then, like, through that, I was able to, like, be able to afford a fancy camera and some lights and, you know, but, like, I didn't know what I was fucking doing. Like, it was all self-taught, and I think there has to be that kind of DIY attitude for people. And it is something I try to encourage in people, is that, like, just do it. Like, I did it. You can do it. Yeah. You know?

I think that's a great point, because I am coming at this from the old man-doomerous perspective of somebody who, like, the world has changed from the way it was when I was young and people don't get their careers started that way anymore. And your point is very valid, that while changes in the industry have closed specific doors, they've also created some. And I think probably in the long run, it is better for people to get their foot in the door doing what you did than rewriting a bunch of press releases about tech gadgets for a shady website that takes advantage of the Google algorithm, which is how I started my career. I think that's actually a really valid point. Yeah, I don't think that's, it depends on your end goal, too, right? But I think, like, the thing that becomes incumbent on people like me is to, like, help people, you know? Yeah. Like, I've experienced a certain amount of success.

And so, and I attribute that largely to the fact that, like, when I was just starting out, like, I had no idea how to make people see my shit. Like, I did not know what I was doing. Yeah. And a bigger creator just reached out and was like, hey, can I share your video? It's really good. And it kind of snowballed from there. So my philosophy has always been, like, you take these, you know, you make space to lift people up with you. And in doing so, it's not an entirely selfless gesture either, because in doing so, if there's an extremely talented person who succeeds partially because you help them, now you have a connection to an extremely talented person, you know?

Yeah. That's a sense of, for lack of a better term, mutual aid in a very loose sense, I suppose. That reminds me of something a good friend of mine, a colleague at Cracked, who now helps run the Small Beans podcast network, said to me years and years ago, when he was directing a video, which is, I want to spend the rest of my career getting hired and fired by my friends. Which is, I think, a nice way of looking at it, and there's a degree to which it's a very old Hollywood way of looking at it, but it also works very well in this, it can work very well in this new kind of ecosystem that is still being put together. And I do think that it's, because I see a lot, and I don't, I'm not someone who does a lot of time, like I like to watch, I like to watch the stuff that you put together, the stuff H Bomber Guy puts together where it's actual like videos on topics and I'm learning something, the stuff that Dan Olsen puts together, you know? Yeah. I'm not so much into, and this is not, I'm not attacking anybody, I'm not like trying to shit on the field, but personally I don't watch like the just kind of like stream stuff a lot. And it does seem like there's a lot of conflicts between people in that.

And I'm wondering, you know, my hope is that there's more people building connections to create resiliency between the people who are trying to make good shit, and trying to make stuff that people enjoy and that has an impact on people and that even changes people in positive ways. It sounds like from what you're talking about, you know, honestly, from what I experienced too, I do think that's more the case than like the drama that goes viral on Twitter from time to time. Yeah, I think, you know, I would hope. I hope so too. I think that it's very easy to piss people off. And it's much harder to get people's attention by being kind. But, you know, I look, you know, how many nice comments do I get in a day can't count, but like the one shitty comment will always stick out. It's the same way.

Like if if I have a thousand pleasant interactions with someone else, nobody notices. But if I, you know, get into if I pick a fight with somebody, you know, it's people are going to remember forever. I think that's the thing that unsettles me most and this isn't actually even just like this isn't about streaming media or left wing media or whatever. This is a problem of social media that you're right. It's the it's the fights that always get most of the attention as opposed to the. I mean, not not entirely because some of like the big moments particularly in recent left wing media things like, you know, people doing these giant streams that raise huge amounts of money for a cause. So that that certainly is a thing that happens and does get a lot of attention when it does happen. But you are fighting against and I think we have to be consciously fighting against the system that does want to engender conflict.

Yes, it's also kind of difficult. And, you know, keep in mind, this is this is perhaps coming from a biased perspective when there are individuals and I'm not going to name names who. Do you see that as an easy source of generating attention? It's very easy to the same way that like if I'm going to make a video on a subject, I will frame it as like I'm disagreeing with Ben Shapiro or I'm disagreeing with Jordan Peterson. It's very easy to go look at thoughts like there's a big piece of shit because he thought this one when actually this is the truth. There's more attention grabbing than just, you know, a kind of neutrally positioned argument. Yeah, so it's a it's a it's a tricky problem. Yeah, yeah, I think one of the ones that that I think on quite a lot.

Well, I think that's most of what I wanted to talk about today. Did you want to like throw in anything else? Or if not, we can go to plugs. Yeah, I mean, I'm good. That's pretty much it. I will say that one of the things that tends to bother me the most is people will occasionally say to me that they'll they'll send a message saying you seem like a really good person. And I will say thank you, but please don't feel that way about content creators because why would I make a work that portrayed myself as a bad person. I in my mind think I am a good person. I think it sets the dangerous precedent that you could allow yourself to be emotionally manipulated by someone else who might not be.

Well, the name of the game when you are creating media, particularly when you're creating media that's meant to make people feel things. Part of that is manipulation, right? Yes, manipulate is not an inherently negative term. You know, Stanley Kubrick is trying to manipulate you when he makes a movie. I'm trying to persuade you. Yeah, you do. It does. It is incumbent upon the audience for their own protection to keep that in mind.

And it's incumbent upon ethical people who make stuff to not create cults, at least not create too many cults. Yeah, as much as you can afford it for sure. Yeah. All right. You want to plug your plugables? Sure. You can find my work at youtube.com slash thoughtslime or thoughtslime.com. You can also find my horror content at youtube.com slash Scaredy Cats TV.

Scaredy Cats was taken. That's me. That's what I do. I make videos about farts and or butts. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That is going to be it for us today. We will be back probably tomorrow. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

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