It Could Happen Here - Roundtable About the End of the World (As We Know It)

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

In this episode, we introduce you to our team (Robert Evans, Sophie Lichterman, Mia Wong, & Garrison Davis) and discuss the future.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, it's happening here. Shit.

We didn't want it to. We were like, ah, it shouldn't happen here. That would be bad. But now it is. And I'm Robert Evans. This is the podcast about how things are kind of falling apart. And maybe it would be good but now it is and i'm robert evans this is the podcast about how

things are kind of falling apart and maybe it would be good if they didn't fall apart or at least if while they were falling apart we did something that was better than the thing that fell apart anyway hi everybody this is a podcast i'm robert evans as you can note from this horrible introduction which was was incompetently done uh half-assedly done, subsequent weeks of the show are going to be very different from the first week. We started off with five very scripted episodes. My vision kind of at the start of this was that first week of this, the first five episodes would be evergreen. So that when we have new people over the coming months and years, we can say, hey, if you want to know what we're about, listen to episodes one through five.

It lays out our philosophy, what this show is, kind of gives you the background. We think you need to understand where we are in the world right now. But of course, this is a daily show. I'm not going to be writing a 10,000-word script every single day because that would literally be writing a novel-length work every week, and that would very quickly drive me to drink. And also, I don't think would be as interesting as trying to be nimble. So this week, we're going to try to give you kind of an idea

of what most of the weeks of the show will be like. It's going to be a mix of kind of breaking news, coverage of some ongoing stories, speculation, interviews. So with, I don't know, probably a little bit of further ado, I would like to introduce, I would like to start this, this episode, this show, this beautiful thing or terrible thing, whatever it winds up being, either beautiful or terrible, by introducing my team, the people who actually do the most of the work on this while I extract their surplus value and turn it into fancy liquors. First off is Sophie Lichterman.

Sophie, you exist. Hi. Apparently. Hey. What's up? You're my executive producer. It's your job to make sure that I do things like turn on my computer and that we have guests. Next up is Garrison Davis.

Garrison, what are you? That's a good question. I read books and articles and occasionally go to places to learn about different resistance movements, I guess. Yeah, we actually sent you out to an Earth First gathering a couple of weeks ago and we're going to have some episodes about your experiences there in the very near future, and I'm excited for that. We also sent you to a Waffle House where you saw a guy get stabbed, so really, it's been quite a week of journalism for you.

Yep, and there will also be some content around that trip in the near future as well. I got to talk to some other researchers about climate change and how that affects extremism. And look forward to Garrison's three-parter, Fear and Loathing in the Waffle House in South Carolina in the very near future. I'm excited for that quite a bit myself. And then last but certainly not least, we have Christopher Ann. Christopher, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. Well, okay okay i say i'm doing pretty good i've i've just you know i'm i am also a researcher and being a researcher means i've just come off of about six hours of reading about japanese war crimes so yeah that's what i do kind of by definition no one on this team is ever doing

all that well uh which is which is the job. Christopher, you are probably most prominently to people who use Twitter, the Ice Must Be Destroyed guy on Twitter. And I became aware of you because of your incredibly well-researched threads, particularly focusing on the history of revolutionary movements, anarchist movements, and include mainly like Southeast and mainland Asia, which is not a history, political or cultural that I knew much about. And so we brought you on to behind the bastards to fill out for the fact that I am not capable of, for example, doing a Mousy Dung episode with any sort of competence. And you've done a lot of great stuff there. And you will be you are a history of particularly

like left-wing political movements, nowhere in a way that I can never be. And I have a great deal of admiration for your ability to do that research. So you will be helpful when I say, wouldn't it be neat if someone had done this and you say, actually they did and here's how many people died.

And I say, oh damn. Okay, well, that's good chris what are you reading about this week yeah this this week yeah this is this is the this is the the japanese war crimes deep dive this is yeah it's mostly been forced labor i made an executive decision that i was not going to start reading about uh comfort women and that particular kind of Japanese war crimes. One hour before this podcast started, but. Oh yeah. Yeah.

So, oh man, that's the good, that's the good war crimes right there. I, I don't know. I I've spent like when it comes to military history, I definitely spent less time in the Pacific Theater than I have in the Western Theater.

But my God, like some of the Unit 731 shit is just among the darkest stories in history. But that's not what this podcast is about. So, guys, I brought everyone here today because, number one, I wanted to introduce the audience to the team. the audience to the team. And number two, I kind of wanted to ask a big question, which is, you know, we had our first week where I sort of laid out the scope of the problems confronting everybody, climate change, the rising authoritarian movements around the globe, the danger of weaponized unreality and kind of the fundamentally separate reality tunnels that people are getting increasingly trapped in that make peaceful coexistence almost impossible. And we attempted in that first week of shows to provide people with some reasons for hope, with some paths forward. I am, despite it all, not blackpilled. And our goal is to avoid being a-pilled podcast. Garrison, you want to explain to the nice people what black-pilled means?

All right. So I think followers of you and us as a whole are probably familiar with pill culture. Coming from the Matrix, the term red pill got used a lot by the far right, especially during Gamergate, to be like introducing a new idea to someone is pilling someone if you're and if you're getting someone to become like a conservative or far or like an alt-right person you're red pilling them um

so that that was what got popular and then that became like a much more viral meme and pill was just got to be used on various various other ideologies and even just like things so if i'm drinking coffee i'm taking my coffee pill etc bad jokes by people who don't have much better things to do um but black pill is like uh is like a doomer pill or like a nihilism pill it's like not being able to see hope for the future everything is like just like a void you don't be able to see you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. So that's kind of what Black Pill means when it's used online.

Generally, it's people who are making propaganda or making content or just people on forums, chat rooms and stuff, who are trying to get other people to become this kind of dysfunctional nihilist and not be able to

really see any any future um and the you know there's a lot of issues with this but particularly it comes from kind of a very like privileged place in in a lot of ways because the people who are you know seeped in this are not going to be the ones facing the worst consequences of climate change or you know localized collapses localized collapses. So that's kind of the problem with this whole black pilling thing. And it's becoming increasingly popular online. Yeah. And I've seen a lot of this. So obviously, I spend some time on the collapse subreddit, because it's a good information aggregator. And I have some fans there. So they've been commenting on the first week of shows. And one person was like, I think that he always understates how serious climate change is going to be.

And sort of made the point that basically we're all going to die. And that's not going to happen. That's not the situation, number one. Have you all heard of the Toba catastrophe? No. It's an interesting thing. I just got informed about this and have been doing a little bit of reading. It was a super volcanic eruption that occurred about 75,000 years ago.

Um, in like what is present day Sumatra, Indonesia. It's one of the largest explosive eruptions in world history. Um, and there's a theory and this is, so this is, you know, obviously too far too long ago for us to have hard evidence, but there's a theory that this caused a global like volcanic winter that lasted as long as a decade and may have caused a thousand year long cooling episode. And this is, y'all may have heard that there are a number of scientists who think that about 70,000 years ago, there was a massive population bottleneck where the global

human population was reduced to an incredibly tiny number, which is why like everyone can kind of trace their lineage back to one of a very small number of people. And kind of the theory is that the Toba explosion caused that bottleneck. It was just so devastating to life on earth that like it caused or to specifically to human life that it it it reduced the global human population down to a very tiny number um but also if that's true we we did make it it was 75 000 years ago like we're doing all right which is not to say like when i say we're doing all right i mean the human species exists in sufficient number to maintain biodiversity, right? Yeah. I think people underestimate how many people are alive right now. Yeah, and how adaptable our species is. And that doesn't mean the problem is not nightmarishly severe, because...

It is. The question is, number one, how miserable is life going to be? How many... We could still... Human beings could exist in completely sufficient numbers for the maintenance of the population and billions of people could still die as a result of climate change and that's a problem like that's a that's a real issue but it is also not um it's not a guarantee that that many people will die that we will let it get that bad it is at this point a guarantee essentially based on all

the best data we have that we're going to hit one and a half degrees um oh absolutely yeah and almost certainly two degrees just kind of based on where things are politically now three degrees four degrees is not a guarantee and can be stopped um it is an uphill battle uh and and but also because we are talking about not just billions of human lives, but hundreds, if not thousands, of species around the planet, depend on us curbing emissions and us reversing, to the extent that that's possible, as much of the damage as we can. And I think it is kind of the height of selfishness to just look at the scale of the problem and go well we're doomed so don't try to do anything welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonorum.

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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So like ever since that climate report came out, there's been two narratives online that I've seen quite a bit, which is does individual impact matter? And what will the quality of life be? These are both impossible questions to answer. I mean, the first one's a little bit easier because generally, will individual consumer choices matter? Probably not very much. No, of course not. We can look at the history of how that's been pushed by certain companies.

I think lots of people are already familiar with that. Which doesn't mean there's no – and I do want to be clear here. When we say your individual decisions as a consumer are not going to fix the problem in any meaningful degree, are not going to fix the problem in any meaningful degree. Learning how to be comfortable and happy with less, learning how to personally emit less, those are all still useful adaptations because part of the solution is how do we fix this? Part of the solution is how do we as individuals

and communities adapt to this? And we are going to have to adapt to less. That is going to be a necessity. You can just look at how in a lot of places, weed crops are 50% lower than the harvest was last year, 90% in some regions like Nineveh in Iraq and northeastern Syria, like calamitous underproduction as a result of how bad this summer is. That's going to continue to happen. We are going to have to deal with less, not just because we'll have less available, but because if we're trying to take care of our community, that might mean even if we can afford to consume at the level we were, we need to personally do

more, get by with less so that we can give more to other people in our community who can't afford anything. There's a, and that's, again, not going to taking care of the people in your neighborhood, you know, setting up a four block radius where you make sure there's, you know, free fridges and soup kitchens or whatever isn't going to fix climate change. But community resiliency is an important part of building the kind of dual power that I think is going to be necessary to fight climate change. It's also just a necessary survival adaptation. And the fact that there are things to do, the fact that there's so much to do, both to solve the problem on a big scale and to take care of the people around us, that all of us have a responsibility to do because we as people are responsible for each other, I think means it's immoral to lose hope.

Yeah. This is also precisely the wrong moment to do it because and this is one of you know one of the reasons i'm excited to be doing this is that i don't think generally the broad public has a particularly good understanding of what's been happening the last three years which is that well and you know you can go back a decade right you know so i i like started doing activism stuff around 2013 with the with the sort of second wave of revolutions from the Arab Spring. And so over the course of that decade, you have an increasing series of revolutions, and they kind of peter out, and they kind of start to lose around 2014, 2015. But then in 2018, they start again. But then in 2018, they start again.

And, you know, I'm going to read a partial, like, enormous emphasis on partial list of places that had either full-scale revolutions or hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the street. So, okay, starting from 2018, you have Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Honduras, Chile, Iraq, Hong Kong, Iran's on their, like, third version of this. Lebanon's had about three. Colombia's had three. France had the general strikes. There was also the Yelvest. There was a 600,000 person general strike in Peru. There was the, I mean, there's been a bunch of stuff in India with the farmers' protests. There's been stuff in Ecuador and Papua, Catalonia briefly.

And, you know, there were a bunch of road blockades last year in Canada. Like Canada, when it went into revolt over a bunch of pipeline stuff. And then there was last summer. And last summer was sort of in the U.S. And that was sort of this capstone of, like, the second wave of revolutions in a decade. And, you know, the thing – like, this wave – again, that's a very partial lesson. That sort of wave of upheaval, right? It's a sign of both the fact that, you you know everyone realizes that the world is just crumbling

right and also that you know people people have sort of started to figure out that like you know the the the sort of ordinary political processes don't work and that if you get enough people together you can like the ordinary political processes cease to function and you know i mean i people there's been a huge effort to get everyone to forget this last summer but you know people were fighting the secret service at the gates of the white house it's sure like the president like donald trump was in a bunker his bunker yeah yeah like you know like the like you know the and you know, for about a week there, the cops completely lost control of most major cities. Like, you know, I'm in Chicago.

And in Chicago. God, the street drinking in Portland was beautiful. Just teenagers smoking cigarettes, walking down right in front of the police station. Yeah, it's. Sorry. No, I mean yeah it's sorry no i mean it's incredible and people like people people like just took control of them like the miracle mile it was you know and you you saw for a very brief moment just like what what a world without the police for example would look like right and

you know it was a lot of parties there's a lot of celebration there's a lot of people sort of there's a lot of art everywhere right and and lot of celebration. There was a lot of people. There's a lot of art everywhere. And I think what we've seen over the last three years, what we've seen really over the last decade is that cycles of revolutions like this, you used to get them once every three decades, maybe two. We got two in a decade. And all the things that caused that, all the old things in 2008 financial clubs everything that was bad that caused everyone to go into the streets is still happening and they're still

getting worse and so this is this is going to keep happening this sort of unrest is going to keep happening and and our job and our responsibility is to make sure that you know the product if this is actually a better world because you know there's there's basically you know if this is this is the thing you learn to study history there's always almost always bad things happening there's almost always resistance to it and that resistance can win and i think that's you know like that that that's the important part of this yeah yeah and it's it's this um one of the things that you're getting at there is one of the things that I think most toxically the left, particularly in the West, has lost in recent times, which used to be a huge aspect of not just the anarchist left, although it was massive among anarchists, but about the organized left in general in the West was internationalism. It was this idea that like the struggles in Spain, the struggles of workers in Germany and England and in China,

in Poland and Indonesia, we are all connected. And like you would have the magazines that were like, you know, part of these different workers organizations would have stories and experiences from protests and strikes and uprisings all around the world. And there was this, this strong sense of international solidarity. And that has collapsed. And the collapse of it is a long story. I think we should probably do a special on it at some point aspects of it started in World War One, when there was this big understanding among socialists in World War One that like, well, if push comes to shove, and there's a big European war, the workers won't

fight, right? We won't we won't massacre each other, and then they're dead. Because, you know, nationalism is a hell of a drug. There's a lot of, again, we're not doing the topic justice, but a big part of why it's so thoroughly dead right now is this multinational series of kind of propaganda campaigns orchestrated by a number of different governments, including our own, in order to, you know, in the case of like Russian disinformation propaganda, make all these different left wing, or all these different kind of populist uprisings and populist movements that are anti Russian political interests, call them color revolutions. And you see, you know, the same thing is done by the Chinese government and our government does the same thing. Like it's not a,

it's not a case of like, well, we're better or they're better. It's a case of like, well, all of these governments have a vested interest in people not seeing their interests as in common and their struggle as the same. But people are still struggling. And one of the missing ingredients in the last couple of years of increasing, as Christopher did a great job of laying out, of increasingly massive sustained revolts against state power and against the global system that is grinding us all under its boot heel, is that we did not have as much of an international kind of solidarity as we should have. And I think that's going to be necessary if we're going to do, you know, we talk about this in the first week of episodes, and you were just talking about a

version of this, Chris. I think the only thing that's really, the only thing likely to get us out of this without, you know, bloodletting on a scale that nobody really wants to think about is the equivalent of a heart attack at the centers of capital which can only happen when enough people are like well i'm just not going to keep doing shit like i'm not going to keep i'm not going to keep doing the shit that like keeps this system moving forward um because at the end of the day you can like send cops out to beat people but you can't make me work. And that could do something. People who are telling you it can't happen or it can't work or it can't be done are full of shit. And one of the things I want to cover that we will at some point is how the movement in Hong Kong came to a broad consensus about their list of demands.

And obviously that is in the process of being crushed, you know, in the long run there's, and there's, there's certainly criticisms to make, but also they were up against a kind of insurmountable challenge really without any kind of aid from overseas. You know, it was, it was, it was, it was a noble doomed fight, but there's a lot of lessons, including how this very decentralized movement came to an accordance about a list of demands that then that process um because uh i think hoping to kind of

overnight get everyone on board with we have to overthrow the government and establish socialism i just don't see that happening um i i we can't get americans on board with whether or not masks stop a pandemic um but could you get amer, could you get a wide variety of working class people from around the world on board with, you know, a more focused list of things that like they see as like, well, this, this, you know, you can get a lot of people who, if you have them talking about the politicians they support

or like how they identify politically, we'll get into screaming arguments. But if you talk about like, boy, it sure seems like we're all getting fucked over by this pretty same small group of rich people. They'll all be like, yeah, I mean, I more or less agree with that. If you say like, hey, it seems like the government's corrupt and shitty and incompetent and never takes care of any of us.

They all agree with that. And you can get them, you can, if you focus on, hey, here's what we all need to advocate for together because it will make all of our lives better. I think you'll have an easier time with that than trying to convince somebody who's been educated for 50 years to think socialism is the devil, to identify personally as a socialist. And maybe that's a little less important than getting that person to agree that we need to seize the wealth of the billionaire class and reinvest it in a world that is sustainable and survivable for all of us. I don't know. That seems like a better shot to me.

I'm not an expert, though. So I guess a question to ask is, what gives each of you hope right now? There's a couple things. I think back to the moment when I was reporting from the steps of the federal courthouse in Portland two or three nights into things getting really fucking crazy. And I was standing next to this middle-aged mom with a respirator who had gotten tear gassed horribly the night before and came back out. And we were all yelling at the, or they were all yelling at the federal agents inside.

And she said, I don't see why we have to wait out here. Let's kick down the damn door. And then she tried to do it. And that, you know, there were some real moments. I think about the line, the phalanx of chuds with weapons breaking and running last year when enough of the city came out to push them back.

I think about the fact that an unprecedented mutual aid effort was organized by huge numbers of regular people around India to try to fill in the cracks and the craps from their government's complete failure to handle the pandemic earlier this year. I think about what activists have been doing in Puerto Rico for years as the U.S. government has consistently failed to deliver any sort of meaningful disaster relief. I think about the fact that while we are all, every single person listening to this ruled by venal cowards who think of nothing but their own short-term interests and will kill the world to

maintain those interests. The vast majority of us would give the shirts off of our back to a neighbor in immediate traumatic need because that's just what people generally do yeah garrison mutual the the heightened popularity mutual aid is something that's talked about a lot in terms of what is giving people more hope i guess the other thing is like being able to see but like both see and experience a lot of like quote unquote like mini anarchies like popping up in different places and getting to like see the world through a different through like through like a different lens for even for however briefly you know that's part of you know what happened staying at like the stop line three camp part of what happened at like the Earth First camp, is you get to very briefly look at the world without the same systems of hierarchy that we live in every day,

and it's almost intoxicating. Once you can experience that, you're like, why can't it always be like this? And getting more people to experience that mini-anarchy will, I think, help people be more able to, like, yeah, I'll go across the country to help you know do something for this pipeline to help protect the specific forest and then even like like even like locally whenever there's like a you know whether it be like a forest fire in your area a hurricane be like yeah i'm gonna go help with the with the relief efforts because one

you're making people's lives better and two it actually does feel good like it actually like it being able to being able to work as a person with other people outside the regular systems of hierarchy is super interesting when we're stuck in such like a repetitive cycle of you know of our jobs and of our bills and of all this kind of stuff being able to go outside of that for however brief is is is a new thing that can get you to really change your outlook on certain things we saw this a bit you know with the temporary autonomous zones popping up um we saw this a bit with like the red house in portland um and like these these things are by no means without flaw like there's a lot of like the same systems of oppression like misogyny um is still like in these spaces a lot um you know there's there's still a lot of you know like men who get guns who want

to be like the security which can replicate a lot of police like yeah we're gonna have to do an episode on protest security yes absolutely too and why those two children got fucking murdered yeah it's like these mini anarchies are not like that he doesn't make all these things go away um and it actually it's a really good example of these even when you get a get rid of certain hierarchies some are still seeped into a lot of people's brains like misogyny is one of them and having having power over other specific people um so those are all things to address but being like you know at the Line 3 camp, that that was like run by indigenous and two spirit women. And that was like a very different environment than all of then like Red House and the AZs.

Red House was an eviction defense in Portland that was extremely successful in its goal, which was to stop the eviction, but also had some problematic elements. People declaring themselves security and threatening teenagers with paintball guns over graffiti, like some dumb shit, which doesn't take away from the effective and very powerful aspects of it. But we should be able to analyze accurately the failures and the successes of things

that are kind of within our wheelhouse of shit we broadly agree with. Otherwise, we're just cheerleading without analysis. Chris? Yeah, I think there's a few things. So there's a line from an Uruguayan journalist whose name I'm about to butcher. It's Raul Zabechi, I think. about to butcher uh it's raul raul zibichi i think um and he he talks about how struggle is like it's like a it's like a bolt of lightning that sort of illuminates a night sky and what

what what that what that illumination what that bolt of lightning shows you is you know it's it's the previously obscure relation to domination and power and you know it it shows you all of the things that were sort of hidden before and i think this is what happened a lot over the summer right i mean you know one of the things i always think about was that so if you had told like in even you know even in the beginning of 2021 if you had told me that like even 10 of americans would have supported burning down a police station no it's impossible right and then you know after it happens the like you know that like burning down the police station had a higher approval rating than both presidential candidates either presidents yeah yeah right and and you know and this is something

and you know in in in that moment right like you know the sort of normal public opinion everything shifted dramatically just instantly in in a matter of a week everyone went the sort of normal public opinion, everything shifted dramatically, just instantly, in a matter of a week. Everyone went from sort of, and I say everyone here, obviously there's always been people struggling against the police, but it went from, you know, no one in the US could ever publicly say

that they wanted a police station to get burned down without like Fox News personally sticking a mob on them, to more than half the country thinks this is good and and that that kind of transformation the way that it is actually possible for things to change extremely quickly and it's possible things to get better extremely quickly and it's possible possible people's for people to get to get used to and sort of and uh you know it's worth noting that a huge part of why a plurality of americans supported burning the third precinct was because a a single citizen with a camera had the courage to film something that was wrong. And that, that instantly changed a lot of people's

minds. People who would not have supported that and if it had just been sort of like, if that had not been a part of the equation. But because the inhumanity of state violence was rendered so stark before them, there was for most decent people nothing to do but say well yeah what else were they gonna do you know um and as often as not like more than i think works of political theory or tracks or newsletters or grand speeches it is moments like that that galvanize people into changing things is just seeing something that's like, all right, well, fuck it.

We got to like, we got to fuck some shit up. Um, yeah, that's less eloquent than the quote you read, but yeah, what Chris said was, was way more eloquent,

but yeah, prettier. Yeah. I stole this. I stole this from people who are better at it than I am, but yeah, that's all. That's what everybody does. Yeah. Yeah. And I also, stole this of people who are better at it than i am but yeah that's all part of the process yeah

yeah and i also i also would say whatever thing you know is it like they're like the the the control of the state the controls or the capitalism the control of uh you know these sort of systems of oppression it's not total and it never it never has been and it probably can't be there's there's always places where the state for one reason or another is either forced to withdraw or has or you know decides it doesn't want to be anymore and you know you know there's there's a good example of this in well you know partially you can you can look at what's happening north in syria which you know is is its own sort of episode in its own right but i mean one of the sort of yeah we did a whole show on that yeah yeah like you know but i think like the state withdraws and

then you know there's there's sort of organizations there that can actually like take power in a way that's not quite that's not taking power and then you know subsequently i think i think maybe more importantly is just the the the reality of the feminist movement in you know so so the pkk is the the the kurdish yeah is yeah workers party and in started up in the mountains for turkey yeah yeah yeah and the maoist is now you know apolist i guess you'd say yeah yeah and you know like they they like that that movement was an incredibly hierarchical movement and in a lot of ways it was a very patriarchal movement because you know it's a it's a classical marxist leninist movement right they have they have a great leader everyone follows the great leader everything sort of passes down and it was mixed in with these kind of very traditional Kurdish militant – because Kurds have a long tradition of like kind of militant warrior culture.

So yeah, incredibly patriarchal in a number of ways. Yeah, and then – but then inside of that, like a feminist movement emerges. And in a lot of ways, they win. This is how you get from this sort of incredibly hierarchical institution to one that's significantly more democratic, that's more egalitarian on gender lines. That's how you get all of that is there's an internal feminist movement inside the PKK, and it wins. And part of that also has to do with Oppo, who's the leader of the PKK, sort of having a sort of ideological come around. pkk sort of having a sort of ideological come around but you know the the fact that it is possible to you know when when you have a radical movement that is doing a lot of good things in some ways in some ways is also incredibly flawed it's possible for it to make it better and it's

also and it's possible for for you know it's possible to mount a consistent fight for patriarchy in in these spaces and win i think is you know maybe not win, but at least very dramatically change the balance of power. You have this movement, the PKK, that has done some really messed up stuff and has some very problematic aspects in its history, but is also effective at doing a number of things, including armed resistance. And you have internally this movement democratized in a lot of ways. You have it shed a lot of its patriarchal structure while still maintaining its capacity for resistance. And it never stops. There's always been and still are things that the PKK does that I'm not going to support or defend because there's some, although a lot less of them now. And if you're going to kind of compare them to the people they're fighting, I think they're committing less war crimes than the Turkish government at the moment. But it's, it's hopeful, because part of what is necessary is, and part one of the things I think that people, particularly on the online left get wrong is this kind of throw

the baby out with the bathwater sort of thing. You get this a lot in the in the, in the the dialogue around US veterans, where there's a chunk of the left, it's like, well, they're all war criminals, and fuck everyone who chooses to do that. And it's like, okay, well, you're going to ignore number one, like people who are 18 years old and depending on where they grew up. A simple fact about human beings is that if everyone around you, when you're a child tells you this is a good thing to do and a moral thing to do, you will probably grow up believing that as a good and a moral thing to do. And some of those people grow up to realize like, oh, you know what?

It was actually pretty fucked up. And this is bad. And I want to agitate and organize against this thing without wanting to condemn and say like, also all of my friends are murderers. Because you know what? They're not. Not in the sense that like every single person there

is knowingly massacring civilians is everybody enabling uh structures that kill civilians yes and so are you and so am i and so is everybody listening to this if you pay your taxes if you um if you exist in this society you are enabling like you every time you fill up your fucking gas tank, you're a part of it. We're all a part of it. And so I think this, I think this, the kind of condemnation culture is less effective than this understanding that like, if we accept that things are fucked up and we agitate to make them less fucked up, you can sometimes accomplish remarkable things within very flawed structures and systems. And I think that's better than, I don't know, trying to just score points over how much you know about how bad things suck.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, I guess in conclusion, I think society could be improved somewhat. I think the things that are currently killing people could kill less people. And I think everybody has some responsibility to try and force changes that make the world less violent and horrible. And if you think the world could be less violent and horrible, then I think we're more or less on the same side. Unless you think it could be less horrible by murdering all of the Democrats because they're harvesting the adrenochrome of babies, in which case we're not really on the same side to kind of go full circle to the first thing we talked about with like doom stuff

i think it's important to also remember like we're we're not even we're barely even deciding how we're gonna live going forward right now we're at like at the pivotal point where we're deciding what the earth is gonna be like in 300 years like we are and and i i would like this podcast to also not be anthropocentric i wanted to also focus on like we're just part of this planet and there's other species and other things that all that are all self-reliant on each other to continue going um and we're not just deciding how long someone like you know me is going to live or people you know younger than me it's deciding like we're like we're at the end of the human climate we are now entering a new age and we're

deciding what that's gonna be and it can be really really bad or it can be only a little bit bad and we can and we can adapt to that little little bit of badness but if it gets really really bad that's gonna be very difficult and that's why, we can't not do anything right now because we're deciding so many important things for centuries and even, like, millennia to come. And that's, like, the other thing to help us not get stuck in the black pill. Yeah, that's an incredibly important point because it is, like, you – we're, we're all, we're not just deciding like how livable is this? How pleasant is the climate going to be for us? How livable is it going to be for,

it's like, we're deciding, are there going to be iguanas in the future? Are there going to be tree sloths? Are there going to be redwoods and salmon? You know, are we going to have clouds in 100? Will we have clouds in a century?

I hope yes to all of and like yeah that is why it is this um the the the folks who have spent billions of dollars kind of fighting against any effective uh action against climate change and kind of muddying the issue until it was too late to to stop what's going to be inevitably going to be a very dark scenario already. Those people are now pushing the idea that like, well, there's nothing that can be done, or there's nothing that like, we can't, none of the actions we take would be worth taking and like, whatever, or like, there's, there's a variety of different kind of tax they've taken. But they have a vested interest in the the reaction that I see from a lot of people on the left, which is like, well, we're fucked.

Just prepare for collapse. Like that, they win. They win if you take that. Yeah, they love that reaction. They're finding like the new way, like the old way to pacify people is by saying, no, this isn't real. This isn't a problem. The new way to pacify people is saying this is a huge problem that can't be fixed and all they want is for people to be pacified and we have to actually resist that because that's the easy thing to do that's the

thing that makes our brains feel more comfortable like we can like we can relax into the doom yeah right and we have to actively fight that every day because it always infects our brains and it affects my brain like it it's you can, you can't escape it. You have to actively fight it. Yeah, the reality is that if we accept doom, we will all burn to death separately. Whereas if we take all of their shit and we lock the worst of them away in a dark hole for trying to kill the planet

and we stop building a society around the poisons that they profit from, then maybe there will be slots and clouds in a hundred years. And that's worth fighting for. Do it for the iguanas. Do it for the iguanas, goddammit. The anthropologist David Graeber wrote something about neoliberalism where he said neoliberalism is not an engine that produces anything economically.

It's an engine that produces despair economically it's an engine that produces despair that's you know that's its sole job and not only is it its sole job it will sacrifice its own continued existence to make sure that people can't actually can't not only like can't imagine another future but are just sort of are so beaten down that you know the engine of despair consumes them they do nothing and you know i i would say this you know the the reason the state cracks down so hard isn't because it's strong it's because it's weak you know the the the reason the sort of engine of despair has to keep going why they have to keep telling you that it's impossible is because it is if it were genuinely impossible for us to do anything they wouldn't have to like you know there wouldn't be any need for propaganda

right if they were if they weren't actually genuinely afraid of the possibility that you know we decided not to give into despair and do something yep that's as good a note to end on as we're going to find so uh don't give into given to despair do it for the iguanas uh and uh you know uh uh uh products and services you can follow you can follow cool zone media on twitter and instagram you can you're probably already subscribed to it could happen here pod because you're listening to it but if you're not you should probably subscribe to that you can follow you can yeah you can follow you can follow the podcast that happened here pod on instagram and twitter too yep follow the things listen to the things that'll help us keep making more stuff godspeed goodbye For the iguanas! You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.