Red Scare - Taliban Mindset

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

The ladies discuss the return of the Taliban, the scourge of seed oils, and Cornel West on why the

We're back, and so is the Taliban. The Taliban's back. The Taliban is Taliban back. We have some talitakes. How come I can't think about the Taliban without thinking about, come Mr. Taliban telling my banana. And I don't even know what that is. I was thinking about it.

I was like, I don't even know what that's a reference to. It's like some song. Yeah, but it predates kind of my consciousness. It's just seared in your child mind. Somehow. And I'm like, every time I basically think about the Taliban, at some point, that refrain will enter my mind. I just think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb,

who clearly uses the Nicholas. He keeps it in his name, so that none of these American midwits confuse him for a Muslim. God forbid, yeah. Because it's like incongruous, you know? Right, right, right. But anyway, yeah, they're back and not a moment too soon. Because we're right around the corner

from the 20th anniversary of 9-11. Just a group of guys based in Hamburg who got together to topple white supremacy. Just some friends. They should maybe have a sitcom about them. I look like Muhammad Oda in my passport pic. Oh, who's Muhammad Oda? He's like one of the masterminds of the 9-11.

Oh, oh, oh. Jacking. OK, I can picture him. Just got it. Think of me in my very short mullet face. Does he have a beard? No. Five o'clock shadow.

I thought they all were supposed to. I read in an infographic on Instagram that the Taliban makes men grow beards. Oh, no, he's not Taliban. He's just like a garden variety, like Salafi. He's like Saudi, I think, Ottawa's. Al Qaeda, right? Yeah.

Off to a great start. Yeah. No, I read a lot of articles. Me too. And the Wikipedia for the Taliban. And I followed some Taliban guys on Twitter. Like sliding into their DMs. He's single.

Did you see Marianne Williamson tweeting at like the dirtbag left adjacent people, like David Sarodin and Breonna Joy Gray? Yeah, Matt Tyebe. Yeah. Weirdly. It's funny. I saw a funny tweet.

That was like. Crystal Ball Jimmy Dore, Bre Bre Joy, Sen Keiger, Kyle Kalinsky, David Sarodin, Matt Tyebe. Everyone, please do what you can today. We need troops at the airport and C-130s to evacuate as many women as possible. Or it's going to be a massacre. I was like, why would they massacre women?

They're going to massacre male combatants and then take the women for themselves. I mean, they're going to massacre some women. They might. I mean, they don't have a great track record. No. They do like to put down women in football stadiums. But they're not going to genocide women

because they need them to perpetuate their Islamic emirate. A massacre is a little hyperbolic, maybe, but she's very emotional. Yeah. Yeah. I understand this situation, regardless of what you think, it just leaves. It's sad.

It's sad. And you can't not be sad for the women and children, even though they're being used as the worst kind of geopolitical pawn. It brings out your inner libtard. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard not to feel. Yeah, for all those school children and teenage wives.

But I read an article in The New York Times about how the Afghan troops were raping boys. Oh, yeah, Bacha Bazi. I know about this because my high school sweetheart was Pakistani from Karachi, but his mother, I think, was an Uzbek or Hazara from Afghanistan. And he schooled me in the ways of the Bacha Bazi when I was like a 15 or 16-year-old girl.

So I'm an Afghanistan expert. And Lindy Mann, I know all seven ethnicities. And the tribes. The tribes. I don't know all the tribes or dozens of tribes. There's like a dozen. Yeah, there's a lot. I don't know, a single one.

Yeah. No, but I saw a funny tweet that was like, Adam Nick Stov. Why not us? If anyone is going to harness the power of love for political purposes. Yeah. But the welcoming spirit only extends so far, and my presence soon creates tension.

They've just told me to stand to the side because I'm a woman. I'm like a Marianne supporter. If she runs again, I will campaign for her. I will endorse her publicly if she runs for president again. Yeah, I would have to think about that. But yeah, I was thinking, yeah, red scare, erasure. Nick Mullen, though, would make a good Mujahideen

with that at-jack beard, that face. Yeah, and maybe he could broker the deal. Yeah. Because he has such good social skills. Yeah. What else happened? Well, yeah, it was a relatively peaceful transfer of power. Yeah, it seems to me like not that much bloodshed.

But I'd also like to say that I'm actually glad that Marianne tweeted that because I do feel like as podcasters, we are kind of like on the front lines in a way. Of the Jihad. I was telling you that my personal Jihad is putting together Ikea furniture, my personal fanstand, because I was up in here all day slugging it out with my frickin' Billy bookshelves.

I declared a Jihad against body fat today at the gym and entered what I'd like to call a kind of a Taliban mindset. I was inspired to work out really diligently and with incredible focus as if I had a Jihad of my own. So I thank them for that. But as podcasters, we are kind of on the front lines of podcasting, of culture. Yeah.

And people are on the front lines of podcasts. And people should be thanking us for our service instead of mocking us and making fun of us on the internet all day. Yeah, we did a lot of research for this episode. Yeah. We kind of did. Yeah.

In my own way. I read a lot of little articles and went on a lot of threads and gleaned a bunch of information. I don't, again, I don't have any. A lot of people. What is your take? Well, I don't. Let's boil all that down into like a quippy.

I mean, my take is that this is like an opioid war. Yeah. That's my Alex Jones galaxy brain take. And the market has shifted. Yeah. And Afghanistan, you know, I think it's like kind of like an autoimmune thing. It's like geopolitical eatrogenics.

Like you got to keep the war machine and like the big pharma machine going at all times. So you have to branch out into like new theaters. Because fentanyl is the new. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Opioid. But there's a lot of talk.

I like wrote down China. Which China. There was a lot of mayhem bedlam at the airport because people were like crowding to get out of there. And some people were literally just clinging to engines and falling from the sky, which is like very symbolic. As Ben Braddock pointed out, because, you know, we started with people falling out of towers

and ended with people falling from airplanes, like Salman, Rushdie, Satanic versus style. Oh my God. Which is horrible. But I was like, Afghans are really not, not like us. They think that you can clink an airplane. I mean, that's part of, yeah, that's a good point in a larger way also, is that Afghans are not like us.

Well, yeah, they're not. And I mean, they're not. They're not. Maybe they don't want liberal democracy. Yeah, totally not far fetched, totally conceivable. There's a lot of talk of American incompetence, like the Americans didn't prepare for the evacuation. They didn't secure the road to the airport.

They did this, like, pull out during the fighting season, rather than the growing season, when the Pashtun tribes are engaging in warfare, rather than growing their poppy seeds. And like, you know, in addition to plunging trillions of dollars over two decades into this conflict, they also retreated. They left a stockpile of weapons. Choppers and like, yeah.

Why didn't they destroy that stock? Well, to me, it's unclear if that's like, incompetent or intentional, because it almost feels like, you know, to make sure that the next superpower that gets its like grubby little paws on Afghanistan will be in for like a world of hell. Because these people are now armed to the gills with American weapons.

But I don't know, like, I have no intuition about this either way. I leave that up to the fellas. And I think they like, certainly also, the Americans failed to anticipate the level of popular support that the Taliban has among average people. It's probably fairly high. I mean, yeah.

And support, you know, maybe it's not even, it just, I think support just means something else. Yeah. You know. Well, it's interesting. I mean, it's like, I mean, we were there for 20 years. For 20 years, yeah.

And my take is like, 20 years is such a long time. The Taliban's maybe different now. Yeah, it's like the sons of the original guys. Maybe they'll be, I don't think they have, they can be as fundamentalist as they were 20 years ago. Maybe they can. And if they bar, then we'll get back in there. For a 100 more years until we really strain it out.

I mean, it was doomed from the start. So why not just give them a shot? Yeah, I mean, they claim on their official Twitter and in their official statements that they will not seek retribution or punishment against anybody native or foreign who was cooperating with the United States, that people will be securely allowed to evacuate,

that they don't seek to sow chaos or violence. And I was thinking, you know, the other thing is like, Biden in some sense is the perfect guy to orchestrate this thing because he's, you know, functionally dead. Senile, yeah. So they can really kind of like bury any liability that anybody else had in this person who takes that L. And he's totally MIA.

Yeah, and he also gets to take credit, right, in the minds of most people for getting us out of Afghanistan. And, you know, he's an ailing geriatric who's not seeking reelection as far as I know. Of course not. But Trump did negotiate the deal. Originally, and Biden pushed the date forward to September 11th, but then pushed it back.

Is that correct? I'm not 100% straight on that. I don't know. But yeah, and somebody said about Biden's conspicuous absence. I'm just quoting a buddy from one of my group chats that it's a strategy that if you're not visible during your regime's most embarrassing moment, it's much harder for the opposition party

to pin it on you because dumb voters are dumb people who have no object permanence. Wow. I just feel like you can picture them smuggling Biden from whatever clinic he's in, like detox clinic to the White House in a burka. He's like, whoa. I mean, it's so Biden to bungle so badly

and to be so like simple-minded and, I mean, absent, like dead-minded, brain dead. Did you watch the address? I didn't. It was today, right? Yeah, at 325. No, I missed it. I was straightening out my moracy poster.

My personal Afghanistan is steaming out the crooks and crinkles in my moracy poster. We should talk about that to me also. You know, everybody's heard the cliche that Afghanistan is like the graveyard of empires, meaning no outside power has ever been able to conquer or vanquish it. But the flip side is also true.

No internal cohort of people has ever been able to create total unity or stability within the country because it's not really a country. It's a collection of warring tribes, striking strategic alliances, and vying for supremacy. What about, though, before the 70s, when you see all those pictures of Afghanistan with groovy chicks and cool botanical landscape

architecture and stuff? I think that was a monarchy, that it was a republic. Yeah, and I think that you're seeing probably images of Kabul and the major cities. Right, right, right. You know, people on Twitter like to wheel out those pics of Iranian girls in miniskirts before the revolution.

Yeah. And I mean, yeah, they tried. I think there was, you know, there was, the Soviet invasion happened because the Soviets were trying to install, as I understand it, a more moderate sect of communists than the ones that were kind of dominant because they were trying to control the pipeline.

I was tweeting about today this film that. Marxists add it again. Yeah, exactly. This film that's really instructive on this topic, the Belyasons of Pustin, which I'm sure, have you seen it? I've seen it, but not with any kind of mindfulness of what the, like, you know, conflict really was. But I love the music in it.

I listen to that song sometimes. But it was just, you know, it's about the Russian Civil War, the Turkmenistan theater about this Red Army guy who's trying to get back to his, like, Russian, like, Kristianke wife, and gets into all sorts of, like, Central Asian hijinks. But it's about basically the, it's like, you know, the Marxist mans burden versus, like, the white mans

burden, like, doing, like, a kind of culture revolution in the Central Asian republics, liberating women. And there's that iconic scene where he gets into the harem of his major foe, Abdullah, and he's like, okay, girls, now we're gonna, you know, do, like, equality of women, like, communist style. They scramble to cover their faces, but end up exposing their tits instead.

And then when he tries to, like, emancipate them, they appoint him their new husband. And it's about, like, the incompatibility of, like... That's really good Russian humor. Yeah. But it's like, it's about the essential incompatibility of, like, Islamic religion and liberal democracy. They have a different mindset.

They have a different consciousness than Westerners and Russians and... Yeah. And it's... Chinese people. There's also some evidence to suggest that women, Muslim women, are more conservative, right? Than Muslim men.

But even that, like, it's because they've grown up in such a, like, maybe, yeah, if they were... Totally different and exposed to the ideas of, like, Western liberal feminism, they would appeal to them, but they don't even... I'm sure, no, I'm sure it would on some level. I mean, it's probably, you know, unless you're very wealthy, it's objectively materially better,

but the jury's really out. I'm not being, like, provocative or facetious. The jury's really out, whether in the long run, it's spiritually and morally better. What? To be a woman under liberal... I mean, I prefer to be a woman under liberal democracy than under, like, radicalism.

For sure. Yeah, for sure. Oh my God. But we... Yeah. We ladies here have our own, you know, miseries and malcontentment. And America has a ton of problems.

Yeah. And we sunk a lot of money into Afghanistan for no fucking reason. For the Sacklers, yeah. For the Sackler. Well, yeah, not for no reason. You're right. That's like, the war was won by, you know,

the people who wanted it to go the way they wanted it to go. Yeah, I mean, actually, yeah. A lot of people made a lot of fucking dirty money. Yeah, I mean... And they'll definitely be going to hell. I mean, totally, yeah. And it's like, America's... I saw Michael Moore tweeting today

about how for the first time since the census was taken in 1970, they're the white population of America plummeted and he was... Or it was lower. I don't know if it plummeted, but he was doing his little libtard victory lap and saying how this is great.

And to me, this is neither good nor bad, right? It's like just a fact. But why is the white population declining in America? Well, partly because so many people are literally dying opioid overdose deaths. It's like really crazy. Like that's not anything to do a victory lap about. It's like sad no matter what the...

I mean, this is all like a giant Hito-Style movie and that it's all like related. Yeah, well, also, yeah. I mean, I know there's like Adam Curtis backlash or whatever, but this is exactly the kind of shit he talks about. Yeah, it is like an Adam Curtis thing. I mean, he made a movie about this, Bitter Lake, was it called, I think?

But yeah, also, I mean, anybody who thinks of this war in terms of winners and losers doesn't get the nature of this conflict because it's kind of an interminable like endless war. Forever war. Yeah, and I like how forever war sounds like forever home. You know, like when you place a dog or a child in a permanent residence.

Forever pod. I think for certain low and mid-ranking personnel, this kind of end was an epic failure and we have to like recognize and appreciate that. Like for people who spent the bulk of their professional lives mired in this conflict. Neocons? Well, no, like military people who are kind of like lower

and mid-ranking tier people who like lost their lives or were injured or lost their loved ones, like that sort of thing. Well, what would a victory have been? Yeah, exactly. They were doomed to sort of lose from the start. And that's the other thing that I think a lot of people are right about, like, this would have happened

no matter when we pulled out. But we could have pulled out a little, a little better. Joe Biden's pullout game is weak. We should have known that when he had Hunter. He was a mistake, Hunter, a mistake, Biden. Oh, but also, did you see that weird disclaimer? I'll read it because I screen-capped it. That was at the top of the Twitter explore page

a couple of days ago or maybe a couple of weeks. I thought it was odd at the time. Overdose from exposure to fentanyl is extremely unlikely according to fact checkers and toxicology experts. I was like, that's a weird thing to put on the front page of Twitter. I'm not saying it's related to this, but I'm not not saying. But it's not true about fentanyl.

Yeah, I don't know. We're there, yeah. So you were saying, and I agree, you're making a lot of sense. Yeah, for once. For them. Basically, it's no longer economically, politically advantageous to have access to the poppy fields in Afghanistan. Because fentanyl, which is made in China, is now

the most common, whatever, opiate. Yeah, that's the going theory. I mean, I don't know anything about this, and I could be totally wrong. Well, China wants revenge for the opium stuff. Yeah, the opium wars, the original stop Asian hate. Well, and China's going to move in to Afghanistan. And they're going to acknowledge the Taliban

as their legitimate rule, as well as Russia, probably, is my understanding, which is major. Well, I mean, they are the legitimate rule. I think that's the other thing to keep in mind. I saw a lot of takes that were like the Taliban are based and sick and awesome and great and whatever. And then I saw a lot of takes that were like, oh my god, the women and girls, they're

immoral, medieval, hidebound monsters. And it's like, well, the truth is somewhere in the middle, they're not really based. They're probably not as horrific as white liberals imagine them to be, because they imagine everything to be completely morally and existentially intolerable. Handmaid's tale. Yeah, exactly.

But there's probably different dynamics in different parts of the country. Well, yeah, liberals are hysterical. That's their main mode. Yeah, but also nowadays, we do have to acknowledge that the Taliban is a more legitimate ruling government in Afghanistan than the United States. Just technically speaking.

Absolutely, yeah. Without making any kind of moral value judgment as to good or bad. Even so, I think it's impossible. I don't know what kind of cognitive levels of cognitive dissonance you have to be on to imagine America as a good guy. Like an overall good.

Like in this scenario, they're definitely the bad guys. Yeah, and I think you can really, again, feel for the women and girls of the Taliban of Afghanistan. Well, I guess they are the women and girls of the Taliban without, while also acknowledging what a shameless and cynical ploy it is on behalf of Democratic lawmakers to ring their hands and be like, but the women and the girls, we have to airlift them.

Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, Nancy Pelosi, that old bitch. Worse. I propose a trade. A fucking wizard bitch. We take the women and girls of Afghanistan. Give them Nancy Pelosi. Give them Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Jen Psaki.

I want those harpies out of my country. Jen Psaki's on vacation, too. Everyone's really just tuning out, huh? Yeah, everyone's exhausted. I mean, people will forget that's the thing. Forget about what? About Afghanistan. Yeah, totally.

They're just going to lay low, and then we're just going to stop talking about it. I have to say, this is a nice break from COVID discourse. Yeah. No, I think we should take. I mean, it's kind of more interesting than Israel Palestine stuff. Yeah, it is, yeah.

It's more dynamic. Yeah. No, we've got to take the women and girls of Afghanistan, infect them with COVID, and drop them in the middle of America, because white liberal girl bosses do need domestic help. Stop it. I'm kidding.

We have to vaccinate them all. White doesn't have girl bosses. They do in Chicago. Yeah, in Chicago. Chicago, you must take the refugees. Yeah. Michigan, they can vie with the Somalis or whatever. Minnesota.

Anyway, you did some research, and you found out that President Ashraf Ghani, who fled his daughter, Maryam, is an art host. Yeah, Brace sent me this. Part of my research was also asking Brace what was going on. And yeah, he found the. So you fought in a similar country that? He knows about geopolitics.

He's been to the terrain. He seemed like a good person to ask his any fellow podcaster on the front lines. Anyway, yeah, but didn't the president also teach it? You see Berkeley or something? And he wrote a book on how to rebuild failing nations. Good. What's he up to now?

I think he fled to, I want to say, Tajikistan? Uzbekistan? I have his a statement he made. Dear countrymen, it's long. Today, I came across a hard choice. I should stand to face the armed Taliban who wanted to enter the palace or leave the dear country that I dedicated my life to protecting and protecting

the past 20 years. If there was still countless countrymen martyred and they would face the destruction, destruction of Kabul, the result would have been a big human disaster in this 6 million city. The Taliban have made it to remove me. They are here to attack all Kabul and the people of Kabul in order to avoid the bleeding flood, some Middle Eastern.

I know. They're so dramatic. Then he talks about they didn't win the legitimacy of hearts. Never in history has dry power given legitimacy to anyone and won't give it to them. They are now facing a new historical test. Either they will protect the name and honor of Afghanistan or they will prioritize other places and networks.

Make a clear plan to do so and share it with the public. Middle Eastern people are so funny. It's like General Dostoum's Ali Express Versailles collection as house as somebody else put it. I'm not taking credit for that. But they're like, you know, made thousands of gin and glowering demons smite you by Allah on the battlefield. The flood.

Yeah. It's like very horror vacuity. They have to like fill every crevice. Yeah. Like ornament decoration. It's actually really cute. Yeah, I enjoy it. But yeah, the other the other thing is I saw a lot of takes

to the tune of like, well, the Taliban is good actually and based actually because they're trad. Interesting. And I actually would push back on that because they definitely adopt certain markers of trad. Like they've outlawed vaccines and abortion. Women as a whole. And I think this is like pretty just like titillating

and exciting for a board Western millennials such as ourselves who are just gripped constantly by on we right. But I I don't know. Like this is to me a prime example of like, as I've always said, like Travis Cope, it's also potentially LARP. Like to me, the Taliban isn't some like weird hide bound medieval formation.

It's like literally a reaction to like global homo to like runaway globalization. It's a very modern formation. Wow. I mean, even like if you think about that symbolic thing that set it off, which was the leveling the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan that was designed for the eyes of like bleeding heart Western liberals to look at these people

and be like these monsters, these like ogres, troglodytes, like how dare they destroy art, like a canonical or historical public sculptural work or whatever. I don't know about the the Buddha thing. There was these Buddhas in Bamiyan in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up on on television essentially. Wow.

Yeah. And I think that that was like the symbolic moment. Right. It was like kind of the visual. And I definitely wouldn't say the Taliban is base, but I would say that their fervor and devotion is inspiring. Well, they have skin in the game. I mean, not to I mean, not to quote Peter Teal,

but to quote Peter Teal, he wrote a whole essay about this. Back in, I want to say like 2008, 2005, called a Straussian moment where he argues that Western liberal democracies cannot hope to defeat Islamists who were then considered the greatest threat we faced because they have no skin in the game. They have no libido.

They believe in nothing. They have no faith to fight for. So when faced with legions of armies of young, angry people who have something to believe in, who have a purpose, will blow themselves up for that purpose. We are doomed. Yeah. And his thesis, which I thought was very well taken,

very smart, was that in finding kind of a viable way to like a vital, vitalist way to attack the enemy, you become the enemy, which is a non-starter for kind of liberal society. You have to be as zealous and violent as them, right? We just never will be. Yeah. And I think this was like the thesis of submission, too.

Well, we're a society in decline, culturally and infrastructurally and psychologically. Yeah. And a lot of people are pointing to this episode as like a perfect symbol of that. A lot of people are pointing to this episode of the podcast as a perfect podcast episode. Well, and the other incredible thing

that my buddy Joseph Keegan pointed out is like for the first time in history, you can witness the enemy achieving victory from his own point of view as recorded on his smartphone. So I was thinking like, oh, it's pretty sublime, but it's actually not sublime. It's sort of like the inverse of sublime. It's abject because you see them lounging around

in Dostom's mansion or using the elliptical in the presidential palace wearing shavarchemies or the thing you sent me of them in the amusement park. I do find that to be sublime. It's like bizarre. I mean, it is like an Adam Curtis film. I even found it sublime when the insurrectionists were like milling about doing nothing.

Yeah. I just think that vitality is so hard to come by these days. Well, they look good. They look. Aesthetics, yeah. Aesthetics matter. Yeah. Like, Kanye West would never.

The Kanye West sounds really like, Kanye should do something like that. I mean, who was, hey, Eli, who was the composer who said that 9-Eleven was a work of art and got kind of stockhouse in? I mean, blowing up the Buddhas was a work of art that kind of transcended triumphed over the original work of art.

Yeah. Yeah. Huh? No, by the way, he shattered those ceramic foses. Oh. Ancient Chinese foses. Yeah. I'm not, by the way, I'm not endorsing what they did in Balmian.

I'm not saying it was a good thing. But it is, in a way, like a literal work of performance art. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's much better than what's this face. With you, yeah. You shouldn't talk about art in moral terms, you know?

Right. I went by the 9-Eleven memorial. Today. Yesterday. The Oculus. Did you do any shopping? No. I was like walking over to Maddie's

to watch the White Lotus family. And I was like, oh, you should stop by because all the Afghanistan stuff, and it was just on my mind. And I was like, I'm going to stop by and pay my respects. And it was chained off. It was all roped off, so you couldn't get close enough to peer into the void or whatever. And so it really wasn't.

Why not? Because you couldn't pass this chain. Pass the point. Yeah. Yeah, you couldn't get close enough. I think it's, Maddie said it was arbitrary because it's technically a museum. And sometimes they have free days.

I've definitely been there. And I don't know. Who knows? It's not always chained off. But it was that night, and I was sad. Yeah, bummer. It's one of my favorite memorials, for sure. Yeah, it's really incredible.

Weird, yeah. What a day. What a crazy day. Well, that place is funny because I like going there and taking pictures of tourists smelling about and going to Kiehl's and Kate's spade. And it's really interesting because they basically turned it into a memorial, like a mausoleum for commerce

because it's like the Oculus. It's just like shop. It's like a literal mall. Is it the only mall in New York City? There's the Manhattan Mall in like the 34th. That's a real dump. Soho's kind of the mall. An open-air mall, yeah.

Anyway, let's see what else I got on them. Afghan takes. But yeah, I do like, I mean, I do really like they're kind of like austere aesthetics because it'll be like some guy who's like lanky and wearing like the Yeezy colored Chewbacamees and like wrap-around sunglasses. Yeah.

And like a military like fatigue parka. I think like the aesthetics really are what's so appealing. You know, like I told you about my- Well, whenever I went to, fuck, what's it called? And that wasn't Dubai. Wait, the Emirates? No, it was a layover. I was just at the airport.

Never mind. Dhar. Oh, OK. And it was the Middle East is, ooh, it's so scary. And like, it's very different, you know, and that's cool. Yeah, it's not compatible. It's not like it's non-compliant with liberal democracy. And I think like the attractive thing

about Afghanistan for foreigners, whether that's valid or not, the reason people like find it compelling, the reason that like the Nat Geo Afghan girl was such a hit under how she's doing right now. Sharpa Gula. Yeah, someone should check in with her. I think she got slapped with a fraud charge.

For what? For not having your single eyes? I don't know, she's like a petty criminal because she's- The eyes were a lie. Yeah, she was wearing contact lenses this whole time. But like, I think that's compelling for people because it's like so unmanageable. Yeah.

Afghanistan is the Gemini of countries. Totally. I was just like, bullets going everywhere. Like I said, I mean, this whole idea that like, you know, we should have learned a lesson from the Soviet Union, which bungled their war. Well, they were also in rapid decline when they withdrew in 89.

Yeah, they fell within two years. And so people- It's really, yeah. Want to make this analogy again, implying that we're going to be felled within two years. I don't think that's what's going to happen. No, no, no. Maybe.

America's too big to fail. Russia, the tower of China. You really think so? I think America will go on for hundreds of years, like the Roman Empire. It'll like slowly slog along without any kind of definitive end date. It's not going to be like wiped off the map

by the new axis of evil of like China, Russia, and the Taliban. But the fentanyl. Yeah. They wouldn't be able to fight a war. Yeah, well, that goes without saying because everybody's like- What if they wage war on us?

Obese and retarded. Exactly. What if they wage a real decline? They're going to import Mujahideen. Well, that's the other thing. That's another reason why the Taliban are so compelling because it's like these young and gaunt but attractive people with like fire in their eyes

that people mistake for a religious zalatry and fervor, but it's really just hunger. They're just like malnourished. They do have fervor. They have to. Like they wouldn't do this if they didn't. Yeah, but they're- And Westerners don't have anything to believe in

except for liberal democracy, which is a sham. Well, they literally have no libido and these young people are uncorrupted, unspoiled by seed oils and inflammation causing compounds and- Seed oils? No, I'm serious, endocrine disruptors. Like they're not like obese and sluggish. They're not slack, which is weird, I think.

Right, their cheekbones are cut. Yeah, their cheekbones look like they're made of like low grade marble or something. They're strong. Yeah. I mean, I think of that. That's why when I do squads. I think about those guys.

Yeah. Like in a sexual way or in an envious way? No, and just like that, you know, like really devote yourself to something, devote yourself to getting into the best shape of your life. Well, that's the other thing. Like I don't know if they are- Pain is weakness leaving the body.

It is, yeah. Mamba mentality. I don't know if they actually believe. I think they believe that they believe, but I'm sure there's also some of them are larping and some of them are just opportunists who have joined the winning side. I mean, some of them, it's a big group of people.

Yeah. I mean, I guess everyone, everyone larps and in one way or another. They're not all like religious purists. I mean, maybe not, but I think a lot of them are. Yeah. I mean, probably, but also because it's like the only thing they've ever known.

Exactly. I don't think they even would understand cynicism potentially, you know. Yeah, they're unironic people. Because of Allah. Though I saw a thread, I think Tim Dillon retweeted from a girl who was stationed there and she was kind of, she was a bit of like a lib

and was kind of freaking out about it. But she was talking about how they would comb through their phones looking for terrorist activity and all they found were like Bollywood videos. Because all young people are like drawn to pop culture, you know. Papay memes. Yeah. Do they have TikTok in Afghanistan, Taliban TikTok?

They must. I have no idea. That would be funny. China didn't introduce it to them because they're not trying to compromise the background of their society. I mean, China's going to be up in there like extracting resources.

So that'll be, I don't know if that's going to be like uniformly, probably unilaterally bad for the United States but I'm too stupid to. Definitely. This is all very bad for the U.S. Well, it's also bad for like the ruling class, the so-called blob or whatever. But I don't know. Is it bad for the ruling class?

I mean, in the moment because they've been humiliated and chastened, they'll be back though. But the Sacklers. Yeah, but they're the subject of a lawsuit, right? That they had to back down, which is why this happened in the first place. But I think like the ruling class, I mean, the neocons, like some people are speculating.

And again, I have no particular instinct or intuition for this, that the neocons will be back. And what I would believe is that the U.S. and the Taliban have like some sort of secret sweetheart deal behind the scenes where they're like working together. I wouldn't be like too surprised by that. I mean, instability in the Middle East, someone is benefiting.

And that's why I feel like, I don't know why, I don't know how or why, but I think those elites are up to it again, Anna. Yeah, I mean, it always comes back to pedophilia too. Of course. Yeah. Because people were like, the women and the girls, I was like, what about the boys?

What about the boys? I mean, we know that during the U.S. occupation, the whole Bacha Bazi thing was rampant and all these warlords had like boys change to their bed or whatever, but as if that's going to also change under the Taliban, I think they nominally banned Bacha Bazi the first time around. They did, they did.

But it's not like that's actually going to ban it. Yeah. I think the Taliban obviously is brutal, but maybe not as brutal as they were 20 years ago. I like what you're with the Bollywood videos and stuff, like they've had to modernize enough to maybe be not so bad. Well, I think if they want to be taken seriously

on the world stage by players other than the United States, they have to at least function like the legitimate government. Yeah, exactly. They have like skin in the game, not just spiritually, but also, you know, geopolitically potentially. Yeah. And it's obviously in China and Russia's best interest to cooperate and court them.

But if there's a sweetheart deal between the U.S. and the Taliban, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some like really complicated. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but it might just be sheer incompetence. Yeah. Like that video of Biden talking about how like, yeah, there's no way it's not going to be like a Friday to Monday thing.

Like them taking power would be highly unlikely and it's not going to be like Vietnam or they're going to have to chopper people out of the embassy and then that's exactly what happened. He described it like clairvoyantly in the negative, you know? Yeah. Like he can't, you know, while Biden is, yeah. What's going to be funny is when all these Afghan

deep state collaborators come to the United States. Refugees. Yeah, and become woke. No. And start finger wagging everybody else about white supremacy, you know? There. That'll be a cute little moment we can look forward to in like five to 10 years, something like that.

I hope it goes okay. What? Afghanistan. I hope they figure it out. I mean, I guess either the Taliban reigns and reigns, but maybe okay. Yeah. Like as okay as it can get.

Yeah, or like the neocons stage another intervention. Right. And this goes on again. I really, again, am like out of my league on this, like a fish out of water. I don't think, I'm just thinking strategically here. Yeah. Like.

General Dasha. Yeah, exactly. With Russia and China basically legitimizing Taliban rule, wouldn't a reoccupation get, I feel like we would lose. Yeah. If Russia and China got involved. Yeah. But who, I mean, I think that were things have happened.

Definitely. Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't put it past these American dogs. Yeah. I mean, I've already seen the neocons kind of melting down and freaking out at Biden and talking about how he's like disgraced the nation and da, da, da. I saw some guy going on a tweet storm and then writing

an entire article about how actually the American public is to blame. I saw that, but didn't, couldn't read it. I like, didn't even understand what way over. Like what? Because we wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan. Yeah. Okay, man.

Yeah. Damn. We're to blame for like the war and the subsequent loss and whatever. If you want to play the blame game, let's get Britain on the phone. Did you see that guy, um, that young British guy, he's like a 21 year old uni student who's stuck in Afghanistan,

like living it up. I did. I did see that. I do want to talk about this, this tweet. Oh, what's the tweet? From some girl. We referenced it earlier. Sorry, not sorry, not going to care about Afghanistan

because I grew up with an alcoholic psychologically abusive brother in constant state of distress, anxiety, and worry about the future. Hearing the key in the door every evening was my own in quotes Afghanistan for almost 20 years. A lot of people dunking on her, but she's not wrong. She shouldn't care about Afghanistan. She's got her own BPD to worry about.

And that's like, probably should have kept that to herself. She can't help it because she's a BPD. But she, yeah, she should be taking care of her like mental health and stuff instead of tripping about it. Yeah. Afghanistan a hundred percent. I'm with her. We should airlift self care packages to the women and

children of Afghanistan. Just like a white load as Terry cloth. Mask. Yeah. An exfoliating mask. Yeah. A candle. A candle.

Bop some on the head. It's parachuting down. Oh, you saw that one of, I have some more military strategy. Yes. So I saw, I read in the Daily Mail that one of the Taliban leaders was in Guantanamo Bay for eight years. He was one of those guys like in the castle or whatever

holding court and he, they didn't even like give his name. Otherwise, I would definitely remember it and say it. But they just referred to him as like a Taliban leader. And my thinking was like, why did they let that guy out of Guantanamo Bay? Yeah. And what's the point of having a clandestine torture prison if you're going to let people out?

Yeah. So they can organize militia armies. Yeah. You have to commit. If you get them in there, they can't leave. It's like, what happens in Guantanamo days? I would have done a lot of things differently. Yeah.

You'd have kept them in the cage. I don't know. I wouldn't have gone over them in the first place. Yeah. I definitely wouldn't. Maybe it was like a prisoner exchange or something, but even so. The whole point of Guantanamo is it's like, don't ask

questions. Yeah. And they have like a bunch of like double digit IQ like Uighurs in there who have nothing to do with anything. Exactly. They're like selling kebabs out of a stall. Yeah. China should just turn all of Afghanistan into a Uighur

concentration camp. No. Since there are certain tribes in Afghanistan who are not ethnically dissimilar from the Uighurs. How do they tell each other apart? I mean, I'm sure they, I think they do it very easily through appearance and language cues, but for us, it's a little bit harder.

And you think they're that different and they're all in that little country. What's up? You think they're all that different. I mean, there's a lot of different ones. There's a lot of like Uzbek, Tajik, like Persian tribes. There's some like Skithian admixture. They're like descendants of Alexander the Great.

That's why they look so good. That's why there's a lot of like blonde green eyed ones with like that even tan skin. Yeah. It sounds fun to live in a tribal. War zone. Yeah. Not a war zone, but you know.

A tribal. In a tribal way, maybe. I mean, tell me about it. I'm from Karabakh. That place is full of far less attractive people, but who are also brave and resilient fighters. And the landscape is similarly like ugly and unappealing. It's a lot of like gray rock and dusty land.

Those are good, good virtues. Yeah. Yeah. As Larry Gugosian said, my people eat stones. Very cool. Yeah. How do you think we stay so skinny? Probably should have watched the Biden.

Address. Yeah. I might watch it now because now I'm like Afghan Pilled and I've gone down that rabbit hole. How long do you think you're going to be Afghan Pilled? I don't know for a couple more days. I was like nutrition Pilled before that. I'm like really autistically spiraling.

When did you find out about the seed oils? I mean like years ago, but I'm reading this book, Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, which is equal parts LOL and OMG. It's sort of like a lot of like infographics and side by side pictures of like Paris and Nikki Hilton to like test her thesis that the second sibling is uglier than the first because they're more malnourished, which sounds like a

bunch of like bunk. That can't be true. It's retarded. But there's also, there's also a lot of good nutritional information that's pretty well documented and non-controversial. Well like endocrine disruptors, fuck with your hormones, make it harder to lose weight, which like people today are

not only fatter, but it's harder for them to lose weight. Or seed oils, for example, cause chronic inflammation. So basically, Some endocrine disturbances make you skinnier. Yeah, like hypothyroid. But like the seed oil thing is crucial because basically anything from like a heart attack to cancer can be pinned to vegetable oils, essentially.

And there's a long term, you know, like in the nineties, there was a big war on fat and everybody had skim milk and avoided like eating butter. And the margarine lobby intervene. And basically her conceit is very simple. That sugar and vegetable oil is to blame for the obesity epidemic in America. I think it's pretty like,

Yeah, that seems pretty non-controversial. Definitely. And that the way that you maintain, not only lose weight and stay thin, but maintain like a more attractive body composition is by eating like meat on the bone, bone broth, fresh seafood and fresh produce. It's like very like basic.

Yeah, yeah, Mediterranean. Exactly. Or like Japanese, like all the diets where people live to a hundred and are skinny. Well, Japanese people have a macro. Yeah, I think which is different. Yeah. Well, she's also into like probiotics and fermented foods.

Cool. It's a good book. It's like a lightweight read. I read it when I'm like breastfeeding. Yeah. I'm very... You're learning. Yeah.

I'm very like committed to like living a healthy and nutritious life now because I'm no longer merely responsible for myself and everything I ingest, he ingests now. So I feel like very like... Yeah. I read this macrobiotic cookbook once that Madonna's personal chef wrote this really sweet Japanese lady. Yeah.

And in the intro she talked about how when she got pregnant or maybe was trying to get pregnant but she thought of her like uterus and like the fluid therein as kind of like an ocean and like wanting the baby to be like have like the cleanest, nicest like fluids and be, you know. Well, that's what it is. For sure. Yeah.

No, it's horrible. I mean like I'm a hardcore sugar and alcohol addict like my father who was a diabetic. I've been pre-diabatic pretty much all my life until I started exercising. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

And pre-diabetes in women by the way also leads to like PCOS like ovariancis, high T. Yeah. Menstrual irregularities. For some reason I've never ever had menstrual irregularities. I've had my period or every month on the same day since I was like 10 years old, which is like weird knock on wood. But like literally just like sugar addiction is a bitch.

It's so hard to like not eat sugar. I don't like sugar. I know. A lot of people don't and I envy them. But I have a disrupted endocrine system. Yeah. Because of Chernobyl. Yeah, I think so.

It's not a nutrition thing. But yeah, I could definitely be healthier. Though I went to the doctor today for the first time in years because I finally qualified for that SAG health insurance. Oh yeah. And he was like, you seem great. I mean, you honestly just like look healthy to me. Yeah.

I feel like certain things don't look like, you know, like your tooth quality, your nail beds, like that kind of stuff like in people, like whether you have good hair or not. Like I've never had good hair because I'm like nutritionally deficient in some ways. Probably also going back to the Soviet Union and my mom's shitty nutrition.

What are you eating nowadays? It's like what she prescribes like lots of like sauerkraut and kimchi type foods. Nice. Bone, broths. Beans? Beans sometimes like vegetables, like fresh seafood, that kind of thing.

Nice. Yeah. Sounds good. It's not bad. And I think it helps also with like mood disorders too. Probably. Like a lot of people are like literally dysthymic, depressive because they have shitty diets.

What does she think about fasting? I think she's into it. Like intermittent fasting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, are you basically like can... Lindy style fast.

It is. Yeah. I mean, you basically can stop eating at seven and start again at noon or something. Yeah. Normal. It's like a decent way of going about it. What does she think about not eating all day

and then getting drunk and eating Taco Bell really late at night? Probably not good, but I do it all the time. I eat Taco Bell. I didn't eat Taco Bell last night, but I've been eating a lot of fucking Taco Bell. What do you get at Taco Bell? I get Nachos Belgrondes with a cheesy gritty to crunch.

Yeah. And then sometimes like an extra hard Taco, but I usually don't. I eat like half of everything. Do you get like a fountain drink? Well, it's late at night. Yeah. And they don't have the only uncaffeinated drink they have

is Sieramist. Oh. And I don't really like Sieramist. Do you fuck with the cantina? I would, but there's not one close enough to me. But I for sure would. I love Taco Bell. It tastes like dog food.

It tastes sweaty. I like it. It tastes like the sweat of Mexican day laborers. I like Mountain Dew Baja Blast, but I don't want to drink it at like midnight when I'm doing my nightly Taco Bell ritual. Oh my God. Well, the other thing that this woman talks about

is how it was previously thought that any difficulties you had like diseases, ailments were due to gene mutations or gene deficiencies. But she says it's often due to like epigenetic phenomenon, like your genes switching on and off depending on what kind of diet you have. And that's like backlogged in your genome

from like generations ago. So you can literally coast off of the fumes of your genes. Well, hence creatinism. Creatinism? Yeah. Like a creatin. It's like not. Like a retard.

No, like creatinine. Yeah. But it's a real like creatinism is like a condition that's like probably not very popular these days. It's like a deformed. Yeah. Like look at this picture of a creatin. And these are all like the factors.

It's like. Like low IQ. Nutrition, climate, soil, social situation. And they're like a little creatin guy. He's cute. But that's what happens if you like. Yeah. Yeah.

For sure. But what I'm saying is you can coast off of your genes. Like the fact that we only went to the dentist for the first time in 10 years and neither of us needed dental work is due to your great grandparents and grandparents and parents and so on. The doctor today was like any diseases in your family.

And I'm like, kind of no. Just retardation. Yeah. I was going to like no. I'm allergic to bullshit. But actually I am kind of fine. Yeah. Thank God.

Health as well. It really is. And I'm, yeah. It's one of the few things that actually tangibly truly matters. I didn't tell my doctor about eating Taco Bell, but I think he would have said. I think he probably would have said.

He told me it was okay for me to smoke cigarettes. My doctor said that too. Basically if you try to not. Yeah. Europe, you know. Well, they say like, well, how many do you smoke and you're like, oh, like under five a day and they're like, you're fine.

Yeah. I smoke like two packs a week. Yeah. Roughly. That's not. So I thought you were going to say two packs a day. No, no. Like a week.

Because I've had these. I got these galois, which I'm so sick of in fucking Berlin. They're harsh. And I got two cartons. They're harsh, but I keep smoking them because I like have so many and I'm realizing how long it's taking me to get through them.

And I'm like, that's probably good. Yeah. You should sell some. All right. Beneath you to go. Good DM me if you want to pack your galois on the low. I'll throw them up on the merch site. Should we talk about Cornell West?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I was going to ask you what you think the Taliban guys eat. Kebabs. They probably like slaughter a goat and bury it in the ground. They're eating lots of meat on the bone

and stuff for sure. Yeah. They probably eat McDonald's. Yeah. I mean, they literally are like Bronze Age mindset because they're like literally the descendants of like Bronze Age people. They are.

True. Way more than any of these like Twitter guys are. Yeah. You know, like functionally gay bodybuilders. Functionally. But yeah, let's talk about this interview with Cornell West that I read because your sister posted it.

He's right about everything as usual. My sister's like functionally black. She really likes like that black preacher tradition. It speaks to her. I think it speaks to anyone with a heart. Yeah. Also black guys love her because she's like thick and has short hair.

That's cool. Yeah. It's cool. Not my demo. But that's okay. Yeah. It's fine. Different strokes for different folks.

It's fine. Okay. Shallow cervix. In this interview, he talks about like the legacy of Christianity and leftism. And but also very eloquently about like talking to people he disagrees with, which he must have listened to the last episode of our pod because we were kind of

on that tip. We were kind of on that tip. And the interviewer asks him about a colleague of his. What's his name? Or like some other intellectual who says like anti-Semitic and homophobic stuff. Do you know who I'm talking about? Oh, Lewis Farrakhan.

No, no, no. This other guy. Oh, the Princeton professor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Cornel West says when the biblical text says one should

allow nothing to get in the way of one's love for God and neighbor, we have to take that seriously. I'm not saying everybody has to follow that. That's my understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Many Christians would say I'm wrong. There's a whole host of Christians who would send me straight to hell.

I think God that they're not in control of things. And then the interviewer keeps sort of pushing on the Robbie George stuff. And he says, I think Robbie is wrong on a number of issues. We've talked about it in public and private, but that doesn't mean he's got some kind of taint that you can't be in the same room with him. You can't have a conversation with him.

You can't argue with him. That's true. Not just about Robbie. That's true for anybody who I have deep disagreements with. I mean, that was not only well said, but just like personally fortifying. Yeah. Because sometimes I'm like, why shouldn't I talk to this

person? Yeah. Because they have a bad reputation. Like that's ridiculous. Why? Like isn't just like at bare minimum. Isn't your duty as like an intellectually curious person, especially when we work in the podcasting industry to talk

to all sorts of different people, right? Yeah. To even if you end up disagreeing with them to understand your opponents. Or yeah, not even opponents, maybe even is too strong. Yeah. You're weird. Just your fellow fellow man.

Yeah. Fellow man. I think Cornell is laying on the Christianity a little thick because I would say that his major sin is vanity. I think he's a brother who's feeling himself and he wants to be liked. And as far as sins are concerned, vanity. He wants to be liked, but not as much as he wants to be right.

Right. And virtuous. Yeah. I think a lot of people suffer because they want both and you can't have both. You can't be a truth teller and always likeable. They're incompatible. Well, a lot of people don't like Cornell last.

Yeah. Yeah. He's taken his share of shit. But I think like as far as sins are concerned, vanity is a relatively harmless and forgivable one. And people always, always, always without fail confuse vanity and narcissism. Vanity is being a little bit too preoccupied with outward

appearances and perceptions. It's a hot girl taking a selfie. Narcissism is a totally different beast. Narcissism means you are incapable of love and you are incurable. You know what I'm saying? Like, and it means that it doesn't mean that you love yourself or find yourself attractive or find yourself to be intellectually

superior. It means that you deeply hate yourself because you depend on the opinions of people who you loathe and don't respect for your validation, which is like an Afghanistan type situation. Totally. Of the mind. Totally. Like you'll never get out of that.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No. Narcissism, I agree. Narcissists fundamentally hate themselves. It's a preoccupation with the self that is so deep it becomes like a black hole.

It's bottomless. Yeah. Exactly. It's not a preoccupation of the self where you are early. It's not whimsical the way that vanity is. Vanity is very, well, vanity is very outward facing. Yeah. I think that there are people who are guilty of vanity who are

very much capable of love, right? Of course. And the vanity is not like the most attractive or like trust worthy quality, but it's not the worst quality by a long shot. Narcissism, I think. I mean, in its extremes all since, you know, I may even, you know, and you could say that an extreme form of vanity could be corrosive.

Yeah. And it excludes all other interactions. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is narcissism much like liberalism is one of those things that also exists on a spectrum. And we're all narcissists to some degree. Yeah. Some more than others.

And some so much so that they are totally like functionally whatever. Existentially incapable of love. And I think there's more and more of those kind of people. Malignant narcissism. Yeah. Is the clinical term for it, I think. Out in Dimes Square the other day with my sister, we were getting

dinner and I saw these girls who were like very pretty and like very well dressed, hugging each other in this. Like, I don't know how to describe it because it was very intuitive in this completely false way. Not to say that they were like competitive or jealous of each other or anything like that. I don't know their dynamic, but the whole interaction was like inhuman, antisocial, it was false.

It was like, again, a simulacra of like a social interaction. And I thought like, wow, on the whole people are becoming way more physically attractive, but way more morally and spiritually unattractive, especially like in the coastal elite cities. I don't know about the middle, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I see a lot of that sort of thing in the West Village.

You know, there's a lot of very attractive, very high functioning people. Should we crack another? Yeah, I'll take a little bit. There's a lot of very attractive, very high functioning people who seem like they are, you know, normies for lack of a better word. And I see them, it's very like evocative of like American psycho like eating at these sort of trendy restaurants, all kind of

dressing the same, participating in this like high conformity culture that feels very false. But then I also imagine that they probably have like tons of private horrible anguishes that are even all the more painful because they have to present in such a like rigid, highly conformist way. Right. You know. I think what I love.

Does that make sense? Yeah. What I love about Cornel West is that he doesn't strike me as a miserable person. No, definitely not. He's not a miserable prick. No, no, no. He, um, yeah, he definitely is capable of, of love through the grace

of God. Yeah, but I think you're right. There are a lot of people who go home and they privately agonize and like see the, which is all the more sad because if you find yourself in that situation, it's like a dead giveaway that your priorities are misaligned in life. I think it's totally normal to feel like insecure sometimes or like just aligned.

Of course. Yeah, but it's very hard to be like an integrated person. Yeah. And there's always something that's going to like be a thorn in your side. I get it. But, um, I think that he's right. It's almost like a, an inverse Taliban argument that he's making.

My only question was like, I wasn't sure why they were so heavy on the DSA stuff, not because I like hate the DSA even or anything, but because it like seems irrelevant now. Well, I think because of like, I don't know, Dorothy Day and like, you know, the Christian tradition of, of leftism. Okay. I think is the thread. Yeah.

They were trying to like elicitate something about because, you know, Jesus was the first. Yeah. There is what leftism at its most robust, I think does have like a Christian. It does. And that's what he says in the piece too. I don't have the quote, but he says like, um, you know, contemporary

Christianity, much like the rest of American culture is like too preoccupied with like success. And that doesn't have anything to do with being a Christian. Yeah. With like marketing. Yeah. And lifestyle. Yeah.

Like real Christianity is about like solidarity and love and sacrifice and like taking care of the most vulnerable people. And self effacement fundamentally, um, not, not self loathing, but self effacement and sacrifice, duty, whatever. Um, and not self effacement with the expectation of getting something in return. Right. Like that cynical style of martyrdom that you see all over the place

now too. Yeah. Um, where people, um, go the extra mile and then see privately when it's not recognized and they do it time and time again, especially women, I think though men do it too. Women really be doing it. Yeah. And that's, that's a narcissistic disturbance, I think as well.

What? Like a time and time again, sacrificing and hardering yourself. It's called codependency. Yeah. You know? Like punishing yourself to people, you know, the, so then you can like project and call them a narcissist. Yeah.

Like extracting your resources, but really you want to be like victimized and punished by them. Right. Yeah. It's, have you ever read drama of the gifted child? No, what's that? You should read it. Okay.

It's about, not cause I think you're a narcissist, but it's about the, it's by this woman, Alice Miller, who was like a child psychologist. Um, and the subtitle is it's drama of the gifted child, how narcissistic parents form and deform the emotional lives of their children. It's really short, but it's just about how like, It's like a psychoanalytic type of thing. If you have a narcissistic parent, chances are you become a narcissist. Right.

It's also like, like nutrition. It's like, there's this void that gets created and children, especially when they're gifted or sensitive or like precocious can pick up on their like parents narcissistic need for them. Uh-huh. And then they, you know, end up never really establishing like a real, uh, a healthy like ego, a healthy, like a goic relationship with themselves. I'll get, I'll give it to you.

Yeah. I'd love to read that. So meaning that they take that formative early relationship with the parent and extrapolate it to future relationships with other people. Exactly. Like friends primarily and like romantic partners. Yeah. They can see that being a contagion.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like very scary. Yeah. Um, I don't know. I that kind of like confronting actual kind of malignant narcissism has always or like like malignant BPD has always been like a very like existentially terrifying. Yeah.

Thing for me. Yeah. I mean, I think in its extremes, it really is like highly disordered and probably incurable. Yeah. But in that way still like even sadder cause it's like they can't help it. Yeah. I was really drawn to lash because I was absolutely like obsessed with understanding narcissists. Narcissism is a modern phenomena.

But also, um, as he says, right, the, the narcissist makes the ideal candidate for psychoanalysis because the analysis can be interminable because there's no cure. Well, it's not like that the psychoanalyst actually is the perfect candidate for a narcissist. It's the ultimate narcissist. Absolutely. Yeah. It's like two narcissists bouncing against each, you know, colliding with each other in a room.

I have, I mean, I have a lot of issues with, with therapy. I finally quit my shrink because I was like, this isn't for me. I can't, you know, function in, in this paradigm. And I think my therapy is going great. That's good. But I, I was like, you know, I think like my shrink also is probably not that great. But it's something that I don't want to. Well, I think first of all, you're doing a different sort of therapy, which is like a

young Ian and your grand thing. I don't, I don't like the Freudian model. Yeah. I don't love it. I think that there's something perverted also like therapy is the Afghanistan of the mind because it makes you, you know, again, like you, you slog through this hostile terrain where there are like warring tribes all in your head. Yeah.

But you have to. Yeah. On a certain level. Yeah. You have to like look inward. Yes. And every tribe wears your face. You have to confront those things if you want to make like progress as a human being.

But I agree. Yeah. Like Freudian psychoanalysis. Well, that's what's so, why I am so interested in it. I like it so much, I think it's because it is so perverted and there's something about Freud that I always really vibed with and it is because it's perverted. But in terms of like therapeutic benefit, like actually trying to be more functional, more integrated, more like.

Well, yeah. And I really reckon with yourself is like, I think Freud is probably a mistake. Right. Also, that's why I was so, I'm drawn to, okay, like I'm drawn to like the history, the intellectual history of psychoanalysis for sure, Freudian psychoanalysis. That's also why I love that Janet Malcolm book, Psychoanalysis, The Impossible Profession, which is a very damning and condemning book. It's not a positive book by any means.

Well, that's why I like Lacan not to be super annoying, but it's because of his like return to Freud and like the chaotic like incomprehensible thing he does with it. That's where I think it gets like really interesting. Yeah. But, but yeah, as like a, as a medical practice, I definitely have no, no faith in it. Yeah. I mean, it's, I think it's borderline, like in certain cases, irresponsible, if not criminal. Not everyone's cut out for it for sure.

CBT is definitely the, well, yeah, the move probably. And I think it's also, I mean, it's a very Jewish profession. It's like, I can never tell which combination makes more sense that Jews are the women of ethnicities or that women are the Jews of gender because Jews are the women of ethnicities. Because there's something like they find it very titillating to talk about themselves and only themselves for hours on end. There is something archetypal about it with Jews and psychoanalysis to borrow a Jungian term like for sure.

And I actually, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll view it rather charitably and say it's not just like bottomless narcissism. It is like a somewhat pure and innocent need to understand and categorize. Yeah. Jews are very discursive. The Torah is all about, they're very verbal. The Torah is all about like discussion and, yeah, hashing stuff out and men talking and talking and talking and so in that way, just talking and talking.

So it makes sense that, yeah, that talk therapy would be like kind of their domain. And it's, yeah, it's unfortunate that Jung is kind of maligned as this like hippie kind of woo woo like new age school of thought because I think it really is just as legitimate. It's just that Jews are very good at like creating, at being industrious and legitimizing themselves and like just dominating and controlling entire industries. Yeah. What's that? Psychotherapy.

I mean, that is a compliment. Yeah. You know, that's what I like about them. That's why I like working in the entertainment industry, you know, because I really feel a kinship with the Jewish people, but I'm just talking descriptively. Like that's, yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. But not enough of a kinship.

Please. I love working in the entertainment. Please. I would never do an anti-Semitism, but yeah, there's just something perverted and pathological about constantly revisiting your past traumas and it's very like very unclear. It's an open question. The jury's out whether it's more traumatic to experience the original trauma or to retraumatize yourself by constantly retreading that ground.

Well, as Freud would say, traumas demand to be repeated. So I think even if the idea is that if you are able to sort of look at the traumas head on, confront them, that you will be less doomed to repeat them because you'll gain awareness of them and be able to break patterns that you might find yourself like stuck in. Right. And, but yeah, I think like sometimes enough is enough and you really have to, I don't know, you have to go into Freudian analysis, I think very deliberately. Yes.

It's not something to just wait into like. Like casually. Yeah. I think you have to really kind of have some notion of what it is you want to address. You have to be a real Taliban about it. Yeah. You have to have a Taliban mindset. And then Lacan sort of takes that to its logical conclusion with like really centering like

desire. Yeah. And being like for Lacan, like if a analysis and like committed suicide, that would could be a success, you know, because it would mean that they had like fulfilled some desire that they had come to analysis. What if the, the analyst committed suicide? And that's a double success. If it's a murder suey, then it's a slam dunk.

What if the analysis just waltzes in that office and opens fire and takes the receptionist to in a couple of other patients? As long as I don't make it a bogo. Yeah. Anyway, that was tangential. Yeah. It was a nice little detour. Yeah.

I hope you guys enjoy that. Anyway, what else did Cornell West say? I mean, he drops a lot of like good buzzwords. He talks a little bit about the, the democratic realignment from the party of the working ports, the party of the professional managerial class and how this went along with a decline in religiosity. And he says it's highly educated, right? But you can be miseducated.

It just like you can be educated and I would add to that over socialized to quote my favorite transgender uncle Ted Kaczynski. But the other thing that I really love that he said was the point about, are you called Barack Obama or Rockefeller Republican in blackface? Obama is wearing blackface. Yeah. He's fake and gay. We agree with Cornell West.

Yeah. And Barack Obama is faking guy. Yeah. I mean, he was wrong about some things. I feel like it's laughable like that in 2021, we're still pretending that like the burning wing of democratic politics is the underdog, like the thing that happened with Nina Turner, where a lot of people are pretending that she was out fund raised and outnumbered by the kind of centrist candidate.

And in fact, I think she had way more money, you know, like that kind of stuff. So he has kind of a libtard in that way, but all great boomers go the way of the libtard. You have to. We're all going to become, I mean, we all are libtards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But I think there's still, I mean, I really loved his, the last thing he said, which was people come to me and say, uses a high-pitched voice, Oh, you called Obama the black mascot of Wall Street. That's the worst thing possible. No, what's worse is promoting a policy on the back of working people. So you're right. When we have a disagreement, we've got to be very honest.

And sometimes when you're honest, lo and behold, the language can become hyperbolic. Yeah. I was like, yeah. I was like, that's right. Sometimes I'm being so honest. Yeah. And I don't, I'm using extreme language. Yeah.

And it's not, it's not up to my haters to dissect what, what I mean. I'm like, I'm getting a, grasping at a bigger truth. Word. Salad. Hyperbole. Um, and what was it? He said that spiritual gangster comment. Oh yeah.

I love that he calls people gangsters in like a negative, pejorative way. I wonder what he thinks of Tariq Nishid. He's so charming. Um, I wonder what he thinks of Tariq Nishid. He probably forgives him for his sins. Yeah. He would probably have a conversation with him. Yeah.

It's not as if he has some taint. Um, but yeah, I think he, he also like is not talk is, he's not really talking about adopting like religion wholesale. He's talking about like adopting the spirit of religiosity and letting that be your guide. Like he's not telling people that they all have to be practicing Christians, right? Um, no, he's not being like, he's not that being that preachy about it or dogmatic. I think, but I do think that they go hand in hand. Yeah.

I think you have to believe in God. Yeah. To believe in love. Well, yeah. I mean, you have to believe in something. Yeah. But that's very hard. So again, like, um, I always chuckle a little when people are like, Anna is larping as trad

because I've never, ever portrayed myself as a trad person. You have a baby out of wedlock. I have a baby out of wedlock at 35. I'm like a reformed party girl. I'm not trad. I've never aspired to be trad. My only conceit, which I think is the correct conceit is not a statement of, uh, value, but a statement of fact, I think is that most people, the vast majority of people would

be happier with a smaller boundary with more limitations. I think most women overwhelmingly probably want to get married and have children to use that example. And I think that that gets confused for me saying that women should all be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, which I've never supported that controversial. It's not at all. I mean, it's like, I think that sounds very sound. Yeah.

I think most liberal feminism has led them very much astray. Yeah. But I guess to that point, I think, yeah, but I mean, to that point, like the, I don't know if it's possible for large swaths of people who have, again, an internal monologue, a running meta narrative going on inside their heads to actually plausibly become religious in the old traditional sense of the word, because you're too self aware and you know too much. What, like, but that's not how faith works.

Yeah. But it's, I think it's very hard. It's certainly it's challenging for people to be able to sustain the faith. Yeah. Right. I mean, to develop a faith that you never had for the most part some, some people did. I mean, you did, but I'm reared in a totally secular mode. I mean, I'm like a spiritual person.

I feel like I believe in God, I say a prayer every day. Okay. But religious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think he's advocating for any, like, you know, particular denomination of Christianity.

He's not saying you have to be like a practicing Catholic that goes to confession and takes communion. It's, yeah, I think you're to your original point that it is about like a spirit, but I think it is still, I don't think you can fake it. Yeah. And that religion as opposed to just spirituality does just give people a good structure and a framework in which to like practice those ideals. Yeah.

There's a lot of social incentive in, in it, you know, and that's sort of the point. Yeah. Because it is about love. Yeah. So it's part of it is about like, I don't know, communing with, with fellow Christians. And I mean, my main like, I guess, and reading the gospels. I mean, that's. That's really all of it.

That's like the most Christian thing you can do. Like the religious texts. Yeah. You can't go wrong with that because even if you come away from it just as secular as you were going in, you would have learned a lot about just like every discipline under the sun, essentially. Yeah. Um, but yeah, you know, I was like reading, like I was thinking about this because I read

that Liz B piece in the Atlantic about JD Vance and how he was weaponizing children by using the phrase, the childless left. And I found myself like nodding along to that piece because I also actually like very much didn't like him that phrase. I thought it was, I understand that it was like kind of, um, meant to be like, uh, pithy and snarky and have a Trumpian vigor, but I thought it was unfair and harsh to call entire like a giant group of people, the childless left left. I think charitably maybe he was talking about the mouthpieces, like the ambassadors who are

legitimately like anti natalist. Well, and I think that that also speaks to something that Mr. West was talking about, which was the, on the left there being this very un-Christian, very secular streak of like ideology and that that is not a robust foundation on which to build like a vibrant leftist movement, especially compared to something like, you know, like Dorothy Day and the Catholic workers and like, like a spiritual religious love for mankind, as opposed to what like the DSA or whatever has turned into, which is like, I don't know, people like whispering and talking about how abortions are rad or whatever those like people do and like shunning

people and like that's not Christian. And that's really what Cornell West is kind of on about is it's like, yeah, that's why the left is sort of like doomed to fail because these like purity politics aren't. They're narcissistic and they're anti-social. Exactly. They're, they're bloodless and loveless. And I feel very vindicated. And you'll never win because like maybe two years ago we said that saying something like

abortion is rad is just morally disgusting and reprehensible. It really is. Yeah. And like, so I was thinking also about these new campaigns of like people like JD Vance and Blake Masters. I like Blake Masters. Don't crucify me. JD Vance, actually, I think he leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I know like a lot of people I know seem to be very bullish for him. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy and then it was made into a movie and now he's running for Senate. I think he freaks me out a little. But I was thinking about how this new coalition of like kind of trad young men who are saying and doing all the right things for the time being are almost an anti-squad. Like they are to the right with the squad is to the left. And it's very hard.

Like I want to believe that some changes around the corner, but it's very hard for me to believe that this is anything more than a branding exercise. So again, I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah. And everything sort of seems to go that way. Yeah. Unless you're literally the Taliban. Yeah.

Whose brand is strong. Yeah. Their brand is trending. Big time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. But they didn't do it with branding alone.

They did it with convictions. Crit and gusto and lots of calorie restriction. See you. See you. See you. Ok for a