TRASHFUTURE - 2018: A Year of Brain Expansion Part 2 of 2 (feat. Simon Childs)

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

This is part 2 of a 2-part extended recording in which your diligent hosts review a year that was bad. Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Nate (@inthesedeserts), join Vice UK home affairs editor Simon Childs (@simonchilds13) to discuss 2018, the year our brains got so irradiated by dumbness that we began appreciating Joker memes in earnest. Please bear in mind that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have an upcoming live show -- with comedian Josie Long -- in London on February 21st at the Star of Kings (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) starting at 7.30 pm. You can buy tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-ft-josie-long-tickets-54546538164 *COMEDY KLAXON* The previous Smoke event has sold out, but on January 31st at 8 pm, Milo will perform his own show at Smoke Comedy at the Sekforde (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA). Tickets are free, but make sure to sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-presents-milo-edwards-wip-tickets-54529080949 Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

All right, so highlights of Q three. Have I done this in order? No, I've not. I have I written down the actual dates that these things happened also know, but because I I am the the reader of things on this on this podcast. I am the the organizing force. I'm the light in the darkness. I've gone Jordan Peterson on these chaos dragons. I've done what I usually do and I have clipped short readings from all of my highlights of the news Q three. So Q three. What's that? It's July. It's it's the start of July to the end of September. Damn summer, the fucking season. It's a it's a get it's a get in. It's a get in ass season. It's also a small Audi SUV available from your local Audi dealer.

So the first they said I get free out if I said that everyone go to Occo tell Occo that Riley sent you they'll give you something for free. I bet it's on the market. It's very good. Okay, so I have a a selection from vice actually by friend of the show Angus Harrison as gone at gone six p.m. The temperature was still 25 degrees outside and inside the bar full of hundreds of jostling bodies. The air was thick the DJ obscured by a cocoon of heavy duty cling film presumably to protect him from flying drinks methodically work through tunes from Anton decks. We're on the ball to Neil Diamond sweet Caroline each enjoying a bigger response than the last the crowd all under 30 draining massive two pint plastic cups of lager

almost entirely decked out in England's new pre-match training top were fizzing then three lions the new national anthem dropped and the place erupted. Oh man. That was really nice. I was just I was just like enjoying that. I want you to continue reading this one Angus Harrison reading article. Yeah, this one of those far right American articles and the song is the three lions of Islam. It's everyone loved singing the theme song from the movie four lions. No, this was football coming home, which was like we're the entire time I've lived in Britain was genuinely one of the high points of me being here. It was a great time because I came immediately home after Russia thought football was coming home and then got to experience it

all over again in Britain. But the whole experience I find it was like just in addition to it being probably one of the high points of living of living here. It also was this uniquely British experience because there was this kind of sort of frantic febrile energy around a completely symbolic victory that wasn't going to touch anyone's lives, but that sort of just felt very important and that for a second there was something that was going on and it was happening constantly every day with new updates all the time with its own cast of characters. Like it's the it's the opposite of looking at the Tory government basically where it's something that makes it good about it's something that makes us feel good about ourselves. It's something that basically makes

people not hate one another and it seems to be like and yeah you can love its cast of characters and it actually thought that we were going to go to have something good happen to us, but then in true British fashion of course we got knocked out by Croats. Yeah but the whole vibe was like just fucking good and like because I remember they did that sort of promo video for like the squad's been released and it was like with all these like kids in like Sunderland and then it zoomed to like some girls playing football in like I don't know fucking like Somerset or whatever and then it went to like a disabled kid in like a youth center or whatever and like and like it was like just like ethnically diverse or whatever and like I

didn't I just felt like the sort of vibe of the England squad not to sort of like recuperate nationalism for liberalism which I don't believe in but like the whole vibe was just like really really nice and just like oh yeah this is like a good place and we should totally win and in the thing in the other thing like we just again this is also so super English we allowed ourselves to be completely diluted by inconsequential victories early on yeah yeah we fucking beat Panama I mean it's nice to be able to see a thing like that that's not also a far right rally you know like it's rare I've only lived here four months and I like I've made the joke before that before I came to London as an extremely mature adult and the only time I'd been here was to be

in Norwich for like a day when I was a kid but like seeing that many people supporting England when it wasn't also like let's kick the Pakistanis out like it was just it was a thing that was completely removed from that I remember like one world cup that's just cricket where I remember like one world cup where England did like very very badly and I think it was it was in the early 2000s and I was working in my dad's store and like some customer like it was halftime and like everyone knew that England was coming out and these customer came in and was just like you just because they aren't English they aren't English they have no loyalty to this country we're not English they look like and then so it goes into two strands one is that they're not English and

therefore they don't love their country enough to play well and the second one's that they love money so much but they would rather play well for their like premiership football team than for the England national team um both of which are like stupid and like abysmal arguments but I just remember that very vividly being quite you know uh just like evident when they played really badly so like this year I didn't really hear much of that yeah um even even after the last I didn't really hear like two stuff that was like too bad I was in a south London pub and there were like a lot of middle fans and they were singing songs about Churchill oh good that was kind of a low point but yeah it was the insurance dog

yeah I think he used to sponsor it loves that guy in the wall yeah that was weird and then I got in a really like intense conversation with one of them who was like mixed race but who was extremely racist and it was quite weird and like he had a lot of basically he's the worst enemy well yeah like no it was fuck yeah I mean one of the things I remember I about this whole this whole experience I wanted to start it off nicely was in addition to just it like the heat kind of driving everyone crazy we did it there was this feeling and throughout London where like people were people for better or for worse like I hate everyone so this is a mixed bag for me but people were talking to one another people were like

there was this weird sort of air of friendliness that just sort of happened for a couple of weeks and you could just be suffused in sort of a nice feeling like like I think that the Michelin web show sort of summed it up best a nice British feeling is basically like sinking into a tub of warm cream you could you could make eye contact with someone on the district line and then do a benzo off them in a public toilet so that's that was my my first thing football coming home and of course it didn't and we all got back to reality after that like blissful period but it was coming home oh actually what before we move on I do want to also point out the friends who made along the way I also want to point out that like the the horrifying rate like the just

awful vilification of Raheem Sterling by by like the son versus Harry Kane where they were like oh he bought his mama house and he's marrying his sweetie and he doesn't have a tattoo of a gun in his leg and then they and he's white and wait no we didn't mean to say that last bit you know stop that bit up where it's like it's you could all like lurking under the surface of that's why it made it so interesting was lurking under the surface of all this sort of positivity was this these nasty streaks but I think yeah I agree but I also think maybe that's like one of the differences between this World Cup and like previous ones as well like this World Cup took place this might be fucking pretentious but like in an era of social media so it's not just like

absurd tabloid like we're definitely going to win and also we're a bit racist it was like it took place in a slightly different world where like you can push back on that and basically when Raheem Sterling was getting shit like the whole of social media was like fuck the sun and fuck you and like because they rightly should have yeah exactly the only response to the sun yeah I also just want to say one thing about the World Cup if we're doing because this is obviously to do with like end of the year it's also like the end of my youth basically the World Cup because it's the last World Cup that's not going to fucking suck before I'm 37, 6 or something because the next World Cup is in Qatar in the winter so that's just going to fully not be good and it's not going to

have the same vibe it's not going to be like a beautiful glorious summer you can drink endless lager and enjoy the football it's going to be like okay it's like is it just done with Christmas and now it's the World Cup so the next World Cup that's actually good will be in eight years time so for all those you know all those tweets about like oh this is like you know the summer where people are going to write their novel and this like this summer sets the scene it's like kind of like literally two and it's the last one like that for a while that's so fucking depressing well I'll be 42 so I feel you I feel you but also I just laughing because again I moved here in August so I missed that and I'm rasking Milo I'm like I'm new to England in the grand scheme of

things help me out when I see a bunch of St. George's crosses is that football or racism he's it's usually the latter let's be honest um yeah that's how you know not to go into a pub if it's got the st. George's cross like we have sky it's like well I'm not going in there okay so my next item on my list um apple becomes the world's first trillion dollar company and my reading from here actually isn't from then it's from an article by friend of the show grace Blakely that was written this week because apple has now flash crashed of course and she says such are apples profits that the company cannot invest all the money it earns cash hoarding by global monopolies is part of the explanation for the failing falling business

environment apple is also notorious for tax avoidance which deprives governments of the resources they need to invest so apple basically if we all want to know where all the money is apple has it in ireland yeah apple has it apple has it all they literally have too much money to know what to do yeah they they because they're they have so much money they can't profitably invest at all but they still pay their ceo 251 times more than they pay their average worker why don't they just make all their workers absurdly worthy because then they wouldn't be motivated to keep working right obviously apple is working on a huge mattress and they need stuff to fill it with apple apple i mean maybe they could invest in a giant mattress outside the

factory where like borderline slave conditions lead people to commit suicide but no this money has to be kept in a warehouse in ireland where it can do the least good reporting live from the massive apple cash mattress as it catches people throwing themselves from the roof due to poor working conditions going wow bro this is fucked up made me think that would literally be a more productive and humanitarian use for apple's giant wodge of cash if they printed out in hundreds if they got american hundreds and they created a giant anti suicide mattress out of them but no they're not doing that they're just sitting on it yeah i mean but then again also we we saw this in the united states where um the whole thing with the tax cut but basically if companies decide

they try to want it they want to pay their workers more than like their boards will fire the entire management and get new people like your job is to give us money not them yeah and it's like yeah it's trash but i mean the system is organized to be trash which is like the most platitude observation but watching this happen like you just said like your argument simon you could literally give every person who works for apple a million dollars and it wouldn't make a difference yeah like they well yeah if they're a trillion dollar company i mean greatest their valuation is not the amount of actual cash they have on hand they still but they what part of the reason they have an absurdly high valuation is because they have so much cash

on hand yeah they've they've got some some eight nine figure amounts of money if i'm not mistaken yeah apple workers should unionize and demand massive pay rises but like they'll be like a union of millionaires i'll be sick it'd be so fucking okay that would be a party at twt i'd want to go to the fucking union caviar blast fuck yeah right they don't act like that isn't a party you've already gone to shut up um i read the dms um and the other thing that i i sort of that reminds me of right and we talked about this then which is like apple and it's sort of compatriots at the top of the tech world like they comprise like 25 percent of the s and p 500 and finance comprises another 15 percent so and the and in tech mainly their business model is either apple

horde cash um amazon sort of pretend like what you're what you're doing is building technology when really what you're doing is figuring out how to casualize and pay workers less or facebook and google which is advertising so but none of these things are actually creating anything or adding any or adding any value to the world more broadly i don't even mean in a moral sense i mean like in a production sense they're not actually making anything they're basically contriving to make it worse yeah and then 15 percent of the of the s and p 500 involves lending people money so that they can spend money on like t shirts that are on ads target to them on facebook yeah it's a really good system i think i would admit james bull has some opinions

i was gonna save it but riley how much you can't put a number on the amount of joy that those yeah i'm a sagittarius and i like dog food so what about it t shirts you know you wouldn't get it it's you wouldn't get it it's a pug a pug loving forklift driver thing um and so that that rules and that's what's defining our economy going forward and we should link grace's article in the description is really good and it's what's going to cause our next big recession which i can't wait for in the era of extreme cut to the bone austerity across the world yeah i'm sure it's going to be a really really good thing because apple already has all the money and that's part of the problem because no one

else can spend it so there's not very much growth and so when we have another major recession what public services are you going to cut what wages are you going to depress like what is there left so that was cheerful all right are we sorry we are sorry we are sorry i'm gonna be about the bends therisa may held her staff physically hostage at a country house in order to save a brexit deal that died immediately and was completely unworkable yeah that was so good and she told the drivers not to take them home if they resigned yeah number ten is told ministers arriving at checkers that business cards for local taxi firms are in the foyer so they can make the 40 mile journey back to london if they resign and lose the right to use the ministerial cars

considering their staking entire political careers on these grand gestures i don't think a couple hundred pound taxi fee really was going to deter anybody but maybe the social awkward this might have i mean there's our british ministers we're talking about i mean also just imagine also like could no one have gotten wind of this ahead of time and just gone in their own car it's not so these people don't own their own car come now my love that would be unseemly no they're wealthy they take trains oh yeah i'm callback have their own private train that runs on the road it's just the simpsons and homers like how much would this car move me around compared to a train which i can also afford very good oh yeah so i thought that was that's a little more

of a quick hit because like it's just also funny to think back to everyone's checkers this checkers that i'm against checkers i'm resigning over checkers i hate president next to stop it to fuck checkers yeah and then it went nowhere and was meaningless yeah and then at tory conference like everyone that was wearing like chuck had like chuck checkers tote bags and shit it was like a really sort of galvanizing wheel hate terry's may now moment the kind of united the country and hating terry's may because to that point it was like some tories like to well it's like i think terry's may's um uh constituent terry's may does still have people that support her in constituencies that up and down the country it's just they are the centrist mps that represent those constituencies

and that's basically it yeah i mean does she poll all right i feel like the tories are polling surprisingly well yeah about may personally well it's like she pulls she pulls terribly but like i the other thing to think of with these polls is that like there are 40 40 percent of this country is just committed like reactionaries who are always going to vote for a reactionary party or there's not gonna vote but in terms of may like personally it's like it's her it's a historic mission her like place in the history books is the person that takes all of this shit basically and like soaks it all up and like this is not my insight i've got to cite uh gavin hains who writes for vice but he said she's like you know she's like quite protestant and like

sort of religious and she's like becoming this martyr figure and like possibly loving it and that's how she manages to go on just like failing and everyone hating her every week oh fuck who was this who was the who who was it um she's she's giles corrin she's prime minister giles corrin yeah he's you all hate me and it's just making my life better actually fuck you she's giles prime minister giles corrin he's amazing looking like massive people at checkers filming the ministers walking home down the drive doing an instagram live stream like this fucking this fucking fake people dead to reside for my government look at them fucking walking down there yeah those chinese fox i'm going to go cry at a monument um so that was that was funny because it just really

went to show that like that no deal the conservative parties makes is going to possibly satisfy anybody because most of their base just wants to reason me to like nuke your up for being foreign look it sounds like the british government needs a man who could make a deal it'd be amazing that like donald trump would go negotiate for us and then somehow the official language of the uk would become french boris johnson said that he'd be ready to get at it don trump comes back and he's just gotten a hand job from the job um okay so here's my next thing and here's some good news nodding hill carnival happened hopefully to celebrate something else that happened in the same day as nodding hill carnival which is john mccain fucking died yes john mccain died

that was a very normal time but john mccain died and everybody fell all over themselves patting patting him for for being a wise elder statesman ignoring his myriad political failings but hey i mean whatever it's not so much failings as like booming the fuck out of people yeah well yeah being being an unrepentant war monger being scammer uh yeah yeah financial criminal being basically having shot himself in the foot within 2008 and being unrepentant about it having embraced the far right after losing the primary to bush in 2000 basically being a piece of shit yeah we it's kind of a grand tradition in america that we when somebody on the right dies they're just a beloved elder statesman and when somebody on the left dies like every obituary

has to mention how how how much they failed and how how much we're better off without them awesome it's just it's so watching that happen and seeing the level of vitriol that people managed to work up when in the and anytime anybody was like uh he was pro war all the time like yeah so i've got some words uh some craven tail between his legs sniveling words from barack obama because he gave one of the eulogies at john mccain's funeral and this is some bootlicking shit john john understood as jfk understood as ronald reagan understood that part of what makes our country great is that our membership is based not on our bloodline not on what we look like or what our last names are it's not based on where our parents or grandparents

came from or how recently they are alive but an adherence to a common creed that all of us are created equal endowed by a creator with certain inalienable rights uh and that's the speech he gave to the guy who was an unrepentant war criminal who was john mccain was on record basically saying that he hated vietnamese people except he used the slur to refer to them he's like i'll hate them for the rest of my life uh he also during the 2000 date election made a joke about bombing iran said iraq we would be in iraq for a hundred years made sarah pale in his vp because he thought he was going to own the libs by picking a woman governor oh yeah like everything he did showed a terrible character and terrible judgment he was nice to the press basically john

mccain as as john mccain once said i put the steering column in his grant to reno myself it's not for sale like it sucks that he got tortured in vietnam that fucking sucks don't get me wrong but like at a certain point you can't just absolve somebody of all their terrible failings because a bad thing happened to them it's like if you get tortured in vietnam that's bad but it doesn't mean you get to do uh the savings and loan scandal or you get to advocate for a bunch of other genocidal imperial wars it just means it may you know what it means you should probably get a lot of like veterans benefits which uh if i recall correctly he was not great on no i don't just want to point out too is that john mccain it's it's funny to me to watch president

obama go out there and do that you know it's like do the eulogy and i realize he probably has to but like john mccain made it a point to be as big of a of a shithead about for example when the u.s got involved in libya in 2011 and the the french and british air forces conducted airstrikes mccain went on record being like well america is leading from the back but thankfully our allies in britain and france are leading from the front basically trying to own obama with the fact that britain was doing it from the back and it's just like i mean he was a piece of shit up until the end like his his vote against the repeal of the aca was solely based on trying to to give a procedural middle finger to mitch mcconnell yeah to look at him as some sort of example of american

politics like he's the swamp monster of american right wing politics he absolutely is and the idea that you were like oh but back when politics was good it's like that dude looked at like you said savings and loan or like the holy atwater thing which or at george hw bush that's been the republican party for forever and he's been a part yeah and here here's the second quote i've got and this it this this one's really great and finally i'm not going to do the obama voice for the rest of this and finally well john and i disagreed no it's more of a halting thing and finally while john and i disagreed on all kinds of foreign policy issues we stood together on america's role as one indispensable nation believing that with great power and great blessings comes great

responsibility he's using a spider man spider man to justify bombing everyone i mean look it's better than when uh herman kane quoted the pokemon movie still like one of the best political moments of all time oh yeah so yeah that's the thing and that's that's the one cute crucial thing here everyone's like oh yeah this is the american establishment coming together to give the middle finger to trump and being respectability back to politics but you always have to remember that donald trump in terms of international affairs has been a way more benign force than either barack obama or john mccain would have been or george bush who's the worst of them all like yeah i mean like there's some things that they've done that are insane and bad but i mean

i'm saying trump's better i'm saying trump is probably got a lower body count he's he's what he's done is he's basically green lit a lot more really damaging shit where like they're killing more civilians in places like syria but hillary would have probably had us in a war with iran by now i mean like and lord knows some of the people that have run or some of the people like tom cotton if they ever got to power in america would too so yeah i mean i i take your point yeah anyway um tom cotton if you're listening yeah boy pussy uh so as we start q4 which is going to be a bit more of a nate doing a speed run because we all remember it it's all still in the news basically hussein has to go back to his home planet hi hussein nate yeah so i mean i think the biggest

thing in q2 or q4 was the fact that on october 2 just in the beginning of q4 um jamal hashoji uh saudi expatriate dissident journalist living in the united states went to the saudi consulate and had probably the worst visit to a consulate ever where he was kidnapped and and dismembered and then his government lied very very incompetently about what they didn't do and then did do sort of but someone did it but they didn't authorize it and so on um and it just sort of led to this total the statement of total impunity on the part of the saudi's where we're basically there was a moment i think where people realized that this was the kind of thing that uh governments might not have done recently and i mean i agree the fact that happened in turkey is pretty telling but like

this is it sort of felt like perhaps there's the sort of a new era of of of governments just kind of doing where the fuck they want yay so a saudi the saudi version of the thick of it where a well-meaning saudi government minister is trying to make an announcement about bin collections outside of primary school while his aides are visibly behind him putting a bin liner that's leaking body parts into the back of a car all these journalists are like what is that and he's like do not look at them so so if you guys have comment you guys have commentary on yeah um how about this let's speed run it because yeah yeah okay cool uh november 21st sentinels a bad bad bad thing that happened should have happened yeah mbsx refer to the

earlier bit of the episode where you prefigure it all right in november sentinels islanders killed the american missionary and when everybody in the world learned about the existence of the north sentinel island uh and then it went away uh on it well they're still there uh one through one through eight december the gilet jaune protest started in france now everybody's a gilet jaune and racist i was yeah i have let's do like two very fast reactions to the sentinels um i think it's good uh that guy sucked and uh he got pincushioned which is kind of what he was asking for uh it was just a big dumb story um but uh yeah don't don't don't go to don't go to island on the sentinel islands now that would be interesting the best the best take

that i ever ever saw on sentinels islanders was uh was hasan piker doing a fake imitation version of joe rogan saying what if the sentinels were actually like will condom were super advanced but they ignored their version of jordan peterson and so feminism got out of control and now they've reverted to being a tribe that only uses stone tools um i have a good news article on gilet jaunes that i'm going to try and drag up because about everyone being them because there was a very funny one in belfast where it's basically like some really like dippy hippy like nice occupy types and then like actual huge racists um yeah about the everyone's yellow vest now there's some quite funny sort of weird contradictions so this is from the belfast telegraph where um both occupy

types and seemingly like ranting islamophobes are trying to take that label so this is yeah belfast telegraph the first protest organized by groups calling themselves occupy storm and occupy city hall and yellow vest occupy belfast list aims including equal marriage rights ending fracking and abolishing zero hours contract and then there's a second protest which promotes itself with the background picture for the group is a young white girl surrounded by figures in burkas with their back to the camera it is captioned britain 2050 why didn't you stop them grandad another another image is i was playing fortnite another image shows a figure with a hammer attacking the star and crescent symbol often

associated with the islamic world alongside the words alongside the words smash islam that's like a brexit protest level of literalism it's so like wait wait wait it's andrew lillico horny for islam stop fracking and the other guys are like smash islam oh we have to frack islam and so i suppose that the uh the final thing since we're all gilijone now i'm wearing a yellow vest at this moment um the final thing is the the two impending political disasters that we don't know what the resolution is going to be but we might find out in the next coming weeks in the u.s it's the government shutdown over the wall and for wall over just wall and uh in britain it's the brexit because at this point there's got to be

you're running out of time there has to be an outcome and none of them are likely yeah exactly there's got to be something has to happen before march 29th and correct me if i'm wrong but there's going to be a deadline coming up with regard to how long it takes for a general election the parliamentary recess in in february and then the fact that the eu elections are coming up in may i think yeah and none of this is going to matter because the world's going to be plunged into a gigantic recession by apple well that's it 2019 y'all 2018 but in 2019 we're leaving behind all this negativity we're just living positively friends brexit or no brexit i got rice i got lentils all in all it's just another brick and wool who boy 2018 huh i feel like that uh

i i i i feel like white beta auror thinking about 2018 but simon i'm gonna say thank you so much for coming here for this marathon recording session there's of this fancast of the news it's been a real long evening that's been a pleasure um it feel like it took longer to talk about 2018 than 2018 took damn damn it do be like that though it's bong one else so we have a patreon you can subscribe to it i suggest that you do you can get a second episode for five dollars uh per month it's very good um and additionally you can commodify your descent with the t shirt from lil comrad perhaps you can get the your favorite event from 2018 on you can immortalize it forever on a t shirt and finally thank no not finally and we have a live show

coming with joe z long on the 21st of thursday uh at this 21st thursday it's been so long this thursday the 21st of february at the star of kings in kings cross the event bright uh link is in the description i suggest you buy tickets by tickets early and often also before that and also free uh me doing a work in progress of my this year's edinburgh show which is all about how the fuck i ended up being a russian deep stay agent which is going to be on the 31st of also of thursday but of january also uh in at the sec food where my comedy night usually runs bon thursday instead of wednesday so do come down to that reserve a ticket online link will also be in the description awesome and finally thank you to jin sang for our theme song

it's called here we go you can find on spotify it's a very good tune you