TRASHFUTURE - Intercontinental Amuse-Bouche Barrage feat. Séamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

This week, Riley, Hussein, Nate, and November speak with friend of the show and returning guest Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) about recent developments in the airspace between Iran and Israel, plus a few tidbits about a Tory MP who simply loves getting blackmailed, a racist Spectator article that may have achieved an all-time TF shock record, and allegations that Warhammer has, in the words of Britain’s very reasonable press, ‘gone woke.’ Check out Séamus’s newsletter here: https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO IN AUSTRALIA ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming Australian tour shows here: www.linktr.ee/Miloontour *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello and welcome to this episode of TF. It is Thursday, that means it's the free one, but Milo's not here, so no one's doing the drive time radio voice. Maybe somewhere in Australia, like, at four in the morning. Sittin' bolt up price in bed at four in the morning to go, it's the free one! Yes, that's right. And it is Riley, it is Hussein, it is November, it is Nate making his appearance as his custom with the Mayan calendar. We were scheduled to be joined by

Lloyd Evans, the Spectator's theatre critic, but he's gotten held up near the train station. So instead, Seamus Malekaselli, our Iran correspondent, has joined us to talk a little bit about the goings on between Israel and its neighbors. Seamus, how's it going? It's going fine. It's been better, though. Thank you for making it. I mean, I just don't know where why Lloyd Evans. He said he was just coming

from a talk at a university and yet he's just been detained for hours. I didn't actually read the article. I was fixing a thing outside in the studio and then when I came in, I just heard everyone say, Oh, that's so racist. And I was like, yeah, I fully put like both hands to my face and went, that's so racist. It's spectator article. The spectator. They broke a new ground! Well, racist in an unexpectedly horny way as well. Again, all politics is sexual pathology, I mean Matt Christman had been saying this. But you don't really see a lot of that, well, I don't know if you, you know, you don't really see so much about these days in terms of the type of racism that emerges out of hornyness

but also makes you very horny as well. Yeah, like, it used to be the preserve of Andrew Lilico, talking about how women in the cab made him horny. Yeah, it's a very specific and special kind of person, and they are becoming rarer in British public life, which is not to say that they don't exist, but... But nobody wants to work anymore, you know? All of the professions. A lot of the sort of new racist, or the new pundits that are sort of making their

names out of racism on GB News, they're like very flat, they kind of all say the same thing, they all read the same type of stuff online. And my thinking is like, look, I don't think that racism, you're ever going to extinguish racism out of British public life. I feel like it kind of depends on it. So if you're going to be racist, at least kind of make it somewhat entertaining. And this actually delivers it very well. Reading series upfront. You know, when Veidt Harlan was on trial for his Nazi crimes, one of the fences that he

brought forward was that Jude Seuss, he brought forward all of the letters that his lead actor had received from German admirers that it couldn't possibly have been anti-Semitic, because all of these women had the hots for his anti-Semitic character. Yes, yes, Suess, or the Jew Suess, who is a horrible piece of shit doing horribly Jewish things to everyone. But it's not an anti-Semitic movie, because people are like, thank you for showing the truth. Imagine writing fan mail for that movie. The Nazi propaganda wasn't enough, you're already doing all the Nazi stuff, but also

you want to big them up a bit, you want them to feel good about themselves, you know? Leave your Fuhrer a tip so he has some walking around money. If you're scratching your head at what we've been talking about, I wanted to open by talking about the Dubai rainstorms and how our plans to locate to the upper 10 floors of the Burj have been scuppered because we were not able to hire a boat from the airport because all the crypto guys got them. However, when you see an article like this, where someone in the Spectator writes, I went to go see a lecture at Cambridge, given by a person who I'm going to name, and then-

ALICE Yeah, and sexually harass in print, and then I'm gonna talk about how I got so horny about it, I had to get my shit honked off professional style by a sex worker. That doesn't just go into the reading series, that promotes the reading series to the first item of business. RILEY It says, on the Sex Worker he sees, he says, "'She looked Chinese rather than Irish'", I'm just gonna say she's playing a game on Irish name. ALICE The two ethnicities! RILEY Oh, theater critic goes into train station

massage parlour and shocks masseuse with perfect Gaelic poem Yeah, going to the girls have to be like going to go to the island being like yes fine I didn't expect it to be Chinese. I don't know I feel like this is like a mr. Beast challenge like you have to jack off She looked Chinese rather than Irish, but you never know these days So I asked her which part of Ireland she came from. You do never know these days, that's so true. You never know these days. What does he- like, does he think that Die Another Day was a documentary? Like, what the fuck?

To be fair, these days it is generally considered offensive to just ask someone outright out of nowhere, are you Irish or Chinese? People are afraid to ask the question, what if an Irish man was Chinese? That's true. These guys are pointing that out. Anyway, it is a strange thing to see, it is a strange thing to see in print. It feels like it should maybe be like a criminal thing to have in print. Not for the sex work so much as the naming an academic whose talk you saw,

and talking about how you thought she was so beautiful that you were gonna write about a hand job you got in consequence of this. Like that feels like... ALICE Everything, like, nobody cares anymore. Gen Z did this in some way, I'm guessing. This is what this academic would look like if they were Irish or Chinese. Lloyd Evans, you are the... You get the Weirdo of the Week award, which we've not given out in a while. That's not a good enough award. You get the Go to Prison award. I don't want to blow up the spot on the various archive Paywall defeat sites, but I feel like we should maybe find a way to embed a link so people can read this because it really

Is genuinely insane, but it's not the reading series. We're just it's just out there in the ether You wouldn't want me to read this into the record like it's some of the stuff in here I don't know podcast referred to prevent You think we haven't been prepared to prevent already? You know how easy it is to buy a Tory MP, right? It's so easy. You think we could hire one to like read, like William Rag is going to read this for

us? Yes. Like in parliament so it can't be defamatory. We're going to hire an MP, we're going to be like, hey, we're a lobbying group for The Spectator. Saudi Aramco. We're a lobbying group, we're gonna lobby the all party group for, like, Ireland, China, bilateral relations, and in order to do that you have to read this into the record.

You have to read one of the strangest articles The Spectator has published in recent years, which is saying something like quite a bit. You have to read that. I think we just need to find, I mean, Tory MP, like, I don't, you know me, right? I hate the whole like, oh, the Tory MPs are behaving badly again, unless it's funny, right? Unless it's like Scott Benton being like, I am not a gambling lobbyist after, and then getting a recording playing to him saying, I am a gambling lobbyist. That's funny. I'll tell you what else is funny. Sure. What is the Mark Menzies, what is the merger about Mark Menzies or other news item,

which I'm segueing into now, was a Tory MP for Field filed, it's in Lancashire, and he now has lost the whip of the party for saying he called his former campaign manager, like an octogenarian lady at 3.15 in the morning, to ask for £5,000 in cash because he was locked in a flat with quote, some bad people and it's a matter of life and death. I love, like, conservative associations are such a funny thing, right, because as you say it's like a bunch of old ladies in blue rinses who are handcuffed to a guy out of a James Elroy novel, right? And he's just...

Getting kidnapped, right, getting, like getting expressed kidnapped and having to call your constituency association to be like, we need to liquidate some funds. How fucking embarrassing is it that you get kidnapped, presumably that's what happened, you get kidnapped, you're in a flat with some bad people, as an MP, and the most they think they can squeeze out of you is £5,000. This is a low budget country in so many ways. All the corruption, it's so cheap. You can buy an MP for so little, you can apparently ransom an MP for so little.

Well look, we've been in an era of wage stagnation for a very very long time, so we don't actually know what a good wage is. We don't know what- Yeah, they didn't have Toblerone before the repeal of the Corn Laws, and if they did then maybe you could have bought an MP for a Toblerone. ALICE This is the tip to MP kidnappers, know your worth. Think about your own self-worth and your own value before you start making demands. RILEY I feel like Chris Morris should not be done making movies about Britain. I think the story of a kidnapped MP finding out how much he's really worth is just perfect.

Just back to back news items about people having interesting experiences with sex workers, allegedly. Can I say that? Yeah, I think it's more than alleged. It's been alleged. I mean, if he writes about it himself, I feel like, yeah. The first guy did, this MP though, the allegation is that the way in which he got kidnapped was that he had too interesting of a time with a sex worker, and that led to him being

kidnapped. But this is like not the first... He's been doing this for years. But he resigned from the front bench. Getting kidnapped. It's like, Parliament's number one getting kidnapped enthusiast. He loves getting extorted. Like he's so good at getting extorted. But also like, I'm just saying, as someone who was just old enough to be watching the

news as a kid when there's like John Major sleaze scandals were happening, and they were making news in America at the time, like, how weird with it do you have to get as a kid when there's like John Major sleaze scandals were happening and they were making news in America at the time. Like how weird with it do you have to get as a Tory MP for it to be like so above and beyond that you end up being blackmailable, extortable, kidnappable. Like it's just bizarre to think like what is he getting up to? You realize that like the Dougie Smith sex party Tories are like the most socially well adjusted of them probably. Yeah, I mean, I guess in a way it feels like the sex party phenomenon is such a universal British thing that like, I don't even really know how to gauge it very well because it's

like, I guess in a way that Americans think, you know, sex party social circle and they just think of the guy painted all gold in JFK, like they don't think of just like, no, your constituency MP, half of your council, the guy who runs the corner shop, the guy painted all gold in JFK. Like they don't think of just like, no, your constituency MP, half of your council, the guy who runs the corner shop, the guy who owns the fucking, what is it? The quick fit franchise. The guy who owns the non-league football team, the manager of the non-league football team.

The guy who runs the one remaining wimpy burger in your local area, like it's just, everyone's in on it. So another couple of things before we get on to sort of more of our main stuff. That the... Just looking back at some of what has happened to him recently is, I think is like Scott Benton tier fun. Because in 2014, he had his first experience of being extorted by a sex worker, and then

stepped down from this front bench position. Um, and- To spend more time getting extorted. Exactly. But that was, like, then in 2017, he was accused by police of getting a friend's dog drunk. What?! How does that work? Well, he says they were having a fight, and he got his friend's dog drunk.

Just, in order to win the fight against the dog you have to like, slug with a mickey. He was trying to kill the dog but he was feeding the dog amaretto chocolates and the dog didn't die, it just got hammered. Yeah, it's uh, it says he's accused of locking himself in his friend's house, drunkenly getting the dog drunk, and then trying to start a fight with him when his friend confronted him about it. This dude sounds like fun, he sounds like he knows how to party, and then trying to start a fight with him when his friend confronted him about it. ALICE This dude sounds like fun, he sounds like he knows how to party, and I think we're just, we're hating on him because we're jealous,

is the thing. ZACH Yeah, we're hating on him because we live in a society where you're not allowed to be a legend anymore. ALICE Yeah, genuinely. This is like, one of the very small number of legend MPs. ZACH Like, it's, I think if we had like a liberal more liberal culture around drugs in this country we could have a story of an MP getting into a fistfight because he like blew weed smoke into his neighbors excel police face.

No he's cool he's a chill dog. See I was thinking about this completely unrelated I and I know we have to move on, but Hussain's story about the neighbors getting searched for drugs at the house and one of his friends was filming the guy on his phone and doing Facebook live like, fuck the pigs, fuck the cops, this is fucking illegal search and shit. And then like 30 minutes later, you know, America brain for me, I would think like, hey, the cops are going to come beat this guy's ass. 30 minutes later, Hussain, you said you looked out the window and like they'd made peace and like the guy who had been filming was like sharing his vape with the cops to try out different flavors.

Yeah, and they were taking selfies, the police were on the Facebook Live, and it was just very chill. I think a lot about the Edinburgh gangster who was like, I am at this location if you want to come and assassinate me, which you won't because you're too scared, and then surprisingly, someone assassinated her. At the location! Like, half an hour later.

Someone clearly saw the video that he posted, or the livestream that he did, that was like, you were too much of a pussy to come and shoot me. And then at that moment was like, lacing them up to come and shoot her. ALICE Like, everybody wants to be fuckin' Yahya Synware, but they're not willing to let go of the extra mile. Yeah, I'm doing that exact same livestream from a tunnel beneath the pub in Leith. They all wanna be Nasrallah, where you're doing the exact same livestream but like with

the Star Wars Imperial March playing behind you. He says, he actually says then, or the dog drinking, I cooperated with the police investigation and officers were handed more than enough evidence to completely clear me of any wrongdoing whatsoever. The evidence in question was pictures of his former friend also getting the dog drunk. Twist. Twist.

They worked together. Who among us? Whoever is not guilty casts the first stone. That's like a law. Whoever has no sin, let him pour the first cosmopolitan in the dog bowl. You know those police recruitment ads that are like, it's a different job every day, you never know what you'll see next? That might legitimately be true because of this.

Like, no one has thought to do this and take it to that full execution before. Yeah, yeah. Like, detectives having to look up what crime it is to get a dog drunk. Oh lord, this is a dog, can't be drunk! No, no, there's like a law... Animal cruelty. No, there's a law from the Regency period that was designed to try to catch Prince George out on something Imagine I mean all I can say is it like typically if there's a problem and someone wants to call the police they better Hope that problem is serious enough to make the cops think there might be repercussions if they don't do it because the cops are just

Gonna be on their phones googling met police jobs do by salary Was it about the circumstances where someone's like, this guy's getting a dog drunk and the cops in whatever fucking region he was in? By field. By field? It's kind of like the Angela Rayner thing, you know? Like, the actual dog drunkenness is a pretty minor crime, but it's like, clearly there's a kind of like, there's some strings being pulled here, you know?

I'd like to apply the rubric of the great noticing of things, right? Which is just, we've seen time and again that the British press is able to just decide who gets a negative 50 approval rating by just noticing all of the things they would have done. I'd love to include like, the dark drunkenness in the great noticing of things. Performing a field sobriety test on a dog. But it's a- the thing is, if you want to be... I think the only place where the police would be in that position, November, right?

Is if you are in what is essentially a Tory rotten bura that's been like voting blue for like a hundred years. At that point, if it's somewhere that has never returned a non-Tory MP, and you become a police officer there, most of your job is going to be things to do with shit that MP is doing. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. RILEY You're basically a kind of babysitter at that point.

ALICE Genuinely, yeah. I think about this too, because we had our first trans MP, and she was our first trans MP because she was outed, because of exactly this. Because she was a Tory MP, in like, the middle of nowhere, and like, got drunk and crashed her car in some kind of like, bizarre situation, and the cops like, had to like, pull her out of this, and were like, wait a second, why is our local MP wearing women's clothing? So like, really weird, dark shit out in the countryside in these safe seats, y'know?

M- Chris Morris. Please make a movie about this. So, not even about this, just take this concept of a Tory MP in a safe seat. L- Cause you can do anything, y'know? M- Last thing. L- And anything, you know? Last thing. And they do. Last thing. This is a little more Menzies and then we wanna move on to what we're actually here to talk about.

Which is that it was claimed by the Times that he arrived drunk out of his mind at the last night of the Proms, and then walked into the VIP section when he told he didn't have a seat there, started poking people. He's a child! Like, what, we have child legislators, because, like... ALICE This is the thing, right, this is why we're the second most powerful country in the world, right, is because we continue to generate

people like this. Like, America's the most powerful country in the world, because it continues to generate people who ask questions like, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible? Right? And we're the second, because we create this guy. Yeah. We create someone whose personality is that they should have been a syphilitic regency

courtier, but in a time of phones and cars, basically. And it's, I see it as a kind of person out of time, but I'll carry on. I want to talk about our core subject today. The thing that we brought you to talk on, Seamus, they're making Warhammer into Wokehammer. It's Wokehammer. They've made it Wokehammer 40 gender. All I will say is that Trashfash Future can never do to me what Will There's a Problem did to me, in which they waited two hours to talk about Neon after they talked about Neon.

ALICE I'm so sorry for the way that we are. RILEY It is very funny to see the same group of losers try to drum up a Gamergate over the fact that a company that is, again, just marketing itself differently is somehow betraying them? ALICE Yeah, this British company of like, five chances who worked out they could sell plastic figurines to autistic kids, it's been lost to woke, now. That's the thing.

RILEY Well, this is from a Daily Mail article about it, which is, video game executive Mark Kern accused Games Workshop of gender flipping characters for woke points. ALICE I want to know what the Venn diagram overlap between Warhammer enthusiasts and Daily Mail readers is, because it can't be big. RIght? ZACH Oh, yeah. I mean, this is... I'm excited for people to start trying to learn enough about it to be mad.

Which is a very popular thing, but this guy says, Mark Curran says, you're gender flipping characters to score woke points. Now I didn't know that they've included woke points in the army balancing mechanisms. I thought it was. Yeah. They've introduced like two new dice, which is, which, which, which is making the game like more complicated and also more gay. So they use Indian numerals like they do in the Middle East. Because good old fashioned Arabic numerals, the unwoke numerals, weren't non-binary enough. Yeah, I've also heard that you're starting position whenever you have to get...

All the characters have to, all the figurines have to face Mecca. And there's like a special compass for that. They made the Space Marines Irish and Chinese. He says, he says, the issue with Warhammer and the custodies, the army that they're changing, is a lie. They could have changed it all they wanted, but they decided to lie and pretend it was that way all along. You were mad about your toys! Adult men are getting mad about their toys again, and it's really funny.

Likely adult men activity. One of their favourite things to do. The reason I sort of bring this up though, and the funniest thing is, there is this emerging consensus among, like, just people who spend their time drinking the right-wing internet soup, right? The anti-vax, conspiracy, wef shit, right? That anything Black Rock or Vanguard touches becomes woke. Anything that BlackRock or Vanguard invests in.

ALICE The woke VCs made Warhammer woke. RILEY The companies that, through owning the index funds, invest in everything. ALICE I really don't think that that's true. I mean, it's cool if they are, you know? Shoutout to Woke VCs. Like, all I'll say is, if Larry Fink started BlackRock, built the world's largest risk management engine, and then basically created the asset class of exchange traded funds in order to become a kind of 8-10% holder of every publicly traded company in the entire

world, so he could make there be female Warhammer space marines. That is an admirable commitment to fandom. Yeah, it's called the long game. I actually want to talk a little bit about our core subject, why Seamus we had you on today. Which is, I have to question for you, is Ailon Levy going to get a different job? No. No. See, see, Elan Levi, or is it Elan or Elan? He's a very interesting subject, because he clearly has formed this identity around himself as like a personal figure,

independent of whatever job he has. But he himself, his heart, he has always wanted to be a spokesperson for the Israeli government. ALICE He's a podium guy, you know? He's in it for the podium. SEAN Who doesn't love podiums? We saw the Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman guy, his podium keeps getting bigger, that's great. But this man, once he loses that compass, he's adrift. He theoretically could forge a different path for himself, maybe he could go back to writing musicals again, like he used to. But he doesn't want to. He needs to be the voice for Israel, and when Israel doesn't want him, then who is gonna

say fuck you? ALICE Once you've found the lure of the podium, you can never go back. The true podium isn't the heart, you know? SEAN Exactly, that's why I can never do it. NICHOLAS I mean, Sarah Huckabee Sanders might literally be facing charges because of the lure of the podium. The custom podium, the artisanal podium. So you know what, like, uh, it's a phenomenon.

ALICE It's the golden calf. ALICE Also, also, he got fired, he got fired, he lost his, like, real podium for beefing with David Cameron on Twitter, which is one of the funniest person, one of the funniest people to lose in the mind dojo, to do the old, like, asardist, like, who must go, meme, but it's David Cameron. NARESH. Yeah, as you say, November, to lose your position as, like, you know, the official atrocity denier in Britain for Israel, to the guy who was vengali by Lex Greensill is quite the achievement.

I have a very, some person like Hussein law here in terms of my very brief crossover with Ailon Levy, which is that he, and I was, I was like, I read that comic book. Yeah. So you know, we sort of like joined forces. Um, he was, he's a, he used to be a university debater. Now I also for a very used to be a university debater. Now I also for a very brief time was a university debater and we were sort of in the same circuit for the last year. I think it was like 2013 and I sort of, his face seemed very familiar, but he seemed like a lot nerdier and lankier back then. I never like competed with him at all, but what I am, so what all this has sort of reaffirmed to me is that there's a certain

type of university debater archetype that they can never really escape or evolve from themselves. And he strikes me as that type who sort of did university debating and it became his entire personality. And now he's sort of stuck with it. He's not really sure what to do other than to sort of do university debating, Which is sort of why he is in the position of really begging people to let him come on their podcasts. You know what needs to happen? I'm pitching art today. I'm pitching art forms today. Chris Morris knows what movie he needs to make. Hideo Kojima. Death Stranding 2. But it's about debate rather than like

Portering packages and Elon Levy is our model for what the mules will be in Death Stranding 2 They're calling it the first completely unplayable game All right, so Seamus I want to ask you right we talked about like the the Iranian barrage of drones and Missiles that were largely not entirely intercepted by Israeli air defenses on the last free episode. We sort of just went through it as a bit of an introduction, but I think we could use just a little bit of table setting to talk about, answering what I think is the core question of this segment, which is between the World War

Three is now imminent position and the nothing ever happens position, where are we and how do we get here? I mean, those are very wide positions. I think on the night that it happened, I think we were closer to World War III than I think a lot of people might want to admit to themselves because the Israelis, it was found out recently that they did want to strike back Iran on that very night. They wanted to make the decision, but they were pushed off of it by outside actors. Now, it seems like Biden has given them the go ahead to move into Ra'afah and Gaza in exchange for them not pursuing full blown regional war against Iran with a targeted strike offensively against Iran.

Now that staves off, of course, a gigantic multi-front war, but that's still engaging in this massive catastrophe of human suffering that is only going to increase and increase. If your concern is purely about war coming to your shores, I think it's probably been staved off at least for the moment. But the idea that this is just going to be able to simmer in the background forever, I also don't think is the case. Basically, I think where we are now is everything changed on October 7th. And I think you can safely say everything changed again when there was sort of a demonstrated increased willingness of Iran and Israel to strike at each other and come close to striking

at one another, basically, in terms of like power balancing in the region. But also that Israel appears to have like, at least diplomatically, been able to turn this situation to its advantage by saying, we will start a war with Iran, and then essentially get US backing to carry on engaging in like an active genocide in southern Gaza. Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's essentially true. I would say that less things, in retrospect, I think a few less things changed on the day that the missile strikes occurred against Israel, just because, I mean, October 7th, I mean, the ramifications of it have been so, so, so severe, and no one died during these missile strikes. But yeah, no, I mean, Israel has been trying to, in the aftermath of this, because of, Israel has been trying to in the aftermath

of this because of how Iran has played this in which telegraphed everything so, so much so well with other countries made it pretty clear, at least in an unspoken way that the intention was for most of these missiles to be intercepted, that Israel really doesn't have the angling that it wanted to out of this. I think their intention, if I can only speculate, was that they wanted, and I'll be frank, they wanted Jewish people in Assad as well to die. They wanted casualty counts that they could point to. They wanted human stories of atrocities they could point to. And Iran denied that to them. And so now they still want that war, obviously, but they don't have a strong foundation for it. All they have suffered is a hit against their pride, an

embarrassment, a humiliation. And that is a very difficult selling point to Biden, to its American backers, even if they are backing them through the hilt in all these different ways. That doesn't mean they won't stop threatening their backers with essentially like blackmail. This trade that's being talked about with Rafa, that's a form of like, we're going to kill thousands upon thousands of people one way or another. You have to decide which one you're going to choose. And also telling them that, I mean, there's recent messaging where they're talking about London is going to be the next strike point for the IRGC's ballistic missiles. Somehow.

Okay, sure, fine. The fucking, the IRGC has like blown up the worst bar you've ever seen. Yeah. Central London can't get much worse, you know? Yeah, we have lost up to seven American candy stores to a washing machine tipped missile. The drug money laundering industry might never recover. Yeah.

Oh my god. They've dropped. They have the world's longest range head drone has ruined an Aberdeen Angus steakhouse. I would say, I mean, I think that looking at this stuff recently, it feels like there was perhaps more, there was pressure on Israel. There was condemnation where there hadn't been previously since October 7th, I think

because of the, what is it, the World Central Kitchen convoy being bombed, deliberately targeted multiple times, you know, numerous aid workers being killed completely deliberately. And then obviously the Israelis bombing the Iranian consulate in, it was a consulate I believe in Syria, and killing diplomatic workers and I think a senior IRC official. Matthew 10 multiple IRGC officials, yeah. Matthew 10 Wow. Yeah. So it's like, so effectively, there are these massive outcries about sort of like what this is completely indefensible. And I agree with your point that Iran couldn't not respond,

but what it seemed Israel was the Israeli government, the Israeli cabinet was hoping for was something that would then, because I mean, obviously the instant there are any civilian casualties, particularly, you know, like civilian casualties that are going to be humanized, you know, in Western media. They could then be like, look at this barbarity, look at this horror, look at this blah, blah, blah. It's like, you know, how, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But they had the memes ready to go, but nothing happened because as we talked about previously, like it seems as though this was, this was announced, telegraphed, not coordinated, but like the fact that all of these, you know, aircraft scrambled to intercept these, the fact that all this stuff happened in a way that basically created a lot

of visuals of missiles, you know, ballistic missiles and drones over Israeli cities, over Green Line Israel cities. But then there wasn't the sort of like, look at this, look at what these beasts have done, et cetera. I'm of course mortified hearing about that the response has been like, okay, in exchange for you not escalating the war with Iran, we'll let you sacrifice more Palestinians because in Biden's viewpoint, it feels like there is no such thing as an intolerable number of civilian casualties in that conflict because he just doesn't see them, any of them as civilians. I feel like, I mean, that's pretty obvious. But it's interesting to me because it does feel like, like the... This sounds crass and I'm not trying to do this deliberately, but just sort of feels like the influence campaign

about like, look at this hideous atrocity was all ready to go. And it's like, oh, whoops. Well, that's why like the... There was another video that the, that the sort of official Israeli Twitter account posted about Paris and how like, you know, scary Shia like, flagellation rituals are coming to Paris. And again, like it's clearly much of it is AI generated. I mean, honestly, if you're gonna do that, just do what the Saudis did. Be like, we're gonna do 9-11 on the CN Tower.

Fucking Canadians, leave us alone and we're gonna do it. Just be deliberate, say what you mean. So what we have is, I think as you say, angling for further escalation that might not come, but what has come is also Hezbollah striking against Israel as well, right? Yeah, I mean, there was a targeted strike on, I mean, what the Israelis at least said was a community center, but was of course filled with IDF soldiers inside a town in northern

Israel. Again, it's a, what do you accuse your enemies of? That is what you are doing. Yeah. It's, I mean, and again, it's like, just as a side note, like IDF's main headquarters is within a very populated area of Tel Aviv. It's a government of a certain territory. Obviously their troops are going to be in a lot of different places and populated areas,

but it's like, oh, I guess they got to get away from this extremely densely populated territory with tons of cities. I don't know. It's strange. Anyway, yeah, they struck a northern town in Israel with this missile and unlike Hamas, which is primarily working with unguided rockets, which don't have any sort of aiming capabilities at all, Hezbollah has thousands upon thousands upon thousands of targeted munitions, things that they can aim with specifically.

And so with the strikes that came in during the initial Iranian retaliation, with these, with all the strikes that have been happening against Israeli radar stations for the past few months, the implication is that the war that I think is to come in Lebanon is going to be much, much, much harder for the Israelis to fight. And they're being primed for war within Israel because I think people assume that Gaza was a relative cakewalk in the sense that only hundreds of Israeli soldiers died, but it was spread out over a long period of time and people came back and vigorated. They're posting on TikTok about how much fun they were having, shooting people's houses, blowing up hospitals, and so on and so forth.

The war with Lebanon that they're promoting, I mean, it's going to be... Hezbollah keeps trying to inform them in various ways that this is not going to go well for them. ALICE being the adults in the room. You know? This is somehow... ALICE Maybe too much so. You know?

The sort of long Star Wars CGI trailer for a Nasralla Switch, which is, y'know? Or some of the other ones where it's like, yeah, we've got recoilless rifles and, y'know, anti-tank guided missiles knocking out military buildings and radar stations, and it's all edited in such a way that it hits all of the beats in Black Sabbath's Iron Man, but we're also legitimately the adults in the room, as opposed to whatever the fuck you guys are doing. Yeah. Hezbollah being the sole 19-year-old in a world of 14-year-olds.

No, but it's like, okay, you have a situation in which Hezbollah is the only, it's pretty much a conventional army at this point. It's the only army, probably other than the Iranian one that could bring the Israeli army to a stalemate of any sort. And Israel is still sleepwalking into this confrontation that it refused to deescalate from in any meaningful way. So here's the other question for me, right? Does Israel think that it is 1967 or 1982 when it's just preparing for its war? I mean, that's what I was going to say is that like everything is 1967, everything is 1982.

1973 definitely didn't happen. 2006 most certainly did not happen. And I feel as though like, Seamus, I'm interested in your perspective on this, but it's like the conditions have shifted. And also it's not like Hezbollah has been like, well, we're not actively having, you know, we're not on a war with an active front against Israel. So everyone's just going to go do, I don't know, harassing people at checkpoint duties. Like, they've been involved in regional things, I believe particularly in Syria, but also like they are a military organization and they, for better or worse, like they understand the capabilities of who they are going to

be fighting. Pretty likely they know who they're going to be fighting if they're going to be fighting anyone anytime soon. And it's like, they're not, it's not, it's not bad-ass TikToks. Like they've got, they have been preparing specifically to both in terms of material and also terrain, like how they would engage. Like to me, when I see this, it's like, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the mashups of, of the music versus the videos are always funny,

but you can tell that there's a lot of, like, you don't go out and have these successful things happening in daylight without the preparation to avoid getting hit by a drone, for example, like without getting hit by a counter battery stuff, like, there's preparation involved. ALICE It's the same complacency that led them to October 7th, again. Like, they had the one wake-up call and responded by committing a genocide, and then were like, okay cool, we can derive no further lessons from this, there is no other border we need to be worried about, all the guys up there can like, they evacuated a few villages and then everyone else is staying there playing psytrance. Across

the border from guys who have been watching them for years, who know them all by name, and who are apparently now getting the orders to go and shoot the satellite dishes off their roofs so they can edit it into an epic video. ALICE No, I mean, the issue is that fundamentally, and you see this thread through everything, it's that Israel thinks that every single enemy they have to fight is like ISIS. They're like ISIS in the sense that-

NARESH But Hezbollah actually did fight ISIS. TITUS No, it doesn't matter. They're bringing ISIS into the country, so therefore they're allies with ISIS. And also the Houthis are literally ISIS and of course Hamas is working with ISIS to create chemical weapons. But the whole thing is that okay, ISIS is this... I mean, fundamentally there's an ideology, and you can debate the Salafism and the whatever, but fundamentally... ALICE It was very funny that like, five guys in Gaza who were like, Hamas is woke, we're gonna do ISIS Gaza, and then immediately got killed

on the house. RILEY Was I'm not mistaken, weren't there Hamas people who were abducted and killed in the Sinai by ISIS? ALICE There was a video where someone who smuggled weapons to Hamas was executed on camera. And like, yeah, no, they're not friends with each other, but it doesn't matter. It's about like, okay, this ideology, which is fundamentally destructive, wants to literally conquer the world. Like that's what they explicitly say they want to do.

They want to do the Holocaust, but worse. They want to do Native American genocide, but worse. They love killing, slaughtering, raping, maiming openly, unabashedly. These people are pure evil. Therefore, all of our enemies, because they hate freedom, because they hate everything that we love, they must be like this. Not only like rhetorically, but they have to be literally like this. And therefore, once you believe that, you become immune to any sort of strategic thinking.

Your enemies have to be stupid like ISIS was. They have to fundamentally have the same strategy that ISIS does, which was to literally fight the entire world because you think that God himself is backing you. That leads Israel into complacency and confrontation again and again and again and again. And they learn only small parts from it, not anything that would prevent on October 7th, like Nova was saying, from happening again. And Hezbollah is like, I'm not saying this from a propagandist point of view. This is a hundred thousand strong force with a gigantic missile supply.

They can be resupplied from outside. Like this is not a situation in which this is like Egypt 1967, like you were saying, where of course they want to fight Israel, but they're not trained to fundamentally to fight Israel. They're an army of conscripts. If you are in Hezbollah, you are training to fight Israel. That is your raison d'etre. That is all, pretty much all you are wanting to do. ALICE Yeah, there's a guy making you do infinity

sit-ups on the basis of, like, you can make them stop playing psytrance one day. You are engaged in a fight that you believe is for civilization, that you believe is for humanity, not for some world conquest, which is its own thing. That is the way that this fight has been sold to the Arab population, fundamentally. So you can't fight that easily. I'd like to go on as well, right, to other questions about people's goals. Because if you read American or British sort of commentary, because I think what I, I think one of the, this holds, this observation holds true for most things, which is that the further you

are from actual power and influence, the more keen you are for escalation. Aidan- If you're the type of guy who like buys your own podium for instance. You can see columnists baying for it. The rhetoric you get about Iran is that anything less than basically a boots on the ground invasion or at least a sort of significant barrage with standoff weapons is going to be akin to appeasing Hitler in Czechoslovakia. It's all Munich over again. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, I look at this too sometimes, but it's like, okay, because you guys, I wasn't on the episode recently where you mentioned this, but just when people were calling for Israel and or Israel partnered with Britain to invade Iran, it's like, oh, okay. From where? From where? How? Like a country four times the size of Iraq, far more stable, far wealthier with a much

better trade, much better integrated civilian military structure. And it's like, and Iraq went really well. It's a huge success. We're always pointing to. We're going to do it from Herat. And we also had the, it was relative to the size of people involved. It was a very small force, but it was still like 140,000 troops in the initial invasion. It's like, okay, well, you need four times

that where you're getting them from, Britain. Army's gone woke. Sorry, I can't do it. Israel, well, they got a problem. They put their border wall on the Microsoft Azure cloud and integration didn't go very well. So, I think my question is that talking about Iran in those terms assumes that it is a kind of... It has infinite ambitions and has to be stopped before it, I don't know, takes driving slowly in a white Audi to other countries. To having really sculpted eyebrows to other countries.

Right? And you look at internal dissent in Iran and stuff, and it's like the Iranian government doesn't survive that stuff for as long as it has by being impatient or by being particularly rash about this. You know? Nor any of the foreign policy stuff. SEAN It has to calibrate its responses. RILEY So what does Iran want?

Why were those guys in the consulate in Syria? What is Iran actually aiming to do? And again, how are Israel and its Western allies willfully misunderstanding them? I mean, obviously Iran wants regional influence. We don't have to mince words about this. It wants regional influence. It wants to create a bulwark against American influence in the region. it does want to dismantle Israel. But fundamentally, again, it goes back to the whole thing about ISIS or comparing Iran to the Nazis or whatever.

Its projection of all of the imperialisms of Western countries, its projection of Israel's own conquering objectives. Iran seeks a different kind of power in that way, whereas Israel deliberately wants land. It wants land for Jewish settlers to settle on. It's not an exaggeration in the sense that I don't know of a lot of people outside, people who don't follow this stuff are aware. and there's more reporting on it now than there was prior to October 7th, but there is a kind of apocalyptic strain of revanchist Zionism that has political power, or certainly political currency in the Israeli state, that believes that the true Israel is, goes from the entirety, basically from Cairo to the Tigris River.

And... Yeah, you occasionally see some like, strange posts that's like, hey, why is this woman in Israel hanging out with all these like, red cows? Yeah, you see this enormous map and you're like, damn, the Egyptian and Syrian merger in the Cold War really really expanded, it's like, oh wait, shit. They're saying that's technically the true homeland thereby, like biblical Jewish homeland. And as such, like, this is one of those things where this is not everyone, but there's enough people and Netanyahu's path to staying in power and out of jail has involved at best appeasing these people. And so like there is a desire on the part of anything that kind of pushes that conflict that conflict in because the the assumption is is that it'll only go one

way. You know they found an ancient side trance track in Baghdad. There are some secret infected mushroom albums being hidden in a secret Tower of Babel and the only way you can find it is to restore the entirety of biblical Israel which I think is a bit of a... I think this is not even anachronism, this is a... ALICE It's just fantasy. NENYAHU It's fantasy. It's so funny that, particularly with Netanyahu, his path to staying in power and out of jail

runs through these guys, not because he has any particular regard for anyone other than himself, right? It's just that he is so unlikable. He's alienated every other political constituency in Israel he's ever worked with. And so he's left in this war cabinet of guys who despise him, whether it's because it's split down the middle between guys like Joav Galan and Gadi Eisenkot, who hate him because they correctly recognise that he's stupid and corrupt, or guys like Ben Veer who hate him because they think he's woke, right? And he's just trapped in the middle of this. ALICE Also, there are kahanists that also think that Ben Veer is woke now.

Be clear. This is, I'm not even joking. This is like, there are people that- ALICE He's gone woke! He's gone woke. ALICE There are people that left Otsma Yehudi, the Jewish power party, because they thought that he had like, he had compromised too much. Like this is the fucking state of Israeli politics right now.

These people can't be fucking reasoned with. Let's be real here. This is like, you know, I keep trying to think the best political analog for the most powerful strain in like Israeli electoral politics appears to me, people are like, oh, it's Trump, whatever, whatever, no, it's Vladimir Zhirnovsky. That's who your analogue is. The Russian Liberal Democrat who was like, Putin is woke! We have to nuke Europe immediately! ALICE If you want the easiest comparison, right, politics that's entirely controlled by like,

a shitload of absolute psychos, and then the slightly more restrained people who want to do everything they want, but in a way that like, the sums add up, the closest analogue is Britain. By far. Like, we have the closest politics, right? I suppose it template... Netanyahu would never drink out of the puddle. I will put my feet back. He would never drink out of the puddle. I will put my feet back.

He would never drink out of the puddle. I mean, some of Boris Johnson's decision making was quite Netanyahu-like. He did the same things of alienating everyone else until he finally got forced out. There's another thing I wanted to talk about, which was the putative US-Arab allies. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, like the rest of the Gulf states... ALICE Did you see the Jordanian king posting about any of this? ZACH Yeah, just like, one of the world's tiniest

men. ALICE Yeah, it's sort of the handshake meme with Rishi Sunak, right? It's like, psychically, I am six foot four. ZACH Yeah, I thought he had to pretend to be like a bomber pilot, but... ALICE Yeah, yeah, he had a photo taken in a flight suit, and then he had to clarify that he wasn't actually flying an F-15 himself or whatever.

SEAN Yeah, then he had to return the flight suit to the Halloween store. But, look, the children's section's popular. But this is, again, it's Iran... ALICE The literal short king. SEAN It's true. Iran has pursued, again, like you can, you look at Iran, you see a country that is working towards a goal relatively patiently and strategically.

They have pursued thawing of relations with US Arab allies at the same time that Israel has thawed relations with them. Like I believe the Saudis and the Iranians open, have had open diplomatic relations for just over a year now. You know, and this is something I think goes under discussed as they like attempt to become a power in the region. And while you can't just assume that Arab,

US Arab allies would just go along with a fight against them. What is the role of the US Arab allies in the sort of ongoing simmering proto-conflict between Iran and Israel? All the Gulf Arab states are terrified. Jordan is... They all have these covert relations with Israel. Jordan was involved in intercepting a lot of the Iranian missiles that flew over the airspace. Saudi Arabia, there were accusations that they did, but I'm not sure of the veracity of them. Here's the thing.

Before October 7th, Saudi Arabia was going for this really audacious thing wherein not only would they have a defense pact in the same way that NATO works with the United States. So if Iran attacks Saudi Arabia, then that's fucking over. There was also going to be a defense pact with Israel and the United States. So if Iran attacks Saudi Arabia, then that's fucking over. There was also going to be defense backed with Israel and the United States as part of like this package deal. They were going to openly pursue this. And then obviously October 7th happened and now they can't do that. There is a Arab population, I would say most of the Arab population that bitterly opposes

any sort of normalization with Israel. Doesn't matter if you're Saudi Arabia or Jordan, whatever. Polls, poll after poll after poll after poll shows this. There's even been a reversal in Saudi Arabia. That's been identified. They can't pursue an alliance with Israel openly the kind that Israel is now talking about wanting again. Like, they got Galant saying that the attack on Israel by Iran means that we can pursue

these kinds of strategic alliances. You can't. If they do that, then they're even stupid in this role. It's going to jeopardize their whole game. I mean, that's, the role is to be these like quiet intermediaries wherein they can try and stop things from popping off as much as they otherwise would be able to, but they cannot pursue open alliances with one or the other, at least not at this point. Yeah. I mean, there's been some instances in which it kind of was able to, but they cannot pursue open alliances with one or the other, at least not at this point. Yeah. I mean, there's been some instances in which it kind of was able to slip under the surface,

but at the end of the day, these are unrepresentative and despotic governments. And even if they borrowed every riot cop in Algeria, it wouldn't be enough given the amount of outrage that this has generated day on, watching the Israeli conduct in Gaza. And I guess also the thing that strikes me with this is that you don't have to be like, you know, world's number one Iranian government fan to look at how they have behaved diplomatically in the last decade plus to say like,

they have basically been engaging in every process with more good faith than the states at least they've engaged with in the sense that in America, no matter how willing the government is to, you know, the present government or the Obama administration might have been to try to foster an Iran deal, at the end of the day, like so much of American domestic politics hinge around like, no, we'll fucking destroy it. we will immediately nuke Tehran. Like, it's just like, how do you go into an agreement like that?

The Israelis would be, it feels like it's the same thing. It's like, no matter how much quiet diplomacy there might be, like domestic politics won't allow it. And you cannot say they haven't been patient. And obviously like, there's going to be back channel things. There's also going to be like sort of like subterfuge, there's going to be espionage things along those lines. Like these are the states that are hostile to one

another, but diplomatically, they've been pretty straightforward, in my opinion at least, and what that's gotten them is just like, a barrage of the most incoherent invective from, y'know, sort of, the governments-in-waiting of the even further right parties in those countries. ALICE It must be so frustrating being, particularly like a senior IRGC officer, right? Because you're sort of, imagine being custom salamani, right? Back in the day, you're sort of engaged in this grand power competition, it's like move

and counter move, and what you find you have done is that you have entered yourself in a kind of chess game against someone who keeps eating the pieces. Yeah. You thought they were going to at least be able to engage at the same level and instead it's like, they've been too busy trying to invent a flavour of ice cream called WhatsApp that their hands are too sticky to pick up the pieces. Yeah. You put them in check and they shoot you.

When Soleimani, when Trump was elected, I mean, you could kind of hear the frustration that he had when he would make speeches, because I believe the comparison that Soleimani made was that Trump speaks like a casino dealer, or like a bartender. It's so without worth or substance, and it's just all of the deep rot at the heart of American society. That's like come back into the fold. It's crude. It's gross. And no, I mean, this is a separate issue, but like the current batch of Israeli figureheads, spokespeople, that constantly have to be splashed across like British TV

in particular. All of the sheen that the Israelis had at one point of being with these smooth operators who were capable of this like immense long-term strategic planning, that's all gone out the fucking window. It's all of, again, that rot that was always beneath the surface but kind of covered up. It's all out there on the open and it's so obvious. And yet, we're still being expected to play these games about how things used to be in the past, that they're still the same way today. I mean, you see that people still get stuck in this paradigm of like, oh yeah, the intransigent Israeli right led by people like Avigdor Lieberman.

And it's like, Lieberman quit the government. Like Lieberman was insane. It was all about like, I love killing Arabs so much, but like this was too much for him. And it's like, what you're facing with is just something that like it's been caught in this, for lack of a better word, sort of doom loop. I would say primarily, if not solely because of, I don't know, the cynicism of Benjamin Netanyahu and the complicity of Western governments to indulge this. And it's like, I don't, I mean, I don't know, I don't want to believe that deep down that

it's, they're so ill informed that they're kind of believing the propaganda and hype, but it just feels like everyone who's actually trying to make decisions outside of the sort of, you know, rogue's gallery, which is named realizes how much bullshit is being traded back and forth about this and how much disinformation, how much is wrong information. And it's like, I can imagine being an Iranian negotiator or military commander in this regard must be incredibly frustrating because it's like, you know your enemy, but not only does your enemy not know themselves, they're hitting themselves in the head with a hammer constantly.

ALICE I do get the feeling that this was like, partially Zadif's frustration, who was the old foreign minister. ALICE Wasn't he the guy who said, I assume most Americans have read Alexis de Tocqueville? ALICE No, no, that was- RILEY Well, there's your fucking problem. ALICE I mean, that's another thing, that was President Khatami, who was like his own thing of like, yeah, no,

he assumed that the Americans were like way smarter and more cultured than, I mean, cause you write in politicians, they have to have a PhD to be elected to parliament and that is obviously not the case anywhere else. What are you talking about? I have a PhD in canine mixology. Yeah, apart from like Germany, but they let them plagiarise those.

Imagine if you're an Iranian senior politician and all you're trying to foster is something that doesn't involve huge open direct conflict, but also you own part of a pistachio export concern, and you're just like, fuck's sake, can we please get a deal through, I really want to sell these. And they're just like, no. No. can we please get a deal through? I really want to sell these. And they're just like, no. No. We're gonna scupper it at every opportunity. It's like, you also just invested in a gender reassignment surgery clinic as well, and it's

just like, fuck! Can I just export these services? Nope. Not allowed to. You're blacklisted. Boycotted. Completely. Just because I was the IRGC's photocopying intern for one month.

If Iran's next chess move is that they want to give me a gender-affirming surgery, I would be happy to, you know? SEAN Nova, I really would love to see your reaction to, because this happened about a year ago or so, Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the IRGC, they held a meeting with trans men in Iran to talk about the societal issues that they face, and one of the primary issues that was talked about was the fact that everyone thinks that they're gay, but in reality they're just trans. Like, these are the complexities of trans issues in Iran.

Like, they're all trans. Trans, okay, can't be gay though. Please don't be gay. ALICE Yeah, this was my thing, is like, yeah, they can give me the surgery, they cannot find out I'm a lesbian. Like... NICHOLAS So, I wanna just, by way of concluding, right, cause we're coming up to time, I just wanna leave us, I think, on the question of... we sort of alluded to earlier, right, that Israel

is seeing this as its opportunity to continue having a free hand in Gaza, and increasingly by the way, like, the speaking out of both sides of its mouth has regarded settler violence in the West Bank. ALICE Yeah, I mean, we asked earlier whether we think that, the Israelis think that this is like 67, or, and I think they think it's like 48, is the thing. Like, the same kind of level of chaos and lawlessness in pursuit of territorial gain. RILEY But this is, I think, one of the things that I'm driving at as well. They see this as a sort of second foundation, I think. This is 419, this is, yeah, is it 67? Is it 82?

Second War of Independence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, this is, there seems to be willingness to continue committing atrocities in Gaza, supporting them in the West Bank. But also there seems to be a desire at a time of, you know, just from a purely strategic point of view, like putting this sort of, you know, moral approbation at all this out the window is that from a purely strategic point of view, there seems to be a desire to use what is essentially a colonial police force that only knows how to kill civilians and make TikToks in their destroyed homes to then pursue a regional power agenda. Do you think

that that's true? And based on what we discussed here, if it is, it seems like it's going to both happen and go very badly. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much precisely it. Again, that term that I used before, sleepwalking, that seems like really what's happening. Everyone in Israel is sort of hyper aware, even if they don't want to admit it. I mean, the telegram groups of hundreds of thousands of people that are pushed by the IDF when news anchors talk about how amazed they are at the images of Gaza and homes burning, about the hospital sieges and all these things. So they're aware of what their army is doing. And yet they understand that point and then they see the point about Israel losing its standing in the world, about all the dangers that it faces ahead, and they can't connect

the two. They don't see the connection because they've lived in this fantasy world that many countries have never been able to truly experience. In which the US has protected them from virtually all sorts of harm for decades and decades and decades. Like, Britain has suffered this inane atmosphere in which they had an empire, they lost that empire, and they are struggling to get that empire back. But there is still this control descent, more or less. And the hangers-on are strange, but there's not this collective.

And I do collective in like 95% of people are not within this collective psychosis. Whereas in Israel's case, it truly does feel like almost the entire society is on board with just mass murder. And they want this regional power to return to what it was. They want it to be even greater. They want their existence to be not only sustained by the United States, but guaranteed, unquestioned in the same way that European nations are. Like you don't talk about France being disestablished.

You may want it to, but like you don't like't talk about it as a logical possibility that could materialize. This is the thing. What I fear is that war is going to come to Lebanon, war may indeed come to Iran, war may come to the West Bank, all these different places by Israel's hands. But at the end of it, all of these discussions that happen in newspapers about like Israel has no plan for the day after and that's really the problem. That's not the root of the problem. They don't intend for there to be a day after.

They may think there is, but like they don't really give a shit. The point is to destroy. The point is to devastate. The point is to kill. The point is to maim. Like actually running these places, trying to form like a friendly government, those days are over. The point is to humiliate. The point is to make your enemies drink dog water and to try and eat rotten food for sustenance.

The age of wanting something grander than yourself, that's not happening anymore. I would throw this out too, just because it's interesting. A friend of mine pointed this out to me because I wasn't really paying attention at the time. I believe it was published in 2007, but there was a guy who taught at one of the, I think, Army War College in Pennsylvania, and it's for the curriculum for armor officers. Former military guy, but he was a civilian. He basically wrote like an MA paper or something equivalent to that about the Israeli war in Lebanon in 2006.

And it was pretty devastating in terms of the stuff that he brought up and the sort of fixation on air war, the fixation on like basically like a complete change in doctrine that didn't translate to anything that made any sense. It was sort of like, imagine instead of getting like an to say, at this time, go and occupy this position, it was more like weird Sun Tzu shit about, you know, confuse your enemy by by by by by

juking left when they think you'll juked right. Things along those lines. But the thing that stuck out to me the most was that like in 2006, of all the units that were deployed, not a single one of their brigade commanders ever crossed the border into Lebanon with the troops that were forward deployed. And that was not a thing that was seen as a particular, like the former Air Force general who was the, I believe, the, he was the head of the campaign. I don't know what his position was exactly. He wound up not advancing further, but like this, a lot of this was kind of buried. But the troops, when interviewed, and then this guy researched this and spoke to people, a lot of the commentary was like, all we've been doing is occupation duty in Ramallah. We've been in Bethlehem, in Nablus, basically just harassing people at checkpoints.

Not only in terms of having the tradecraft required to not get immediately killed in a force on force conflict, but also just not knowing any of the basic drills you're supposed to do to do infantry shit because they just don't do it. And that was this constant complaint, like, we aren't trained, we don't have the experience, we don't do any of this stuff. We were like, go take this house. No one knows how you take a house and not get killed. And I bring this up because that was 2006. And when you think about where Israeli domestic politics and the sort of implementation, the usage of the Israeli military, what those were like in

2006 versus now, it's only worse. And I do think that Gaza, you see plenty of evidence of this in action. It's just that also like in that case, the sort of dictated by air war constant bombing, overwhelmingly civilian population, and they're just brutalizing and murdering them. I mean, in case there's any ambiguity on my part, it's absolutely a genocide, but it's not a force on force conflict in the same sense, but this would be. And I feel as though, as you said earlier, Seamus, that bloodlust, that hunger for war, that hasn't diminished.

And I feel as though the sleepwalking comparison is great because frankly, the minute that sort of hungriness, hunger for war, that hasn't diminished. And I feel as though the sleepwalking comparison is great because frankly, like the minute that it's no longer threatening videos, you know, and press conferences from Hezbollah, it's actual force on force conflict. Like those actual reality is going to puncture that conception of how things are going to go. And I just like, I don't know, it's going to be horrific. And I think the people that would suffer the most are going to be civilians in these countries in places like,

I mean, like what on the order of what Palestinians are experiencing, you know, that's the thing that concerns me. But like, I also think the Israeli military, the Israeli state doesn't realize that like, just because you can get your, you know, your ideological enemies banned off TikTok and fucking Instagram doesn't mean

that the guys who've been training on how to use these munitions against your equipment aren't gonna do it. It's like the US government sending the NYPD to invade Canada. Yeah as I was gonna say I mean you know probably like comparable military budgets between American military aid to Israel and the NYPD's budget. I just I look at this stuff and it's just like I it, I, I, it's just on a long enough timeline, you know, if it goes the way they seem to want the, the, the, the, the, the Israeli state Netanyahu's government seem to want to take it. Like it's going to come into

contact with people with, for, for, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, not to disparage what, you know, not to denigrate or to reduce the degree to which Hamas as an armed organization is engaging with Israeli military. But it's different thing when you look at what you described with Hispala, for example. And I just, I don't know. I don't think that, I don't want, I don't want to see it happen. I don't want because I, because of the consequences it's going to be for non armed factions, but like, fuck's sake, man. It just man, it just feels like it's heading towards that, and it's being abetted by a combination of cowardness and just sort of like, choose your own reality.

ALICE Yeah. It's sort of like, Israel approaching the big, how many sad movies are we gonna have to make about this, like ten years later, sort of... ZACH They're gonna need a new term beyond shoot and cry, like it's gonna have to be, there's gotta be something stronger. ALICE and ALICE Slaughter and cry. ALICE Slaughtering and crying too. RILEY Slaughtering and cry.

ALICE Slaughtering and cry. Yeah. I, I dunno, sometimes it's like, I try to make a joke about it but I can't, cause it's just like, it's fucked. So anyway. ALICE And again, like, to put, okay, yeah, the IDF headquarters in the middle of Tel Aviv, and then every so often Harats writes an article about it that's like, hey, is it gonna be a problem that like, the middle of Tel Aviv, and then every so often HiRats writes an article about it that's like, hey, is it gonna be a problem that the middle of Tel Aviv just

has IDF general staff and everything? RILEY It's one thing when there's a daycare in the Pentagon, it's another thing when there's a Pentagon in the daycare. ALICE It's in a skyscraper, it's in like three skyscrapers which are across the street from three civilian skyscrapers. RILEY I can't believe that they put the IDF headquarters in the middle of the chillout tent I um I I think that's that's probably a good place as any for us to leave it I know Seamus you're gonna plug your your your sub stack

But I just want to say to the listeners out there read Seamus's work. It's great I'm a subscriber as a person not not as not as trash future research consultant just as a guy It's really informative and great. I highly recommend it Yeah Seamus is always a delight to have you on the show Not as trash future research consultant just as a guy. It's really informative and great. I highly recommend it Yeah, uh shamus is always a delight to have you on the show except when we talk about neon It's rarely in pleasant circumstances, but it is still Like you fuckers never have me on to talk about like football or like anything like that No, it's always when something bad happens, which I get it's fine next next time you come on We I promise i'm making a gentleman's agreement, we will discuss something

fun. We will discuss Miam, we'll discuss a Saudi mega project. What you're doing is you're diplomatically committing us to a phased process that is gonna ultimately lead us to have Seamus on for something nice. Correct. Yeah, this is the unofficial launch of the Trashfuture Sports Podcast, featuring Seamus on for something nice. Well, yeah, this is the unofficial launch of the Trashfuture Sports Podcast, featuring Seamus. Yeah, it's called Around the Horn 2, and it's exactly the same as Around the Horn. Alright, alright.

I was thinking more of like a Barstool vibe, and then trying to figure out which one of us gets to be Dave Bortenoit, but, you know. No, it's a Dungeons and Dragons actual play podcast where we're playing as the Barstool Sports staff. Yeah, Barstool Sports staff play Wokehammer. That's right. Yeah. Okay.

Seamus, once again, thank you very much for coming on. Nate, as you say, we must wholeheartedly recommend your writing on the subject. If you want to go into more detail of anything we've talked about, Seamus's Substack is a great place to start. It certainly provides a lot of the jumping off points for how I talk about the issue, so I must recommend it. Also, if you're listening to this, you are listening to the free episode. There is a bonus episode.

It comes out in a couple of days. It's $5 a month. There's the $10 tier with Left Unread. November and I are going to be doing the second Aubrey Matron book soon there. And also, I just want to put my foot down. I'm getting messages. I'm getting Twitter comments. We're getting messages on Patreon saying, oh, you're just doing a joke. You're actually going to watch the Kevin Hart Netflix vehicle lift. We are not going to watch the Kevin Hart Netflix vehicle lift. It's never coming out. So like, if we do, then something, you know what know It is if we release a bonus episode at some point in May

Maybe after one of the long weekends where we might want the Monday off I don't know about the directed Netflix Kevin Kevin Hart vehicle lift That is me blinking in Morse code that I am in distress Swan Lake on the TV If that happens anyway, thanks again to Seamus. Thank you for listening Thank you to my lovely co-hosts. And we will see you again on the bonus episode. Bye, everyone. Bye.

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Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye.