TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* The Ophthalmologist's Dilemma feat. Séamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

Middle East correspondent Séamus Malekafzali returns to discuss Syria - a retrospective on Ba’athism, Assad, and for the first time after decades of moral panic about Islam… moderate jihadism is back, baby! Also - Ehud Barak’s camera company, and finally cutting the budget of the DfE. Check out Séamus' work here! https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/ Get the whole episode on Patreon here! *POPES/LAGOON SHIRTS STILL AVAILABLE!* We've got some extras of our recent shirts that can be purchased online and will ship immediately! Get them here: https://trashfuture.co.uk/collections/all *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I'm looking forward to seeing some fantastic games played in the King Salman temporary football shelter. Let me tell you, when I offered this deal to the Saudis, they took my hand off. We're going to talk about a lot today. There's like a couple of UK, US politics, things I wanted to raise. I have a startup that's relevant to our interests. And then of course, we are going to be going into a little more depth on what's happening in Syria, who are HTS, what are the international implications of this and the usual stuff that we do when we have shame. What's happening in Syria? Well, not the fucking 2034 World Cup now, apparently. Have you robbed?

I lost so much money on that long shot bet. No one wants a World Cup run by HTS because they don't have the deep pockets of the Saudis, even though they're a great footballing nation. That would be, I mean, there must be guys in HTS who were like, we have to host the Olympics or the World Cup or something that will give us the reputation that we're trying to garner. We're going to get the snooker. Just, you have to start with a small thing and work your way up. World Championship of Darts is going to be held in Damascus next year.

Okay. Stand up if you love the darts. Yeah. Phil Bristow sweating more than any human being ever has. Raymond van Barneveld collapsing from dehydration. ALICE And they're doing it in winter, it's like 30 degrees max, and all of these guys are just looking like beef jerky, it's gonna be incredible. NARESH None of them can perform, because they can't

have pints. ALICE Setting a new record for dehydration, it's like, it's gonna go for like, most dehydrated human being going to be like mummified corpse and mummified corpse. Every darts player mummified corpse. Yeah, I'm very excited for like the inevitable FT article about the wrangling of someone in the new government trying to figure out how to like get enough pints in that they can do the darts, but still have alcohol prohibited. I'm still I'm still looking forward to the FT's lunch with Jelani. That's going gonna be a Jelani's tiny desk concert

Jelani he him was pretty good. Yeah, that was not I mean show me the lie. Yeah, not much of a desert island discs Lot of nashids. A little bit of UK-US politics first. Do we still, do we have to? Like, we can just do it, we can do it on Monday if you want. This is a joke country, the sole piece of British politics I know about is, Kemmy Badnock leader of the Conservative party saying she will not not touch a sandwich because she's like anti-sandwich.

And then Keir Starmer defending the sandwich! Yeah. Hold on, is there a new leader of the Conservative Party? Yeah we had an election for it and she won. Everyone knows she's completely insane. Yeah she's fucking tapped. She got interviewed in the Spectator and she said, unprompted, I never eat lunch at work because I don't like sandwiches, I don't like when the bread is moist, I won't touch moist bread, but I will occasionally...

Who's artistic queen, Kemi Badenow? True. But I will occasionally have someone bring me in a steak and then I'll just eat a steak while I work. Which is... Why do all of these policy papers have like beef juices on it? You know? This is like, this is like how I would talk when I was like 12, and I went to Disney World and I asked the people at the cafeteria if they, I could have steak for breakfast. Like this is, this is a child's taste. Alright.

Yeah, basically. I mean, I think a lot about Trump's well-done steak with ketchup, that haunts me still. Oh, looks like we've got a troublemaker. Goofy, get the taser. If you really want to legitimize HDS rule in Syria, build a Disneyland, you know? Disneyland Amazons. Oh my god. But I would say if you want to talk about like, sclerotic countries with kind of fake

politics, I mean, the fact that the leaders of a nuclear armed nation are spending time getting into a sandwich argument feels like beyond the bottom of the barrel for the P5 of security council. It was it was when Starver was like I think the sandwich is a great British institution. I'm like yeah it's the only one we've got left. Like you've destroyed everything else. I'm like, yeah, it's the only one we've got left, guys. Like, what? Like, you've destroyed everything else. Yeah.

The fucking sandwiches! That's all there is! Yeah. There's no rail network. Take a look at Kemi Badenoch's disgusting lunch. Yeah. That was also a great one. Kirstal was disgusting lunch.

Well, that was the thing, it wasn't even a sandwich, so he doesn't like them either. This is the thing, you have a bipartisan anti-sandwich consensus. You can't vote for a sandwich enthusiast in this country. So you know, the two party system has fucked us once again. We're so much better, I love having liberal democracy with multi-party elections, whole process democracy is a sham, and then it's like, oh you can't vote for the sandwich party, because the mono party, that we have a one party system, and they're anti-sandwich. I feel like the sandwich policy just got like 5% in the German elections and is best described

as extreme right. Jeremy Corbyn failed his MI5 vetting because he admitted having eaten a cheese and bransden sandwich that day. I want to say one thing about the UK, the UK politics. We talked about the destruction of all of the stuff in our ongoing chart of Keir Starmer creating enemies out of everybody and allies out of nobody. And there's coalition building against him. Yeah, he's he's like Batman.

He's uniting Britain by making everyone hate him. Well, when he's at the table of success, he wants there to be enough waiters for the extravagant meal that he plans on having. And for that, you are going to need a lot of haters. So, he has united a lot of people around... He's basically united people who are vaguely right-wing around this cause celeb of like, farmers losing their tax break on inheritance or quote unquote farmers, including I think it's worth mentioning like as a kind of check as to how deep this is penetrated. My partner's conservative, like vaguely conservative

parents that just live in a country town have never expressed a view about farming before are wearing support the farmers pins. Yeah, but wait until they get a load of the sandwich discourse. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, he's made enemies of the farmers and the people who like them. He's made enemies of the civil service. And now he's making an enemy in addition of most of his party. And now he's making an enemy of teachers. Oh, yes, that's right. Because finally, finally, it's your own time you're wasting.

Yeah, finally, a British government has looked at the education sector and said, you are going to have to cut, find 2.8% more pay for teachers from within your own budgets now. So you know that education sector that had lots of fat on that particular cut of meat, right? Oh yeah. Like schools dripping with money, lavish, like going to Dubai. You're just like, you go into a British school, you're like, why is that? Why did they spend money on this? Why is this here? Yeah. How come this British elementary school was able to pay for Neymar

Jr. to join their football team? Why? Why have they leased this work of art from the Louvre? You know? Like, why all of that, right? So they're saying, OK, schools are being told to find efficiencies with the education secretary. And I always like having like someone who lives in America on these calls because you get

to see into us. So we expose our national humiliation for your entertainment. Where schools, the suggestion that's come from the education secretary is, hey, maybe consider switching your bank or your energy provider to make up the savings. Just pointing at a school and being like, have you considered like, cancelling a Netflix subscription? Maybe if you bought less avocado toast. ZACH Yeah, it is genuinely the Australian boomerification

of the Starmor government. GARETH Can't cancel our Netflix subscription, that's replaced three of the teachers. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Have you tried piracy shit? Have you tried getting like a cracked fire stick? Putting that, like, putting that on a TV that you wheel in and just showing the kids illegal FIFA streams or something.

We're all watching lessons from other schools on 123movies.com. What if the schools were to share a Netflix password, perhaps then some savings could be made throughout the educational estate. Listen, this is great though, because if you watch something on one, two, three movies or whatever, and it's got like hard coded Bulgarian subtitles, then it's a language lesson as well as whatever it was originally. And this is a whole generation of kids learning Bulgarian swearing. The children of Britain are going to be watching the Angelina Jolie movie Wanted with Bulgarian subtitles.

I keep thinking as well about that govern like a startup mentality that Starmer and Pac McFadden said they want to inculcate. It's like startups don't they pay everyone so much because they're given huge amounts of money by Andreessen Horowitz compared to like what they need to just take over so they can pay huge salaries to top talents. They can make a product, sell to a bigger competitor, or become one of those bigger competitors. Governing like a startup is not possible when you're trying to find efficiencies in the budget of everybody except the hundred million pound fund for managers or startups to come in and try to fix education somehow. That's efficiency though. What if we got Mark Andreessen to invest in the schools? What if we go, we like, we put, we, you know, we sweetened the deal for him. We were like, okay, so every science lesson in the UK is

going to contain a unit about how it's perfectly normal to have a big pointy egghead. And then in exchange, you just fund all the other education stuff. So I want to move on though. This is a startup, what we're going to be talking about. One I found kind of specifically for Chamis. I will give you all it's called Toca. T.O.K.A. That has no bearing on what it does. Israel. It was founded by Ehud Barak in 2018.

Yeah, baby. OK, OK. I mean, do you like to smoke weed?