TRASHFUTURE - Savoury Vapes Rising: Community Justice is Served (A Trashfuture New Years)

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Riley, Milo, and Alice ring in the new year by looking at the Economist’s rosy predictions in an alternate universe where Britain magically becomes fine due to the power of positive thinking and sharp dressing. We also look at some developments in Scotland, and Labour’s plan to give every homeowner control of Trident to deal with the rampant issue of young people loitering. Finally, we round off by looking at a new Yacht Neom DLC. 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 *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 Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hi, everybody. It is the first TF of 2023. And the instruction that you're going to receive from us is to take all of your old acquaintances, forget them. They're gone. You're getting all new friends, know all the acquaintances. Yeah, we're your friends now. We're your family. Give us all of your money. Move into our compounds. And, you know, await further instructions. Happy New Year to you, our listeners, and to you, two fifths of the people that do this podcast with me. Yeah, the song God of Ra has once again allowed a pair of scarabs to, like,

sort of rotate the sun across the sky enough times to make it a new year. And we hope for a felicitous flood and a tall pyramid. Well, according to this editorial in The Economist, what if that did actually happen as the New Year's message in The Economist? A sort of creastly cast of The Economist. Yeah, yeah. So the New Year's message from The Economist goes, it goes, standing bird, man doing a hand gesture, standing bird. It goes, what the editorial is entitled, and this is probably from their last issue of the year,

what if things in Britain just go right next year? What if that? Which of the stages of grief is that? I think it's sort of, it's the one between bargaining and acceptance. Pyramid scheme count as a stage of grief. It's not even denial anymore. It's just delusion. It's like Hitler bunker stuff. It's like army group Steiner is going to come and like destroy the Red Army before they can liberate Berlin. So they say, you know, and then this is, this is what they say, right?

Is that it's been screwed up so badly by sort of some combination of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and various sort of circumstances outside of our control that we decided to remove all of the safeguards against because it was slightly too expensive. Yeah. They say, look, basically after that, after a year like this, Britain will find it hard to surprise in the downside again, which means we are setting the poor face. There are more things in Britain than a dreamt of in your philosophy, the economist. Yeah. Britain is kind of like the global politics equivalent of Kanye West. Like we always find a new way to surprise. We always find new depths to plum.

Very anti-Semitic also. We also kind of what like reached our peak in arguably 2008, 2009. We had like one or two good albums. Yeah. We've been cut by Pete Davidson somehow. First and most modestly, it could be a year of political stability. And this refers to boring old Rishi taking over from exciting but harmful Quarteng and Truss. Looking at the sort of avalanche of strikes coming down the mountain, smaller versions of which have already been very successful at creating

sort of like untold amounts of disorganization and discord. And being like, yeah, but what if it's snow, right? It just goes over us. It's fine. Oh, yeah. I flew into Heathrow yesterday in the fucking border force were on strike. I had my passports checked by the fucking Royal Logistics Corps. I mean, like if you managed to make the ultra cops go on strike, I feel like it's not going well for you. It's sort of one of those quirks of labor organizing that home office and like border enforcement staff are like represented by the PCS, which is like surprisingly militant. Just like a weird little thing about unions in this country.

So speaking of, they says it is true that the... Oh, yeah. And by the way, the bearing what Alice just said in mind, right? That there is this avalanche of strikes coming down the pipe inflation remains high and that the government is essential and everywhere that the government, that Westminster government has not been involved in negotiating pay, these strikes have been resolved. Like for example, a Euro start, the Westminster government is not resolved, the strikes have been resolved and everyone's agreed to get back to work. Scotland even. I mean, like, we'll see what happens there, but the Scottish government has

been sort of more willing to capitulate to nurses as well they might than Westminster has been. And indeed, so bearing all of that in mind, what they say and the fact that Rishi and his ministers and sort of mandarins are largely preventing this from happening, the argument is that revolutionaries no longer look like winners and moderate seem like a better bet. What's really funny is that Ken Clark of all people said the quiet part loud, unfamiliar from him, I know, where he was, I think he's quite in the times, I want to say, where saying that like the point of doing this, the point of sort of standing a thwart this sort of like wave of strikes is because people can't be afford, people can't afford to learn that striking is an effective

means of like intervention because otherwise, you might have to like negotiate every pay rise from now on. And you know, obviously, we can't have that you can't govern the country like that if you're Ken Clark. So we don't negotiate with terrorists, but in this case, the terrorists are getting you on the train safely and helping a surgery be performed on you. If we choose to live our lives differently and award different pay deals, the nurses brackets terrorists win. Nurses wanting to be paid a living wage is the thin end of the wedge of the nursing union flying a Boeing 747 into Big Ben. That's all I'm saying. And you can't argue with facts.

So what they say, right, is that there is a sort of general air of competence and you can tell because I'm about to redo the next sentence, which is a real sentence printed in again, unsurprisingly, the economist, right? Even when the prime minister is taking a populist position on issues such as asylum seekers, he does it with a five point plan, leading me to ask, what populist position on asylum seekers is improved by a five point plan? It's the form over the function, isn't it? I mean, like no evil man could have like a five point plan. No, of course, they tend to go with three or eight. Five, no way. If you have a five point plan, even if all five of those points are, I am going to kick the

shit out of you, that demonstrates that you are a politician of profound seriousness. Five is a reasonable number of points. It is more details than I think the more slapdash three, but less prescriptive than the needlessly over the top eight. Labor might introduce a sixth point on the populist plan to deal with asylum seekers. Or to encourage them to go further. Absolutely. So they also write, you know, a less doctrinaire approach to Europe. Again, you know, sure, maybe we'll just like pretend that Brexit has gone away. You know, that's that's not very doctrinaire. I mean, that does seem to be the sort of policy

right now is we just try and ignore it, hope no one notices and then question mark and then we become Switzerland. So, you know, that there's that's not a doctrine. They're right. It isn't a doctrine. It isn't even a plan. It doesn't even have one point, let alone five. And also, but it's the so basically, right, their argument is things will be better if we have an overall air of seriousness in government, if we'll sort of have a more sort of conciliatory approach to the EU. And but also the third one is and a loosening of the labor market will be welcome news for readers of the economist. And if you're wondering, hey, wait a minute, what does a loosening of the labor market means? It means slightly higher

unemployment. Thank you, economist. Amazing. Good. We have to we have to discipline labor with with unemployment and with the repression of strikes. I mean, it's cool that the economist has been writing the same like the same line, essentially for what, 100 years now at this point, more than. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, never gets on it. Playing the hits. Absolutely. Absolutely. They couldn't think they could have just taken their article in support of Pinochet and done some like find and replace and deleted the words death squads. And then the thing about Pinochet is that like throwing someone out of a helicopter, that's a plan that requires at least five points. Because number one point one,

you've got to get the helicopter point to put the decedent in the helicopter point three, take off the helicopter point four, throw them out of the helicopter point five, land the helicopter again, it's comprehensive. It's very serious to a little snack. That's the labor, you know, the labor amendment to that point six little snack on the way. Yeah, one also in Britain that would require like the army having a functioning helicopter, which I think is, you know, a bit far fetched throwing you off a grounded helicopter, you fall about four feet out of the thing, go out, and then they pick you back up and throw you back out again. We do this enough times, eventually you're going to stop striking.

Yeah, the cumulative fall will be enough to kill you off. Doing sort of like a long term NFL brain injury to like organize labor. So are you saying that the plan is basically what to like, just, you know, like kite organized labor and then slowly make them go. Yeah, one hit point damage every time this will work. They also talk about that there are glimmers of hope in the death in the domestic labor market where high levels of economic connectivity have been a big problem. Now they say that the reduction in levels of economic activity has been driven by 50 to 64 year olds going back to work. Awesome. Perfect. Amazing.

Yeah, great. That's a good thing. Erefin glimmers, glimmers. We're seeing glimmers. The solution here is, and not to keep mining the Nazi analogy here, right, but like since Mark's already, you know, helpfully mentioned the reserve army of labor for me, we're literally getting into like the Volkssturm here, right? Like old men, like the very old, very young, the infirm, all of these can be pressed into service in like the checkouts of Aldi or whatever, and thus we will rescue the economy. So if you remember, right, check Aldi. We're building a check version of Aldi. It's pretty similar.

If you recall, one thing we talked about a few months ago, in fact, on the last All Remote episode we did was the fact that in many towns in Britain outside of London, the replacement for the pension for the social safety net and so on is to just go get a warehouse job at Amazon, which has seen its average age creep up to which the economist says, thank goodness, we are going to see a reduction in labor market and activity among the very old, and again, possibly infirm, we're being forced back into work despite, I don't know, it being a monstrous thing to do. And additionally, overall, however, while the level of economic connectivity will drop, we also see slackening in the workforce generally, which means higher unemployment. So

hey, maybe Britain will be saved from this hell by, as we say, getting all the 64 year olds into an Amazon warehouse, Rishi Sunak making five point plans for, I don't know, like getting the fucking Navy to put depth minds in the channel, and then just a general sense of sort of seriousness. So yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. And the upshot of all of this is, what if it's just fine? Not even fine. What if it's good? What if it's better, actually, off of the context of these things? What if no more Black Swan events happen? Come on, we're doing a year without one, right? What if nothing unpredictable happens after sort of like, sort of every possible system we can introduce instability and unpredictability into, we have

done that to the maximum by choice over the past, what 40 years, sort of like pulling back the big slingshot, the big catapult, pulling that back, it's aimed directly at my own face and going, yeah, what if the string snaps? Oh, no, not the big facial catapult. Actually, Alice, that does sound like something you would own. I think it's a good way as well to try to think about Black Swan events as well, right? Unpredictable things happening, these bad things happening is basically, this is not about the unpredictable thing happening, but about unpredictable things happening and there being the mechanism to absorb its effects. Unpredictable things

happen all the time. The way I interpret what you've said is, I think about that as us having removed our ability to absorb the effects of unpredictable events and I'm sorry to the economist, but it will take more than a PowerPoint presentation or a spiffy suit to compensate for that particular, let's say, deficiency in the way that we've set up the country. In Britain, look, we take the view, what's the point in preparing for an unpredictable event happening? What are the chances of an unpredictable event happening? Well, famously, nobody knows and if they can't even predict an event, how are they going to make it happen? Predicting stuff is easy. This is a statistical anomaly that ordinary people who are not

like statisticians are becoming increasingly aware of because it's now the fifth year in a row of hottest year in history again or you've lived through a couple of dozen once in a hundred year weather events or something like that and it's just like, oh, okay, well, maybe these things have become, maybe unpredictability has become more predictable to me. Lacking somewhere behind this are the brains trust the economist who are just like, it's going to go back, it's going to go back to normal, we're going to have a lovely summer, it's not going to be too hot. Nothing weird is going to happen and it's going to be fine because of the old people, the old people are going to get jobs and therefore it's all going to be.

Well, because they have statistics brain, so they're like, oh, well, actually, the weirder things get the sooner they'll go back to normal because statistically, the weirdness is so unlikely that it must be just on the cusp of going back to normal. And every time it gets weirder and they're like, which means we're even closer to things going back to normal. These things couldn't possibly be correlated, the weirdness weakening these systems to prevent further weirdness couldn't possibly be correlated with further weirdness. No, sir. Yeah. And there's a lesson here that is like being deliberately not learned that normalcy is something that you have to actively maintain. You have to like, sort of shepherd your flock of

white swans if you want to like make sure that there's, you know, it's at least rare that there's black swans, right? Like, you have to maintain some sort of like institutional capacity. And meanwhile, we're just like stripping bits of institutional capacity away instead. Or creating laws that make it more difficult for the people trying to protect the institutional capacity to do that. They're terrorists. They're about to do Nurse 9-11 on Big Ben. The other thing that I sort of, that this makes me reflect on. Nurse 9-11 aiming the, aiming the plane at Big Ben and going, no, this may hurt a bit. You may feel a slight pinch.

You know what this makes me think of, right? Is that I don't know if you've all been following Solana. It was a popular cryptocurrency at a huge market cap. It's crashed very low. And people are losing money trying, trying to find the bottom of it because they can't, because they're so used to the number being high, that the number being low feels increasingly unlikely. The lower the number goes, the closer it is to returning to normal. Well, it's, it's the same thing as in the beginning of the pandemic, when Hertz, other rental car company, went out, basically started filing for bankruptcy and people were buying at stock because they were so used to the number being higher. You know, and it's this,

it's the same thing here. As you say, Alice, right status quo is something you actively have to maintain. But I think generations of economic orthodoxy have been that there is just a status quo that kind of comes from God, the market, whatever you want to call it. And that it's something that, yeah, that we can just sort of snap back to if we just hold on. Well, this is happening like internationally, like not to totally derail the podcast, but you may be aware that China has like abandoned after mass protests. It's zero COVID policy and it's now about to have because, you know, the not importing Western vaccines and their own sort of like denatured vaccines aren't as good, are about to have like this huge wave

of COVID. And it's like the Chinese Communist Party's ideology, we've talked about this before, is almost entirely maintaining normalcy and like actively proactively maintaining normalcy. And if the guys who are like the sort of the constant gardeners, the guys who have like see themselves in their role in government as keeping shit normal all the time, if those guys have given up, what hope do we have in Britain, a country where we like our sort of like our ideology is like, yeah, it's to get weird with it. What chance do we stand? Well, I'll tell you one thing that the that's a few things have been happening in Scotland. That's true, that was sort of a perennial thing when things do happen up here.

He said segueing. I wanted there was one thing that I think that there's a little more talking about, but I don't think you know about this Milo, but one of our predictions has come true, at least as a proposal in Scotland. Do you want to guess which one it is? Because I think you don't know. This is ringing a vague bell, actually. No, I can't remember. I think I heard about 11. It's it's this, which is world's loudest dong. I had to get Philip Glass to compose that. Which is I also have been watching glass on you. The Scottish Greens are set to propose plans

to ban the sweet vapes. Amazing. Yes. Perfect Green Party policy. Perfect. Here's the thing, right? Britain is Scotland, too, within Britain is a country that enjoys passing no fun allowed laws. Scotland, this particularly appeals to like the Green and the SNP is sort of like social liberalizing mission of like minimum alcohol pricing or like well, the sugar tax too, right? And I've hated all of those no fun allowed laws. This is one I can support. I finally support a no fun allowed law because I hate a sweet vape and their ubiquitous.

And if I can like, not walk down the street and become enveloped in a cloud of like strawberry bubblegum sort of emanating from a 14 year old. Perfect. Thank you. Please do that immediately. Enforce this. Get the army to enforce this. Get the Royal Logistics Corps to confiscate people's vapes. I should be able to drop a tungsten rod from orbit on like anyone selling a sweet vape. So would you support a Tapanard vape? Yeah. What if you were walking down the street and you got walked through like a cloud of lobster bisque? What about that? Smoked mackerel pate vape?

Just a sort of very savory. I support a savory vape as a sort of moderate reform, you know. I think you have to like bear in mind that there are some directions that you don't want to go with it. Like there are a lot of savory flavors you don't want to explore. You don't want to walk through a cloud of sea salt vape, for instance. That would be very uncomfortable. But yeah, the steak and so is vape, certainly, maybe. I support that. I just think it's quite telling, in fact, that only after we published our idea for an olive Tapanard vape that all of a sudden the Scottish Greens seem to be saying, we'll take that one, Trash Future Podcast.

Add them to the master list of people who steal our ideas. It's the U.S. postal inspectors, Buffon, Interpol, the Scottish Green Parsi. They're all tripping for now. The Department of Fish and Wildlife for their investigation of Greg Stooby. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Apparently, he's smuggling rare toads. I'm just kidding for libel reasons. So basically, there's no toads entirely above all. Yeah, we have no questions about the legitimacy of Mr. Stooby's toads. Thank you.

Yeah, Greg Stooby's toad operation is fully legal, as far as we are aware. Which is, I wanted to talk, another thing is happening in Scotland to close out the year. Two things? The fuck is getting busy up here? Well, Scotland followed the classic sitcom storyline of having a small funny thing and then a big weird thing. And Nicholas was sort of the crammer of the United Kingdom. Yeah, bursting through the door to Westminster. Which is, I'm aware we're a little late on this one,

but it really felt like something that we had to discuss, just given everything, given our sort of forays into turf madness, is Scotland, as I'm given to understand it, has passed a law allowing it. Scotland has passed a minor administrative reform of how you recognize a change in gender. The sole effect of this is to make it slightly easier to change your birth certificate. It does nothing. However, because every turf group has insisted that, through a sort of peculiar misreading of the law, that this is what allows trans women to enter single sex spaces, which it isn't,

this has been the focus of huge protests. I don't know. I always show my birth certificate whenever I go into a changing room at a store. Yes, right. Of course you do. And it's normal to have it demanded of you. Yeah, that's why I keep it folded in my breast pocket. I think you'll find I belong here. If you want to look over my papers. Years and years of public consultation and protest and more public consultation, it's the most scrutinized law in Scottish history.

The upshot of this is that it passed after a long attempt to delay in filibustering sponsored by the Scottish Conservatives. And then a thing happened in the Scottish Parliament as it passed. Riley, would you like to like to summarize what went on? Well, first of all, I just think we we have to say thank you to the gender critical movement for preventing adults from coming into, let's say, public spaces and sexualizing them to make a political point around children especially. That's very important safety consideration. So what happened is this was being passed is that a sort of prominent gender critical person with a Twitter account called Gussie Grips.

Yeah, Gussie Grips. Damn, that Gussie Grips. Well, no, Milo, you make a joke, but that's I believe what her name refers to. Because she isn't sort of a campaigner for his sort of pelvic floor exercise. Yeah, she she she said that as a physiotherapist whose deal was like Kegels and like pelvic floor exercises. And from that sort of point, that singular obsession, that transformed into a different obsession that of the trans woman. She's a scholar of Kegel. Yeah. I've been reading Kegel. But her phenomenology led her to the understanding that trans women are trying to take her pelvic floor exercises away. And so Gussie Grips,

which is, you know, named Elaine Miller, I think her name is, but her yeah. Well, Gussie stands for guy pussy, obviously. No, that's exactly the opposite of what she wants. She she she wants to be like, yeah, she's not thought about it. But so she she wants the Gussie to remain, you know, sort of women only and for it to grip very strong healthy vagina. Sure. So she she got up in the parliament after this past and she flashed her pussy, her Gussie at everyone. And they were including like supporters of the bill, opponents of the bill, there were children there as well. It was apparently a merkin, a pubic wig over over a pair of tights. But as I understand it, both the police and the

like Scottish Parliament are now investigating this. To me, I don't care. I don't care if she gets arrested. I just think it's sort of I'm very grateful to her for making the point about how fucking weird serfs are better than I possibly could. Oh, absolutely. It's I mean, there there has there I think there is sort of a the longer it's sort of that it goes on, it does seem like it does get slightly more insane. Oh, yeah. But it also it's it's I think it highlights sort of one of the things I sort of bang on about, which is that if you start becoming a transphobe, it will take over the one like relatively normal thing you might do. Riley's low. Yeah, pelvic floor exercises or writing a beloved children's story set in a magic over exercises transphobically

somehow. I'm sure she's found a way, you know, and then it will just take over everything until you're flashing Scottish Parliament to be like, this is what they do. This is this is actually this is, you know, bypassing this law, you have sort of enabled sex crimes. And I'm going to prove it by doing one is like a fantastic piece of political political theater. Turfism is fascinating, because I think more so than any other like right wing political phenomenon, even though it's not one of the more popular ones, despite what you might think in the media is kind of it's actually kind of it doesn't pull that well with the populace, but it's just like all of the people who do it a very high profile. But what's fascinating about it is it

is just a madness rune. Just like everyone, everyone who gets into it, it completely takes over their life and it sends them absolutely bonkers. Like there's not a single turf who hasn't completely lost their mind. And of course, now we get into an interesting constitutional question, because Rishi Sunak has and the Home Secretary for that matter have threatened to just flatly overrule this new like administrative change was going to take like a year to implement anyway. But they're threatening to like procedurally overrule it as being like incompatible with the Equality Act. Remember that economist article we read about 15 minutes ago? Hey, how's that looking right now? Yeah, maybe things will just get better. I mean, I think this is also a good

thing in the sense that I can't think of something that would motivate Scottish people to be less transphobic, more than English people telling them that they have to. We sort of saw this with the Scottish Human Rights Commission. It's the beautiful chess of Anglo-Scottish politics. Exactly, exactly. Like sort of that kind of spite and not wanting to be, to be, you know, told what to do and dictated to. I think that will, that will, you know, come in very, very handy. The Tories need to start telling the Scots to leave the Union.

This is, this is the perfect 7D chess. Yeah, you just need to like sort of neg Scotland at the next election into like, you know, maybe, maybe just fuck off then, maybe rejoin the EU. We don't care. And this will then lead to like a massive Conservative or Labour majority and, you know, support for Remain. But additionally, right, this is, this comes back to another thing that I've been sort of, I've been thinking about, right, which is that this is, again, by the numbers, not very popular except among columnists.

Yeah, and this is strange too, that like Rishi Sunak's image of sort of like moderation and sort of like calm, quiet politics, that has survived without even a dent the idea of like taking human rights legislation off of a devolved administration and blocking it because you don't like it. Something which is not particularly moderate or particularly calm, I would say, doesn't seem to have made a difference. But equally, you know, reminded of this, again, there was a very popular idea, especially when sort of, you know, Corbyn was in charge of the Labour Party, that it was the left-wing parties that were populated and staffed by isolated weirdos who are willing

to appear like repellent oaths in public because of their odd ideological commitments that most of the public finds strange and off-putting. Yeah, remember when Corbyn got his pussy out in a conference? I don't know why he did that. Yeah, the cussing. Even the cool pussy. Yeah, but he was like, cool pussy, hey. Oh, we all did it the same fucking time. He would fucking take you for it, yeah.

But this is, it's not just the... Designed a chair that looks like a... I think he actually did that. But I'm reminded of this idea and also it's not just the, you know, sort of TERFs doing their odd nonsense up in Holy Root, but also it's the Conservative Party as well, just becoming increasingly insular and talking basically to itself and its most ardent supporters. I wonder what's been described like that before. Yeah, yeah, not the Tory Party we know and love.

The Scottish Conservatives are now, and you know, just a reminder for anyone who insists that Scotland is like more progressive than the UK. Second largest party in Scotland is the Conservatives and largely off of this culture warship and the Constitution. And so if you want an example of like a party that's like talking to itself, the Conservatives certainly, but the Scottish Conservatives, like within that, they're like doubling down even more on that. So I want to sort of come on to, don't worry, it's not going to be all British politics. We have a little, a little fun thing at the end from one of our favorite,

one of our favorite little sort of ongoing projects, let's say, but there's another, a new sort of, and again, this is going to be a very good little sort of slice of, I think, actually, Britonology as well for all you international listeners, which is Labour has announced their new plan to deal with- How many points does it have? So far, just two, but I'm sure that there will be more coming. Bloody austerity. So Steve Reid, in Shadow Justice, has said, we have a new plan for dealing with anti-social

behavior. Shadow Justice. Knowing the Labour Party, it's going to be both ineffective and also extremely authoritarian. We have hired the Batman. Yeah, we've put the bat signal on the roof of Luna House in Croydon. I think maybe this is the time, you know, we always talk to think tank people, right? And we always talk to think tank people on the basis that like, ideas on the table, right? This is a policy proposal, even if they don't take it, it's good to have the idea out there. It'll influence things, right?

Maybe now it's my turn to be the think tank person and say, I've had an idea about this, I've had it for a long time. And that is, I'm just putting this out there, just leaving this on the table, Keir Starmer, if you're interested, the quiet car on trains. British Transport Police should be able to enforce that with grenade launchers. Now, I'm not going to say it's a panacea, it's not going to solve all the problems, but don't, you can't say it wouldn't cheer you up. So just, I'm just leaving it there.

That's one of the ideas we're putting on the table, huh? No, Alice, have you considered that there is a small issue with this idea is that for at least a very short period of time, the quiet car will be very loud indeed. I've got noise-canceling headphones, it's fine. Okay, fine, good, excellent. Problem solved. No, so basically remember a couple of things before we talk about this, right? Which is that the laborer said that the route to office is through sort of suburban older white male lead voters, basically, right?

Come back to labor, right? Because your mortgage now costs £4,000 a second, so come back to labor. Or as I'm sure it will sound the poster, come back to labor. That's right. And it will be a southern person just doing a voice. It won't be, it won't be just be that. So, and also remember that... Giant version, that building with Mussolini's face on it,

but it's Kirsta, I'm wearing a flat cap. I was going to put one of those up at every market now. And that's like a mining lamp on it for some reason. But the other thing I was going to remind you, of course, is that overall the trend of crime in basically every city in every sort of like the North Atlantic country is down. The idea that there is a crime wave is a fiction. Everyone's too depressed to do crime anymore, plus all the hours at the Amazon warehouse. Or indeed, if there is crime, it's the kind of crime that we don't really class as crime,

like wage theft and things of that nature, right? But the... This is why I'm holding this whippet. And so, so bearing all that in mind, right? That the people who they need to get on side are already people whose pensions are expensive and their mortgages are expensive, but they've decided to do this one thing, with Alice, who very presciently have said, probably won't achieve its intended goal, but will massively increase petty authoritarianism.

Well, that's almost as good. Okay, I'm going to try and brainstorm this here. Is it that as soon as you sign a mortgage, you get the powers of like a special constable? Like you have the power of arrest once you own a home? Weirdly, not a million miles away. Oh, great. Oh, we're getting British standard ground laws. No, no, no, no.

That would require you to be sort of have the, the Cajones to actually stand your ground. This is, I'm tattling on the teacher and then I get to decide what happens to you. Oh, fuck yeah, I did read about this. This is that they're going to, they're going to let like the victims of antisocial behavior decide the punishment, right? Basically. But not in like a restorative justice way in a like, how many lashes do you get sort of way? I love this, I love this, but it's a perfect labor policy.

It's, it's sort of like stammerism in a nutshell, right? We can defund the courts even more so we don't have to like do anything approaching like a process of justice. Instead, we just like, you know, the policeman picks you up by your ear and like delivers the miscreant to like, you know, the nearest homeowner who decides, I don't know, I think I should be flinted and then, you know, we just do that. You're hung drawn and quoted. Your punishment is that you will be restricted to smoked salmon or tapenade

rapes for the next six months. No, fuck, this is so unjust. No, I mean, I think this will go over very well with voices. I think this is sort of a broadly well considered thing. Electrally, because British people are tyrants and they love this and like every fucking little sadist is going to go for this. Like huge labor landslide on the basis that, you know, an ASBO can now mean that if a kid kicks a football into your garden,

you can choose to have him tonsured or whatever. Give him a ball back. Yeah. We can like has to wear some kind of like device called the heretics crown or whatever that kills you after a day and putting him in the iron maiden. The things that American local officials in like small municipalities where they run unopposed get to decide to do where it's like, you know, they send a guy for, I don't know, not paying child support or whatever.

And the order will be like, and you have to wear like a pink tutu and stand at this intersection for 12 hours or whatever. Alice, I don't know if you're doing this intentionally, but you were essentially describing Maricopa County under Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He was given this broad remit to essentially take vengeance on people who often, again, had like administrative issues like unpaid parking tickets, they didn't show up for a bench or stuff like this. And this included stuff like having them work outside with inadequate heat protection.

Listen, if you have an unpaid parking ticket, it's only fair that the person whose parking space, like their house is next to that parking space, gets to decide how much cock and ball torture the police get to do to you. I actually love the idea of like a guy getting his car keyed and the police coming around and asking him like how the offender should be punished. And he's like, what's the name of that thing where I put you in a sack with a chicken, a steak, a snake and a goat and then throw you in a river? Yeah, if anyone does antisocial behavior to me, it's to be punished by scoffism, thanks.

Yeah, I think I should be thrown off the tarpaian rock. Just in accordance with the sharia, you know, whatever I consider that to be. Get in the vigiles to throw him off the tarpaian rock. As a reminder as well, this is for antisocial behavior, which for, again, American listeners, antisocial behavior is like- Nothing could be nothing. You know, it's not nothing, Alice. It's what if you're a group of four young people and you're standing around?

Yeah, what if that? I think we know the answer and it's the tarpaian rock. Yeah, that's the tarpaian rock, I'm afraid. Five point plan to throw like, yobbs off the tarpaian rock. Yeah, it's five yobbs, one point for each yob. Every person under 16 in Britain gets thrown off the tarpaian rock. Yeah, there we go. Never did me any harm.

Oh, my God. I'd get thrown off the tarpaian rock all the time. My father wouldn't take any of that shit. He'd throw us off the tarpaian rock so we woke up. Oh, it was a character building. He listened to music slightly too loud. You're going to get buried alive under the forum boarium and, you know- If I catch you playing the nose flute at that volume again,

you're going to be off the fucking tarpaian rock, son. No, yeah, he caught us dishonoring Vulcan for us off the tarpaian rock. Yeah, we ate all his garum, tarpaian rock. I'll explain what's being proposed specifically. So labor's proposal is to strengthen the use of community sentences, which they say would achieve a double win by tackling reoffending rates and, quote, giving a voice to victims. Wait to me again, this is like,

this max of the same kind of democratization talk that you would see in like a cryptocurrency that's like, we're democratizing syndicated finance or whatever. It's like, no, you just have a cryptocurrency. It's the same thing to me. Reed said, victims will be able to select the unpaid work that offenders carry out, so victims will see justice being done. And while currently, community sentences can include useful work,

like clearing wasteland, decorating community centers, repairing churches, or removing graffiti. Painting the ground directly under the tarpaian rock. Labor intends also to widen the scope of what can be considered community sentences. So what that basically says is, we're going to create a new laundry list of petty revenges that you can take on young people you find annoying if you vote for Keir Starmer and his band of merry men.

I was going to be like playing Tekken, you know, you get a list of like button combos that are different moves, but it's like anti-social behavior punishment. Yeah, this is genuinely going to go over so well, is the problem. Like this is, I hate to say it, but they may have like, labor scientists have worked after hours in the lab many a long night, and they finally come up with a policy that I think will be genuinely popular. Yeah, Operation Vaporclip, where the labor party brought over all of the most boring German scientists

to triangulate the most dull possible policies. Yeah, so now if you like smoke a sweet vape or whatever, they get to like your, you know, various responsible adults get to fire mortars at you when you run across a field like that one Maya video. No, it's a, yeah, look, my father found my birthday cake flavored vape in my nightstand, and now I have to like do the run away from the guys like in the movie Apocalypse. Hmm, yeah, it's going to get executed with an anti-aircraft gun, like those scare stories about North Korea.

I think the other thing to remember here as well, is it's not exactly like everyone in Britain who loves this, it's just the people who are most empowered and taken seriously by our, you know, decrepit media and political system. It is all of the- And they vote, we're bumper stickers, like I throw yobbs off the tarpaian rock and I vote. Yeah, love me wife, eight youths. Don't like it, there's the tarpaian rock. Giant giants are like tarpaian rock bumper sticker next to one of those

like two foot wide radiator grill poppies. That's the future. Victims would sit on new community payback boards that would oversee community sentences and make sure that offenders complete unpaid work, which again is a bit like empowering, you know, that like, like, like, from down the road. You know, yeah. Rain from a mum is going to like sentence you. Exactly. She's going to sit on something called a payback board. Oh, you know what though, in this, in this, but in this sort of university,

there's also going to be like the tiresome liberal person who's against the policy. He'll be like on question time going like, Well, actually, I think the home, the home secretary should be thrown off the tarpaian rock. If they like it so much. Just like everyone else. And so these boards would be given the power to hold local services and companies accountable for failing to enforce the terms of community sentences in full. Because like there is a sizeable political constituency in this country.

And the naming it the payback board is just so much clearer to me about this, that there's a sizeable political constituency whose only political policy platform is why hasn't the Prime Minister made the film Harry Brown real yet? Yeah, it is quite a Jason Statham ass line. I'm chairman of the payback board. And you're up for a view, sunshine. The payback board is like a two by four, the nail through it. Yeah, you have the tarpaian rock. Goad people off the tarpaian rock.

If I don't, if I don't throw a lawyer in you off the tarpaian rock in the next 15 minutes, my ass can literally explode. Interestingly, you described the payback board as a two by four with a nail in it. One of the punishments for listening to music on your phone in the bus is you do have to sit on the payback board. So this is the last bit. Don't throw an Alice with a good time. This is the bit that really makes it for me.

Which is Steve Reed that went on that his own experience of being robbed at knife point helped him to understand victims desire for and they actually use the word retribution saying, I know what it's like to be the victims of crime. I know how victims of crime feel when they want retribution and I know how victims of crime feel when they don't want that to happen to other people ever again. I thought the point of a justice system was to remove that. Yeah, it's not like Kirstama was ever, you know, a barrister or anything, a human rights lawyer. Like never sort of sat through any classes about, you know, the retribution's place in the

justice system. But it's cool. We can go back to like blood money now. This is great. Yeah. Sorry. The whole thing with victims is the reason why there's a system around this is that victims are very bad at deciding what the punishment should be for a crime because obviously they're

usually quite emotional about what happened. And this is why they're generally removed from that process. And I think there is like a, as you say, for this reason victims are like typically quite separated from that process. And that's why things like victim impact statements, right? Or like having the option to do, you know, some kind of like restorative justice, probably a good thing. That's probably like a good liberal intervention to make.

Taking it out here to, well, they should just be able to decide how many lashes you get. That's more problematic, let's say. Yeah. They should be tied to a post and the victim should get 15 minutes in there with a baseball bat. God, it is that, isn't it? It is like that thing that Sun readers say about like nonces or whatever, where it's like, yeah, just giving like half an hour and it's like, oh God. They're going to reanimate Roy Shaw and put him in charge of justice.

No, they've ruined prison now because you can't, they don't let you near the nonces anymore. You know, you want to get out and you can't now. I think the way to understand, you want to fit this into a larger political trend, it's that the best way to understand the politics of the last, you know, however many years in Britain, depends on when you want to start counting for them. But let's say the recent past is that there has been an increasing tendency towards, I think the, let's say, embracing the darker side of the self and valorizing the sort of innate human desires to hurt, to exploit, to take and to break things essentially,

that we more than most other countries have chosen to hold those qualities up as laudable and sort of look with scorn and detest on anyone who would attempt to do something else. You can call it a kind of, it's a kind of realism that sort of says the only thing that can be treated with respect as an idea is that which we know to be hurtful, to be cruel, to be even short termist, you know, that anything else is kind of effeminate or liberal or unserious. Or dangerous as Corbyn was, mind you. Indeed. And to put into context of just the fact that this is, the race now is between who can allow victims of loitering youth to control of the whole army for 15 minutes a day,

who can get there fastest? Which country, which party will be brave enough to nuke Croydon? Yeah, who can make homeowners into the like the judges from Judge Dredd fast enough? Well, you know, we've had, we've had Dark Brandon, are we gonna get Donnie Stalmo? Dark Stalmo. Will he be the one? Yeah, that's a good idea, isn't it? A powerful thought. We have a few minutes left. I wanted to end on, I watched Neon's 2022 year in review movie. I just this second got a fucking ad for Neon. Yeah, a huge advertiser on Twitter, one of the only ones. Yeah, it's like people in a supermarket and then in a forest somehow, but they're like living rooms in a forest and then robotic arms assembling something labeled

the future. Great. Where else are they going to assemble it? Oh, there's also people BMXing outside the supermarket. Oh, they would never fly in Britain. No, the progressive justice system of Saudi Arabia is like much more humane about these things, which would be 4,000 foot high skyscraper that's also 4,000 feet long. Yeah, of course. No, so and the thing is that there was, we missed one of the Neon zones when we last talked about Neon and I thought it was the giant we could walk through the organs of the boy was next to them. Oh, if Neon got the boy, that would really, I'd move there. Then we'd have to go. Yeah. Yeah, we'd have to go. We'd all have to take a picture with the boy.

Okay. No, so they basically created a space and I shit you not is what they say for the yachting community. People of yachts. Pretty fun. Yeah, people of yachts. I sort of fucking got that language. That language escaped its sort of useful barriers and is just being used by the most repellent people in the world. If you can't do person-centered language for like super yacht owners, who can you do? Yeah, the rock community. Yeah. So Cindala, which is the name of this new area is an island. And all the guy who gets a super yacht with like a scale tarpaian rock on it that you could throw people off. Yeah, it's actually you dive off it into the ocean. It's really fun. Oh, yeah,

it's considered sort of like a grizzly joke, you know, like, oh, I'm watering youth. Oh, it is made of rock though. So it does sink the boat. One of the oligarchs that we sort of like accidentally became too British from living here too long, like a Brownovich or something. It's getting the tarpaian rock on there. So Cindala, MBS said, this is another significant moment for Neon. I'm sure it is. And a major step in the kingdom realizing its tourism ambitions under vision 2030. Cindala will be Neon's first luxury yacht island and yacht club destination in the Red Sea. Raising my hand here for a question. What are they doing that's weird or fucked up here?

Is it going to be, are we stacking the yachts vertically? Are the yachts on the blockchain? Yeah, does it like retrieve your yacht sort of like mechanically from a big parking structure? Like what's happening here? Free tarpaian rocks for all. They're dropped from a sensible height of 300 feet onto your yacht. Like Russian oligarch with tarpaian rock on his, on his, on his yacht, standing at the top of it and going like, it is, it is me, Robert Maxwell. Oh, no, please members of British special air service. I will do whatever you want. But his yacht's still around, which means there is a strong possibility that its

current owner could have done Robert Maxwell bits, just like on the back of it, just like whoop. You would be tempted. Yeah, yeah, of course you would. You feel like it's an ill-starred yacht to buy. So you asked me earlier, what kind of impossible thing are they doing in Cindala? And I would say that MBS has once again defied our expectations by making this the first theoretically possible project in Neon. Okay. I mean, congratulations to MBS. I've often thought that one of the possible outcomes of Neon was they,

they would build some sort of aspect of it and then declare victory, right? And then say that the line was just a metaphor or whatever. So maybe it's just this, maybe like they'll have like evicted those, those tribes and like killed the dissidents in order to build one marina in a place no one would ever go to. It's entirely possible. Oh, good. The one, so it's just, it's just a big series of luxury hotels and luxury service departments

and births and fine dining. All of the things that you would like if, you know, you were MBS, and that you'd want to have your own special, Pay and Rock on your back. Have your own little special island where you can have fun with your friends, but no funny business. Yeah, your own specially secured floor of the hotel where you can have fun with your relatives.

Yeah, the weird thing is the suitcase is a band from this area. But right, the, the, and it's just something that again is a giant expensive boondoggle, but is theoretically possible. The one bit is the couple of bits of fun of sort of impossible things here, of course, that like it's I think widely known that extreme luxury stuff is incredibly energy intensive and very, um, let's say environmentally unfriendly. And they say we will somehow preserve all the nature of this island and all of the beautiful marine life while also making this like incredibly high end super luxe.

Yeah. Meanwhile, Robert Maxwell's yacht is like belching bunker oil into the atmosphere, like covering all the seabirds or whatever. And another one is that it's going to have a golf course on the island that will be physical and real and you play actual real golf, but we'll have so many sensors on it that apparently you'll be able to like have it has special ball tracking technology, which again, like they should give that to the fucking Scottish turfs. Yeah, we got the Saudi ball tracking technology.

Golf and ball tracking, GBT. Oh, wait, no, fuck, sorry. An update about the yacht. I'm yacht piled now. I'm down. Yes, I'm down the yacht. Right. The yacht, which is now called the Dancing Hair, but which was formerly the Lady Gillane

and the Lady Mona Kay, was built in 1986 for Ahmad Khashoggi, who didn't actually buy it in the end and Robert Maxwell bought it, died on the yacht famously, and was then owned by an Arabian businessman. And it is now owned not by Trump who owns a similar yacht, which is actually what they were going on about in that article. It is owned by the former wife of Rupert Murdoch, Anna Murdoch. Hell, yes. Very auspicious for media moguls this yacht.

Yes, yeah. Well, I guess we know how Rupert Murdoch is going to die, which is positive, being thrown off a tarpaian rock. So here are a series of questions and answers about Neon's most again, like quote unquote sensible project from Antoni Vivesh, the chief urban planning officer. I've picked, there's 10 of them. I've picked three very fun ones. I'm going to read the first question to you now.

Saudi Arabia is now one of the fastest growing economies in the world with a young population and a visionary leader looking to position Neon at the forefront of growth. How excited are you to be part of the new future? I get a sense of the interview technique here. Yeah, it's great. Did you say it's great? Was he sort of, did he push back on it? I would be surprised.

Is it? In short, it is very exciting. The country has a leader under 40. Cool. Wow. Just sort of like, how many of these questions are hyping up MBS out of curiosity? So there are, there are in fact 10 of these questions. I've picked three. I'm excited to like, learn how the first Russian oligarchs are going to commit suicide in Neon. Yeah, what's going to happen?

He put his entire head down in front of the like high speed monorail that goes down the line. Tragic, unforeseeable. My other favorite question that he's asked is the following question, which again just starts with a long sentence. The world received news of Sindala in a hugely positive way, but there is a small percentage of naysayers. What do you say to those who have yet to be convinced? Why is this written like it's the Quran?

It is. It's really like winding old fashioned speech. Received, received news of this written in like Fushar. Like it's very strange. But in an absolute. Yeah. Came down from the mountain and turned into a flame, and that flame burns in the fireplace of Neons.

Truly they will be amongst the losers. Yeah. Pardon me, but the haters and the losers rejected his message. Genuinely, right? Cause like the most English translations of the Quran, use the word losers for like, I don't know, like sinners or like people who are gonna, you know, not get into heaven, right? And it's very difficult, very difficult to read an English translation of the Quran

that doesn't sound a little bit like it's in Donald Trump voice. Like every so often you'll get a line that is like, truly they will be amongst the losers and you'll be like. And then the Prophet Muhammad, very big guy. One of the biggest guys of all time, actually. Well, my message to those people is to come and visit us once we open Sindala. You know, for those people who are in the Yadding community, but skeptical about Sindala, what they do,

they will see with their own eyes how incredible it is in this part of the world. And, you know, if they don't, then they're going to see the like secret floor of the Hilton, which is also very nice. The third question I've chosen to end to round off this fine New Year's episode is how is life at Neon for you on a daily basis to which? Sort of a very light sort of gun visible at edge of shot. How is life?

How are you enjoying continuing to experience it? This is, we work hard, but we are treated very well. We, I am being treated well by my captors. I'm holding today's newspaper for no reason. I just like reading it, like reading the funny pages. Yeah, I like being photographed with the newspaper because it brings out the color of my eyes. That's right. And if I seem, if I seem like haggard or distressed in any way,

that's just because of how much fun I'm having. It's very tiring here. So much so that I had to like actually handcuff myself to this radiator to calm down. Actually, you know, something here and I have in common. No, actually, I don't feel like moving my index finger from behind today's newspaper. There's nothing to see about it. I've not been kidnapped. I'm just reading this great article by Kay Wiggins in The Financial Times.

Well, this orange jumpsuit is what I normally wear around the house. It's my comfy. That is as good a place as any, I think, to end the first 2023 episode of TF. We've been recording in 2022. None of us have been kidnapped. We're going to remove the podcasting headquarters to Cindala. We will join the global yachting community. So everybody, please join the $10,000 a month tier on Patreon,

which is send TF to Cindala to join the global yachting community. Yeah, you can like sail your yacht directly up to the, like the Hilton and like through a sort of like barred window and some heavy curtains. We will do the podcast to you from there. Yeah. Now the Cobbers came around and asked us what we want done with the people we legally part in the bonus episodes of Trash Future. And I said, they haven't be headed by ISIS.

I said, that's no problem, sir. Or alternatively, there will be a Patreon tier just called Yacht, and it is one yacht per month. Yacht, yacht, yacht, yacht, yacht. The Maxwell tier of the Patreon. You can get thrown off a boat. If you're out there, which you may still be, against all the odds, we have a tier for you.

I want to see, right, the fucking cowards at Call of Duty need to put a fucking flashback mission in the next one, where you throw Robert Maxwell off a yacht. Soap. Okay. All right, we've all got stuff to do. You've got things to do out there in podcast land. So we, and by we, I mean probably us from Australia,

we'll see you on the bonus in a couple of days. I think I'm very quiet on that one, sorry. Oh, bonus. That's right. But happy holidays, happy new year, and here's to a year where maybe everything fixes itself. That's right. Here's to the economists.

Yeah. It's going to be fine. It's supposed to be fine. Don't like it. There's a tarpaian rock. All right. And don't forget also, I'm going to try to make a habit of doing this again. Our theme song is Here We Go by Jinseng.

You can find it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. Plus we have a Patreon. Because if you don't, Jinseng can decide what to do with you. And it's not going to be pleasant. No, indeed. And don't forget, there's a Patreon.

It's five bucks a month if you don't have a yacht. So do check that out. Anyway, we will see you soon. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye-bye.