TRASHFUTURE - Shooting and Cry-Laughing feat. Josef Burton

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

This week, the gang speaks with author and former U.S. Department of State consular officer Josef Burton about the tendency for liberal institutions to find themselves ordered to carry out illiberal practices—whether it’s Trump’s Muslim ban, the UK’s barge housing, or any other recent story in which we simply cannot believe that we’re obligated to do an immoral thing, for the state. We also talk about a recent news story regarding Russian air traffic safety, and a startup that shifts into dark mode when it can commercialise its ‘harmless’ product. 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 *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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

So, and welcome to Trash Future. It's your favorite podcast, it's Trash Future. I am supply teacher Alice this week because Riley is away in the like, Italy themed levelling hitman, joining me, as always, Milo and Hussein, how's it going guys? That's good. He's getting Ripley, I mean, he's gone to the heart of the Ripley universe to get Ripley to get. He's, I mean, I've always been sort of uncertain

when I've referenced the talented Mr Ripley about Riley's endless Mediterranean holidays, whether he is getting talented Mr Ripleyed or whether he is talented Mr Ripley about Riley's endless Mediterranean holidays, whether he is getting talented Mr Ripley or whether he is talented Mr Ripley. I think he is talented, because he's the least posh person on all of those holidays. Yeah. Which isn't to say that Riley isn't posh. It's just to give you a picture. He's going to like fake his own death, you know.

We're going to continue the podcast without him and then we're going to see a guy who is like ostensibly named like Dickie Greenley for whatever who is just rightly undercover and disguise. What if what if he's actually trying to get Mr. Ripley'd? And so he's actively going on all these holidays to particular destinations because he wants to get beaten to death with an all because he wants to he wants the story of how I got Mr Ripley, but it just keeps not happening Yeah, I mean that kind of ties in with the sort of like hitman level in a certain place, is that he's constantly like going around

sitting from like drinks that like firm in with poison and stuff. Right, yeah, the grand piano is dangling for carelessly open. Yeah, yeah. So I really get like half beaten to death with an organ, his explanation being like, I was trying to get into King.

Yeah, I mean, I should have played. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are method on the show. And obviously, Alice in order to play Riley has been drinking a selection of fine wines all the time. I have to play Alice. So I've been taking huge doses of estridial in a chance to catch up. Yeah, I have had the wine flight. You have had the sort of like gender confirming more wine. Just pretty emotional right now. And his same will now be displaced onto you.

So I mean, he's actually going to be in the dresses. Yeah, I'm just like honking my, honking my BMW horn in stand still traffic as we are, as we approach Essex. That's right. We have a full show crossing the 10th S. Sure. We have a full show. We have a full show. We've got some news.

We've got a startup. We've got a fun list of last I found. And then in about a half hours time, also, we're going to hear from past Alice, past Riley, past Milo and past Asane, to speak to past Joseph Burton. I got used to work for the US State Department, has written an article about what it's like doing some like evil bureaucracy. So that's gonna be fine. And then found it a very affordable menswear chain. I mean, yeah, also tune into,

if you wanna hear about affordable menswear or unaffordable menswear, you can listen to other podcasts, which I will not plug in the middle of the show that we're doing right now. No, we'll plug them at the end. Yeah, you can listen to the, the, the, like, Derek Guy, the gentleman's whatever podcast. Yeah.

But yeah, I'm afraid though, we have a jarring change in time and first up because the podcast has once again suffered a grievous loss. You know, so Raleigh's finally been killed on that holiday. No, it's the ticker tape coming out of Alex's hellisers machine. A greater and more sort of tragic, talented Mr. Ripleying has happened. As a friend of the show, someone who, you know, we are all very

fond of getting foregoation, has it seems shuffled off this mortal coil? Now, I was so here for this. I mean, first of all, may I say a Russian air travel is statistically very dangerous for certain individuals in the industry that needs to be investigated. Have you seen the official line that the Russian government is taking to explain this? No, what is the official line? So basically, what actually happened is they shot his plane out of the sky with a fucking Sam missile system.

So I think one of, in quite a competitive league table, the most blatant Russian state assassination of all time. But what they are saying happened is that, and this is the most TF possible thing, that the pilot got myocarditis from the vaccine, and collapsed at the wheel and crashed the blade. Fantastic. So the people joking, saying vaccinated question mark,

were actually pretty close to the official Kremlin line on this. There is no hack joke you can make about this that isn't sort of true. If you do the good, naffy joke and you're like, Oh, he was going to create a United States of Africa. He was just in Rwanda kind of saying he was going to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was getting deported from Rwanda, one of the only people that's that happened to. Yeah, I can't believe they like fully just shot down his plane in between Moscow and some Peter's book, too Like that's really yeah, it's you mean it's you really eating to die in fair sky all blessed

But you know, I guess some guys got to do it. It kind of it sends a message to it to be like not just like fuck you But fuck anyone near you as well. Oh, yeah fuck the pilot It wasn't being that like actually I don't want to starts getting like, like, fucking like Louis C. K. Like, there's like no one, no one will work with him. Like, I'm not flying this guy anywhere. It's too high risk. You'd think that like that this massive people were already doing that, but like I like to imagine there was one guy who was like really excited. It's like, wow, private jet with, you know, flying on the Gulf Stream with the guy that Putin wants to kill more than anyone else in the world. I get a free hot dog. Yeah.

Yeah, one of those sort of like super dangerous electric hot dog grills. Yeah, George Foreman was on the plane with him in RRP. Yeah, so I mean, it sends a message, right? But I was kind of surprised that it was this blight and I would have thought they would have poisoned him. But I guess those guys were on holiday or something. I mean, you know, I guess they earned it, right? You know, they're all, they're all like toasting with Riley

and Santorini over the fuck right now. Gotta do it. Yeah. So I mean, any pre-gosh in a live in Serbia, question. Well, he got, he got a replay. There was a minute where people thought he was, he was going to do the prestige, right? Because his other plane was landing like 10 minutes behind.

And there was sort of like 10, 20 minutes on Twitter, wherever and we're like, it was like, is he going to get out of this one and pull off the sort of like ultimate level joke as trick? Yeah, there are actually two you have any pre-goshons that look identical and you cannot tell them apart. Oh, in relation to the Joker, there's nothing ruling out the whole Bane thing, right? You sort of think he's dead.

That's true, like he's dead. He's one of us in the wreckage. Yeah, yeah. So you think he's dead of any old sharp, but a random like Yeah, like a sports game and say that You know somewhat yeah, he's got a big nuclear bomb. We've seen this like Spartac Moscow game It's gonna get like the entire sort of field exploded under A familiar dog did catering I was born in it

Not should buy it. Yeah, if the whole field exploded as part of Moscow, that would be more or less a regular game. Maybe we're string live hand grenades onto the pitch because like one guy looks a bit Portuguese or whatever. God's sake. Yeah. So that has happened. We're very sad to hear it because, you know, he was a big influence and us coming out.

Yeah, he didn't even get to see the film about what happens if a game becomes a race car driver. That's true. Yeah, you didn't even get to see the film about what happens if a game it becomes a race car driver. That's true. Yeah. No, I mean, Putin's going to be watching Gran Turismo to like bursting into tears thinking, you know, who would have loved this? Is he organic? Oh, mate of Gany would have loved this shit. Him and Captain Tom are up there right now grilling naked with Keith Chegwin. And that's that's all we get. He's in a better place, you know? Yeah, 100%. In other news, we have some British content here. We've talked about this a bit before, but the U-Las, the ultra-lower mission zone, has now extended across all of London. It is extremely illegal to the tune of like

£12.50 a day to drive a shitty car in London anymore. You have. Well, it misses one. Yeah, you have to have a work car. Well, and it's also it's killed you have getting pre-gosh and because he was gonna fly directly over London's airspace, but due to the U-Lets charge,

he had to diver into the twelfth sky all the streets of West. It's not vertical, so the speed, yeah. Yeah, they don't tell you about the U-Lay's No Fly Zone, which is enforced by Sam's system. There was sort of, they almost had that during the Olympics. We could bring it back so, so easily. But no, what is happening though,

is a kind of fucked citizens resistance movement. It's a bit like, you know how in France, they had the Gilles Jean, right? And with this weird, like, mishmash of reactionaries and like people who were just kind of pissed off at the cost of fuel was going up and people who just like, were like anti-government for good reasons and bad reasons. Well, what's happened now is, I regret to say, your dad has started doing direct action. And the daily mail has spoken to these people.

They have spoken to a group of people who call themselves the Blade Runners. Oh hell yeah. Yes. Complete with photos of sort of like older men ballied up, right, wearing like the hoods up, clutching the carcasses of the cameras that are used to like

enforce the boundary of the U-lets. You see a traffic enforcement camera lying on its back. What do you do? I don't know why Blade Runner's. I don't know where they picked that. It doesn't seem to me to relate them. Maybe they just thought Ryan Gosling was cool on the sequel, I don't know. But maybe they're getting confused with like Blade Runner and Drive. but maybe they're getting confused with like Blade Runner and drive. Yeah, like a bunch of older guys wearing balaclavas and the scorpion jacket.

Yeah, that would be awesome. I mean, the Eulas does join by aesthetics alone. Yeah, if the Eulas oppressors anyone's freedom, it's the driver from the movie drive. Because that's the one thing he likes to do. And so the way driver, but he's not playing the U-list. He said, now that's fucking robbery. I tell you what. He loves to drive his 2006, like, I don't know, fucking Renault diesel, that's why I'm a sat as a getaway. So these guys, what they, It's a reliable vehicle. I mean, it's kind of table stakes right to points out the hypocrisy that like the way

the Daily Mail is covering them versus the way the Daily Mail covers like just stop oil, right? Yeah. Like the picture captions are, you know, this camera's days of spotting polluting cars in London are over after it met its end at the hands of a blade runner. Or this one about like Londoners coming together to rise up. Yeah, Londoners joined together in the fight against ULEZ. But what's, so they claim they've destroyed like, you know, however many hundred cameras. But the reason why they've done this is because

they've figured out what the cameras are actually for and it's not for like Making sure you have a woke car They quoted one of them in fact. It's a way to try to restrict our movements It's the tip of the iceberg. We do not live in a democracy Critical support kind no critical support hesitant support. Yeah, I mean, it gets worse. Uh, what we will achieve by our actions is the removal of the infrastructure and waking up the sleeping masses to what is really going on. I was just going to say, Alice, before we riff on this any further, can you just tell

us if this, if any, we're the rest of these quotes, you're going to contain the words of the Jews because I think it's important before knowing what they're going to sort of imply it. I agree. Oh, great. Yeah. Okay, then I take away my hesitant support. This is, and I'm simply shaking my heads. Because what they're talking about is direct action in favor of sort of like power to

the people, right? One of them says, we the public have paid for these cameras. We own them. We are only governed by consent. And it's about time we took the power to the people, which is an interesting sort of strain of militancy, right? And then you look and you go, well, okay, why are you choosing to apply that to the cameras that make sure your car is woke?

And their answer is, because of 15 minute cities, that's why. Right. It's so often like people on this kind of cranky end of the right, they're sort of, they're so close to seeing what the problem is, but just not quite. Like there's like a, you can see it like, like there is, there's a huge surveillance culture in the UK and a lot of it. Whilst sometimes put in for relatively benign reasons, could be utilized by less benign people to do very non-benign things and that's an interesting public discussion that's worth having.

Do I think we should be bringing the Jews into it? I don't think so, absolutely not. I mean, these are like automated number plate recognition cameras, right? So they can send you the fine if you're driving like a shithee car. Yeah, that's just sort of like, you just don't find for having a shit car. Like, you're sad, you're, what are you, you're fucking nonsense. But that's like you say, that's a sort of like frightening piece of technology maybe.

And what these people are saying is, you know, we can withdraw our consent for that unilaterally by like destroying the infrastructure and sabotaging it ourselves. Yeah. And it's like, it's a complete sort of like misdirected piece of energy, right? It's like, it's so strange. Like anytime in fiction, you see like people like rise up against dystopian technology, it's perceived as like a young thing,

like a left thing, like an anarchist thing. And instead what we're getting is watch dogs, like becklessly, right? Like there's guys in Bromley who are like going for the Volkswagen Passage. Well look, from like, as, so this is my dispatch from the heart of the resistance,

which is a little older sack of that I live in, where we have several cars that have like, but have been now been decorated with anti-U les like stickers, I saw one this morning, and I was like, how, that's a very interesting aesthetic, my neighbor who a few months ago had English Democrat stickers on his car now has just pivoted to anti-Ula stuff so I think that's cool. There's a set there's a core demographic that

are present in a lot of these organizations. But I think there's something there's something really interesting in this which has to do with like digital culture I think to a certain extent as well and just how you kind of get from this point of like, you know, you can sort of see where they're coming from. And I don't necessarily think that I mean, for lots of, for like a host of reasons, like the whole Ula's rollout has been like a real shit show. And it's worth sort of saying. But like in the context of Bexley Council, they spent more money trying to take the mayor and the mayor's team to court and then losing in a really obvious case where they knew they would fucking lose,

then doing any type of public outreach to sort of suggest that like, yeah, the ULAS is coming. It might be worth putting your shitty car in a scrapbook scheme where you will kind of get more money than you would selling it privately, right? There was no literature about that. Or to the point where our local next door group, which is to kind of go to surveillance for a second,

like our next door group and many next door groups, I imagine, fucking love surveillance. They love their ring cameras. They love sort of neighborhood watch snitching. They love snitching on people who they think aren't sort of like doing their bit for the neighborhood watch. That was an interesting one that happened, right? They love the savaget.

They love the savaget. A possible nonce. They fucking love the surveillance state, right? And so when they're sort of saying these things, it's like, yeah, you're getting to something, but like it then sort of stops when it comes to this personal grievance, but the thing is the way that it is then refracted onto digital culture, it is one that kind of automatically gets absorbed into these broader sort of sets of conspiracies. And so like, yeah, it's a point to be made is that if you don't want to get rid of your like

2006, like Volvo or whatever, then you're not going to be able is that if you don't want to get rid of your 2006 Volvo or whatever, then you're not going to be able to drive into London from where you are. That's a fairly obvious thing. But you can drive southwards. You can drive outside of London to then go diagonally. It's not the 15 minute city thing, but they then her, oh, this will just sort of mean that we'll be stuck in, like we locked in. Yeah, yeah. We'll be locked into Bexley for the rest of our lives. You know, bearing in mind that like, you know, in the case of my neighbour does not really leave anyway, but that sort of beside the point. But I feel like it sort of gets absorbed into these much wider conspiracies. And so as a result, anything, even the energy that could potentially be leveraged to be like,

yeah, no, surveillance is really bad. And dismantling it can achieve much broader objectives that benefit everyone. It then can then so easily be taken into these conspiracies that are then extremely difficult to get people out of it. Also, this completely loose sight of what they were mad about in the first episode. Of course. You can weaponize this for anything.

Once you've got people angry enough about it, that your dad is willing to look like he's joined the provost, and he's like being photographed in a field with a three-hole balaclarva. You can get him on board with fucking anything. COVID isn't real. Jockey LNPR, there you go. Yeah. Mm, sure. We got there on the end, yeah.

And it's just like this, it's a real gift to any sort of like extremist movement, I guess. Well, I mean, even like, you know, beyond extremist, although I'm putting my lip out on them being like the real extremist, Tory party, but mean, even beyond extremist, although I'm putting my lip out on them being the real extremist, Vittorri party, but you can see how they are leveraging that anyway, right? Like Vittorri, kind of mayoral candidates,

very much sort of playing into the broader conspiracy theories despite Ula's being a Tory policy to begin with and also one that until very, very recently, they also supported, not least because many people in there, like many of their natural votes of base will be people who would have bought new cars anyway. Like most of the cars in London, if you drive in London, like for the most part, you have the money to replace it.

I don't wanna like assume too much, but I do, I feel like I am safe and at least the basic assumption But if you have a shitty 2006 like Volvo diesel or whatever like you probably do have the money to replace it with a 2008 petrol Volvo which does not like fall into the US especially these guys The these are not the guys who are like gonna to be most sort of like fucked over by this. But you know, it's I think it's a bit of a case for me of like with the city car like overplaying his hand a bit and like playing a stupid game and winning a stupid prize to extend in that like when they brought the U les in initially it was contiguous with the congestion charge zone.

There was literally no objection because no one was really driving in there anyway. Then they expanded it to the North Circular and South Circular, which is basically covering still essentially very urban built up areas of London. So it was kind of also went largely without instant. There was a little bit more rumbling about that. But then now they've extended it to these like incredibly suburban areas, some of which may as well not be in London. Like no one, people who live in those areas don't really consider themselves as even living in London in a lot of cases. And their places where like you need a car, and a lot of these people have had these cars

since when the government I am old enough, Pepperidge Farm remembers, when the government was telling you to buy diesel car because it emits less CO2 than a petrol car, which is true, but it also emits particulate, which is worse for air quality, you know, the, the, the, I actually like,

I like inhaling these are actually. And so yeah, a lot of people are kind of like, and it's like, it's not, it did they really need to do this expansion? Did it really matter that much in these very non-built up non-super urban areas? Probably not. And it's a thing. Also insane. You pick this, this fight with sort of like, yeah, very outer London.

And this is the, as you say, place super games, win super prizes, what you get is a bunch of dads in a field holding your surveillance cameras. I mean, I sort of want to say one final thing, which is that like, I think, I think like politically speaking, yes, like this stuff needs to happen as a bare minimum on the basis of that like, car's sake, pollution sucks, like, you know, and even in the suburban areas,

like, you know, air quality is not great. It is not good, but you also have local government that does not give a shit about any of it. Because ultimately, we're thinking about London as a city and what greater London represents. I'm sure both of you will know this as people who live in these areas or at least have been familiar with these areas. Like these are areas that are defined by, you know, the sort of political class that, you know, wins beyond sort of like the by-tillet landlords and stuff are drivers, right? Like everything's rooted in driving. Like even in the suburban areas of London, like I feel like what people, like who may not be familiar with these territories are is that even though they are technically London boroughs, like you kind of have one bus and that bus maybe like doesn't show up half the

time. Like you may as well be living outside of there. And so for the most part, like you do need a car. If you do actually want to get anywhere, right, you can walk it like maybe you know, there it is better. It's better than nothing. Don't get me wrong. It's better than places that don't have buses, but there is not enough public transport

to sort of make it efficient options. And so within that, and also within like local governments who just don't give a shit about public transport, you have this class of people who are like, well, the car is really the only kind of thing that I own that gives me a sort of sense of freedom of mobility. And any sort of perceived threat to that, real or not, is kind of like the only, one of the only animating forces of politics, right? And it's like the reason why the only things that really get sort of fixed in the area that I live,

for example, and even then it takes fucking ages, but the only thing that really gets fixed is not like local health services. It is not domestic abuse or like shelters, it's not libraries, it's roads. Like roads are the only thing that sort of get repaired eventually. domestic abuse or like shelters, it's not libraries, it's roads. Like roads are the only thing that sort of get repaired eventually. They barely fix those to be honest.

And they barely fix those, but eventually they like, I will tell you how many shows have been in there this year. And so like this kind of like where you sort of have like low expectations in terms of politics anyway, and also groups of people that have kind of just given up on the idea of like democratic politics would sort of do anything for them materially. Like, you know, the car is really the only animating thing. And so what I feel like what this is is the first kind of sign of like a perceived threat to like the few things up many people in these areas feel that they have. And like there's a broader conversation about that

in terms of how people feel and everything, but like I feel like at least from an observational level that's sort of what's going on in like the areas actually, but I feel at least from an observational level, that's sort of what's going on in the areas that I'm actually familiar with. After this all simmers over in a year's time, we'll really get into this and we'll do some live reportage on the barricades that these guys are setting up. But in the meantime, I have a tasty little startup for us. Its name is Caden, and it's not an American middle schooler. I'm gonna give you a little bit from the lead page. Caden, how are they spelling that first of all?

C-A-D-E-N. Oh, that's a very, okay. Yeah, the tagline is, and I will say this is the same word every time. Control your blank, learn from your blank, earn real money for your blank. What do we think Caden is? We're gonna go, is that?

Calm. Control, control your calm, learn from your calm, earn real money for your calm, yeah. Yeah, I think so. I know that you said it's not an American middle schooler, but you didn't say it wasn't a AI generated person. So I'm gonna say it's an AI generated nephew. It's an uncle simulator.

It does contain an AI generated person, but it's not strictly speaking. It does more than that. Nepotism with no vowels in it. Okay, well, I'm thinking about the word, Kaden, meaning I like kind of related maybe to like, Kaden's. It has absolutely no relations.

Okay, fine, fine, fine. I mean, well, drawing on the boring knowledge I have of every other startup we've ever talked on this program, is it something to do with your data? It's got it, got it in one. Control your data, learn from your data, and real money for your data. It's got it. Got it in one control your data, learn from your data and real money for your data. So it would be better if it was come. It's true. Kaden is just got like 24 million dollars worth of funding. Okay. And what it is is it's an app that you know how

you're constantly giving your data away to like different other services like your bank or Amazon or whatever Well, sure. Yeah, only fans whatever. Yeah, exactly. What if instead of that You could just consolidate all of that data. So you're giving away by giving it away to this one app I was ocean finance, but for your data exactly Then gives it away to like those people. What if you had a data middleman? Oh, okay. And if you do that, they will pay you real money, real hard, not even crypto currents. No, they pay in dollars even because, as they say, your data is powerful, interesting and valuable. And so you should give all of it to

them. They have this like, we pay in dollars, don't ask which country. They have this kind of like very nice light mode website with a very sort of like affected FAQ, which is Caden's story, which has like emojis and stuff in it. Oh no, not emojis. Wave emoji. We're Kaden and we believe every digital citizen should be part of the data economy and the one who can decide how their data is used and what they want to exchange. I mean, if you're on the internet, which most people have to be unfortunately, you are

part of the data economy. That's true. Like, really, really like the better copy is like, would you like to sort of, you know, you're getting, you're getting milked for free. Would you like some money? Oh, this data. Yeah, I'm able to pay to get milked. Right. Yeah. And that data is going directly to Caden. So you could be paid to be jacked off. That's right. We're completely obsessed with privacy. So you can rest assured that every function and product we offer protects privacy period. Because it's called the zipped mouse emoji, I feel like that would have added to that for me.

What you're doing is you're taking all this data, you're putting it into one app on your phone, and you might say that's quite vulnerable, right, to have one app know everything about like your banking details and your only fan subscriptions and maybe that's kind of like a risk factor. And they say, don't worry about it. So I don't worry about it. Because. And that is a common thing that a lot of startups

that we talk to say. Yeah, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it because it's time to, and this is in bold, make everything better and then they have a little blue heart emoji. Great. The Tory heart. But what's really funny, famous at Grand One Post story there, is that on this website they will say in this light mode, customer facing thing, we've paid out literally like

hundreds of thousands of dollars. We've, you know, it's a... Don't ask rich country. Yeah, don't ask how many people that is either. Yeah. But then they have a little four business thing. And you click on that. And I shit you not, the website changes

from light mode to dark mode. And their page, it becomes much scarier. Oh, that's so cool. I actually quite like that as a UI experience. Yeah, if you read the like for business FAQ, it doesn't have a fun little heart. It doesn't have a fun little emoji. It tells you compliance is mission critical, right? We acquire hundreds of millions of data points per day.

At Caden, we are seeing the quiet part loud. Exactly. Yeah, Q, I have read 100,000 posts. And if you sort of like dig into why this is happening, why they're trying to like pay you off to give you your data, the reason why is because more and more states, both the EU and like states in the US, are passing these consumer privacy acts, which means

that places that have to tell you. No, fun. Yeah, because they're no fun, because they don't like posting emoji at you. They are enforcing laws that make places tell you what data they're collecting and let you opt in and out of it. This is an attempt to steal a march on those and say, well, instead of that, what if you just gave it to us instead at a trusted third party? Yeah, we've got all your U-Las camera data. We know when you've been going to the London borough of Bexley. The Spear Mint Rhino will buy that data off us. The CEO of this guy, John Roa, he's an American who he had just like John Roa,

he had this like Swedish themed design bureau that he sold the sales force made like millions of dollars. And then decided to spend a few years off the grid on an island in Europe, apparently. Okay. Well, the Isle of Man, like what are we? Malta, like Rockwell, I don't know. I just don't know. They just aren't really remote islands in Europe in the same, the Shetland, I don't know. Off the grid, too.

And then he came back to put everybody else on the grid. We've got to get people on this grid. That's right. But I mentioned that it contains an AI nephew, right? We've got to get people on this grid. That's right. But I mentioned that it contains an AI nephew. This is one of the little spin-off projects, Kaden AI. Kaden AI is, it's like a Siri, except it runs off AI. And it has a very happy with the Lego Bionicle.

You just bought it for its birthday. It has access. Your AI nephew has access to all of the data that you've been giving to Caden, right? And then you can just like ask it things. I have it suggest you things based on that data you can choose to be marketed to. And there's a little example on the website of some questions that you can ask this AI. And some of them are, what cuisines do I enjoy most?

Oh, it's the Riley AI. What types of movies and TV shows do I enjoy? So if you weren't clear on this from the stuff you've been doing, you can do sort of like consumer research on your side. You desire the bounty of the sea again, Uncle. And I might have provided you a lovely plate of oysters and exchange for yet another delectable bionicle. And so at some point that's just going to

like become proactive, right? And you're going to get a little notification on your phone from your nephew being like, you should order a place of oysters because you usually order a place of oysters about this time of the day. Like, yeah. And while you're at it, can you please give me your credit card data? Yeah.

Your AI nephew just slowly sliding a picture across the steel table to you. And it's just a picture of a 1976 Polish army sniper uniform. He's like, fuck. You know, you want to auntie? I just feel like at best, right? This is fodder for the kind of people who like to see their own, like, Twitter or Instagram analytics.

But at what? Yeah. This is like marketing wrapped. Yeah. You ate like 16 oysters this year kind of thing. You ordered burger cut 72 times. I'm trying to cut back, you know, it's a real bad boy. But yeah, so this is Caden and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

Yeah, as do some nephews. I'm trying to figure out how the AI is related to the main product. Oh, no, it's not at all. It's not at all. So it's just like this little experiment, but I imagine this experiment is going to end up being like, hey, we can code you an AI girlfriend if you give us like all of your data.

And that way, we can use your data to optimize your girlfriend so that your AI girlfriend will talk to you about whatever you want all the time and not about having stupid dishes. Or or like exactly. Yeah, they can scrape all of your only fans to make you the perfect AI girlfriend. And that feels like the only logical approach. And that is why I support it. You know, Adriana from the sopranos is on only fans now. Really? I did not know that. Okay. Well, I did not know that. Okay. Well, I did, hurriedly wrapping up the episode. I think all of this helps. What's your name now?

I can be sure not to visit that, that particular thing. What's for you, Aralaghan, just for research, perhaps? Yes. Just so I can be sure to put that on my content log. I'm being told by my AI nephew that I have an appointment to like type an address really fast into my browser. So this taking us up to roughly the half hour mark, I think it's now time to hand over to past us

and speak to Joseph Burton about. Little do they know the horrors that would have come. I know. They were still recording this when you have getting pregozion was still alive, you know? I know. Well, he was on the episode. Yeah, he was on the episode. Yeah, under the name of Joseph Berson, we have you have getting for a go for you now.

Thanks so much for coming on. That's a trash future. They want to destroy Russia from the inside. And I think we can just like go straight into that. We already signed off on at the end of that. So yeah, yeah, and we've all got to just go and get on our big trash-shoot, your private jet flying directly to St Petersburg.

It's leaving track. It's leaving track. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly.

...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly.

...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. ...suitly. I want to move on to the meat of our discussion. Of course, Joseph, you have written it. Oh, is that the jarring shift in tone? Bell I hear? Oh, I think it is. I think it's time to get grim about think pieces. This is going to be great.

So you are currently working on a book and this book has been preceded in a little bit of sort of short writing of some articles for Verso about the phenomenon of shooting and crying, where functionaries for imperial bureaucracy in the places that are being imperialized have ways of, I guess you could say what, observing or being observed in a way

that tends to absolve what's going on. Can you talk a little bit about your thesis? Yeah, yeah, so I started kind of chewing on this basically like in, I mean, I had this weird experience where I joined the US diplomatic corps and obviously like, you know, the idea that this is gonna be a 20 year career and that basically I wanted to have had this weird experience where I joined the US diplomatic corps and obviously, like, you know, the idea that this is going to be a 20-year career and that basically, I wanted to have this kind of experience kicking around the world dealing with, like,

American citizens freaking out and ruining their lives and the ways that that involved the... Trying to become Indonesian. Trying to become Indonesian. You know, why am I being arrested? Like, why can't you send, like, Marines to intervene in my property dispute with my brother in suburban Calcutta, you know, like levels of divorced guy that you've never met. And it was like, okay, this is cool. And I think my big thing was like, I, you know, had become a little more jaded or cynical during the Obama administration. But I want to stress, and this is important, I think, for the article in my bigger point, that my ideology going into becoming a US diplomat was like, okay, maybe a lot of this stuff is bad,

but I can find the harmless corner of the institution where I'm just like renewing your passport and I'm interviewing some immigration visas and I'm like doing notary services and galloping around the world providing relatively reasonable service for people. And I won't have to do, doing notary services and galloping around the world, providing relatively reasonable service for people. And like, I won't have to do any of the gross stuff, right? And I think that that underpins a lot of liberal ideology and goes hand in hand with, well,

what happens when you do the gross stuff? So I was the Farsi Language Counselor Officer when the muzzle band got implemented. I was at the US Embassy inor Officer when the Muslim band got implemented. I was at the US Embassy in Ankara, and suddenly it was like, okay, well, this is your job now, like there's this waiting room full of Iranian grandmothers, and like you literally work at the racism factory now, right? So like all of them are gonna come up and you're gonna deny all of their immigrant visas

to go live with their grandchildren in LA because of who they are. And that racism raises my mind. It was this Monday. Yeah. You need the racism on that. My numbers were terrible. I was not moving the racism quotas nearly, nearly fast enough.

But like there was something that happened in terms of how the institution writ large related to, like not that the Muslim ban was really looking back on it that much weirder or worse than like the normal functioning of the US security state, how it relates to certain people from certain places. But the fact that we were ordered to explicitly, like it was basically, like he, Trump came out and just said the thing that you're kind of not supposed to say, which is like the, the Muslims didn't know good, right? And we're doing this for this reason. You can do the same thing for other reasons, but you have to insist that they're for other

reasons. And so in that moment, I was in an institution where I hated it, but everyone hated it, right? Like this was, I mean, the State Department is like a very cozy, bowl, lanyard, Obama, Hillary. I'm with her kind of liberal institution in terms of the hegemonic culture. It's also like, I'm not gonna,

it's not like the old days of just being pale, male, and Yale. It's still, I mean, like I'm just another white dude in the State Department who's kind of like the cruel chill liberal guy. And, but it's also becoming more diverse than it used to be. It, you know, my, like, My boss was pretty developed, not from a band-affected country, but a pretty developed Muslim herself when we were doing this in Ankara, right? When we were ordered to do this. What I have become kind of fascinated by is how people within liberal institutions, and

I mean liberalism, culturally liberal, but also liberalism, like liberalism, how they react when ordered to do completely liberal things. And then I think in this piece I wrote is kind of based off of an outgrowth of that, about well, then how does the whole moral universe of liberalism react when the mask comes completely off?

And I suppose I could ask a further question just jumping in here, right? You reacted to this by eventually leaving, correct? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was in a lot longer than probably I should have. And there was a bunch of like bureaucratic and administrative reasons for that. I was back in 2019, 2020. I was back in DC and I was working on the Afghanistan Special Immigrant Visa Desk, basically moving a pile of Afghan visa applications who were not going to get approved in time from the 7,000 applications that are not going to get

approved in time pile to the 5,000 applications that are not going to get approved in time pile. that are not going to get improved in time pile to the 5,000 applications that are not going to get improved in time pile. And I was looking at leaving and then COVID happened and I was like, well, maybe that's not the time to quit the government job just yet. So I did leave eventually, but like I was in this weird thing of like most of the time I was inside the institution. I was like, this is really messed up. And I also know that there's this kind of like, there's a latent, the very nature of immigration screening and it's enmeshment with

national security, creates like a latent illiberalism within the liberal institution, which is liberal culturally and also liberal legally. Right? So we're administering these laws that are based off of, you know, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, fairness, openness, non-discrimination, equal process into the law. We are also like multilingual, multicultural, you know, diplomats who spend most of our time not living in the United States. But there's a huge ban muslims button that's just on the wall, right? And someone turned the button on, and then I think also kind of almost more importantly, someone just decided to turn the button off one day, and like the button's still very much there.

Mm, but you can't remove the button, it's great to list it. It can, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's near the fryer, you can't remove the button, like no one removes the button. I want to also sort of note as well, right? You're talking about the US State Department, which sort of has been, you know, since the 1940s and 50s, like the more liberal institution of US foreign policy

than say certain other ones. If the US, the State Department, yeah, certain other institutions, the state department being, of course, targeted heavily by by McCarthy and his various, um, uh, bulldogs. But you, the, the, what's interesting right is that across the Atlantic, the, it's, um, the, the department that handles immigration, the home office, an extraordinarily conservative department, but that has the same button and produces largely the same outcomes for the same groups of people. But attitudeally sort of opposed.

But you just feel bad about it in the same ways. They're supposed to feel good about it. And that's, and I think you've hit upon something like really interesting about, you know, like the foreign and commonwealth's office, as I understand it, doesn't really handle a lot of the immigration. No, it handles none of it. It's all the home office. But when they link those two together

and then explicitly kind of structurally link immigration to foreign policy and then link immigration to the part of the foreign policy apparatus that's like the nicest and most liberal ones because like there is an attitude in the State Department of like we're not, you know, meet head military people, we're not those creepy other government agency

which may or may not have any sort of working relationship. But anyways, so, you know, we're not those people. We're not the military. We're the nice ones. We're the liberal ones. And this actually goes back a lot further than like Obama or Hillary or something like that. This is a pretty long tradition of like,

oh, the United Nations, multilateralism, all these good things. And so there was a really interesting thing that happened when, you know, the the Muslim ban happens in, um, in 2017, is you get the one part of the US government that absolutely does not want to do this, gets handed a remit to do it. Right? And I think that that's almost an interesting kind of petri dish for any kind of thing that you're looking at, which is I think becoming increasingly common in the world of, well, I know we have these explicit values. We are now going to be absolutely annihilating those values when it comes to our policy, but we still need to kind of either one put a fig leaf saying we're not doing it, or two, I think the function of

the bureaucrat in this situation becomes like a sin-eater, right? Like there's a need for the functionality and especially like the liberal functionality to do it and then to feel bad about it. And reconcile the kind of ideological contradiction of a multicultural society that claims to be a multicultural society that is, I mean, in the case of the UK, like I'm sending gunboats into the channel to blow away refugees. We're reporting, we're sending you all to a Dickensian prison barge. Like it's cold creating jobs. Yeah, and some of the people doing those jobs, they might feel bad about it. You know, and that's, I'll read from your article in fact, it says, they cannot change what governments and institutions and centers of power actually do.

But the liberal moral universe demands a balancing of accounts for the agents of that power, whether the bureaucrats, soldiers, spokespeople, or leaders. Effectively, they have to bear witness and have an emotional reaction. That's the, the Adolf Reid thing of like liberals believing in bearing witness to suffering, right? So it's like a state back, state back discrimination, 815 to 1230, DEI committee meeting, 1230 to 130, and then back end processing for security screening for Muslim band cases rest of the day, right? And that's not an accident,

and it's not really jarring, right? Like our job was not so much, I mean, yes to administer policies like the Muslim band because only we had the administrative capacity to do so. Right? The Trump admin itself, they didn't have the chops to make the policy actually work. They didn't have the staffing. The Department of State did. But in a bigger sense, especially now that it's been repealed, but crucially, is still there, can come back at any point. We have to perform, and we did perform when it was banned, a level of

like, contrition and a level of regretfulness and a level of like, ah, good, now things are back in order. To basically say, it was actually fine. We mitigated the harm of the policy. We were good people the entire time. And, you know, what, don't think about that. So, so, so, harm, harm reduction, you know, someone else, someone who would have, you know, enjoyed it, or someone who would have felt like explicit bias, or someone who would have like, you know, been on board with this as a policy,

it would have been worse having your visa denied by them because they would have taken pleasure in it. Exactly. And it's like, I did, and that's, that's where this, this whole thing in the title of pieces, like we're so glad it's you, is the reaction I got from my bosses, I got reaction from my family members from people,

I'd be like, hey, this is kind of messed up what I'm doing, like I did not sign up to do this, which is also, I think it's a pretty interesting kind of self-reflexive point on my own ideology that you think that you can join up with like literally a major imperial edifice and be like, but I just wanna do the good. It's so that you understand. It's so that's productive. And Ed, like that's part of it too, imperial edifice and be like, but I just want to do the good. It's so that you understand.

It's so that's productive. And Ed, like that's part of it too, is the personal thing of like, no, I could be the only good person doing this, you know. And the whole point, I think that that's the interesting discussion here is it's not just that, well, there is harm being reduced. It's that the people who would be that the people who would be the people who would be doing the the who be the most outwardly prejudice the people who are let's say directly involved in the administration they didn't they weren't able to do it they needed the sort of educated well-meaning liberals or whatever to do the policy and feel bad about it so in fact that it couldn't have

otherwise been done and so it's what I think you're writing sort of shows very well is that feeling bad about it isn't just a kind of a way to manage something going on politically outside yourself or something to try to distance yourself from what's going on politically. It's actually a necessary, that effective outcome is almost a necessary grease for the wheels of the empire itself. Yes, so it's, diplomats are like, definitely ideological workers.

And I think that that's why this insight, because the diplomats, they have to go there and pitch it. They have to go out there and be like, explicitly, these are our values. This is what we're doing. You know, you know, get out, talk be like, explicitly, these are our values. This is what we're doing. You know, get out and talk about like, global Britain or whatever.

I tend to look at that shape of the ideology factory, but they don't own the means of production of ideology. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you are, you get the ideology you're given, right? And if the ideology is, we've got a statue of a boy in a tent and we've got it in front of. So the view is killed, you pick up the ideology. Yeah, you pick up the ideology and you continue, if've got in front of you. Is killed, you pick up the ideology. Yeah, you pick up the ideology and you continue if the person in front of you, you know,

gets jared here or whatever and has to be sent home. Yeah, get shot with the hot attack gun. But I think it's illuminating. And by the way, you can control F, the Muslim ban for any insane illiberal policy, whether that's like the Rwanda scheme, whether that's the, you know, you know, the family separation at the US-Mexico border, whether that's the Greek Coast Guard doing pushbacks in the Aegean, like any one of these can be fit in, but I think in the US system there was something about the fact that it was executive authority, the fact that the person ordering the Illybor

policy was a oath who was considered to be like a democratic breach just by existing and the the explicit fact that the ideological workers also did the policy right that it was that the immigration apparatus and the diplomats were the same people and i i mean literally the same people so it was it was the muzzle band was administered out of these working groups inside the state department that had been stood up during the Obama administration for security screening and basically were building the infrastructure to do something like this before anyone thought to turn it into a ban. Indeed, it's also worth noting that those working groups, those working groups that were creating the infrastructure that Trump then used to create the ban, they were also largely

formalizing under Obama what were sort of, let's say, very draconian immigration policies from Bush. I mean, the real story of, as I'm given to understand it, of that particular moment in history was actually a pretty straight through line from Bush, Jr. all the way through to Trump. Yeah, and it's turning sentiment and specific targeting into actionable processes. Right? And so I should have a piece coming out in foreign policy about how a lot of these anti-Chinese land ownership laws, there's this spade of laws in the United States basically banning certain people from certain countries, including like China, Iran, Syria, from like owning property or agricultural land, right?

And how they are using justifications that legally passed muster to justify the muzzle ban to use this. So where the Bush administration is like, hey, we just renditioned this guy from Romania. And we've just turned him over to the Egyptian services to get the security services to get tortured. And can we kind of find a way to make that legal retroactively of like, hey, we did fly all these guys to get more, we're torturing them, but we got to figure that out retroactively. The Obama years were basically, okay, well, that's president.

How do we systematize it? And now it's free floating, right? And now the same justifications and the same like actual institutions and mechanisms that you during the Muslim ban basically created this list of like unpeople, right? Of like, hey, these rights apply, but not for you. That's just like an eye of sore on now,

and it can focus on anyone. And that is what in the end really took me from a place of being like, okay, this is a messed up policy I'm implementing now to like, there is a problem with the existence of this institutions. Because if you're in like a diplomatic career, you're gonna implement policies that suck and you hate.

And there were other policies that suck to my hated that I implemented because like, hey, that's part of the job, I signed on the dotted line. This cast a bigger question about like, well, what is the work of an institution like a global migration regulation? What is the work of even like a foreign ministry or a state department or a diplomatic corps,

when you start needing to mobilize ideology to these ends. And that's why I think, you know, I have this book proposal I'm shopping around if you're a literary agent, what's up? I'd love to run it by you. But I think as time goes by, I'm less interested in the specificity of the Muslim ban and I'm more interested in like this phenomenon

of the Muslim ban, and I'm more interested in this phenomenon of the liberal institution, resolving the contradictions of illiberal policies within itself, right? Which is why I didn't want to jump on the author of Lawrence, right, for making that bad tweet about the beating of Issa Amaro, the Palestinian activist. But I actually think that's why it's interesting to look at how he talks about the Israeli state and the mobilization of the idea of shooting and crying, right? Because, you know, shooting and crying is actually like a term coined by this Israeli scholar about how like, you know, why did I have to go to this country and kill these people and now I feel bad about it?

But what's interesting is like when this American liberal author encounters this happening in front of them, the Israeli state no longer feels a need to justify itself on liberal democratic principles. They're just like, I'm beating this guy. I don't care. Shooting and laughing. Shooting and laughing.

And he had to kind of care for them, right? Like, and I think that there's something that's been put in motion and I think especially around borders and migration, you're going to see this more and more of like first a process of like, you know, humanitarian immigration officials and liberal institutions being kind of syn-eaters of like, oh, but we need to help the migrants and make sure regularized crossings happen. And actually... And then they don't need you anymore after a while. After a while, it becomes normalized enough

that you don't need the people to feel bad. And I think it's interesting in Britain, the context of that where we've arrived at this sort of state, where we're sort of doing both at once. And if you'll forgive me, the joke was sort of schoozing and cry laughing, right? Yeah, well, I think the one thing I also want to seize on here as well, right, is that if you look outside of the personal, right, that all of the people involved might be

might be sort of good people, good people, capital G capital P, scarecodes, etc. It might be like a nice people in the Greek coast, got a nice people anyway. Indeed. And and that they like a nice people in the Greek coast, they're like a nice people, anyone. Indeed. And that they, and they have decided that the weapon, if you like, the institutional weapon, must be built. But if it is, and they're the only ones who can build it, really, most likely,

they're the only ones who can build it well. And if it is going to be built, it had better be us. But then, as you say, Joseph, the liberal institution that needs to exist in this way, as it interlinks with the other, say, more conservative institutions of foreign policies, such as intelligence agencies, or such as Homeland Security agencies, ends up being building a crucial, crying part of a machine that wouldn't work without it that it just goes on to spread sort of you know as you say a Untold misery either across the Mediterranean in visa processing centers in Turkey or or outside Iran and so on and so on like There is this institutional look at an institutional tool and you can think of it as an actual machine or a weapon

at an institutional tool, and you can think of it as an actual machine or a weapon, which I think is profitable. So what we're saying here, I think, is that feeling bad is not a locus of resistance. What? I was going to say because clearly it sort of feels like the Americans, like even under Trump, sort of have to at least kind of present the idea that they want to be seen as like the global good guys. And that this is just kind of like, you know, this is sort of, you know, bureaucracy that, you know, doesn't always work in the way you want, but if you work hard enough and like, you know, you'll get the waiver or like eventually you'll be able to, whereas in

Britain it's like, no, not, not gonna happen. Although it's not, it's just, it's not uniquely American, we just put in different places. The thing that I was, you know, discuss with myself is like, you know, the big institution that we like to do this that does self-defense and it's in its own way like this is the police. And it is very much the kind of like we're glad it was you, sort of like harm reduction thing. Yeah, yeah. Everyone's got one. And it's certain types of centrality. Now, I think this is becoming like, there's ways that some places are going to make this more important for them. And other places, clearly, I think in the European case and especially in the UK case, they're just like, it is shooting and laughing. It is like, I am sending a Type 45 destroyer into the English channel

to obliterate small boats coming over from Kalei, and I am sending everyone to a concertina wire camp in Rwanda, or is that still on, or are they just putting them on the bar? Yeah, well, essentially what's happening is it's a legal impossibility which means at some point they're going to force the issue and make it an illegal reality and when that happens that's going to be the breaking point I think. Or a special administrative measures. Yes, we love a state of exception don't we? You know it's it's an unconstitutional me 14th Amendment act to say I'm banning

Muslims from America, but if I'm saying it's a PP-9645 enhanced security screening, which as you understand applies also to North Korea, then it's fine, right? And there's always a way and there's a way to reconcile it, but I think I think you have a good point of like these institutions are different for in every setting, but I think the mechanism as essentially, I like the direction that TF has been going in talking about whatever post neoliberalism is going to emerge as, it's happening now, and you can see elements of this

of an openness towards industrial policy, but also this weird renewed moral vigor behind basically dead liberalism, And you can see it in like the uh you know, Washington DC foreign policy insider guy who now has changed his icon to one of those little shiba inus in the tracksuit and it's like. Yeah, NATO dog man. I'm a NATO dog man and I'm eating from my cozy bowl and I'm going back to foggy bog. I'm posting myself about based neoliberal, you know, order hudgemaid is vaporizing works in denetsk. It's in industrial policy.

It's in laserized Joe Biden memes, but I think it's also in an attitude of like, you know what, these institutions actually rock. They actually kick ass. And like, when Secretary Blinken announced that we're repealing the Muslim ban, right, he wrote this pretty self-congratulatory letter that was like, you know what, this was a moral stain on our country.

It was wrong. And I'm big enough to say we were wrong. But then he actually, then what he did is he was like, also, I'm introducing a new type of executive order, which is retroactively changing all the immigration decisions made under this policy. Which at the time it was actually like incredibly great and merciful. If you got Muslim banned, I'm unbanging all of you. Except when I was reading that and I was often mubye at the time, I had long sense to part

of that assignment. I was like, oh shit, because what he just did is said, oh yeah, if established precedence that we can reverse immigration decisions via executive order, even after they're already settled. I'm like, oh, certainly the magically, retroactively undue immigration decisions button will not be used for evil. Hitting the big bureaucratic control zed.

Yeah, he's like, how into your office and installed a second unmarked button next to the banal Islam's button? It's not as though these things aren't worth doing. They are in fact worth doing. I think the problem goes back to the banal Muslims. It's not as though these things aren't worth doing. They are, in fact, worth doing. I think the problem goes back to the institutional context in which they are happening is one where a set of institutions for advancing an imperial agenda will ultimately always take anything that you're doing, which even if you're what you're doing is good, those institutions will then retroactively use it to an event's end period agenda.

We used your left on red, waiting for the barbarians. So we see this in all of our discussions of like the home office in Britain, where a lot of the things that were built by new labor with their vision of a kind of technocratic, finally controlled utopia, it self-highly distopied. It's self-highly distopian, but never mind. A lot of those things were then seized on by subsequent administrations. What's it's true? What's the joke about the Obama administration, which is, you know, I've installed a sort

of like techno-utopian sort of mass surveillance system that only requires the oversight of a benevolent philosopher king forever now to take a huge sip of coffee and watch these election results rolling. So you can sort of see Joseph while you're talking about the repeal in that way because it's like, yes, this thing has been done. It was good and necessary that it was done, but the institutional context in which it was done, much like feeling bad, isn't like a locus of political resistance. The institutional context in which it was done is creating more space for, you might

say, the next horrible thing. Indeed, yeah. Yeah, which I mean, we don't know what the next horrible thing is going to do or what it's going to be. I can tell you how it's going to be kind of administratively run. I can tell you probably under which authorities. And I can tell you that we haven't really come up

with the grim stuff. So since leaving the State Department, I have been like working with and talking with immigration lawyers and people trying to kind of wrangle some kind of accountability out of the US immigration system. And the kind of running joke is like, hey, what weird shit is Steven Miller going to come up with when he gets back into office next time? Right? Like what's the next horror coming out of the horror machine?

I had like a sort of slightly kind of related tip, but I was thinking about this also in terms of, like the next inevitable like global challenge when it comes to understanding like borders and especially where I feel like the institutions that you're talking about will kind of come under a lot of pressure, will be when the higher securitization that comes with the effects of climate change, like sort of dealing with like climate refugees

was seeing that a lot in Europe, we're gonna be seeing that a lot in the States and the Southern border. What's the racist book, ship of something? What's the racist book, I mean, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no maybe isn't as skeptical as you still believe. The institutions, the bones of the institutions are still fairly strong. Eventually, you'll reach this point where you can effectively manage your way humanely through these crises, which I can't speak for Europe, but I think there are certain aspects of the current Labour Party for whom the only thing they've really got left is this idea of, well, sensible, case-time, or will run the institutions effectively and

provide a more humane way to send people to Rwanda. I wondered, what are the challenges for UC coming up as a result of what feels to be climate disaster, really accelerating the movements of people and institutions having to become, or institutions as they are and as they're structured, kind of then needing to become much more brussel in order to sort of sustain themselves. I think the most frustrating part of this is that like the liberal response is actually like an 80% good one. It's just that, you know, everyone's like, this is horrific. We're putting kids in cages. We're doing all these things that are totally wrong. It's the 20%, the remaining 20% of liberalism with this like, okay, time to reconcile this with existing power structures. Like,

you know, I'm going to just resolve the contradictions. I don't, I mean, to anyone in that situation, now I think it's really about, and we kind of have to start from the beginning, right? And I think you kind of have to start with among people in these institutions, just get the idea of like within and against going at all. Of like, hey, maybe the problem is this procedure, the existence of these executive authorities at all.

In the American case specifically, I think there's an argument to be made towards the premise of law. A lot of these horrors happening with even ICE and the southern border are all due to executive orders, or presidential proclamations. It'd be like, well, shouldn't we bring this back into the domain of law and democratic control? Is an argument that's actually pretty effective with a lot of liberals and like a lot of liberals are trying very hard to do that, right? But that's not going to work everywhere and I don't even really think it's going to work

in the United States. I think that the first thing we have to do is be clear-eyed about like what the work is, right? Because I think that there is, when you're inside the institutions, there is a kind of, there's a mystique that gets promulgated. Like it is the idea that you can, like what I thought when I joined, do it but stay away from the yucky parts, right?

And I think if you have to, you're gonna have to get people inside the institutions to realize that there's going to be actually an opposite, like to stop identifying with the institution, to identify as cogs in a machine who are employees of that institution and might actually have an oppositional relationship with, like, their management structure or where they are. I don't think it's like diplomats can be workers because I think that there's an inherent culture of middle management to the whole thing.

But I think that, like, discursive stuff kind of matters in this one set. Obviously, in a bigger social sense, it's like you've got to start creating demands for democratic or at least legal oversight over these things. Because when you look at people's mass attitudes and polling, it's actually pretty decent, right? The problem is, is then it goes into the administrative black box and it comes out as like an executive order that no one can do anything about.

So like when people thought protesting the Muslim ban would do something, they shut down airports. It was a huge moment of direct action. People like pilots were refusing to take off and taxi cabs were going on strike, not taking people from airports when they thought that's something you could do. So I think that it really is about kind of snapping out of it or breaking out of a kind of haze or a mystique for the people inside these institutes. Falling out of love with the state. Yeah, fall out of love with it and realize that in the end it's not just a job, but also you aren't conversely. It's just a job, but also like you aren't conversely.

It's just a job, but you're also not just a guy. Right? And I think if people can conceptualize themselves as like, wait, I'm part of the same machine and kind of really understand where they stand inside these institutions, I think at least there could be a more like a non-a less ideological conversation about where these things are going. But also, if I knew the answer, I would be shouting it from the rooftops. I mean, I think it's gonna take a while for me

to kind of grapple with this and putting together the book proposal has been, I honestly, the beginning of trying to grapple with this because I also don't really know what I could have done differently, right? Well, I think also it's worth pointing out that the distinction between liberal attitudes and then actual, what actual power brokers will do, right? In the, there is a huge, there's a concerted effort among the Democratic Party in the states

specifically to not give themselves more power and to seed that to the courts and executive orders, so they don't have to do anything. There's a similar drive here, not to sort of seed political power from parliament just because that's not the way that we're really set up. We don't have the same kind of, we don't have the same kind of a sort of like judicial, for example, oversight or division between the executive and the legislative that America does. It's slightly, we have a Supreme Court, but it is different enough, right?

But at the same time, even though these attitudes will begin to be popular among liberals, the parties that the liberals will vote for, who will hold power over these institutions that will be making an enforcement these policies, they ultimately, they also don't want that authority either. Or here they want the authority to govern them in largely the same way. Yeah, it operates in a really particular way where the weird thing is during this time that I was exercising executive authority on people,

I myself felt totally powerless, right? It really is the chief wiggum, like, oh, I'm only powerless to help you, not powerless to harm you. And so like part of my like cop-brained part, you know, my little instinct where I go is like, God, what if we could have actually made our own decisions? Like on, for this particular policy

in that particular place, if people had actually been able to function like diplomats did in the 70s, which is you're just like seven scotches deep with a stamp, getting to do whatever you wanted. Come on in, boy. There was a lot of that. I was like, well, you seem good to go.

Okay, you seem like a decent guy, and then you would just cachunk, and then it's like, congratulations, you have a green card. It's a paper card. I signed it, right? In that area where you actually had a lot of large SN authority, it probably would have been a better outcome for individuals affected by that policy, right? Now, do I think, hey, let's give more unaccountable authority to immigration

officials can ever turn out to be a good result? No, right? And so there's obviously the liberals are doing a lot of ideological work to reconcile this contradiction between what they say and what they do. But like those contradictions are manifold in the border of the liberal democratic state right now. And like I don't know, there's a lot of ways that there could be bad answers to that. And I don't know exactly how to start moving towards a good answer to that, which is, you know, return to the world, return with a V to the world that existed in living memory, where national borders and immigration controls were pretty refundary. Like, I mean, you know, you just kind of had to show up. A lot of people could travel without passports. It's like if you look at a picture of the US-Mexico border

from like 1912, it's just like a street. You know, and I'm not saying US society was better then or less racist than or that there weren't, I mean, there were just straight up racial quotas in the US immigration system at that time. But, you know, there's always been some mechanism of the control of populations moving from place to place. That's kind of been there as long as there's been like, qualities, right? The existence of borders as this sort

of securitized zone that have to operate in this specific ideological way is like really, really recent. And so even if we could go back to like the 80s, that would be an improvement over what we have now. And if there's one hope, I think it is the recency and the contingency of these sorts of border forms. Now, if there's the downside to that and something which is like, oh damn, there I have no flicker of hope, it's that everyone seems to be racing

towards the kill everyone, Greek Coast Guard, island evacuation, kind of model of border control. Greek Coast Guard, island evacuation, kind of model of border control. Greek Coast Guard, no apology, no surrender. Yeah, so I guess we've made a lot of malacca. I suppose we can say the interim solution is, let diplomats drink on the job again. That's true.

Absolutely. Let's hashtag resistance, more resistance, and also more drinking on the job. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and also more drinking on the job. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, absolutely. And people probably would have done that. Yeah, get drunker if you're a dip for that. Joseph, I want to thank you very much as well

for coming on and talking to us today. It's been lovely having a chat. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Oh my pleasure. This one goes out to all the listeners out there working tirelessly in bad places, doing bad things. I know that there's, I think there's at least one UK diplomat I know who does. Oh, I think we have people everywhere.

And they DM me because they know I was empathized and I will. So I'm expecting some more after this goes out. Okay, actually, you know what, new solution to this whole problem, trash future deep state. That's a maybe so. Absolutely. Trash future reverse gladiator, just create a group chat. We'll just, we'll just consent to create it.

It's not a hog who works for MI6, please DM on it. I am about to become the British Vethalogalin. That's right. Anyway, Joseph, thank you very much. We will be eagerly awaiting that book proposal. We're now an agency also. Yeah. And you, the listener, thank you very much for listening.

But also, do you remember that bounces are part of the, they are holding their own border outside of the homie clubs. That's true. Every time Sven or Misha bounces you, they feel bad about it. Bouncing and crying. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's all for today. Bye everyone. Bye. you