TRASHFUTURE - The Disease of the Western Mind ft. Karl Sharro

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

This week, the full TF crew of Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Milo (@milo_edwards) speak with satirist and urbanist Karl Sharro (@karlremarks) about the backwards Western proclivity for conspiracy theories, their fondness for strongman rule, and why he sees a vibrant future for Occidentalist thinkpieces that cite one sole apocryphal London cab driver. Karl's presence in the room raised the aggregate IQ for the Trashfuture franchise to an inordinate extent, despite our valiant, Dunkirk-like efforts to dumb it down. We also hear a profound apology from Hussein, who unleashed a salted meat euphemism on British politics and watched in horror as it echoed villainously through some of the worst publications in this country. Hussein: we forgive you, but God might not. As always, you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. If you buy a custom text shirt, Riley *might* remember to give your custom text a shout-out. Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this episode from Brooklyn, or (as it's better known throughout the world), "the Hackney of New York."

So, Hussain, do you have any apologies to make? I have many apologies to make. I'm sorry to my parents, sorry to everyone who's ever read any of my tweets, but there is... Related to that is, I don't think it's necessarily all down to me. I don't think it's all down to me. I think it's like us as a collective group and this podcast, Trash Future, contributed a lot to this.

So this is an official apology to everyone listening and everyone not listening for the word gammon. I didn't write this down because I was just too ashamed, but if you've been plugged into the news for the past week, it feels like it feels like months. Well, it is because the word gammon went from a way to describe a disgusting way to eat ham to a sort of mock insult that we use to talk about the men who wanted to nuke everything because their wives don't sleep with them, to a slur being genuinely debated by Julia Hartley Brewer and Brendan O'Neill.

Our friend Brendan O'Neill. Our friend O'Neill on fucking spectator radio, and it took the course of an extended lunch break. I think on behalf of the entire podcast, we're sorry to every man whose blood pressure was raised beyond dangerous levels because their complexion was compared to that of a ham. That's exactly the same as racism. That's what racism is. It's when you make fun of someone for looking completely fucking stupid.

But we're very sorry also that we've cheapened the political discourse in this country. It's once great nation, home of beautiful poetic writers, hum, all manner of delicious cured meats, bristola. And we've cheapen, I feel that our podcast being part of this whole new leftist space, we've cheapened the discourse, but it's also shown how influential we're becoming. It's all down to you. So we're no longer going to be using the word gammon on this show, but we will instead be interchanging it with obscure anime references.

So from a month from now, we're all going to be debating whether being called Sailor Moon is in fact violence. My prediction is for a month's time, Hussain is going to be on radio to debating Brendan O'Neill about whether coffee is in is or is not in fact a soup. It is. Welcome back once again to this episode for some reason that we still seem to be making and you still seem to be listening to of Trash Future, the podcast about how the future, if we do not implement fully automated luxury gay space communism, is and will be trash.

That's the first time I've ever said it right on the first try, feeling very proud of myself. Who from my from my left, which means the ball, have we got in the end the bougie hackney flat today? Hi, it's me, Milo Edwards, coming at you live for the people in the room, but not live for all of you listening to this podcast from Moscow. You can find me on Twitter at Milo underscore was as always, and I've been following all of these ham related developments from the country on earth, where in many ways they love disgusting cured hams the most, the Russian Federation, as you say, in fact, they could

replace spectator radio with just ham radio, which is funny because it's a kind of radio. My name is the same because money. This is the last day before Ramadan begins, where hammers her arm always, but especially during Ramadan. So I feel doubly ashamed, but I'm ready to atone for my sins this month, which includes poisoning the British political discourse and also referring to coffee as soup. It's not a fucking soup. Here's an idea for the whole period of Ramadan.

We refuse to say the word Gammon, Gamma Dan. All right, that got what it deserved. Hi, I'm Carl Sharro, an online satirist and architect, and I'm getting about every other word in this conversation. I'm not you'll get this very quickly. I'm not a native English speaker, and I'm actually still struggling to catch up on the slag of the eighties. This is like I'm 30 years behind, but it's all right.

You probably also have like better things to do in your time, but like listen to our dumb show. Oh, no, no, I listen to it all the time. And anyway, no sweat, Daniel, it's rad to have you on board. Yeah, it's it's really it's it's I'm honored to be here. It's a huge learning experience, trying to bridge, you know, the gap between generations. And yeah, I might stop occasionally to ask you for the meaning of a word or something

like that. But yeah, we might stop occasionally to ask, like, how, you know, to get houses? What to do with, like, you know, how you get married? Just like life advice. Yeah, no, that's that's professional service, not advice. You have to pay for that. That's exactly what my dad says. That's free. I'm still Arab.

I'm not giving you stuff for free. Yeah, I guess I suppose unless we go to your house, in which case you'll like feed us till we die, right? Yeah, yeah, obviously, generosity, generosity, rose. So basically, while Carl is an architect and satirist, he is also a a Middle East commentator, and the land of breaking news and analysis has continued to generate breaking news and analysis. Can you believe it?

Yeah, absolutely. I should plug my book in now. My book is coming up in July and then God created the Middle East and said, let there be breaking news and analysis. I mean, I have to say the great thing about Western media is obsession with coverage, Middle East coverage, you know, and Orientalist tropes and all of that. It's it's like really good for business for me. It's really great.

Always hustling. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what would how would Robert Fisk eat? Like the moment Lebanon becomes like a stable like a stable democracy that doesn't seem to have like a weird tripod between like three different religions. I Robert Fisk need to go to the job center. So that, you know, I might personally, I think like Western politicians would solve all the problems of the Middle East very quickly.

My theory has been like a long time now. It's actually Middle Eastern pundits and journalists who are keeping the problems in there. That's their business model, you know, you can thank us later. They need this kind of area and people to explain to the West, you know, you have just you have to understand the economics of it. Well, the follow the money. Who's got all their money invested in breaking news and analysis? Well, it's it's it's mostly it's mostly dark news out of the Middle East recently.

But one one thing that happened is Iraq just elected a communist who it's a legislature in, I think, a northern town. Yeah, I mean, I think this is this is really one of the interesting things that are happening that don't fall into the, you know, the stuff. There's, you know, there's a book, right? There's a book about Middle East policies and everything should follow the book. And then to make it easier for Western media, things should follow a certain pattern that so a week before that we had the elections in Lebanon, right?

And it was a very complicated result has Bala made some gains, but also their worst enemies made some gains. And then the headlines next day is Hezbollah takes over Lebanon, you know, and it's the Iranian domination of like it's going to extend to Southern Europe. And everything has to be seen through the prism of that. And then again, once again, I think Western media is like they're completely surprised by any unexpected developments in in the Middle East. So in Iraq, in this instance, and I think Muktada Sader,

who's, by the way, his it's obligatory to call him a firebrand, Shia cleric. One thick boy. Yeah, that's all I know about Muktada Sader. He is one thick boy. But but he's I think he's brilliant because he's kind of like breaking that sectarian mold, not necessarily out of like the goodness of his heart, but he's a player and in kind of like playing different sides. And by the way, he's already like announced his quitting Iraqi politics seven times

like every year that's his annual easy. Yeah, I know. I got 99 problems with the Sunni 8-1. The funny thing about that is that like you consider JZs be modern music, but like we like our youngest listeners like listen to like fucking sound cloud rappers and I had to look up who like little C was the other day. I was just saying it's so the way that they're talking about Hezbollah, it's like it's the Baka Valley branch of momentum.

Yeah, yeah, that's the thing I'm saying. Let's let's let's have an iron alloyed alliance, not to be confused with Lisbollah. I am this is like so this is the extent of my least pundit tree, which was I really wanted to piss off some people one day. So I made a muck up Hezbollah palace t-shirt and I put it on Twitter and I was just like could someone make me one of these and I had a bunch of people that got like really mad at me. But then there was like these teenagers who just slid into my DMs was like,

yeah, if you pay me 20 quid, I'll make you want to look authentic. That would be sick. I would I would absolutely love one of those. Edie, Edie, please, if you're listening to me, can we all get one? But did you see there was an image? There was a great image that I tweeted. It was this woman who's wearing the kind of the abaya, you know, and covering her head and her whole body, but it was bright red with a hammer

and sickle in gold. And it was like a product of this alliance between Muqtada Sada and the communist. And he was like, there's always the thing about Arab communists is you don't have to choose, right? You don't have to make like you allow the dialectical materialism to kind of manifest itself. And it's brilliant, you know, contradictions don't have to resolve them. And you know, this is difficult, like it's kind of a bit sad.

But whenever a communist dies in an Arab country, because you can't have like a civil ceremony or a secular ceremony, it has to be a mosque or in a church. So you have all these people that only go to churches or mosques when someone dies. That is basically a very long communist tradition. But I mean, it's like, I think to me, for me, the image kind of represented the sense of complexity, which I think it's fucking brilliant. It's coming back, you know, enough of the reductiveness.

That was fantastic. So what does I mean, this is this is only one election in a country whose politics are fractious to say the best. So what do you think this means, if anything? Well, I think it means several things because Iraq, in a way, on some level is kind of following because of the brilliance of the Americans, you know, after they invaded the country and then they put kids in charge of running it, you know, it's a no prior experience.

And then they wrote the constitution, did all of that. They hit on this brilliant idea is they modeled Iraq, politics of Iraq, emerging Iraq on Lebanon. You know, the famously successful, the famously peaceful success fit at the resolution of political divisions. And they went like, you know, we have to inject an element of communitarian representation into Iraqi politics. And then they kind of like, I think what we're starting to see now

is people not playing by that. So you're not not automatically voting along sectarian lines. And then you have players like Muqtada Sader, regardless of whether you like him or not, he's bucking the trend, he's distancing himself from Iraq. So all sorts of things that you don't expect, you know, Western pundits don't expect him to do. And I think that just kind of injects a sense of dynamism. And obviously it takes a long time for these things to work out.

But I think it's we're seeing a lot of interesting things that are happening. We're seeing a body emerging as a kind of a unifying figure. We're seeing a lot of internal trends. But I think what I feel personally is just people kind of like step back a little bit and they give these countries a chance to develop and not fucking persistently like meddle in their elections and try to influence the outcomes. And then we can see positive things happen. I think the one thing that I want to mention about it is when you mention

communism in Iraq and a lot of people don't know this, it's like, oh, there's communists in Iraq. The Communist Party was the strongest political force in Iraq in the 40s onwards, and he played the leading role in, you know, kind of fighting British colonialism and imperialism. And it could count on up to a million people, you know, it could bring in demonstrations and that sort of heritage doesn't disappear. And I think that's that's one of the the things I like to remember about it.

And what what this, I mean, if we really want to model Iraq and Lebanon, what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to import some droos. No, but I think that's I think that's that's that that's exactly right. I don't know if this is right. The fuck do I know, but it that feels as though it's an almost optimistic outlook for a region of the world that rarely gets any optimistic outlooks, especially from outside. Yeah, I but I want to sort of address something that is slightly less optimistic, which is what has been going on

in Gaza for the last, well, I mean, a for the last several days and weeks or B for the last several decades, there is often a protest at the borders with Israel borders, they're not borders, prison fences, prison fences. And this year, the response to them from the IDF has been particularly heinous. Are you aware of sort of the are you aware of the current numbers at the moment? The casualties, you mean? Yeah, yeah, of course. And I think it's it's been particularly vicious this year. It's kind of an escalation of scale.

And I think there's there's a number of reasons that have contributed to that. And I think the only problem that I have with the prevailing narrative now is how much of that is linked to Trump's embassy move. Which I think is kind of more of a symbolic thing rather than what actually triggers the event. Yeah, I think what we're saying is the situation has been years when Gaza under siege. And I have to disagree with a lot of people who say people in Gaza are doing this out of desperation.

It's not true. They're doing it out of hope because people who are in complete despair wouldn't actually do anything about it. They would surrender completely and nobody willingly is going to die. It's another trope that you see in the media that they're willing really dying. No, Israeli soldiers are choosing to kill them. They're not choosing to go and die. They're choosing to do something about their dire situation.

And that's different completely from despair. So I think that kind of way of of again representing it that those people are so desperate and they're doing this irrational thing. No, they're choosing to actually act on the only form of political action that they have available to them. And often that like that perspective. So I've had people in my kind of mentions over the past kind of couple of days. They're all kind of saying the same stuff.

So sometimes it sort of borders the ridiculous, which is I had some guys today who... Was it racist duck? Racist duck, my friend racist duck. We have a history. That's his ad. We're not calling him racist duck. That's his ad. So, you know, just a bit of backdrop. I did a story from my magazine that I work for about these kind of conservative, pasty dads.

We're not allowed to use a G word on this show anymore. Who basically like pretend to be ducks on the internet. And I somehow ended up like hanging like ended up in this kind of community of like middle aged British men all living in like random rural towns in the country who just are united by the fact that they love ducks and they hate brown people. We can't say the G word anymore. We're going to start calling him mallards. Ah, yes. The two genders, ducks and brown people. So one of them basically said, you know, and you've probably heard this before.

It's just like, oh, you know, these Palestinians, they weren't innocent. They were agitating, they were agitating the Israeli army. So I was like, how would you go about like agitating like one of the most well equipped armies in the world? Like, you know, you've got to have some serious firepower to do that. So he gave me two examples. The first one he said was like, the first one that he was like, showed me these kids like the sovereignty of Israel, more than a rope tied to a fence. The these kids with like slingshots, right? And we'll go on to this topic in a second because it becomes more ridiculous from this point.

And the second thing he sent me was like, oh, you know that they're sending fire bombs on kites, right? And this is like ridiculously, you know, but that's fucking brilliant. That takes such a level of skill. If you can actually rig a fire bomb to a kite and manipulate it to actually deliver that is. I mean, when I was a kid, I would have loved to do that. Yeah, I mean, if any of these people ever just tried regularly flying a kite, it's challenging, you know? You know, both Afghan kids were pretty good at flying kites. And like, if they were smart enough to like attach fire weapons onto them, you know, I love the symmetry of that.

You know, like because the Israelis, it's kind of their winter collection now, I guess, or the spring collection. So they have now these drones, the fire tear gas canisters. And that's kind of like the mirror image is always the mirror image, right? Like the very highly symbolic weapon that doesn't really isn't effective in anything. And then the super sophisticated lethal technologically advanced weapon where that one is legitimate. But the other one is like, all of a sudden, all these soldiers have to freak out. What a fucking kite. We're going to have to start shooting people now.

What you see the trope and the thing is you see there's two, I think, related tropes that you see, which is number one, which is that. Ah, we it's it's it's Hamas is using all of these civilians as human shields to advance its agenda. And number two, if the Palestinians were serious about peace, they would protest peacefully. You see those two tropes quite frequently, which I think is utterly fucking ridiculous because they are being made war upon every day by Israel. Number one. And number two, the idea that people are organized and this has a weird parallel with British politics almost where the idea where people who are organized by a central body around a thing are seen as dupes by that thing because they couldn't possibly agree with its aims. No, it's a serious this at that point.

I mean, that's that's a very important point. It's this idea that people can be organized. You know, people will call you a cult like I called you guys before we started this and then we do sacrificing chickens as our own business. We're still going to work out how to fly. Is that what you're doing to that chicken? It's like this idea that people, if you know the kid, they kind of give up their spare time, they get organized. There's a kind of a central authority and a discipline that's immediately suspicious. But my own interactions on Twitter, which I don't like to mention because I'm not, you know, as much of a Twitter person as Hussain is.

And he keeps coming back to Hussain online. I love being online. There's so much fun stuff like racist abuse, racist dugs, racist dugs. So I've been getting this thing like I tweeted one thing about it, right? I tweeted one thing and I said, like, Israel didn't give, like, Hussain is much of a choice. It's either the humiliation of prison or we're going to shoot you. And then I said, like, all these people kind of coming back at me and saying, they keep electing Hamas, they keep electing Hamas. And I'm like, yeah, they have functioning elections.

Maybe it's just because that march is really good. They're missing the big story here. There are free elections and they're voluntary. You know, the anger directed at them, they're not saying that Hamas is actually brainwashing them or whatever. They're actually accepting that people are voluntarily voting for Hamas, whom I'm like completely against politically on a kind of ideological level. But I understand, you know, the position that they play within that struggle. But it's kind of as if there's like some fundamental problem with the idea that people are choosing to vote for them. Yeah.

And also, you might think like it's there are extreme conditions being imposed upon them. And so they are choosing to vote for an extremist party. Like it's it that doesn't seem that ridiculous to me. Yeah, I mean, whatever that thing, I mean, I think the rise of Hamas was because of the the bankruptcy of the PLO after years. There's many historic roots for it. But I think that the main thing is we're talking about genuinely free elections in which people are choosing the representative. And that's the force they think. And this is a moment of existential crisis for them, right?

Like that Ghazan aren't going to go tomorrow and vote for the legalized marijuana party. These are not the choices that they have one. They have one Ghazan and his chicken. And that's not what their situation is. But the mere fact that they're recognizing that they're actually being voted in and they're angry that they're being voted in. And that's kind of like, you know, they're trying to take away the legitimacy of this this this process. That's that's that's a kind of a recognition of their legitimacy, in a way, in the eyes of the Palestinian public. I think there was another thing as well, which was and I saw it on the way here.

These kind of pictures and I'm not sure whether they're real or not about like Palestinians who are basically getting paid the protest, right? So I think I don't know what newspapers are. I mean, it's either the Washington Post or the telegraph. The Washington Post and the telegraph. Two excellent progressive magazines that definitely do not have imperialist and racist undertakens. Democracy dies in darkness, man. Or democracy. No, democracy dies in the toilet.

I think you'll find or in our case, democracy is alive and well in Palestine with fiery kites in the sky. Yeah. Actually, can I can I interrupt you just about the kites? Because I saw something amazing today about the kites thing. Speaking of how terrifying these Palestinian kids with kites are, there was two like chud Israeli dudes who we might describe as being the colour of a certain meat, who who decided to like get get one get one back on the Palestinians. Because, you know, the Palestinians have been too long of the Israelis suffered under the oppressive jackboot of the Palestinians. So they decided to get one back on the on the scary Palestinian children by making their own fire kite and flying it over the border into Palestine.

But they fucked it up and it crash landed into some Israeli farmers field and set it on fire and they all got arrested. Owned. Owned. The winds of God will carry my revenge to Palestine five years later. Ah, nevertheless, the point I was trying to make, the point I was trying to make with that thing is not like, you know, it's not really adding much credence to their point because, you know, you forget the fact that, well, Israel controls like, you know, the majority of their economy, right? They control the water supply. They control most of the land supply.

You know, it's it's effectively a dead economy. So if you've got young people who are like, yeah, I can make, you know, I can make a bit of money, it's like hanging out at a protest. Then like, I don't know, it just doesn't all what I've kind of noticed in this period is that the arguments that have been made by the usual pro-Israeli side. And we know what the we know what those arguments are, like I've sort of fallen into dead water. Like they don't seem as effective as they used to be. I don't know whether they ever were effective or whether like people are just pissed off. And I sort of wonder whether that's like whether like the Trump influence sort of plays into that. The fact that they're being so like, obviously, you know, on one side, even though like American policy hasn't really changed that much.

And if that's the case, like, can we actually use this? Can this actually be used as a way to actually progress what's going on rather than it being in a quagmire? I mean, I'm not sure about that. I think that what's happened to propaganda is it's become more fine grained. And that's a byproduct of not just social media, but like a wider cultural condition, so to speak. But we're all kind of like our cycle of reaction and outrage is like an hourly and daily basis. It's not like we're not we have to admit we're not in an era of like people living, you know, with like this super big competing narratives. It's not the Cold War.

We're all like the grain of all of that. It's the latest thing that's happened, you know, two, three hours ago, everybody's looking at the same video online or the same image or so. The kind of there's the effort then to manage that propaganda both ways is much more kind of persistent and fine grained, by which I mean, you know, you're doing it like hour by hour. You're not sort of putting out a big narrative out there and, you know, like the old kind of myth that Israel is bringing civilization to the Middle East. And all that kind of thing. And then you kind of leave it like that is kind of you have to kind of continuously work with that image. And that has kind of two two sides to it. One is you can score more kind of PR wins if you like, if you're if you're trying to be kind of countering the narrative.

But the downside to that is like two hours later, that's going to be forgotten. So there's a sense of lack of persistence that used to exist historically. I love being able to speak like that, because you guys are kids and you don't remember these things and I'm the oldster. I love being in this position in my days, in my days, in my day, the communists were Russian. Well, speaking of fine grained propaganda driven on social media, I actually recently learned that the IDF and and and and the Palestinians are actually clashing. It's not a one sided massacre because the IDF has exposed Hamas's tools for infiltrating Israel. Owning the lips. These are very, very scary guys.

They include destroying them with logic. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. How did we not think about this? Holy shit. I've got an idea. I've got an idea, right? I've got an idea.

So we drone a load of like Sam Harris books right into the West Bank. Just drop it down. Oh, my God. It's like it's like Avengers, but intellectual children screaming Israeli soldiers that their attacks are at hominem. Yeah. Eventually they'll get shooting at me. You've already admitted you lost the argument. Eventually, after they read all of Ben Shapiro's fucking fan fiction, they'll become so

like logically insane and their balls will be so big that the next time they go to the Israeli border, holding up their Sam Harris end of reason books, fucking owned, man. Yeah, that's it. You have to own them. Hamas plans to own Israel with logic. Okay. So it can be called the Weiss Nationalists. The fucking hell stopping bullets like in midair, like Neo, just with logic.

So the IDF, the IDF, helpfully has posted a poster of Hamas's tools for infiltrating Israel. They didn't include logic, I think, which was a mistake to me. It's a start a pack. They have included rocks. Everyone rocks, presumably, which is the same as a 50 cal bullet explosives arson kites, like they fucking rock wire cutters don't know why you could possibly need wire cutters Molotov cocktails and then here's where like the first five were like at least you could understand kind of what they mean, right?

They could be weaponized. Yeah, the next four are fucking crazy. The next one is burning tires, which I can because I guess they're creating smoke. So I guess we're dealing with the Hamas. But you know the burning tire thing is like a is like a biblical thing, right? The burning chariot in the Old Testament and all of that. That's a biblical meme. Why are they objecting to that?

And then plagues of loco. Here's my favorite one, rope tied to fence. Which sounds more like a conceptual artwork. Rope tied to fence. Rope tied to fence attempt 72. You can see all this like this poor, it's probably this poor cousin kid who's into contemporary art, right? He takes his like a coil of rope every day, goes out to the fence and ties one and looks at it,

takes pictures, chairs it on Instagram. Meanwhile, like the Israelis are sending this top squad of forensic investigators. It's like, what the fuck is happening on there? It's like, holy shit, it's a rope. Quickly get the wire cutters. No, then we're no worse than them. We're no better than them. We cannot use the weapons of our enemies.

The final one is a plum floating in perfume served in a man's hat. So basically what this is, is this indicates to me that the IDF thinks that Hamas is Wiley Coyote. Either that or they genuinely like are scared of every fucking being Q in this country. You have to give it to and here's the thing and this is where it gets a little bit serious, is the last two entries are children and disabled civilians, which makes you realize that the IDF is actually exactly as brave as American police. Yeah, absolutely. There's a whole program of rich cultural exchange between those two institutions.

I mean, yeah. I've got to object to this. Benjamin Netanyahu will never be the man that Paul Blart Morkop will be. Never ever. It's like both American police and the IDF are definitely are sort of frightened or intimidated into shooting unarmed children, which is basically horrifying on both counts. I asked the suspect to produce his license and registration, but I was concerned that he was reaching for a rope tied to a fence.

So I shot him 18 times in the head. I mean, but you know, the thing about this day is like, I think it actually shows the resultfulness. I mean, when people ask me what's the first like, how do you learn cooking with the first recipe you learn? So actually the first recipe I learned was moloft of cocktails. And that was like 1981 in Lebanon in civil war. I'm not going to go into the circumstances, right?

But but it's actually like it actually taught me the basics of cooking. Getting because I'm not joining, you know, moloft of cocktails. If you don't get the more than cooking bacon, if you don't get the measures right, it won't work. And that actually shows the resourcefulness and discipline. They should be uploaded for that. You know, any kid in my book, if my kids grow up to try to make their own like homemade moloft of cocktails at the age of 13, I'll be proud of that.

This is also why I find like, you know, how you have all these stories about like bombers who like their bombs like fuck up, right? Like, and it always turns out to be the same story, which is that they just didn't know how to make it because they got the proportions wrong or they used the wrong type of like concentrated chemical. And it all turned out to be like teenagers or like early 20 somethings who were just like massive fail sons. They don't know how to cook.

They don't know how to clean. They've never seen detergent in their life before this moment. And I just said, okay, you've got to get the measurements precisely right. If you're going to do this and you've got this fucking teenager, this is like, yeah, whatever, mate. Fucking this is actually brilliant. It's like basically the shittiness of this generation is actually prevented a lot of terrorist action.

That's just fucking a brilliant insight. Don't fucking teach this generation how to cook. Don't even give them any sense of discipline. As a man who still struggles to cut an onion, I can guarantee MI5 who are listening to this, but I'm not going to do anything because I just can't do it and I'm too lazy. Let's trick disaffected youth into learning how to cook by replacing form making instructions subtly with like instructions for making a delicious lemon drizzle cake.

Like, well, it didn't go off, but it was absolutely delicious. They're like copies of the anarchist cookbook that were put onto the internet by like government agencies, which were deliberately wrong to basically like find people who were going to try build weapons, but were evidently too stupid to be able to do. It's like just like the instruction, just like take a bowling ball, put in a candle, like you've got a bomb. That's also that you build it. You build a machine and just a flag comes out that says bang.

Yeah, I mean, that is true. But at the same time, I'm personally, and I know you guys probably don't agree with that, but I'm like very wary of kind of investing too much political capital into trying to control media narrative because media narrative has its own internal logic. And it's not something that people are interested in political radicalism and necessarily capable of influencing outright. So the best that you can get is you might get a kind of instantaneous accommodation.

And I think that actually in a way defends you if you're trying to be radical. And it kind of just kind of makes you, in a sense, sound a little bit whiny. So I'm kind of like, I'm worried doing that because ultimately we become too obsessed with what the narrative is about internally. So I think I want them to actually say what they want to say. I don't want to be able then to critique that because by doing this, you're able to kind of strip away the ideological layers and get people interested in radical politics to understand how the dynamics work are much more interested than that than the Washington Post or the

Telegraph being woke, right? Because the moment we get to that, and that's happening, I mean, that's happening a lot because they realize there's a kind of like a market for it. And people are kind of more radicalized now, but it becomes an attempt at pacification. And for me personally, that's not really the battle. The battle is actually kind of coming up with the counter narrative, not kind of getting these concessions from the media.

And ultimately, the uglier it is, the better it is for you to be able to then build a counter narrative against it, as opposed to it becoming just a kind of symbolic accommodation, ultimately. Okay, that makes sense. Democracy dies in dark hot soup. All right. It's coffee. So I want to go on now to a... You're not going to cut out all these like serious monologues I'm doing, are you?

It's just the chicken stuff. I'm going to, I now want to transition to a viewer listener question. By the way, I've decided I'm going to start doing more questions, just interspersed in a regular show. So send questions to my curious cat or the trash feature curious cat, either one really. So an anonymous listener asks, I studied IR and was very happy to hear you say in a recent podcast that it's incredibly fucking stupid. Something I couldn't agree with more.

Are there any good IR scholars or articles you'd recommend on a serious question? Oh, sorry. Okay, that was a serious question. So I'll follow it up with, would you rather bang Princess Peach or Birdo? Yeah, Birdo, she's the only, I mean, Yoshi's female counterpart who has like a giant snout that's like a foot in circumference. I don't know any of these people. What are we talking about?

So I think Birdo is the consent Birdo and I don't know what you're talking about is the consensus on the IR field. That's a tricky one. I wouldn't be having sex with either of them because I'd be busy tying a rope to a fence. I think with the IR, I think there's a lot of misunderstandings about it again with stop me if I start to sound preachy. IR isn't intrinsically problematic. I think there's a world order post-World War II that's based on certain assumptions.

Key among them is the idea of state sovereignty, right? That is a very critical idea. That is very crucial to how IR functions. When people say this all doesn't work as shit, it's actually it works. It works in principle. It doesn't work in practice because particularly since the end of the Cold War, the West in particular has been taking a little role in dismantling the logic of state sovereignty. And state sovereignty is the only mechanism that we can have now of international representation,

any chance of getting any notions of international relations theory, IR theory working, and enabling that to ultimately, what you want out of it is to prevent things from sliding into outright conflict, what you see happening in Syria, for example, which is a consequence. If you want to dig back into the roots of it, a kind of this Western tendency starting from Yugoslavia and onwards to claim that a humanitarian narrative gives them a kind of an order of a riding authority to go over the United Nations, go over state sovereignty, and then the introduction of the right to protect and all of these aspects. What they do ultimately is they weaken the basis of how international paradigm is built

today, right? And that is really the problem. So today it's like there's no point standing up and saying, this is all shit. We don't want to do anything about it. For me, politically, what you need to be saying is we need to actually go back to defending state sovereignty. That is really an important thing.

It's a concept that's really not fashionable. Like not in liberal circles. But it's actually a really important foundational concept because the assumption is state sovereignty comes from the people within the nation. But once you can start talking about a global constituency, that is there's no mechanism for representation for that. And Americans can't have a say about what's happening in Syria because the world is not structured like that.

And I think the one thing that we can do now is to kind of insist on the importance of sovereignty for me personally. I think that's basically right. I think if you want, in terms of articles, you can read, well, okay, look, this letter writer has probably already read everything I would recommend in terms of, I think, if you want to think about IR in terms of state power and have to want to understand how international institutions are sort of also extensions of state power, you really can do no better than going back to Kenneth Walz

and looking at a book like Man the State in War or Theory of International Politics. These are very dry. I suggest you read a summary. If you want... Me, myself, and I are. If you want something a little bit shorter and it's a little more up to date, I think you should look at the article. And this is often free online.

Anarchy is What States Make of It by Alexander Wendt. It's quite good. I should actually read more IR and less manga. All I could think about is like shown and jump references. But you know what, like in terms of popular stuff, Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger, I think is quite good. Maybe it's not necessarily like an IR book. It's kind of like a mixture of like literature, politics, and global affairs.

But I think he's got a good grip of the big trends that are affecting societies. And even though it is like a bit bougie at times, and it is like a bit kind of... I don't know what the best way to describe it as. I think it's like a bit whimsical at times. But I think it's a decent, you know, it's a decent, like, you know, train read or bedtime read or whatever. And I think it kind of really helped me think about stuff.

The other thing is actually on Riley's bookshelf, right? It's called The Story of Oh by Pauline Rick. None of these books are mine. It's a great bit of literature about international affairs and absolutely nothing else. The Story of Oh. Actually, right beside that, I have one of the few books in this house that I do own, which is Afghanistan by Thomas Barfield, which is an excellent study of the history of that particular country.

I strongly recommend it. Anyway, show me move on to all the other shit we've got going on. Or Milo, famous idiot, do you want to recommend an IR book? No. Sorry, Milo, I didn't mean to laugh so loudly about that. No, it's fine. It's all right. I I know my place any any any IR recommendations or a book book recommendations

generally something from classics. I'm just I'm just not a fucking nerd. All right. Yeah, classics, anything. You love Virgil so much. You love Virgil so much. Famous act. Why don't I marry him?

Oh wait, I would if he wasn't dead. No, I actually I actually think home is home is better. He's more big dickhead in the world of epics. Big big dick poet Homer. Huge dick poet. So the catalogue of ships more like the catalogue of hell, yes. Russell group graduate university students on a podcast guys. So on one thing, Carl, you're absolutely excellent about and I recommend people like

if they are introducing themselves to your reading. I recommend they look at these first. Just you're excellent at writing about the West as though it's being written about like by a Western journalist writing about the Middle East and the UK is about to celebrate the second is about to celebrate the second anniversary of its independence. So yeah, basically I forgot from the introduction to say that I'm actually an Occidentalist and I don't take that flippantly. I genuinely moved over here because I love the way of life.

I love the authentic ways of the various pink means you can buy from the store. And I wanted to be like with Western people and understand their culture and really learn from them. And that took me to sort of becoming one of the greatest Occidentalists alive today. And I do lots of lectures in the Arab world to introduce. I'm passionate about the subject and I like to introduce, you know, the Western area, which is rarely heard about. Of course, it doesn't dominate the media and the news or anything like that in the Middle East.

And I think what you're going with this is I was I was fortunate to be in this country when it gave it its independence in 2016. Yes, the famous, the famous independence, right? Yeah, when Independence Day 2 was released. And then... Well, I love it how at the time everyone thought 2016 was like the worst year ever. And now you can look back on it with such a rosy eye. Like things weren't so bad.

Yeah, and it's basically was like, no, it's like basically this article that I wrote that came out of this idea that Britain is finally gaining its independence. And we're like, how come, you know, and before that, like Brits were saying, like, how come like every nation in the world has like an Independence Day? We don't have an Independence Day. And I'm like, yeah, because they fucking got an Independence Day. You, you were occupying them. And but I love that metaphor.

And I was like, what's going to happen next, right? So I was like, start looking at the scenarios. What happens post-independence? Like you look Nigeria, India, Lebanon, all these countries. What happens when it demanded? Obviously, these countries have been colonized for a very long time, not the case of Lebanon. It was only 19 years, but still.

And then things don't work immediately, right? So they're going to have economic problems. They're going to have political problems. So what happens, right? You see the kind of the occupying power coming back to intervene again, economic collapse. So I kind of tried to like see foresee these things happening and, you know, getting like an economic crisis and then India stepping in to rescue Britain with an age package. And then Nigeria and Pakistan's sending in like a peacekeeping force to separate

the Remainers and Brexiteers. And I was really fun to read, to write actually. And yeah, I just loved that whole parallelism between the idea of Britain gaining its Independence. I was actually the fucker that happened after the rest of us got their Independence. Well, on the subject of fuckery, I have in front of me a Telegraph article. Oh, yes, the very broad topic. This is earlier this month, a guy called Paul Carter, who is definitely not probably ham, wrote an article where I can only imagine he was rock hard and just beat red in the face from high blood pressure.

Could an army coup remove Jeremy Corbyn just as it almost toppled Harold Wilson. So Carter writes basically on parallels with the idea that the army may topple Jeremy Corbyn. It genuinely did conspire to topple Harold Wilson for being two leftists in the sixties. And so this is basically this guy just fantasizing about the kids like him. So it's going to fucking die. It's like, oh my God, you need to fucking relax. Jacking it to a picture of Sir Jockster, he says first things would need to get pretty bad. Certainly should investor confidence collapse the economy unravel in unemployment rise

than an unpopular leader intent on ruling Trident out ambiguous on NATO and implementing a defense diversification swords into plowshares policy would no doubt raise eyebrows with the armed forces. Imagine if investors had lost confidence in the UK. Imagine if that had happened, right? So we get this idea that because Jeremy Corbyn isn't going to just preemptively nuke anyone who's rude to Britain, that the army is going to get rid of him. You know, the funny thing is, and that's why how we got talking about my article was actually predicted that scenario in my very satirical article. And then it's great. And then to see the telegraph and pieces like that, these things seriously, because I was genuinely thinking about it, thinking like if Corbyn does

come to power, what's going to happen? You know, you're going to have this like foreign powers trying to like oust him and then maybe feed the rebellion in the north and channel funds. And then and then so that was all the fancy. And today I read this thing that the EU is actually insisting on very strict terms and negotiations because they want to prevent a Corbyn government from implementing anti free market legislation in the UK. The European Union famed organization friendly to socialism. Yeah, no. So they're that street like they've been like an exposition today that it's basically there. They're they're trying to kind of prevent Corbyn government from from basically initiating

anti free market legislation. Anti it's like they say anti free market legislation as if it's like some form of discrimination. How dare you discriminate against the free market free market is a slur of capitalists is a slur. I mean, these are the racial time. These are the same people who think that neoliberalism is either a massively insulting term or a totally meaningless term somehow both at once. Yeah, but so the the other set of justifications for an army rebellion against Corbyn here is are pretty funny. We could also assume that this scenario includes security services reorganization, the abolition of private schools and a referendum on the monarchy. That's what all that sort of really get the army going the abolition of private schools.

Like, oh, they they've they've you mean Eaton's no longer a charitable organization is going to have to pay taxes. This is a bridge too far. I mean, it's just this is utter this is just just fantasism. This is just as just as this EU anti anti free market legislation perspective is hitting Corbyn from the soft left. This is the same fantasy from the hard right. Yeah. Now, I mean, this is what's so brilliant about this moment that we're living in. It's like everybody's become so unhinged. You know, it's like just the mere thought of someone like Corbyn coming to power is just like producing this most beautiful of absurdist writing, right? There's all these fantasies. It's like, you remember like science fiction was at its best

when America like was afraid of aliens invading them or like the Cold War, all that kind of thing. So all this deep fear and uncertainty is producing absolutely beautiful fiction in journalism. We go on. Hem, for any modern day coup to work against a radical Labour Prime Minister, a comparable charismatic figurehead would be required. Even assuming a plausible unelected leader was found, possibly Daniel Craig. No, I want Roger Moore to save me on the moon rover from the evil socialist grandpa. Roger Moore is way more charismatic to be fair.

Would they really want to challenge me dead? Would they really want to challenge Corbyn's 1.4 million Facebook followers with a depleted army of less than 80,000 soldiers? Oh my God, this is beautiful. This is white. Wait until they see the rope that momentum have got tied to a fence. They'll be quaking in their boots. Just the very idea. It's bizarre. This is why I think the sort of the alliance between sort of the reactionaries and the people

they're trying to mobilize is so crazy, is that they think that everybody in the country has a very emotional tie to Harrow. Yeah. Oh no, if you reduce the sovereign grant given to Princess Michael of Kent, I'm going to fucking kill my neighbors. You know, this is amazing. But you know, it reminds me, all of this thing reminds me like, I mean, I have to say it's people ask me a lot on Twitter.

It's like, why do you live in the West if you hate it so much and you keep criticizing it? It must be the same thing. And it's like, I'm like, my answer is like, yeah. And it's like, you're right. I criticize the West a lot. But the only reason why I live here is because I want to observe its collapse close by. You know, it's like, it's like ringside seats. Of course, I want to be here now.

And obviously it's not true. The West is not collapsing. Exactly, I'll tell you about Russia. We'll edit that out, right? Because my friends in Russia will be upset. So by the way, I'm like, I'm sure you know about all of this, but there's this conspiracy theory about me online that I'm like a paid Russian agent. And there's the same conspiracy theory about us.

I mean, Riley. And allegedly, because I used to appear on Russia today. And also it's like, oh, you're Jonathan Pye. Now I get it. Wait a minute. I didn't find out what his real name was. Do you have a list of logical fallacies in your pocket? Are you a member of the intellectuals?

You'll find that the English language is much better. The reverse intellectual dark web. But this is sophisticated, right? I was like sent to like an advanced KGB in the last days of the Soviet empire. I was sent to an advanced KGB run satirical school. It's like the upright thing. I turn the upright citizens brigade is the upright comrades brigade. Where me and the rest of comrades.

Satire divides into two categories, my friend. Lampoons and Owens. We were all trained in the high art of like satire to undermine the West from within. Right. And we were taught like I wasn't even funny when I was when I was a teenager. And then they we had special instructors, special Russian instructors that taught us into ancient ways of British wit. Just so we can undermine, undermine the empire.

While you were going out on dates, I was studying satire with the KGB. Now you have the temerity to come to me for help. You go and have fun. I have all these volumes of Laurel and Hardy to go through. But the whole thing is like from 2016 on again, it's like it's like it's just such a kind of mental collapse of everything. And I love when that point with like from my position as a Middle Eastern person, like Westerners were always like you have to respect democracy and voting and human rights

and democracy and voting and you have to vote and you have to stop your violent ways. And why are you Arabs backwards? Just voting and elections and things like that. Right. And then one vote doesn't go their way. All Westerners go fucking hell. We want to go now. We want the CIA to remove Trump.

What's happened? It's like everything is out of the window. I'm like, wait, guys, what happened? You used to always say like democracy takes a long time to work and you have to have faith on democracy and elections. What happened now? Like one vote didn't go your way. Sarah Silverman is like, let's have a cool.

Let's get rid of like we want the CIA. And then all of a sudden, like the CIA became the good guys, right? Liberals are like the CIA or the heroes, the FBI, famously the FBI, you know? Created by J. Edgar Hoover, the most objectionable creature ever to walk this earth, right? Becomes this enlightened vanguard of liberalism and humanism and human rights and Trump is the enemy and we let's march together. I just realized, you know what, you know what American liberals want? They want the CIA to do for America what they did for Iran in the 50s.

Exactly. They want to restore and especially with the royal wedding coming up, they want to restore Queen Elizabeth to the throne of America. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, but that you're joking now, but there are people seriously now. There's a movement going on. There's like, aren't we better off? Why didn't we have, you know, our independence?

Are we better off getting the royalty? It's just none of it. It's like all of this thing is just absolutely phenomenon. The other one was it's like Western liberals were for decades lecturing us. It's like, why do you Arabs believe in conspiracy theories? Why is everything, everybody's fault, but not yours? And I'm like, I started fear after years of hearing this. I started feeling like, yeah, maybe there's something wrong with me.

Maybe I'm like deeply paranoid. Why am I always playing like blaming imperialist? Maybe they did it for love. Why is like some, you know, why, why am I blaming the American embassy in Beirut? And I'm like, they're lecturing me and I'm like by weakness. Like I started, I have to say, you know, my resilience started to weaken. And then one election doesn't go their way. What's their explanation?

Russia did it. It was a Russian conspiracy. And I'm like, what is it about Western culture that makes people believe in conspiracy theories? It's great monologue, but that's also one reason why you'll never get the coveted spot on SNL. Oh man. Well, SNL man, before tonight, I wasn't sure that

no one people are allowed to do podcasts. I think you're a great blazer. When Riley asked me, do you want to do this podcast? And I'm like, are you sure none white people are allowed to do podcasts? I'm allowed to host one these days. It's mad. It's mad. And I go, I go, I go down Hackney on my way home

and I only get racially abused once or twice. It's completely different worlds. Crazy. Usually it's me doing it. When you're not distracted by the chicken. I know you're calling you Brazella. Hey, Teresa, Teresa, get out of here. This is Hackney.

This is Hackney. We only eat Dona Kebab. I'm going to London. Oh, I'm walking here. See, you find that funny, but that's literally like what fucking like this fucking place is. I mean, no, I mean, I look. Broadway market.

Brief digression. Yeah. They say Hackney is the Brooklyn of London because I fucking hate them and they should all turn themselves inside out and then get flung in a catapult into the sun. All of them who say that I just wanted to be the Brooklyn of London in the sense of being able to say I'm walking here because I just really want to be in a Broadway market.

I didn't see a single broad. That's a classic hit. So before we before we before we close out, I do want to finally talk about Liverpool, a certain football club that is the Socialist football club of all because they've had some there's been some news about Liverpool recently, hasn't there? Yeah. So this is the backdrop to this is like Riley's been trying to organize

this for like months now, you know, and and and every time he's like, what about that day? And I'm like, dude, Liverpool are playing. And and what we recognize is like dual monsters. It's a card. It's a card game. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm genuinely I need the translator. Yeah, but I'm still loving playing the role of the elder statement here.

It's better than the new statement. Statement, statement, statement. We've recorded in Moscow. We had to literally stop the recording about 10 times to explain to my friend, Jenny, what the fuck we were talking about. Oh, God, yeah, that's this guy called Matt Hancock. Yeah. So so the backdrop to this and it's like it's Liverpool is massively popular now, but I hate to sound like a hipster, but I've been supporting them since the early 80s,

you know, this like geeky kid in Civil War, Lebanon, early 80s. And there was like, you couldn't get it on the Internet or anything. The Internet was invented only like later. What was it like? What was like before? What was it like? Jesus Christ, must have been bored all the time. Yeah, I mean, you can imagine just following football by going to the shop every week to buy a magazine that was printed in like black and white that told you how Liverpool did the week

before. And occasionally you get like a game recording on VHS about a month later. I mean, it's I heard that the only way you could tweet back then was to fly a kite with an explosive into the sky. Now we had this like little magical yellow squares that they were a bit sticky. Are you familiar with these things? You used to write a message on them and pass it in class. That's actually how I honed my tweeting skills. Passing notes around in class.

And basically like people asked me, so we've been supporting Liverpool since the early 80s and two reasons, right? Liverpool was the biggest club in the world in the early 80s. And the second reason is more important. Liverpool was at the forefront of kind of opposition to touchers policies in the 80s. And it's always, I mean, it's this kind of paradox about Liverpool is a city built on slavery, but as well that has like a kind of amazing leftist working class culture to it. And you go to Anfield, the Liverpool Stadium today, and it's actually embedded right in

the heart of the working class area. But Liverpool was the kind of at the forefront of, you know, the left tendency and all that kind of thing, the opposition to touchers policies. And they were properly read. They don't just wear red like those fuckers in Manchester. They're actually properly read. And I think it's kind of for me as a leftist who's completely materialist. It's a sign of the end of times and coming of the apocalypse that Liverpool are going

to win the Champions League again this year. Oh, excellent. Um, good. So on on that, do you think maybe we can get get Nate to play the you'll never walk alone as our outro? Oh, my God, but you got to leave my voice over like my sobbing. We the nicest tech. But before before we before we trigger the song, then I might take this opportunity

to thank everyone for listening. I might want to take this opportunity to say who's saying in Milo you're here all the time. But to Carl, thank you. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you guys. Despite despite all the nonsense with the sacrifice and racial abuse, if we say. Every time I come, every time I come down here, it's just something I'm used to. I see Dave every all the weeks like, Hey, what's up, Davis?

Like, what's up? You're packy bastard. It's fine. And finally, to thank Nate, our producer who is at in these deserts on Twitter, please follow him and listen to his podcast, How Live a Way to Die. He's a troupe. So you have to salute every time you have to every time you listen to his podcast, you have to salute.

It's for law. Um, and also the whole duration to thank to thank Jinsang for our well, for the beginning theme song of this episode. Here we go. You can find it on Spotify and to thank Liverpool and Carl for the end theme of this episode. You'll never walk alone. Thanks. Thank you.

Goodbye. Be afraid of the There's a golden sky and the sweet All up. Oh man. Whoa guy. Oh. Whoa guy.

Whoa guy. With hope in your heart. And you'll never walk alone. You'll never walk alone. Whoa guy. Whoa guy. With hope in your heart. And you'll never walk alone.

You'll never walk alone. You'll never walk alone. You'll never walk alone. You'll never walk alone.