TRASHFUTURE - Trashfuture vs. The 8th Amendment

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

This is a slightly more condensed episode in which the TF crew discusses an idiotic Sunday Times piece about 'hipster fascists,' but more importantly it's an episode centred on the campaign in Ireland to repeal the 8th Amendment. Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Hussein (@HKesvani) speak with journalist Sirin Kale (@thedalstonyears) about Irish abortion laws, the impending referendum, and whether or not the uniforms of the royal wedding were inspired by Steven Seagal. If you're in Ireland and can vote, make sure to do so — unless you're going to vote incorrectly, in which case you should bin yourself immediately. Please remember that, in these trying and dark times, you can always commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from Lil' Comrade (http://www.lilcomrade.com/). Please help us support a fellow socialist's small business! We'll pause for a minute as a thousand buttery dads emerge to say, 'Ah, but aren't you participating in capitalism by exchanging goods for currency?' Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this from a British politics exclave in sunny Brooklyn, New York, where everyone is in fact walkin' here.

Do you know that Nigel Farage is currently doing as a member of European Parliament to Facebook? What I do to my bank when I run out of money, he is saying that there surely has been some meddling, because none of his videos have any views or shares. Why is this? There must be skull-duggery at foot. So he actually said to Zuckerberg that he was the most extremely online person in Parliament. Therefore, he should be just as pleased to meet him as he is to meet Zuck. And Mark Zuckerberg, who famously has two expressions, one which is just existential dread, and one is existential dread, but he's the one who's caused it.

So the expression that he made was sort of like in between both. If you can caricature what a blank expression was, that was Zuck's face. So it's in between blank and blank was his response to Nigel Farage yelling that he's been like blocked, that he's been soft-blocked. I mean, it's just like in Windows, you have the blue screen of death. It's like the blue screen of death if it was a pasty wife. It's like, no, Mr Farage, I'm afraid I don't know why your grandchildren don't reply to your messages. I feel like all of these people that get really worked up about this shit though, did you see that Tommy Robinson's suing Twitter as well?

He blocked me ages ago. Did he? Yeah, he blocked me ages ago for reasons that I have no idea about. Yeah, so he's suing Twitter because they took down his page. Apparently, he's also suing the media, but he hasn't specified what part of the media, just the ill-defined media. I think he's very angry that he's not being given the attention. Yeah, he's angry he's not being given the attention he deserves. He's angry he hasn't been like invited onto trash future.

I like the idea of, again, if you take a relatively strict definition of the word media, it's just the plural of medium. So it means just he's just suing the concept of something being via another thing. Oh my God, he's suing Derek Acoura. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know who his lawyers are, but they must be making a lot of money. No, I can't know if Tommy Robinson, the only lawyer he could afford, is lying a lot. Oh, I'm sure I don't use the word hero lightly, Mr. Robinson,

but you are the greatest hero in British history. I mean, that sounds like a pretty legit lawyer for one of these guys that represents like right wing chuds. Well, it's because they never they never have any money, so they can only get the lawyer that was like, you know, kicked out of kicked out of law school for, you know, drawing up like rearranging all of the law textbooks into his swastika like they can never get a lawyer who actually finished law school like they they're always variously disgraced. You know, it's just like Michael Cohen, right? Like, you know, Michael Cohen, like famously sent a try to send

a threatening letter to the onion believably be like a Steven Seagal book, the law of the swastika. Well, it's like Michael Cohen tried to send a cease and desist letter to the onion about some of their Donald Trump coverage in 2013. Did you see at the road just like on Steven Seagal news? Because like it's an important feature of the show. But how the Royal Reading like all the all the kids were dressed in Steven Seagal outfits. What an A frame leather jacket in an office chair. No, you know, like his weird Milo, you know more about this like what's

his weird like Asian his weird like Asian get ups with like the Chinese the Chinese buttons and yeah, yeah, it looked it looked very Steven Seagal ass. It was the first thing I thought of and I didn't know like I don't know what that says about me or like how long I've been on this. George, you see Steven Seagal. I mean, I was just excited that to see the dramatic kidnapping of Meghan Markle followed by Prince Harry putting on shooting glasses and being like it's time to get invincible. Yeah, it's time for Prince George to protect Moldova from the Albanians. Welcome back again to this edition of trash future the podcast about how if we do not

implement fully automated luxury gay space communism the fit you ah shit I fucked it up again. I think it's like simplify simply. I will not fuck it. I have done the same intro for a year. I've gotten it right twice the last two times we've recorded. We will not dumb down. I will not change the intro. The intro is a small podcast about come. I might get tongue surgery. I will not change the intro. I am I'm joined today by the usual cast and crew sitting on my left and back in Russia in the ball. Hell yeah, it's me, Milo Edwards. I am currently in St Petersburg at possibly the most terrible comedy festival ever devised by man's perverse inhumanity to man. You can find me on Twitter

at Milo underscore Edwards. If you want to read my bad jokes. It's the same because money I'm back. I haven't been on. I wasn't on for the last show. You weren't you weren't on for wonk future danger wonk danger wonk. But I am back now. I had to explain to one of the guys I work with what trash future was today and you could see in real time how they just became more and more confused the more you try to explain it. Follow me on Twitter. You know the you know the handle the ads. Yeah, send send send me stuff. I need material. And sitting in with us today.

Hi. Sitting in with us today is Shirin Kale. You can follow her at the Dahlsten years on Twitter. And she is variously journalized across many different outlets and recently has been writing about the repeal the Eighth Amendment movement in Ireland. Yeah. Hi. This is me. I write a lot of content for the Internet and I also write a lot about Irish reproductive rights. I'm not Irish. I should probably emphasize that. But I have been reporting and editing and talking to a lot of people on this issue for a really long time and the referendum has been held this Friday and frankly I'm shitting my pants to be honest with you.

I'm really nervous. But I hope it will go the way we want, which is which is you have the right to shit your pants. We'll get into that in a moment. This is going to be a bit of a bit of a quick hit of an episode because I have to I have I have a dinner to go to. But we need we wanted to get this out. We want we're going to get to that very shortly. But before we do I wanted to contend with an article that has traveled from I think 2014 to my inbox from the Times of London. I can only not the New York Times that the Us Times. I can only imagine that there was just some incredible city city. There was some incredible lag between it being published and me reading it because once again we are talking about the dapper fascists or as I've started calling them

the Nilfs, the Nazis I'd like to fuck. I don't think they're that fuckable though. They're just Nazis that don't dress like complete shit. You know what I mean? I'm looking at the picture of them right now. They're just quite normal. I don't think there's anything particularly hipster about them. I mean, which one is the most good looking? I would say okay wait from a sex podcaster perspective. Yeah, okay. Now I do actually do a sex podcast. I'd say the most good looking one is maybe like second from rights, but only because he's the tallest. Yeah. So he's the most genetically superior, of course. Yeah, which I guess he would get on board with because he's a Nazi. He would probably have those ideas about

racial superiority. Yeah, I'd go for him if I had to deal with one of those Nazis I'd deal with him. So the title of this article is the hipster fascist who anti-racism campaigners say are breathing life into the new far right. And I think one of the reasons I think this article comes from a different time is that in 2016, I think it was 16, we all met dapper fascist Richard Spencer with his like ill-fitting dad suits and his extraordinarily punched face. And with sort of the whole trope of oh my goodness, these white supremacists aren't wearing like one strapped down overalls and straw hats while chewing on another piece of straw at all. They're not some kind of country bumpkin. They seem like regular people. I'm going to make a complaint about this

as soon as the wallet inspector gets back with my wallet. And of course, I can recover from my injury having fallen off the back of the turnip truck. Those are some American sayings. But the article says a 23 year old city banker leaves a movement of young hipster fascists, et cetera, et cetera, middle class and well-spoken dressed in skinny jeans and new balanced trainers rather than bomber jackets and boots. Members of this group, Generation Identity, I don't know why I did air quotes. This is an audio medium, are accused of using slick branding and coded language to normalize extreme views. Now, again, it's the article sort of does have a bit of window dressing as mainstream journalism often does of, oh yes, look what they're being

accused of. But really, I mean, what they're trying to do is just, you know, so you can be a gape that these guys aren't hicks. Everyone's been ticking off about this article on Twitter because they're saying that humanize as fascists, which is kind of dumb because fascists are actually people. But what I think is kind of interesting about this article is that this, the guy involves actually being fired from his job. So yeah, I find that out today, actually, from someone. So yeah, I guess maybe if you're a fascist, you shouldn't give a really self congratulatory interview about how you managed to combine fascism with having a really full-time demanding city job because it's a hard knock like yeah, well, it's the being racist and also having it's going to

have to get a hatre on being racist and somehow still holding down job. It's hard work. Yeah, it's it's like a work life balancing, I guess, you know, it's a difficult thing to do. Where do you find the time? It's really hard actually to like use Microsoft Excel when you're looking through the white sheet tall, pointy hat. But I think it's true, right? Like, yes, they are like them or not, they are human, even though they do have to be fought and probably can't be understood into quiescence, you know, it's listening to them doesn't really do much. But at the same time, I think just being shocked that their middle class is basically just obscure is sort of is just obfuscating what fascism

tries to do. You know, it's that it is a middle class movement. It's a movement that protects sort of certain holders of capital. You know, it's a movement that tries to organize the working class around a kind of ethnic identity or a race identity, but it still ultimately is a middle class movement. So it should come to no surprise that sort of well educated or well paid or well or people who come from money or privilege or whatever are going to be fascist because all benefits is them. Yeah. And also, what I feel like kind of dumb about this article as well is also the fact that they kind of missed the point here, which is not like how they dress, but how slick their branding is and the fact that they even have a presence here because

generation identity is originally a European movement. And now that it's come to the UK, that is kind of concerning because although they pretend like they're super chilled, like lovely fascists with great footwear and they order shopping goods and shit, they do actually want like an ethno-nationalist state, which does spread the shit out of me personally. Reconquista specifically. They specifically want to reconquer Europe and you know, really try to create a... He wants to reconquista of Europe and he wants to link up with... A right that will last for a thousand years. He wants to link up with sympathetic individuals within political parties to take out of the shadows some of these ideas about the great

replacement. And it's vital that you get normal, respectable people confronting this publicly and not privately. Dupre, this guy, claimed to disavow racism, but said, everyone's told to believe people are equal, but the whole way people live their lives proves that's not true. It's sort of... I mean, I was looking into... When the story came out on Sunday, I was looking into some of their YouTube stuff. And the YouTube stuff is like, you know, these three hour Google Hangouts where they kind of just like recycling. The thing that I found interesting was that all the arguments that they make, like we've heard before, there's nothing kind of new about them, which made the whole line of, you know, breathing new life into the far

right, like sort of... It was a weird line to take because it was always there. And all you now have is like a new generation of like mid-20s something kids who... Not even kids, like mid-20s like men who are making these sorts of arguments. And the difference is that, you know, rather than kind of wearing tweed jackets, they're wearing slim cut jeans that they've got from Gap, you know, new balance trainers, which, you know, mid... You know, if they were wearing, you know... They were Yeezy's and then I'd listen to them. No, because Yeezy's is the fashion shoe now as well. No, Kanye now is retweeting Adam Curtis videos. Kanye's cool again. So, oh, I age every time I hear about internet stuff. But if he was wearing, you know, like

Nike dunks or something, you know, I'd be like, okay, maybe they've got a point, right? You know, outside, you know, if they were talking about palace drops, yeah, maybe, but, you know, they're not. They're going... They're doing what we all do. They go to Stratford, they look for the stuff on discount, and they wear clothes. There's nothing that remarkable about it. Yeah, let's leave it to the socialists to wear palace. Thank you. Oh, wait, are you netting me because I'm wearing palace? I actually wear quite a bit of palace. I'm just not wearing any today. But your stuff is like legit, right? It's not like from like random, like,

you know, vendors in Hackney market. No, yeah. I didn't queue up for this one personally. Yeah, reselling. Reselling is the way to go. I had a teenager who was trying to resell stuff to me. I'm not sure like how legit he was. Almost certainly. They're the only ones at the time to queue. But he's like, he's like one of my cousin's friends, right? And we don't know each other. He lives like somewhere in Nottingham, and he just like messages me on DMs. He's just like, yo, I've got some stuff. And I was like, what stuff are you talking about? I was like, I heard that you're into like, you know, I had that, you know, you want, you want to pop some, pop some merch. It's like, what, what merch are you talking about? He just like sends me a link to

his like, it's not depop. It's another website that looks like depop. Something like that. It's got like all this stuff. And I'm just like, you're 16 years old. How the fuck are you trying to sell me hoodies for like 200 pounds? Like probably more than all three of us combined. Yeah. Yeah. And this is like, there was, I read articles like all the time, which I like, there's just these teens that are making like a shit ton of money doing that. That's why they're, and the thing is that that's why they don't have that, that economic precarity that's pushing them into fascism. That's why hypebeasts aren't fascist. No, they're Tories. Remember that vice video that was that vice, you must know the vice video

where like, I don't know if Alan like goes outside. Oh, God, yes. The hype beast and that's like, you know, he goes to like Supreme drop. He's like interviewing actually these kids outside of Supreme. And one of them is basically saying how like he's a Tory. Yeah. Well, they're small business owners, aren't they? I don't, I don't doubt that they're all secretly Tories. To be fair, anytime, anytime I sort of dress like more of a hype beast, I am sort of keenly aware that I'm dressing like a 16 year old from capture. Yeah. It's actually fundamentally tragic. I have to say, like I put this T-shirt on this morning and I know that I'm a tragedy, but it's just like nothing else is clean and it's David Cameron.

Definitely at least one item of Supreme clothing. You know, initially, you initially feel very shameful about wearing clothes from M&S, but eventually just grows on you. And then you put on a pair of new balances and you whiten Europe. I mean, the thing is, I personally am now just having a great deal of fun imagining a hype beast fascist. I feel like it's the logical next step. I could see the Sunday Times article, maybe I'll pitch it myself. I mean, it's not entirely, it's not entirely unfeasible. Like, you know, and you must know about this as well, but like, you know, in these kind of, you know, various like a strain of like

social conservatism that does exist in like these strains of like, you know, streetwear, hip hop culture, at least in the US anyway, like, you know, so like there's a podcast called No Jumper, where they've got a lot of people who kind of very openly say that they're against, like, you know, but they're against like social justice and they don't think that like feminism, you know, they cause feminism causes damage and stuff. And these are guys who like, you know, they're wearing, they're wearing like brands that I don't even like, I don't even know about, but are like huge in LA and everything and they're huge on the hip hop scene. And, you know, you know, that strain, that strain does exist and it does make sense that it would extend that far.

I think the question, this is like, obviously a ridiculous article, because it's really just like a middle-aged journalist who's just like, oh, new balances, they must be like the hip thing that all the young, all the youngsters are wearing. You know, so it's comedic in that sense. And I remember like, all the kind of right wing YouTube personalities, who are always just like conservatism is a new counterculture and like youth cultures encompassed by all that. But they're also like these middle-aged men that have no idea like what this is about. So really what you need is like the right sort of spokesperson, the one who like knows about, you know, fashion, who knows about like, you know, streetwear drops and stuff, but also is very well versed in race science.

Do you read that spectator article about cocaine? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's so fucking funny. It reminds me of this piece. It was, it's so funny that like the spectator article about cocaine. It reminds me of this piece because it's clearly written by an old person that has no handle on youth culture. See, I reckon if you want to make like a load of money, right, you basically just need to find that intersection between conservative, like conservative, like bullshit conservative takes and slight knowledge of like supreme and palace. And you can get yourself like a spectator column just like that. Also with an ability to clearly fictionalize the opening paragraphs of articles, because...

Oh yeah, you can make up whatever encounter you want. Absolutely. Who goes to Shoreditch to buy cocaine? Exactly. And there's a scene like that like the queue out of the club was winding. People looked twitchy and sniffing their noses. It's like... That did not happen. Yeah, you have never ventured east of, I'm going to guess, Notting Hill. Yeah, 100%. He like just made up that whole thing. Yeah. Oh, of course. But who who reads the spectator, other than everyone who writes the spectator would really be able to tell?

Well, look, you know, we're still waiting for our garden party tickets. So Fraser Nelson, if you're listening to this... Fraser Nelson, if you're listening, please come on. Anyway, look, the point is this article is stupid because it seems like we've been making this point for the last several years and young people who aren't dressed in actual SS uniforms or like they're the extras in the movie Deliverance are still finding fascism, which suggests to me that listening to them and giving them soft focus profiles and mainstream media outlets hasn't really fixed the problem. So maybe we should look at something else.

So skinny jeans are not slim cut jeans. Yeah, different. None of the two different things. They're wearing skinny jeans. That's true. That's an important distinction. It is very important. Yeah. Nope. That's... I want to say the young fascists on Bake Off making fascist cakes. So that it's just like Gamergate, ethics in fashion journalism.

I feel like some members of the royal family look more fascist than those actual fascists. A lot of them, yeah. The page boys. I thought that was really flashy, those outfits. The Steven Seagal ones. Yeah. I thought they were extremely fascist. Oh, yeah. That was my first thought. Oh, yeah. They were like, they were very, you know, if and when this country does descend

to some form of like neo fascism, those will be the uniforms of the good boys. Moving on to the, I guess you could say the meat of the program now that we've engaged with our stupid article of the day. There are just so many. There's so many stupid articles in very little time. Didn't even get to do the Grimes becoming an anti-union reactionary, but I'm sure you've all heard about that. We're now going to move on to across the Irish Sea.

So I'm going to say, Shirin, what is your relationship to the whole abortion debate of cross the Irish Sea? Yeah. So what I would say is, me personally, obviously I'm not Irish. I'm a journalist. I specialize in reporting on women's rights. And I've been reporting on Irish abortion laws for the best part of the last three years. In the course of that time, I have interviewed and spoken to loads of activists from both sides of the, both sides of the debate, actually. And what I would say is that this week is pretty much the biggest week for Irish women

in the last two decades, something like that. So if you don't know about what's going on this week, what you probably should know is that on Friday, Ireland will vote to, on whether or not it wants to repeal the Eighth Amendment. So the Eighth Amendment is the amendment to the Constitution, which specifically forbids abortion in basically all circumstances. You can have an abortion if there's a direct threat to the mother's life, but as the case of Savita Halapanava in, I think,

it was a couple of years ago, I can't tell you exactly, maybe 2012 showed, even in her case, she died as a result of not being able to access abortion. So what was her case? So Savita's case was really horrible. So Savita was admitted to hospital with complications from her pregnancy. She had sepsis and she requested an abortion, but the doctors were unable to perform one because the Eighth Amendment forbids abortion in all circumstances, apart from when there's a direct threat to the mother's life.

At that point, there was not a direct threat to her life, but there subsequently became a direct threat to her life because sepsis set in, and by the time they were legally able to have the justification to perform the abortion, it was too late, so she died. And this is happening in a first world industrialised nation, so it's just really apparent. So yeah, so what's happening on Friday is that Ireland is in a me-voting on whether or not to repeal this Eighth Amendment,

and if they vote yes, they want to repeal it, then the Irish parliament will look at voting on legislation, which would allow abortion on demand for up to 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, and what would happen would be that you would have to have two doctors sign off that you can have the abortion because there's a threat to your physical health or mental health, and that would be up to the point of viability, which is normally about 24 weeks. So that's basically what the law is and what the referendum's on, and it's kind of a really big deal because Ireland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws

in the entire world. A lot of people don't realise that you can't get an abortion in Ireland, and as a result, Irish women have to fly to the UK for treatment to have abortions. That's not illegal, they are allowed to do that, but they have to pay for it themselves, which is obviously really fucked up because it intentions social inequality. There was a referendum on whether or not women should be able to travel in the 90s, and no one opposed that at the time, as I know,

which is kind of fucked up really when you think about it because you think that if anti-choices would want to save as many lives as possible, then they would also want to prevent women from leaving the country for abortions, but they seem to have the view that it's okay as long as it's not happening under their own roof. It's the pope, right? The pope doesn't, the one pope at one point really, really didn't want it. This pope seems to be sort of coming at us with curveballs every day. Who knows what he's going to do next?

He's the wacky pope. The pope says Coke Zero is better, deal with it. So this 8th Amendment has been around for a while and has been sort of just preventing abortions from happening in Ireland, but it hasn't prevented women from leaving to get abortions, even though, of course, they then have to pay for it. So I think we know some of the common stories you get from people who are sort of anti-choice is they'll say, oh, well, we're actually pro-life, and so I see this happening in America quite a bit,

where they'll say, oh, if you say you're against genocide or whatever, but you support Planned Parenthood, which kills over millions of African American women a year. Yes. So, okay, anti-choices, I prefer not to call them pro-lifers, because in my opinion, I feel like that kind of pro-birth, they don't really give a fuck what happens to you once you actually have the child. They have this whole view and it's of equivalence. So under the Irish Constitution at the moment, a woman's life and a fetus's life are equal, which is actually a real head fuck when you think about that, like actually when you think about it. The anti-choice movement would say that they want to love both. That's what they're saying,

or their messaging, that they love both the fetus and they love the mother. But I think if you, I really don't feel like there's any way of looking at this as anything other than a human rights issue. And I feel like the people who are anti-choice, really, what it comes down to is just controlling women and controlling their bodies. So for me, that's for me personally, because I think if you sincerely cared about life, you'd care about the lives of those women who have been forced to carry pregnancies that they don't want, you'd care about what will happen to those children when those babies are born, that those mothers never wanted to start with. And you'd also look at it in terms of like a

humane, compassionate view as to why it is that women shouldn't be able to force, be forced to carry children that they don't want, because I don't think that's a humane or caring or christian thing to do. And actually, can I talk a little bit about the women that I spoke into? Okay, so this is another thing as well. People don't really realise quite how deep abortion goes. Like when we were chatting beforehand, you guys were talking to me about how you feel like, you know, this is a women's issue, but I feel like it's really important to emphasise that it's not a women's issue. This is an issue that affects everyone. It's a human rights issue. And the reason it's so important that people recognise that is because almost everyone will

actually come into contact with abortion at some point in their lives, like you have sisters or family members or friends. And what Ireland's laws do at the moment is just entrench inequality. So if you can have an abortion, it's normally because you're wealthy, you're able to travel, you're not in an abusive relationship, you don't have childcare commitments, it means you can leave your home and grow a board and get it done. And so if you care about social justice, like if you're the sort of guy who posts Black Lives Matter stuff online, or you read The Guardian, or you don't protest marches, but you think that abortion is a women's issue and you don't want to get involved in it, that's a real problem. That's a problem, right? Because actually,

accessing abortion is a fundamental human right for women. And so if you care about equality, you care about women's rights and you should care about abortion. That's my two cents on this. And in terms of what's happening next week, sorry, in terms of what's happening on Friday, so the pro-choice side, I think we're on like 56% likely to get the Eighth Amendment repealed, but tons of shitty stuff has happened in the last couple of years when it comes to giving people the right to vote on referendums and stuff, right? Like, I think we all remember about it. Yeah, so you never know what's gonna happen. A lot of people don't want to say that they're pro-life because they're kind of embarrassed about it. And there's also some

incidental polling, which will suggest that pro-choice men might stay out of the vote because they think it's a women's issue, which means that, again, that lead could narrow further. So, yeah. And I'm thinking like on an extension point about that, even if the vote does, even if we get a yes vote on Friday, as you've kind of mentioned at the beginning, like there's still a lot of work to do, right? Like this doesn't kind of resolve the problem even at an institutional level. There's still restrictions when it comes to women getting abortions. And you're completely right in saying that like men do have a really important role to play in this. So what can people do and what specifically can guys do?

Even if we get a yes vote on Friday in terms of like advancing, you know, this very fundamental human right? Yeah, so I think it's really important to never be complacent about shit. Like in the UK, we have pretty progressive abortion laws. We have abortion pretty much on demand up until 24 weeks. And that's a really good thing. But I think what's really important is just to not view issues, not just like abortion, but women's rights issues. Don't view them as something that is for women to discuss and fight for and preserve and protect. I think that's kind of the problem that I've always encountered, even in my work as a journalist, especially specializing in women's rights. So men are always like, yeah, this is so great,

I really support this. But it's always from this perspective of like not wanting to get involved in it, not wanting to go on protest marches, not wanting to write to MPs. I think if you care about equality, then you should care about feminism. And if you care about feminism, then you should actively support it. It's the same as any other sort of social injustice. That's basically the problem with the liberal or like identitarian approach to these things, right? It's like, stay in your lane, do your thing. And men don't come into our space and talk about our thing because this is our thing. Because ultimately, the liberal identitarian point of view is not about promoting solidarity. It's about policing what you do and keeping people in their

box. It's about saying, oh, if a man goes on a march to extend abortion rights, then actually what he's doing is coming into women's space and taking over for them and taking their voices. Because I think liberal see politics as kind of a game of dungeons and dragons. And it's all just kind of fun. And it's like, hey, let the wizard cast the spells fighter. When it's not, it's just about securing an outcome for people as opposed to playing particular roles in particular ways. I mean, all of these people, I think that's why I think like liberals are fundamentally nerds who just want more homework and who want to be able to get the right answers and the multiple choice questions. Yeah, I totally agree. And I actually really don't like this whole identitarian space

that we're moving towards. I really hate it, especially if you're a journalist, I don't think you need to be from a community or from a culture to be able to talk about it at the point of journalism is to speak to people and find out facts and then report those facts. And yeah, I think it's so important. I think we're literally never going to get shit if people stay in their own lanes and never get involved in movements that aren't directly beneficial to them. Yeah, well, it's because the and I want to move on to this a little bit. The no campaigner believes everything is his lane. Yes, I have been on many anti-choice marches and been to many anti-choice events in my capacity as a reporter, not because I support that movement.

Only once because you supported the movement. Just by accident. It was it was statistical, you know, if you go to 20 events, statistically, you're going to support one of them. That's logic. That's a 5% confidence interval right there. Let me tell you that on the anti-choice events that I've been to, there are so many guys there and I don't want to be horrible about them, but they don't please do. They don't look like they're having a lot of sex with females. I have to say that and they're not hipster either. And so that's where they went wrong. We need to get some new balances. Then they'd be fucking getting it in.

I eventually managed to get a girl pregnant. She's not getting out of it by having an abortion. We can't take that chance. I can't wait to hear what that was. Like these guys don't have a problem with talking about abortion and by talking about abortion, I mean making sure that women can't access abortion. And it's because it's awesome fucking weird thought experiment for them. Like they just like to sit and just philosophize about the equality of lives unborn and born. I wonder if you can call what they do philosophizing. Just because they give themselves like shit with Mesopotamian names and go on free hour live streams. Does that really make them philosophers?

All of these people are just the same fucking jerkwads who are getting together and deciding that there's a sexual marketplace that's been deregulated and there are a bunch of fucking hip socialist podcasters who are also hypebeasts who are just getting all the trim. And they're got getting any. And now they're going to take some kind of revenge. And for them, it's the ballot box. To what extent is this just like a sort of movement of resentful men trying to reassert control over women? I keep coming back to this really incredible piece that I read in the London Review of Books by Sally Rooney. You probably should have had on this podcast instead of me. Have I asked her? She's been sick twice. But she does say she did

want to come on scene. Okay. Cool. Preview. Preview. Preview. Preview. Preview. Preview. Preview. Preview. Nigel Fingers Conference. Definitely go on. We invited women. They weren't available. She made a really fucking good point on this specific thing, which is that, okay, so this is her analogy. I really want to emphasize it. It's her analogy. And she was talking about how under Irish law, in order to take organs out of a dead body, that person needs to have signed an organ donor card just in order for you to cut open that cold dead body and take out like pancreas or something. But a woman has no right to choose what goes on in her living, warm, breathing body. So technically under Irish law, a woman has less rights than a

dead body. So when you really look at those cold hard facts, it's hard to see Ireland's abortion laws as anything other than just the way to control women. However, I would say that I really don't think that the people who are anti-choice actually see it like that. I don't think that they have the self-awareness to actually look at the history of Christianity and the history of religious oppression of women and all the different ways in which women's bodies are weaponized against them in order to control them. I do actually genuinely think that they sincerely believe that it is taking a life. And that's what I'd say. Yeah. I mean, this is because I've worked in religious spaces and I come from a religious

community where it is anti-choice. And that's not going to change. There's no compromise on that position. So for people who are pro-choice, it takes effort to figure out, okay, we want to change minds. Part of getting progress is by changing minds. And there's this big question about how much power do you actually have to hold in order to do that? And also, can you even do it? It's one of those really sacred things that people hold. And it's sort of weird in a way, because their argument, again, as you said, is they prioritize life. So they say that if anyone's life is in danger when it needn't be, then their life is prioritized over everything else. But do they really prioritize life, though? Because their

prioritization of the mother's life being in danger, which would often just result in the fetus being dead too, they seem to take a very cavalier attitude to what that can be. A lot of this stuff comes afterwards. As Sharon said, it's like, they don't give a fuck about what happens afterwards. So even so, there's Elizabeth Frunig, for example, is an interesting aspect that we should invite on at some point. Welcome to the trash future episode planning cast. And, you know, she is, you know, in our definition of this show, she is anti-choice, but she kind of wants to see whether there's a progressive position, some sort of progressive

position you can take on that. And a lot of that comes with, okay, well, the big problems here are like, what happens when a mother gives birth to a child where she didn't want it, or she didn't expect it. And for the most of the time, but she's just like left on her own and kind of left of her own devices. There's very few charities that are helping her out. And those charities that were campaigning so hard for the baby to be born, there's now nowhere to be found. And I feel like if you're looking at progress and you're looking at, well, what are like, where are there intersections where you can bring people into at least kind of a more reasonable view when it comes to this, that's where your intersection is. And maybe there needs to be

more conversation around those sorts of people. I don't know, like, it's really tricky. I think it's all about actually moving away from the whole dehumanizing thought argument, thought logic argument thing, and actually just connecting people who've experienced it. Because I think it's very, very difficult to listen to someone like Claire, Colin Del Sol, who's edited, I edited a piece from this week, who had to carry a dead fetus the term once, once you've actually listened to someone tell you what that's like. It's incredibly hard to retreat from that, that reality, that like real lived experience. And I think that, you know, you can also, I have family members who are religious, they're Muslims, and they support abortion because they believe that

a woman should still be able to choose, although they would not, because that's what it's about, right choice, it's about choosing what you want. Like, you can be pro-choice and then abortion is murder. Like, that's totally okay. It just means that it's your, it's your view on abortion, someone else can have the choice to do it or not, you know, like what's right for you is not right for another person. A lot of people recognize and accept that. And my final thing on this is that I've always been really, like, kind of annoyed by the fact that all these pro-lifers or anti-choices or whatever the fuck you want to call them, they never seem to do the shit about miscarriages, right? So like one third of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Those are human lives too,

and they never ever donate any money. They make them into weird posters. Do they? Yeah. I've seen like lots of very weird miscarriage, like, so okay, so I'm going to talk about another weird kind of sub-cultural look at Instagram. But like there's this weird kind of like anti-choice, and you, you must have seen it as well, like the anti-choice stuff on Instagram, which is often done by like weird kind of evangelical zealots based in the US. And they refer to miscarriages as like, you know, young angels and stuff like that. And like the art they make is really, is really bizarre. It's what it reminds me of, like, one of my favorite SoundCloud rappers. They kind of fashion themselves as like, you know, there's like business motivation people

that make their own motivational posters, and it's really badly photoshopped. Oh, so it's, it's like a, it's like a sort of creepy millenarian Jay Shetty. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's like probably the best way of putting it. They're really, they're really, really bizarre. And like they, you can see when, even like, when you look at like American anti, you know, anti-abortion, like, demonstrations and stuff, and they're holding up those posters, a lot of those pictures will be repurposed. So it's really bizarre. Like I saw one picture of something that was supposed to be like a terminated thesis on a poster in out, you know, one of the West Barrett, Westboro Baptist Church ones. And then you see if you

had that exact image on an Instagram page, which is, oh, it's a miscarriage and it's a little angel that's gone to heaven. It's just like, it's absolutely bizarre. So they care about it in a very cynical sense, which I guess it's just like feeding into. So I actually, I think that's unfortunately that's actually all we've got time for on this quickfire, quickshot episode of Trash Future. We, there's a lot left to cover on sort of discussing pro-choice advocacy. There's a lot of US foreign policy ground to cover. There is even, there is even like the sort of rumblings of trying to roll back existing rights to cover. But I think today it was very important that we focused on Ireland and that we say to everyone who listens to us, who's in Ireland or who knows

people in Ireland, get them the fuck out to vote, especially if they're a fucking man. Go vote, man. Vote. Vote right too. Don't fucking vote wrong. If you're going to vote no, then we know where this has gone before. If you're going to vote no, then march into the sea and vote there. If you're going to vote yes, then go vote and tell all your friends to vote. And if you meet any man who says that he doesn't think it's his place to vote because he's a good liberal, he doesn't want to impinge on women's issues, flick him in the nuts and then tell him to vote. But the Trash Future podcast is going to pay to have, we spent 350 million pounds a week on living fetuses on the side of a bus and drive it around Ireland. So that should hopefully do the

trick. Sheeran, any final thoughts? No, I'm good. This is going out before the referendum, right? Oh yeah, you should definitely vote right. Where can we find your work and where can we find all the stuff you've been publishing? Just follow me on Twitter, it's at the Dawson years. I'm often to be found there tweeting away. As are we all because I'm pretty sure at some point I pissed off an old witch who cursed me forever, who said all of your thoughts shall be posted. I have a private thought never again, my sweetie. Anyway, are we out? Yeah, we're out.