TRASHFUTURE - Welcome to the New Flesh
Episode Date: July 9, 2024As Labour takes a landslide victory on fewer votes than they received in 2019, we reflect on the concepts and articles that are time travelling here from 1997 and how the right is going to respond and... rebuild. Also, we talk about universities, the state, and private capital combining to surveil students protesting for Gaza… which we can only assume will intensify! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture NEW MERCH AVAILABLE! We’ve re-issued our ‘What If Your Robot Was Just a Guy?’ shirt with artwork by Rory Blank, and we have an all-new Britianology shirt entitled ‘The Falkland Islands: It’s All We’ve Got Left’ with artwork by Eleanor Osada. They’re both available to pre-order here! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/store MILO ALERT Milo’s special ‘Voicemail’ is premiering on YouTube on July 10th - check it out here: https://youtu.be/x4oTP3M6ppo EDINBURGH LIVE SHOW ALERT We're going to be live at Monkey Barrel comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 14 (NOW SOLD OUT) Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)
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Hello Trashfuture listeners.
Just a quick heads up,
we have new merch available in our store.
We have re-released the Rory Blank design
for What If Your Robot Was Just a Guy.
We also have a brand new Britnology shirt entitled
The Falkland Islands, It's All We've Got Left,
with artwork designed by Eleanor Asada.
Both shirts are available at the link in the description,
trashfuture.co.uk slash store.
Thanks again, have a good one. We now go live to a broadcast of Keir Starmer's first speech as Prime Minister.
White boy summer was created to be fun, playful, and a celebration of fly white boys who love
beautiful queens of every race.
Anything else that has been twisted into to support any kind of hate or bigotry against
any group of people is deplorable and I condemn it.
You'd never say this.
White boy summer is for white English people only.
Reasonable concerns about the extent to which white boy summer is changing.
I know it's called white boy summer.
Welcome everybody to the first episode of TF in the new Emceerium of Man.
Mmm, very good.
Year zero, day five.
For verisimilitude, I shouldn't be on this segment.
Yeah.
How are we all feeling?
How are we doing under the kind of the new regime?
You know, the Labour Party has been regime-pilled once again.
Yeah.
I'll tell you, I wouldn't say it's harshing my white boy summer, but it's...
I'm being forced to have a white boy summer against my will.
Oh God.
We're obviously going to be talking about that, but Hussein, how have you spent your
first five days in the Empyrean of Man?
How have you enjoyed white boy summer?
Have you been allowed in?
Well, yeah, no, I haven't.
So I've just sort of been like watching in the little window.
I've been sitting on my own cuck chair watching everyone else have a white boy summer. Although it is, you know, if I'm, if I'm correct and don't at
me if I'm wrong, it has been a very damp, very somewhat cold, surprisingly cold period.
All of which to say it is the summer of Kier. I don't know how the England football team
has done, but my, my prediction has always been that they'll sort of like apathetically
make it to the finals. Yeah. And so is the summer of Keir Starmer.
The funniest thing, the funniest possible thing is Keir Starmer wins the kind of like
stonking, ridiculous majority.
The weather clears up, England somehow like fumbled their way towards winning the Euros.
And we have to read a thousand, thousand think pieces about how everything is good now.
I will be lying dead in a ditch for most of that, ideally.
It's going to be very funny watching him wrestle with the fact that the Tories suggested they
would do an extra bank holiday if we won and being like, no, no, it's white boy summer.
It's not work shirk summer.
Yeah.
A key part of white boy summer is going to work at the office.
You're not working from home and working all five work days.
Because that's what those crazy ass white boys, they love doing extra hours for no pay.
It's true.
For the service of the economy and the British family.
Keir Starmer, I guess you could usher a white boy summer.
No, no.
It's dumb.
Hands on hips.
Why don't you try busting it down work style?
He's the team leader who fires you but sat backwards in the chair.
Efficiencyed up white boy busts it down work style.
It's going to be, oh my God, that's going to live in my head for a while. It's a gift for coming up with these things.
Well, the real white boy summer hobby, I guess, or like thing to do is to learn like
fluid Mandarin, right?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Doesn't get much more white boy summer than that.
Yeah.
Cause then like imagine the restaurant owners you'll shock.
Remember that children's book.
Oh, the, oh, the, the waitstaff you'll surprise with your fluid Mandarin.
I know.
I think the, uh, sorry, one more white boy summer
thing, which is that, uh, for, sorry, on our agenda for white boy summer, I have one more
problem with not having Milo on is that without him in the back of the class to like diverse
us from the thing, we all divert from the thing. We don't like to admit it, but we like
to be diverted from the thing that I'm like, Oh, come on back on track. But now, you know, that's I think with no, with no inmates in the asylum, we have checked ourselves in.
I was going to say it's that, it's that we're drinking lean, but it's lean six sigma actually.
Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. That's, that's enough of that. Settle down. Yeah.
Okay. All right. Come on. There's always one person in the class that always over exit, always over does it ruins the fun for everyone else.
Yeah. Substitute teacher genuinely upset instead of like playfully upset.
Before we talk about the sort of the beginning of the thousand year white boy summer of Keira
Stormer, I wanted to revisit. Better than the last time somebody tries to do a thousand
year white boy summer. I'll say that.
Oh, God. Oh, my.
I wanted to revisit some old friends before we talk about that,
because, look, there's no way it fits in easily.
But my God, is it satisfying when companies
that we say are going to go out of business go out of business.
Oh, is it another episode of We Were Right Watch?
We've been right about EVs for a while and like, not like electric vehicles are bad.
Certainly not.
It's like fine to have an electric vehicle, but we've seen that the way that they're
delivered by companies that are structured like startups, which suck frequently have
a habit of going bankrupt.
Yes, largely scams is the problem with EVs.
Unless you buy a Chinese one.
Yeah, exactly.
So remember we talked about many, a a couple years ago, Trevor Milton and
the company Nicola to refresh your memory, it was demonstrated as functional and an investor
presentation when it was in fact just rolled down a hill.
I was going to say that's what I remember Nicola for. Yes.
So Fisker was another company we talked about like on that episode is like here are all of the crazy electric car companies, none of which are going to succeed.
Did it not succeed?
Well, it's now officially filed for bankruptcy protection.
It was going to for a while.
In many ways, the Nina power of electric vehicle companies.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Most of her writing was actually just her rolling under her own power down a hill.
In so many ways.
So basically, yes, the vehicles were found to have serious build quality
shortcoming, software issues, a less than responsive central touchscreen.
But now owners have been asking themselves what's going to happen when the car
eventually bricks because no one's updating the software anymore.
Oh, I wouldn't worry about that.
Like, just not including any kind of like
rights repair or any kind of transparency about how these things are like made or
maintained. That's fine because you lock people into your kind of like walled
garden ecosystem and when everything goes wrong, don't worry about it.
You know, you now have a very, very expensive paperweight.
But I tell you what, you can weigh down a fuckload of paper with an EV.
So, well, actually, you'd think you can because the EV is big.
But because of the structure of a car, you can weigh down a maximum of four piles of paper.
Yeah, OK, sure.
It will not be better than that.
One massive sheet of paper, the sort of size and dimensions of a car wheelbase.
Look, I'm not going to tell you how to use your new paper.
You used to have a car. You now have a paperweight. I'm not going to tell you how to use your new paper. You used to have a car. You
now have a paperweight. I'm not going to tell you how to use it. If you want to weigh down
a bunch of billboards that you're saving up outside under a car, then be my guest. You
don't have to do the sensible thing and weigh down four separate stacks of normal non-silly
paper.
Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri under an EV. I never saw that movie. I don't know if that's offensive or not.
I assume that's what it's about.
Probably.
At the same time, Lordstown Motors has also filed for bankruptcy.
Oh, those guys.
Yeah.
We also said they're a scam.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the thing about all this is there's a lot of uses for a dead EV besides paperweight.
For instance, four chairs.
You could use the glove box for stuff, assuming that isn't like locked to an app.
Four chairs don't talk to each other, though.
Yeah. For sort of like facing forward chairs.
Yeah. You know what it is? You could do a drive in at your home.
You could project a video onto your garage door.
How about that? Yeah. You could you could use it.
You could use the trunk as like a kind of a keepsake box, like you used to make in
like woodwork.
Yeah.
Any number of things.
You could practice driving in a really low stakes way.
The radio might still work.
Can I say might?
So you have like a massive radio.
Why wait, there's like the most obvious thing for it, which is you could turn it into like
one of those, what you call it, those like, you know, those types of YouTubers that just
film in their cars?
Oh yeah. They just rent in their cars? Oh yeah!
They just rent in their cars?
You're in a soundstage!
Yeah, absolutely.
You have a content creation studio right there.
Buying a dead electric vehicle instead of like a kind of 10 pound backdrop thing to
film my YouTube videos.
Yeah, and then when you get really big, you can buy like one of, you know like in the
old films where they sort of have the automatic backdrop and you know, to sort of...
Yeah. Yeah, so you can sort of like bring that back, where you're like sitting stationary in the old films where they sort of have the automatic backdrop and you know, to sort of, yeah.
Yeah.
So you can sort of like bring that back where you're like sitting stationary in the car,
but you're pretending you're driving while also sort of like doing a racist rant.
Recording a sort of like racist rant to camera, both hands in frame and off the wheel at all
times and you're like ostensibly going like 90 miles an hour.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Driving 90 miles an hour through the old Oh my God. Driving 90 miles an hour through the Old West.
Wow. How that happened.
Yeah. The other thing of course is, hey, maybe don't let it slowly decompose in
your front lawn because then all those helpful battery chemicals will end up in
your garden.
It's one of the like wrong answers on the theory test for driving.
What should you do when you're like dead EVs, batteries are decaying.
And the answer is of course, throw them in the ocean.
It's a safe and legal thrill.
It's often answer C on the test.
I don't know why, but it is.
The other answer of the driving theory test is, of course,
what should you do when your EV that you bought directly
from a private company run like a startup on huge amounts
of venture capital inevitably goes in a business. Have fun with it.
Weirdly long question. It like goes off the edge of the monitor.
Yeah. It sort of, it covers all the dots on the scan front so you can't even fill it in.
Yeah. And the answer is, as you say, be yourself and have fun.
Yeah.
It's really, really the answer to every question on the theory test. Being fully honest.
This is official driving test advice by the way. Yeah, absolutely. This all comes in because I need to reset my theory test, being fully honest. Yeah. This is official driving test advice, by the way.
Yeah, absolutely.
This all comes in because I need to reset my theory test.
A little bit of a peek behind the curtain there.
The other thing I wanted to cover before we get back to the, um, back to the, the, the
Enchirium is of course, I don't even have notes for this.
It's just something that's been in my head.
Why is Mark Zuckerberg getting Epic?
And why is he getting Epic in such a specifically 2004 way?
Listen, I know I said this about Macron, right?
Who can comprehend the mind of Jupiter?
And then it turned out that anyone can easily comprehend the mind of Jupiter, which is why
things are going very badly for Macron.
But like, I think Mark Zuckerberg really is like a Jupiterian in that way.
I think none of us are like kind of spiritually large enough to comprehend his thinking.
If he decides he wants to become a 2000s epic bacon guy, he has the facilities to do that.
None of us are going to know how he arrived at that conclusion.
Wasn't it the case that, because Milo basically made this point that he's the most normal
weird tech guy.
All of the rest of them have sort of gotten off the rails in very different, bizarre
ways.
Most of them involving trying to sort of start their own version of the Grey Wolves or build
their own sort of mega cities or like develop their own cults for like broadly political
reasons.
Right?
And Zuckerberg just is completely dising...
And it's interesting because like a few years ago, there was that whole thing about like,
well, is he going to like do a presidential run and is he going to, you know, and it sort
of seemed like he was kind of venturing towards that territory and perhaps he did it and was
just like, yeah, vibe's pretty off here, not for me.
Which is so reasonable, to be honest.
He went to like two diners in like Iowa and did the kind of like glad handing everyone,
the photos exist.
He must have realized somewhere, which is like, I'm'm rich I don't have to deal with this shit.
Yeah for real.
He was just like yeah I can use my money to do whatever I want.
Why do I want to deal with this shit and that's why he's now and now he's got a perm and he's
got like big chains and like.
Yeah.
Why Bo Summer?
He's the only one doing it right.
He's the only one doing it right. And he's the only one doing it right.
He passed the test that Rishi Sunak failed, right?
Which is, okay, on a smaller scale, he's still like a billionaire or whatever.
So Rishi Sunak was like, okay, yeah, but what I really want is like the trappings of power
and like motorcade and shit like that.
Okay, yeah.
Miserable.
Miserable, whereas Zuckerberg correctly assessed if I don't do that, I can just record videos
of myself like perfectly hurling a spear through
a watermelon.
Okay.
I've developed my theory a little bit, right?
Which is in the Sunak period, this is like, you know, Sunak's manager, like a techno
manager, right?
But he comes from a world where like accolades and status and like job names and stuff like
all your CV really matters.
And so for him, it's just like, well, no, like, you know, you want to rack up like, well no, like, you know, you want to rack up all those,
you want to, you know, you want to rack up all that stuff.
You know, you want to work for the big bank, you want to have like been a sort of MP,
you wanted to be prime minister, like all these cool things that like people sort of do your
thumbs up on LinkedIn for, right? Not realizing that like no one does that,
like all is only like weird and kind of strange people, but do LinkedIn endorsement.
Are you suggesting that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to get
endorsed as Prime Minister on LinkedIn?
Yeah.
That's my theory.
I believe this intrinsically, on a deep spiritual level.
It's like, I've got like a bunch of friends. I've got like a well, I've got a bunch. I've got like a few friends who are management consultants
who still really believe in like what they do as sort of being valuable.
And like they love fucking posting on LinkedIn.
They love posting their job promotions.
Like they're really into that stuff.
But Zuckerberg has sort of calculated that none of that really matters anymore.
Everything's going to shit.
No one cares if you sort of like have those accolades.
No one cares if you're prime minister.
No one cares if you're like a congressman.
If anything, like people will sort of despise you for it.
But if you're just like a cool guy doing epic shit,
like if you're just like sort of perceived to be a cool guy doing epic shit
and being normal, like not even doing like the Elon thing
of being like a fucking weirdo.
Like you're better off doing that.
And I feel like he's sort of calculated that he may as well have fun
and like not be perceived
as weird guy as like Elon and Andreessen and stuff.
He just, the thing is, right?
Like you're so right.
I think the psychic wound that precipitated all of that
was like Hollywood deciding that this was a man
who needed to be portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg.
He just kind of like took that and was like,
I need to change everything about my being.
And he has done.
So fair play, you know?
I think I've sort of explored this theory a little bit on Twitter.
I think what happened is the PR team that has been making him normal.
Number one is not made him normal, but has made him like palatable to people who aren't
looking too closely.
It was helpful when he tried to kill Elon Musk. I appreciated that.
It was when he took up Salat and then, and then just effortlessly turned a brick wall
into dust with simultaneous punches. No, no, no. It's that it's that what they, I think
with the PR team rehabilitating him has done is they have restarted his experience of the
internet at
1999. And they did that about six years ago.
He's discovering like Maddox now. Yeah. Yes. It's going to get worse. He's a couple of
years off of like, you're the man now dog. Yeah. He's, he's going to discover YTM nds.
He's going to get really into like fave star. We are three years away from Mark Zuckerberg
doing like cop starts breakdancing
line line break jokes.
OMG, Jenny.
He's going to get into Favstar. He's going to be a tweet decker. He's going to start
saying my dude and he's going to stop Coney. And I think that's really exciting.
On that basis, you realize in a mere 20 years time in a bunker, he's going to be doing like
K-Hive bit.
Yeah. Although what other I think maybe actually, what about this?
His experience, we're workshopping this in real time, not a single note on this.
What if he is experiencing the Internet faster?
You think he's on like a kind of interstellar situation?
Yeah, yeah. He's going to pass us and he's going to be doing K-Hive bits like next year.
He's going to be like when Kamala Harris is like halfway into her presidency, he's going to be being
like, Hey, the coconut tree. I know about that. Like he's going to be doing like pieces
to Cameron is he's going to stop like wearing a tuxedo and surfing and like drinking a giant
beer. He's going to have left his like bacon shorts in the cupboard. He's going to have
like past his like, you know, my dude, not a good look phase. He's going to have his like make poverty history bracelet. He's going to have his,
his cancer shirt burned and then he's going to be a K-Hiver and he's going to go on to
something else. Burning your cancer shirt to indicate your new found support for cancer.
Yeah, that's right. Joining the war on cats or on the side of cats. Doing a reverse fundraiser to make people in hospitals worse.
That's the kind of shit he's going to be doing in like 10 years and we're going to get it
like five years after.
I think it's what's going to happen.
Well this is like a like 20, 30 trend of like reverse fundraisers to make things worse.
He's going to be so much of a bigger Mr. Beast than Mr. Beast ever could.
Oh, yeah. He's going to take over an actual country and start a real war like as a social experiment.
Well, maybe Vassi endgame is like he's not viewing Elon.
Elon wants him to Elon wants like Zuckerberg to view him as like his main opponent.
But really like his main opponent is Mr. Beast.
And this all ends with like an epic showdown between both of them.
Yeah, it was called Les Enfants Terribles Project.
Yeah, they're all from Brazil, huh?
No, I just...
I think that we're getting closer and closer to Mark Zuckerberg, as you say, like declaring Hawaii, I guess, to be his own country, calling it out of
heaven. And then we just we just started on the Metal Gear Solid timeline.
It turns out it took it.
We had to like send one of our stranger billionaires back in time to before he
invented the thing that made him weird.
It's not much more contrived than MGS5, to be honest.
The guy who did basically invent Big Shell, Arsenal Gear,
were sending him back to experience time faster than any of us.
And he just happens to be in a kind of uncanny valley
of not old enough to be retro,
but not recent enough to be trendy version of the internet.
I remember when Solidus Snake came out onto the roof of the federal hall wearing the tuxedo
and the epic bacon shorts.
Okay.
We've, we, I have to get us back to...
Yeah, this is the thing.
Once I've introduced Metal Gear Solid, you need to like start like hitting the shot collar
button at some point, because I'm not going to stop talking about it.
I will need to break the glass.
All right, look, I want to talk a little bit about sort of about the politics.
This is obviously like the last episode we're talking about.
We're doing this on election day and I suppose it's worth just like.
It's actually our last politics episode we're ever talking about because like.
Yeah after this I'll be dead and then like Riley you'll be experiencing like white boy
summer and you'll be in the like cock chair.
Yeah. So you won't ever have to hear from us again.
If you're, if you're like annoyed by this, if you're one of the people on Twitter who's
like off trash future, don't worry about it.
Cause it's over now.
Yeah, that's right.
Because they finally fixed it by getting a labor government in what kind of labor government?
Don't worry about it.
We just abolished the podcast having achieved our political aims of, I don't know, a bit
more NHS privatization.
Yeah. So, so much of this shit has appeared. We want to talk about stuff coming through
a time portal from the late nineties.
Well, Peter Maddelson is here.
Yeah. Well, Starmer getting like the support and backing of the sun and like, I'm tired
at this point of being like, oh yeah, well, he lied about this as well. Right. It sucks
to be like, oh yeah, the same thing. We have to say over and over again, well, he lied about this as well. Right. It sucks to be like, oh, yeah, the same thing.
We have to say over and over again, which is he lied.
He lied. He lied. He lied.
He lies constantly.
And most people don't actually like him.
And, you know, to them to say, oh, I have the support of the sun,
which just shows how this is a change labor party back in the service of working people.
Which working people do you mean?
The ones that work for the sun?
Like, what do you mean? The ones that work for the sun? Like, what do you mean? I saw a poll recently that said that Stama has like the same favorability rating, give
or take, as Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn, like, had like, you know, several years of
like every media force in this country trying to convince you he was some kind of mad Romanian
communist.
Whereas Stama has gotten like a relatively easy ride and has still arrived at the kind
of sunlit outlands of 22%.
Yeah.
How do you unearth?
Well, the only conclusion you can draw is that people just don't give a fuck anymore.
Yeah.
I say how unearth rhetorically, but it's like it's the situation in which we now find
ourselves is astonishingly, to
be honest, to me feels like new territory that we have been edging closer towards, which
is after the wave election that brought in the Tories because labor couldn't respond
to the financial crisis.
That's what they got sustained on cheap credit, which is never coming back, by the way, that
is gone.
That is never coming back.
Their stuff will be expensive forever because of climate adaptation.
Alone climate adaptation, let alone increased
conflict proneness in the world system.
But politics kind of is over in the sense of politics as we know it.
We know labor's going to govern that way too, right?
That it suits them for most people.
To be like, I don't give a fuck, nothing I can do can change this.
Therefore, I'm just not going to worry about it and let these bastards get on with it,
which is what they're going to try and do.
It's just at a certain point,
that's going to become unsustainable too.
And what follows that, what follows the post politics,
if you like, the post post politics,
could be really spicy.
And if you want to talk also about things coming through
in a time machine from 1997.
Nigel Farage is here. Yeah.
Guardian must have had this article like in a content management system since Partygate.
Right.
Which is Julian Hartley, the head of NHS providers, wants the government to apply quote, fresh
thinking and imagination to how the health service can access potentially billions of
pounds in private capital to build new facilities by collaborating
with property developers, private healthcare companies, pension funds, drug companies,
universities and local councils.
See, the problem with PFI is that too few like Jackal vulture companies like Carillion
and G4S got to benefit from it.
What if we let GlaxoSmithKline build a wing of a hospital and it like beeps if you try
to go in and you've had the Moderna vaccine. What if we did that?
Yeah, I mean, it's it's not even like PFI, but worse.
It's like PFI again. This is PFI, too.
Like it's the same thing.
Yeah. Like, oh, what if we let private health care companies collaborate with the NHS to
build hospitals? What do you think they're going to do?
It's fine. Don't worry about it.
You know, the thing is, we already have that in Birmingham.
There is a hospital that has a private wing that's got like a kind of back and forth deal with the local NHS trust that is creating literally a two tier system in the same building.
There's already a back and forth thing because like all of like every private hospital in the UK sends patients to the NHS for stuff, including
like all the like, like intensive care stuff.
But look, think about the positive, which is that we'll have a lot more sort of media
commissioned where the sort of concierge is you couldn't afford medical care, so you had
to go to extreme measures to, you know, to sort of get like a routine hospital appointment,
which is something that this country is lacking that type of those types of movies
and TV shows.
So it's so true.
Like, you know, post politics, it's going to suck in a lot of ways, but it's going to
be great for the Omegaverse.
Yeah.
I'm finally creating the conditions for a British Breaking Bad.
I don't approve of it.
Well, you can do a British Breaking Bad because Walter White would get killed by the concrete
roof coming at him in episode one.
Yeah, that's also right. Like how come we're saying, oh, we need fresh thinking
and imagination.
You've been diagnosed with cancer. You need to do something to pay for your
treatment. Roof of hospital collapses, killing Walter White.
It solves the cancer problem. You're not going to die from cancer.
Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg has been doing a fundraiser to give you cancer
because he thinks it's
going to create entrepreneurship.
And to be honest, in the case of Breaking Bad, he would have been right.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Also, it's like, yeah, we need fresh thinking and imagination.
There are hospitals where if you're overweight, you have to stay on the ground floor.
Why do we need fresh thinking and imagination?
We need concrete.
This is the thing.
Things that are concrete, either literally or metaphorically, just don't
figure into the like new changed Labour Party's worldview.
You know,
Obviously we know this is what they're offering. They've made it very clear ever since like
10 minutes after the 2020 leadership election. This is what they're offering and this is
all they're going to offer that the lack of enthusiasm for them is again, it's not surprising, but like that much of the data that gets analyzed is that the party
is less well liked than in any previous year since 2015.
It's just that the Tories are hated more. Once you are in government, that goes away.
That's gone. Like the Tories figured out a way to trade on people not liking new labor for like 10 years.
Like one treasurer, one secretary, Kancelovic-Szeker, excuse me, made one joke about there being no money left.
Then there was the just consent. Everyone decided to believe it.
Also, like the other thing is that in some ways they're a victim of their own success. Because if, as it seems now on election day, the conservative wipeout is so much so that
they cease to be a going concern, and the real opposition on the right is reform, then
you don't even have the Tories to kick around anymore.
Because Nigel Farage can continue to say that the conservatives know, the Conservatives are terrified of him and their yesterday's yesterday's party anyway, you know?
And you know, that's again, what he has the advantage of is like, Hey, we've never been
in government.
You don't know what it's going to be.
We can break.
We're not having to trade against any record at all.
Just promises, just wonder, just whatever you can imagine will do it for everyone forever. And
that's what it's going to be.
And you can always kind of sheepdog labor to the right like this. You can always be
like, interesting. It's been like six months in power and nobody's machine gunning migrant
boats yet. And on the off chance, Kirstama does decide to do that. They'll be like, interesting.
You're not using like mortars on the migrant boats instead.
Britain has a lot of anti-materiel rifles.
Yeah, why doesn't the channel look like the kind of vulgar scene from Enemy at the Gate?
You know? Why not that?
We have lived so long now in a political system where you are voting against the other guy.
Nothing has been promised since, except Brexit. And by the way, if you want to talk about fucking
Brexit, Mr.
Romain, Mr.
like, oh, Mr.
second referendum, Mr.
lose the 2019 election on the basis of insisting that a second referendum
like appear as a manifesto commitment is now saying we will not in my
lifetime go back into the European Union.
We won't even have a youth exchange program
because that looks too much like free movement.
Yeah. The kids can escape and then who else is going to like eventually have to do all
your low paid labor.
Hey, but think about this as much as the economy might be absolutely turbo fucked Steve Bray
job for life.
He's the only one that fucking cares. Everybody else who was like a Corbyn is a secret Brexiteer.
We could never support him.
I'm afraid a tactical vote for a Remainer must never go to labor while Corbyn's in charge
of it.
We have a guy who's now replicating Theresa May's Brexit policy.
Like that's what we have now.
Okay, great.
And the only person you hear from about it is fucking Steve Bray, the guy
who camped out in front of parliament and just harasses everybody going by with like
bewilders tourists with a megaphone. That's the only guy who seems to actually care.
Do you think that he like was briefly granted the gift of prophecy at the time and was like,
he was just trying to like get out of the house and was just kind of like, Oh boy, it
looks like another five years camping out again. Can't can't come home. Sorry. His wife is desperately waiting for him by the
way. Just like not any day now. We'll, we'll, we'll do a second referendum and we'll win.
No, sorry, sorry, darling. It's, they're still Brexited out here. There are lots of people
that actually do care about it. It's like lots lots of people who are- Yeah, I mean I care, it fucking sucks, but like, at the same time, it's just like, I
recognize that this is a kind of path we've been led down, right?
I don't have an opinion either way, except just, hey, that thing you said was the worst
possible thing that could happen to the country, we're all just agreeing now that the guy's
in that it's sort of fine.
Or at least it's fine enough to not cause a bother.
And it just explains so much of why at the end of the day, 55% of voters who were again, pulled by YouGov,
we're doing a lot of YouGov polling in this episode, were chose like, oh yeah, I'm not, I don't care of a shit about Starmor.
1% of people pulled by YouGov said that they had confidence they would fix the cost of living crisis.
1%. 5% of people said they agreed with his policies generally. The rest were
fucking, I hate the Tories, I would vote for like, an inanimate carbon rod to get them
out.
Yeah, it's not great, is it?
Even the people who were like, the hard right stuff we hope he fails to do. They're like,
they don't even think he'll solve the small boats crisis, quote unquote. We want him to
not do that, obviously, but even the people
who are quite right wing don't think he'll do anything.
I would actually like it if if Stammer was doing the kind of like long con that he's
sometimes accused of and is like the second he gets in, which is today, by the way. So
like maybe today as of as of like now he's like announced that like he's now a Maoist
and like the purges begin 10 minutes from now.
We are unilaterally reentering the EU.
The Maoist unilaterally entering the European Union.
It's called a united front, you right deviationist.
And yeah, and everyone's going to have to have pronouns now.
Maybe, you know.
I would like to announce the dissolution of the United K-K-K-Kingdom.
It is a settler colonial project.
Difficult to speak in Maoist standard English when your name has a K and an S in it already.
Oh my god. K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K- It's a star. Yeah. Make a placard for that. Keep it in the back just in case.
I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure it'll be quite a lot of use.
We support our new Maoist star over.
But also rightly. I mean, there's sort of so many things is cropping up in the
final days of the election where everybody's trying to interview interview
everybody. He's just getting a chance to like talk and talk and talk and talk.
This is going to subside, I think, for a while. Right. So just some of the last star
neurology I hope to do for a bit, unless we're like looking at how he's actually governing. But again, it's like he also is showing himself to be someone who will just like he will abandon a
commitment to a piece of settled legislation if you ask him and raise an eyebrow where he's interviewed in the Times and asked a question that J.K.
Rowling asked on Twitter.
She's a biologist.
Biological males with gender recognition certificates have the right to enter women only spaces.
It's a simple yes no question here.
Starmer was emphatic.
No, they don't have that right.
They shouldn't.
That's why I've always said always.
He's always said this, by the way. He's always
said that biological women spaces need to be protected. What does the labor manifesto
say? He's never said any of that, of course. No, no, no. He had nothing to do with that.
Between this and Israel, do not ask this guy a yes or no question on what he thinks someone
has a right to do. So his answer is like legally incoherent, which is funny for a lawyer, it would like
rip up about like 20 years of equality law, and Labour have since sort of quietly clarified
that they don't really want to rewrite the Equality Act definition of sex, which means
that like, I mean ultimately, as extremely depressing and frightening as this is, pre-election
it's all meaningless, like I'm gonna,. I'm not going to say I haven't
been terrified by all of this, but I think I'm more usefully terrified by the stuff that
happens once he's Prime Minister, rather than while he's a candidate.
The problem with this though is that I keep having this thing, whether it's the UK or
the US, where I keep coming up with a smart, well-reasoned rationale for why you shouldn't worry so much and things are going to be fine. And then it gets worse again.
So you know, maybe I'm just coping and seething. I don't know.
I mean, there's also been the something I've been sort of thinking about a bit, not least
because we don't really know at the time of speaking, like we don't really know like what
this new government is going to look like or how sort of active they are going to be.
But like one of the, and we sort of mentioned this a little bit earlier, which is that like, as this sort of becomes a different
version of like managerial politics and we've kind of, I can totally imagine like a lot
of the sort of, even the promises that have been made by the Labour Party right now, kind
of are reneged on the basis of, oh, well, we had a look at the finances and realize
that actually we couldn't afford to do, we couldn't afford to fix the potholes actually.
So like- There's no money for bathroom cops. I mean this is the thing when Maoist,
when Chairman Stalmers sends us all to the fields, not all of men's or women's toilets in the fields.
Well this is the other thing, I mean again like I've mentioned this a lot of times but like
you know the sort of bathroom discourse in this country really does ignore the fact that a lot of
the public bathrooms here really fucking suck. They never work. I went to a hospital of a maternity ward, like the other week, and there was one working
bathroom and like, when I say working, it means you could go into there, but the flush
wasn't working. This is in a maternity ward of a hospital, right?
Statistically, one of the most likely like women's spaces, you know?
Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, but if you're like got beyond willy or if you're really
hoping that fucking G4S comes in and fixes the toilet. I mean, I guess you could then turn them into
toilet jails. That would probably be an effective way of doing it. But the point being that
like, as they sort of renege on even the sort of lukewarm promises they've made, what is
really left in terms of like how politics is kind of defined and I think in this first
Stammer period is really by the affect around it. And what you're going to have is like a mix of kind of populist firebrands in parliament
that like have a lot of sway over a very vicious and cruel media culture that we've sort of
seen little slivers of in the like Boris, you know, when once like Boris got elected
with like GB news and everything, I imagine that's going to really, really get worse.
But also like the lack of a kind of coherent opposition sort of means that
that potential for chaos is a lot more likely to kind of flourish in quite surprising, and I wouldn't
be surprised, pretty like violent ways. And so it's like, it doesn't... The idea that like the
government is sort of going to sort of, not even fix problems, but like kind of ameliorate all the
sort of catastrophes that the Tories have caused. Like, yeah, they might do some sort of cosmetic stuff, but I think the thing that's
really going to define this first period is like the types of politics that kind of occur
outside of the sort of parliamentary system and how these will be less likely to be controlled.
You're sorry. It's like it's a cultural thing first, right? And the Labour Party is having
its, you know, it's like the dog being wagged by its tail on this one right but like again the thing is like
Irrespective of like because changing the law is very very hard and very very boring and a lot of people don't want to do it
This is another like coat by the way just to be clear
But like what it is doing is it's enabling and it's reinforcing the same kind of stochastic often violent kind of like
prejudices right like
Obviously like as far as like me going into the like women's bathroom, right?
First of all, there's the question of me finding one.
But second of all, if you're sort of like if you've already changed the law,
which is presumably a pretty like arduous process in order to make it so that I can't be in there,
you're then, I guess, citizens arresting me.
And then we all wait 10 hours for the one cop left to turn up.
It's like that cop is on a patrol of bathrooms.
Yeah.
Which is like exactly what they used to be doing in like the seventies as well. Like
we're bringing that back.
Yeah. But like, no, what you're not really aiming at doing that. What you're aiming at
doing is making it more likely for like someone who has been driven insane by the internet
to like confront me and kick the shit out of me while filming on their phone. is making it more likely for someone who has been driven insane by the internet to confront
me and kick the shit out of me while filming on their phone.
It's like volunteer border guards, volunteer toilet cops.
That's kind of what the culture is going to be.
We sort of see it heading towards that direction in some instances.
We see this happening a lot more in mainland Europe, right?
Germany being a really big example of this.
So I wouldn't be surprised if like, again,
one of these sort of uncontrolled,
or like one of these forces that like
the Stammer administration is not going to be able
to control because their version of like
sensible grownup politics completely ignores the fact
that like this is the type of political energy
that is kind of about to emerge.
Like very chaotic, very external.
I feel like that we're sort of gonna see a lot more
very chaotic, like citizen. I feel like that we're sort of going to see a lot more very chaotic like citizen policing of, you know, lots of like the remaining public institutions.
You're under a citizen's arrest, put your hands on the toilet and prepare to die.
What's crucial I think here, especially about this like, Oh, J.K. Rowling, you object, don't
worry. I, the punitive prime minister, and he'll do it again when he's prime minister,
probably. Well, also I'm willing like say, I went fine with ignoring this
long standing piece of equalities legislation, which number one, that's demonstrating to
me, I think an enormous amount of like personal weakness because that's like, Oh, is a columnist
about to ask me a confrontational question? Better fold, better promise to like have a
beer summit with JK Rowling.
Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. You might not care about trans people, but if he's going
to fold for us, he's going to fold for whatever it is you have going on too.
Yeah. And moreover, it's also, I think what you're both talking about, this is also a
kind of stochastic incitement, which is a willingness to be like, oh yeah, the law.
It's like when you have a burned out EV that's not getting updated anymore. Just have fun with it. Just be yourself.
Starmers Britain, gangs of roving terfs kicking dents in the side of a dead EV by the side
of the road.
Yeah. It's like a law is a law, but it has to be supported.
You have to have the state capacity to enforce it.
A law is a law. You have to have the state capacity to enforce it. And if there's going
to be something like a piece of equalities legislation, it has to have the constant moral support of people in power.
Otherwise, it's not going to work.
It's not going to work if everyone powerful signals, oh, we don't care about this, actually.
We don't give a shit.
Yeah, it's going to not be worth the paper it's printed on.
And, you know, again, whether knowingly or unknowingly, he's doing this so that the Harry Potter lady won't get mad at him.
He's doing this because he doesn't want people to get mad.
Yeah.
Do you want to be friends with a woman who posts 16 hours a day about how much she hates
trans women?
Does she sound like a fun hang?
Does she sound cool?
She should get married to Bill Ackman.
I think.
I think they would be so they would have such a good vacation together.
Just like reply. Just both of them in Laura Loomer's mentions from like-
Just like in bed on their phones separately.
Yeah.
In like the world's, like in a mansion on a Caribbean island that's so luxurious, it's
not on the map.
All of the pleasures of the world are right at your feet.
So I saw a photo of JK.K. Rowling's yacht.
Right. And like if I think if I had a yacht, let alone her yacht, which is a big fucking
yacht. Right.
You could not like there is very little you could do to entice me to care about anything.
And I consider myself a like more like community involved person than her.
Right. So she's just fully like it's just deranged stuff. yourself a like more like community involved person than her, right?
So she's just fully like, it's just deranged stuff and she can't even enjoy any of the
billionaire stuff.
She's making herself miserable by doing this.
She should learn from Mark Zuckerberg about like, yeah, for real, J.K. Rowling, dude,
do your white boy summer.
You'll really enjoy it.
Like, you know, this is an official like call from trash food to the podcast. Check they rolling.
Embrace, embrace white boy summer.
You know, cut to like 60 replies from her about how actually I'm the one who needs to
embrace white boy summer.
But finally, last thing we'll talk about on labor before we move on is, you know, you
say one insider with knowledge of the party's growth plan.
By the way, all of this is like, it's all Kremlin ology, right? We don't know what's actually going on in there
right now. Secret Maoism. Comrade Streeting is preparing even as we speak the shock brigade.
Not left. It's not right. It's a secret third way.
Yeah. Wes K-K-K-Kreeding.
Yeah. There's a weird handshake meme between Tony Blair and Mao, you know?
But right. Is everything we're talking about is like, we don't know how much like blood
letting and backroom like backroom deal making glad handing is going on at the Labour Party
right now. I know that they're all having a great fucking time. They're all getting
to play out their little fantasies. Yeah. They're so excited that they get to betray each other
and it's like actually meaningful or at least as meaningful as British politics can be.
Kind of like the magic one turned up to maximum just like this is just like the West Wing.
Sure. Perfect. And you know, I wish them every happiness with it, to be honest.
Yeah, they should just play diplomacy.
New Victoria DLC just dropped.
One insider with knowledge of the party's growth plan suggested there could be quote,
pretty hair raising stuff ahead saying there will have to be almost trust like deregulation
on things like planning and freeport.
We're going to do that again.
This is the plan.
This is the fucking plan is like we're going to try and do the cabbage lady shit without
scaring the like bond markets.
Yeah.
We're going to try to do the Liz Trust thing, which everyone admits was fucking mental,
but we're going to do it good.
And also the OBR won't let them do it because again, like the thing is, even if they wanted
to do something like that, like, and again, I mean, I guess like he could sort of break
it, but like one of the sort of like gam, one of the sort of things that he said, or
they said to sort of get the sun support, I suppose was, well, every costing we do will sort of pass it through V.O.B.R.
And like, when is V.O.B.R. or the IFS or any of these fucking places ever said, yeah,
you should spend stuff, right?
Like their ideology is still very much rooted in austerity because they are a product, or
at least like the V.O.B.R. is sort of a product of an austerity project.
And so again, it's like, well, okay, how, how, how are you going to do this? Oh, I can tell you that, which is that the site, the source says planning and free ports,
the craziest stuff that will have the least effect everywhere is a free port.
Now, congratulations citizen.
You live in like Neo Britain, free port zone, 800 formerly known as stockport. Yeah. The, like the confederation of Hackney and the two Bethnal greens has declared war on
this sounds, this sounds pretty good.
Actually.
I'm kind of in favor of this one actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What you think we should do more like a conditory, like a roving bands of mercenaries.
I'm willing to become some kind of like corporate ninja warrior mercenary in the service of
like, you know, the Glasgow Freeport.
Yeah, but that's the problem. We're going to get like, let's say South Shields, a subsidiary
of the Arasaka corporation.
Yeah, but we're not going to get Trauma Team. Like that's never, we're never going to get
Trauma Team because that's too good care.
It was my favorite part of that game. It was really conceptual. It was really good.
And this is the thing.
This is the kind of like innovative private sort of healthcare initiative that you can
bring to the NHS once you kind of like open that door, you know?
What if there was one ambulance left, it costs 600,000 quid to call it and everyone on board
had a rail gun.
Also, it flies.
It's the ambulance. It's the ambulance.
It's the ambulance.
We're just combining existing startups.
That's ambulance crossed with the like hover taxi that crashes into your building.
And crossed with the hydrogen powered rail gun that was invented by the three year old.
It's all coming together.
All the technologies are there on the table for Trauma Team to be real.
Unfortunately, it's also based on crypto, so it will take them 90 hours to get
there. So I want to finish up on what may initially seem like a startup segment,
but might not be the company is called Halo Solutions.
Master Chief, where are you going with that VC funding?
I'm going to give the covenant back their series B.
Halo. I've done a couple of those recently. Halo Solutions, colon, let's protect everyone.
Okay.
So rather than doing all the guessing, right, I'll just go into tell you what it is.
It is an incident management platform designed for a world leading client base, experts in
the field and unique features.
So it is a essentially it is like a really common type of product that
aggregates a whole bunch of security information into one screen.
Oh sure. So if you're managing like Wembley, right, it shows you simultaneously like how
many drunk unticketed fans are trying to like kick down each turnstile.
Yeah it will show you the location of the guy with the flare up his ass at any given time.
But there's like AI enabled to really lock on to it.
It's seen so many pictures of that guy with a flare up his ass.
It can identify instantly.
It has become sentient and believes it is the guy with the flare up his ass.
So there was a police officer in 2014 called Lloyd Major who started just like a normal
security consulting company that
started working at like festivals. And then after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017,
said, okay, we're going to work to stop that anything like that from happening again.
Yeah, if only there had been a kind of like sort of oversight platform that seeing that
guy walk into the crowded auditorium had identified him as a guy with a flare up his arse.
Or also like, oh yeah, if only there had been like some kind of a national security state
that was, I don't know, tracking the guy that did it. Anyway, so he creates this thing,
right, which is used at like, which is, as we say, right, a, like something that just
aggregates lots of information so you can see what's happening, where, what kind of incidents are going on. This is relatively
common and in as much as anything is innocuous, pretty innocuous.
Yeah. When you're looking at the surveillance cameras following you everywhere thing, it's
not particularly objectionable in itself to be like, they're using software that lets
them watch a bunch of screens at once kind of thing.
Yeah. I mean, other than like the fact that that allows, I always think when you're thinking
about information, that guy in the middle of the panopticon is wearing glasses.
A little bit. Or it's like that guy in the middle of the panopticon has like a bunch
of mirrors that allow them to look at all of the cells at once and without having to
turn. They're defeating the purpose of the panopticon really.
But essentially right. It's what you think of yourself as like
giving off information.
You have to understand like the more that gets
aggregated with other people who are in some category similar
to you whether that's people who are co-located with you people
who share a demographic with you people who might share a set
of political beliefs with you.
Any characteristic that you can have in common with someone else, the more you can be observed alongside them,
the more the person observing you has power over you with respect of that thing.
Yeah, I mean that's what a lot of intelligence and intelligence analysis is,
is making connections between data you've collected, right?
Yeah, exactly. And this is something that just sort of automates that process and is
a British company that's like sold to a lot of other sort of British organizations.
This is the point at which is sort of centrist, more centrist podcasts would do the kind of
like all wells that ends well joke and like whack their eyebrows, right?
So what I think is worth talking about here is that they have an education offering saying
from boisterous events at the student union to quiet and corners of the library overseeing
the safety and security of a campus comes with many challenges and obstacles. A proactive
approach and operations reduces risk and maximizes the value of your services.
We can identify an entire Palestine solidarity camp as guy with a flare up his ass in a matter of microseconds.
You point that out November. This is why I wanted to talk about this company because
it connects to a couple of things that I think are worth discussing. And I think it's something
we're going to see, we've seen a lot of in Britain and we're going to see a lot more
of which is as the semi-public sector, like universities for example, has like increased
needs for security and more
importantly increased demands placed on it by the state to engage in political policing,
so to speak.
There's going to be a melding of private capital, in this case a company started by a guy, relatively
small company, a university, and then the security state and the police.
Yeah.
And until you're at the point where you're like, why do my
uni's security guards know
as much about me as like MI5 do?
Yeah, exactly.
Because it's not like it's not like tools like this or like
sort of more less automated, more human versions
of this kind of process don't exist already.
Right. It's just a question of them being broadened out to like what you might
call non-state actors. Right. Exactly. It's the company. This is a press release.
And by the way, like none of this is happening in secret. It's just not talked about because
it only happens in press releases and those press releases only go out to like safety
management magazine quarterly or whatever. Yeah. About which you can learn a lot by reading
those. Yeah. Where do you think like 20 percent of the content of this show comes from?
I just read the press releases, the information's out there.
There's just so much of it. It's hard to know what's relevant.
This company is providing technology to Birmingham City University.
It's in discussions with a number of other universities in the UK.
This is the press release following growing concerns about female safety on
campus, criminal activity and a spate of non-student
protestor activity in protest over the war in Gaza.
Going to identify outside agitators and we're going to protect women and girls. This is
all like very, very familiar language as far as this stuff goes.
I think Birmingham City University was also one of those, like when Prevent was sort of
talked about a lot, it was like one of those, because I think a PhD student who was doing a research project on like, ironically,
like surveillance of counter extremism on campuses, like ended up getting reported to
Prevent because they took out a book on like terrorism or something like that.
I think it was at Birmingham City University, all of which is to say, but like very sort
of like interesting and convenient.
And the thing that I was thinking about when you were sort of talking about this, cause I think in the mid 2010s,
there was this, there were these events
on like student campuses in London,
and I'm not sure if it happened anywhere else,
which was called like Students Against Surveillance.
And it was the idea that like Prevent
had just sort of been expanded.
And the idea was that like anyone who had like any sort of
like public position and that range from like someone,
you know, a university administrator, like a secretary that range from like someone, you know, a university administrator, or like a secretary,
or someone who was like, you know,
just kind of working in the medical center, for example,
had a duty to like report anyone who they sort of
considered to be like at risk of, you know,
sort of being extremist or sort of on the verge of it.
And like this sort of frameworks for that
were really, really broad,
but it relied on like expanding the scope of snitching
and kind of like telling, snitching and telling public administrators
that if you refuse to do this, then your job is also at risk as well.
And so clearly the extension of this now is that, well, clearly despite that sort of expansion
of actual surveillance against students, this still isn't enough.
And so in a weird way, it's kind of like, okay, so now we're going to introduce a type of, I presume, like an AI assisted technology that will do the job.
But like people who were sort of coerced into doing it weren't able to do effectively enough.
So this involves some mention of AI, but I think that's just because they want to increase
their valuation.
Like I don't see much evidence of it or there's very little information available is what
I'm trying to say.
I'm sure there's some of the usual in it.
I think in this case though it doesn't even matter if it has a I because the more a security platform can integrate data feeds and spit you out one coordinated number that will allow you to take action.
The longer your lever is against people you're trying to control.
And so Lloyd Major says well legitimate protests are allowed to take place in the cornerstone of every
vibrant thriving democracy. I love that. Walled, Walsed, load bearing Walsed.
Well, we do have to like allow some level of protest to legitimize our kind of like democracy.
You are allowed to protest against like if the canteen of the university like
serve fish fingers like three times in a week.
You're allowed to do the kind of like protest, the last ditch protests of like the Russian
anti-war movement. You can hold up like a blank sheet of A4 paper on your own.
Yeah, you can do wooferendons.
The Russian anti-war left doing a wooferendom against the special military operation.
They beat the shit out of a lot of dogs in the course of the Russian woofer random.
It was really bad.
Yeah.
I tried to take my XL bullies to the last referendum and they were just...
Oh my God.
Is that Steve Bray has been spotted at the University of Coventry?
The recent barricade over Gaza at the University of Manchester, which is carried out by a large
group of protesters, many of whom are not students, has highlighted how vulnerable UK
universities are to such actions.
You're not allowed to have like a position on stuff that the University of Manchester
is doing or saying or investing in if you're not paying them nine grand a year.
Like the university isn't a public institution.
It's a kind of like, you know, real estate fund and kind of Ponzi scheme.
It's whatever it needs to be.
Yeah, exactly. It's a real estate fund. kind of Ponzi scheme. It's whatever it needs to be. Yeah, exactly.
It's a real estate fund.
It's also a classroom.
You, you as someone who like maybe like lives in Manchester or who lives in Britain, you
don't really like your opinion of what like any given university might be doing is kind
of irrelevant.
Ideally, I understand that sometimes people graduate universities, right?
Like, and maybe they still have a pin that like, you know, they'd maybe send them like
a newsletter, you know, they may be send them like a newsletter, you know,
they maybe kind of like are alive to issues of like governance of the university.
Just as long as you don't do that in any kind of like protest related way.
You should interact with the university by donating to them.
And you can maybe find a special number you can donate that signals disapproval, but it's still ample.
Buy a scarf at the gift shop, shake your head the whole time so that they know that you
disagree with it.
One of the reasons I'm talking about this as well is there was recently an article published
by Liberty Investigates, the law firm, the sort of civil rights law firm, on email exchanges
with police.
Now, I want to be clear, I'm not connecting any of this to Halo.
None of the universities here explicitly use Halo, and Halo doesn't say they cooperate
with the police.
They give information to the university, the university can choose what to do with it. It's just I'm saying that's
one example of like an increased ability to surveil.
Yeah. And it's all working in quite like an incestuous ecosystem generally. Yeah. If we
can't like make actual connections between those things.
And on the other side of the universities are state organizations which are demanding that they all work together.
So this is a quote from the investigation by Liberty.
In one email forwarded by North Yorkshire police to the head of campus safety at York University,
a former police officer said of an unnamed female protester,
she came to our attention during the anti-monarchy protest during the King's visit in York.
Is it possible to find out if she's a current student of the uni and any address details that she holds? The force also highlighted
that campers protesters had chanted from the river to the sea and 5678 Israel is a terrorist
state on May 21st campus security said it was keeping a log monitoring general mood
and behavior of the York encampment lamenting senior management's decision against installing
CCTV.
Yeah, because all of the all of this stuff kind of exists irrespective of what university bureaucrats
choose to do about it. Like if you're kind of like, if you successfully move your 750
grand a year vice chancellor to not deploy the kind of like predator drone over your
encampment, it doesn't matter. They still employ a staff of people who are going to
be like emailing the cops about you.
And earlier that month, the National Police Chief's Council's neighborhood policing lead
contacted all police forces asking for intelligence on any students quote, replicating American
campus protests, an email sent from Gloucestershire Constabulary to the Royal Agricultural University
in Sirencester suggests.
Number one.
Imagining that protest encampment. Like, yeah.
People with 19 last names are accidentally starting a protest encampment because they
drank a mixture of port and piss.
That might be the first like Palestine solidarity campaign that actually is motivated predominantly
by anti-Semitism.
Just like cutting, cutting a kind like cutting a triangle in the Palestinian
flag out of your red trousers.
And also it's like, but this is cooperation again and again and again, where like university
security asks officers to like join them in the control room to monitor CCTV during protests.
It's very similar to like a lot of police intelligence in the US and the UK is a waste
of time, right? It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money, but it is kind of a jobs
program, right? You look at like US stuff like fusion centers, right? Which exists largely
to regurgitate myths from Facebook to scare other cops. Time and time again in 2020 and
later you saw these fusion sensors which are intended
to do just this, right?
To share intelligence, to collate intelligence and disseminate it outwards.
Doing things like, hey does anyone have any information on the bus full of Antifa that's
coming to a small town to start a forest fire?
What set you from?
Because we have read about this on Facebook, we are like putting out a kind of alert generally to maybe like, you know, without considering it's sort of like evidence base, you should be aware of and afraid of the idea that like a bus full of Antifa are going to show up and they're going to like fire an RPG full of dildos at you or whatever.
Whereas, and it's exactly the same in this country too, it's just like slightly more obscured because we have more of a kind of a security state around
it.
Yeah, well, because there's also, this is interlinking with Prevent, right?
Yeah, of course.
And this is saying like-
Which is an extremely hysteric organization.
To be like, this kid drew a picture of a stick guy with a gun in his notebook and has therefore
presumably pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
What I sort of see here is a willingness on the...
We go back to how people interpret the law and how so much of the law is what people
think it is, because it depends who's enforcing it at any given day.
It's not illegal to say from the river to the sea.
It's not illegal to say five, six, to say 5678 Israel is a terrorist state. Not illegal.
But all these police forces, all of the not the met for reasons we've discussed, but other
police forces, other like semi private security organizations, universities and so on are
all acting like it is. And like they can't send you to jail, but they can refer you to
this like quasi institutional sort of formal, very vague state surveillance program
that will repeatedly fuck your life up.
Yeah, even before the latest round of legislation on this, intelligence gathering was always
something that was deliberately, for exactly this reason, extremely vague and extremely
unaccountable.
And to ask what information the police will prevent, or the security services, or
whatever kind of agglomeration of policing that becomes like counter-terror policing,
or shared intelligence units, or whatever, hold about you, it's almost impossible.
It also kind of just relies on people not caring in the main that this is a thing that happens. Which, you know,
most people don't give a shit, which is also grim.
Yeah. Well, look, I think what we're going to see is, of course, we elected a Labour
government, so that's, they're going to put a stop to that, right? I assume that's how
that's going to go.
This kind of intelligence work is absolutely a growth industry. Probably will be a growth
industry everywhere going forward. And it's very self perpetuating is the thing.
Does this create a lot of useful intelligence?
Arguably not, but it does create a lot of jobs for people to keep doing this and to
keep monitoring people who the state feels more comfortable when they're monitored.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyway, I think that's about all we have time for today.
So I hope you enjoyed the first episode
of the new Emcee-rium and that you're ready to enjoy the new flesh, the new very square
Lego haired flesh.
Oh, you got a license for that flesh.
Oh, you got a license for that video. You got a Videodrome license. Going to jail because
I didn't pay my TV license for Videodrome. Okay. All right. All right. That's enough
silliness now. Thank you for listening to this free episode of TF.
Don't forget, there's a bonus that we coming out next week and next week, excuse me,
in a couple of days. Guess what it is.
It's finally the live show we did about Liz Truss's autobiography.
That's what it's going to be.
Ten years to save the West, which at this point is like nine years, ten months to
save the West. We have so little time to save the West. So that this point is like nine years, 10 months to save the West.
We have so little time to save the West.
So that's coming.
That's coming this week.
So do check that out.
And yeah, I guess we will see you in a few days.
Maybe we still have Edinburgh tickets.
I don't know.
I guess you're going to have to check in the episode description.
It'll say do your own legwork for once.
Yeah.
Hey, you know what?
Why don't you find out if there are Edinburgh tickets? I'm not, you can't have me to kick around anymore. Okay. All right. I actually
have to go. Bye everybody. Bye!