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Feb. 23, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:48
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #335
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters.
It is the 23rd of February 2022.
I am Thomas, your host for today, and I'm delighted to be joined by Harry.
Hello!
Today we're going to be discussing the Covid narratives that are falling apart, the West sanctioning of Russia, and that music theory may not be racist.
But first we have some things to share with you.
The first is this Premium video, The Origins of the Dark Enlightenment, which I recorded with Carl.
What we do is explain and unpack in, shall we say, some detail, but not too much, the philosophical origins of the Dark Enlightenment.
So this isn't the deep dive that some of you more familiar with the Dark Enlightenment may have wished for.
We're going to do this more later on.
But nonetheless, if you don't know what the Dark Enlightenment is or want to know more, this is the video for you.
The next is an article called...
Oh, just as a shout out as well.
Regarding that, I'm aware that there's been some contentious thoughts about it put up on Twitter.
And as a result, for anyone interested, I'm pretty sure Carl is debating academic agent on this subject later on today.
Oh, fantastic.
On YouTube, on the Cigar Stream.
So that should be interesting for anyone who's interested in that.
Absolutely.
Are we looking forward to that?
As will I. Yes.
But next we have the woke hegemony, the ESG index and the woke cartels by Michael Rexenwald.
I'm sorry if I mispronounced your name.
I presume that this talks about the inextricable link between corporate capitalism and wokeness.
It's very, very, very, very detailed, this.
So I'd strongly recommend it.
And the last of all is the gold Zoom call at 3.30pm on Friday, which is kind of a hangout of sorts.
Yeah, people can tune in.
I've been on one before.
People just tune in to the Zoom call.
Everybody gets a turn, as long as they're within time limit, to be able to just ask us a question and just have a chill time.
It sounds like really good fun, so if that excites you, then do tune in to that and ask us a question.
But yes, without further ado, let us begin with COVID narratives.
So, it appears, for now, that the COVID narratives are officially dead, as has been handed down to us by God Emperor Boris Johnson, who I do not actually consider God Emperor.
Don't quote me on that one.
He deserves it for the day.
For the day, maybe.
But it seems that there is good news coming, which is that in England, at least, all of the restrictions, and I mean all of them, are going to be lifted.
So let's take a look at what's going on.
So, Boris, all coronavirus restrictions to lift in England.
Here's Boris Johnson's plan for living with COVID. I thought I'd include this so we can get a more detailed rundown of what exactly is being pulled back.
So...
All of England's coronavirus rules will be lifted later this week after Boris Johnson set out his plan for living with COVID but without any restrictions on people's lives.
The few COVID-19 laws remaining in England will soon be relaxed, including self-isolation returning the country to the same levels of freedom enjoyed before the pandemic for the first time since lockdown began in March 2020.
Radical.
This is great news, but let's be perfectly honest, who gave the government the right to take away all of those freedoms in the first place?
I know that many can consider, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, it was kind of an unknown quantity how dangerous COVID was.
They had to make all of these statements and do these things to protect the public.
But at the same time, past those initial few weeks, there's very, very little to do with a strong argument for supporting it going forward.
So the more we learned about COVID, We just copied China because we didn't know what else to do.
Yes, and it's obviously the least British thing to do imaginable to take away the people's freedoms like that and maintain those powers and then reassert those powers a few months ago while laughing about it, despite the fact you knew the public didn't want that.
But the changes are not UK-wide, with Wales and Scotland employing more cautious strategies, but Northern Ireland had already moved to lift all of its restrictions last week.
All of England's coronavirus laws were due to expire on March 24th anyway.
However, the Prime Minister announced two weeks ago at PMQs that encouraging data was allowing him to bring forward the date by a whole month.
Mr Johnson said the plan was about finally giving people back their freedom.
How very gracious of him.
After one of the most difficult periods in our country's history.
Once again, my freedom was never yours to claim in the first place, Mr Johnson.
And also, we know from hearing about what's going on in Canada and places like that, that they've said, the people who are part of the World Economic Forum, such as yourself, have all said we know how to apply these rules to future pandemics, like climate crisis or anything like that.
Wouldn't that be consistent?
Wouldn't that be convenient now that we've set up a system whereby the public is known to comply very easily with these sorts of measures, as long as you infer it for the greater good, for your own good.
So, that's very convenient that we've got that set up now, and who knows when...
I would say if, but it's when you're going to apply those rules again in the future.
But...
So, what is with the Living with COVID-19 plan?
So, here are a few of the rules that are being pulled back.
The rule to self-isolate after a positive coronavirus test will be lifted from Thursday.
There will no longer be any requirement to self-isolate following a positive test for anyone in England, whether or not they have been vaccinated.
The law will instead become guidance, with people being urged to act responsibly to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
And isn't that incredible?
Now, after almost two years, only now are we being said, well, I'm sure you can take the responsibility into your own hands.
I'm so glad you finally realised we all just grew up over these past two years.
We're all finally functioning adults.
But this is great because it means that if you're ill, you can just...
I feel too ill to go into work today?
Yes, then I'll stay at home.
Do I not?
Then great, I'll go into work.
Free universal testing will end in England on April the 1st, and the contract tracing program will stop from February 24th.
So this is, of course, removing the ability for people to just get free tests.
Which is fantastic because I would say the overabundance of testing is one of the things that freaked people out in the first place because you get lots of false positives through certain tests.
I'm not going to say anything much further than that for just in case on YouTube and everything.
But I think it will be good to stop subsidizing people pathologizing their illnesses.
How much will the tests cost moving forwards?
Absolutely.
So the government expects a market for lateral flow devices to develop once boxes are no longer available free on the NHS, with individual tests expected to cost a few pounds.
Financial support as well through COVID will be removed.
Self-isolation support payments will cease from Thursday, February the 24th.
And from March 24th, the extra COVID provision on statutory sick pay, as well as the employment and support allowance, will also lift.
And I think, you know...
Some people may disagree with me on this.
These are good things.
Because what we are doing is, if you put in incentives for people to get maybe a little bit ill, and then subsidise them for their potential hypochondria, whatever illness they may have, you're just going to encourage a work environment where people are taking as much time off as possible, because they know they can get away with it, and they know they won't get any final...
It's extremely open to abuse, especially as the symptoms of COVID are so minor.
You could literally just have a common cold and think, I'd best be safe, yeah.
I'd best be safe.
This has the potential to be really, really damaging socially and economically, and I think it's about time that we lifted it.
Absolutely.
And of course, some of the opposition, the opposition leader in particular, had some nasty things to say about this.
So Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer labelled Mr Johnson's living with Covid plan as a half-baked announcement from a government paralysed by chaos and incompetence.
He criticised the removal of free testing, saying, If you're up 2-1 with 10 minutes to go, you don't sub off one of your best defenders, which is a complete nonsense analogy.
I don't get the analogy.
It doesn't really have anything to do with the situation.
But also it's obvious that Starmer, being Labour, being a socialist, well, socialist adjacent, given that he's in Labour, you just want to maintain more government control, larger government provisions, etc., and you can piss off, to be perfectly honest with that.
He also said that the removal of financial support will hit the lowest paid and most insecure workers the hardest.
To which I have to ask, will it?
What's the evidence there?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Oh yes, John said he's obviously trying to explain it in football terms.
That just shows how effective that was.
Yeah, I know, but the question there is, will it actually hurt them the most?
Because people who may be lowest paid and most insecure, they still have different choices.
They still have options in a supposedly free society.
if you can't work if you literally can't work due to whatever disability or illness you have you can still get on benefits if you have a job you can continue to work it and maybe if you're just feeling a bit poorly one day you can stick it out and work through it anyway to make sure that you get that pay or if you're ill often enough you can still try and find a job that will provide sick pay for you yeah that isn't just given by fiat by the government and is therefore not coming straight from my tax
I have to be honest, I think he's clutching a little bit here, because if there's nothing legal to stop you from actually going to work, say if you have COVID, then surely in an economic sense at least, that's liberating for the working classes.
You would hope so.
Especially if you have a zero hours contract, you literally get paid for the hours that you work.
You would hope so, but statist big government types want the public to be a commodity that they can move and shift at will, and keeping people financially dependent on the government is one way to modify them.
And it would interfere with that, wouldn't it?
It absolutely would.
But...
As I was saying, there are options for people, barring the government treating them like their misbehaving stepchild, but people will just have to take their own decisions and their own responsibilities into their own hands, which is something I fully support.
But it's not all smooth sailing, because there is also the question...
What about new variants?
Oh, no.
Oh, dear!
England's chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, the illustrious Pope of Science himself, Chris Whitty, said it's likely that new variants will be identified, which will cause significant problems.
We might have to shut you down for being too naughty again.
Mate, just accept your place in the pit of irrelevance.
It's over!
Yeah.
Go away!
This is making me think that this might turn into an eat out to help out situation where the month after they're going, why did you do all of that eating out that didn't help out at all?
No.
And you're grounded young man, that sort of behaviour.
He said, we need to be very careful about new variants, saying testing and tracing would need to be ramped up quickly if a new dangerous strain was found.
Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance also said the virus is continuing to evolve, and it will continue to do so quite fast, probably for the next couple of years.
Well, it's a good job that so many people are vaccinated against it then.
And those who aren't vaccinated or refuse to get the boosters moving forward are taking their own health into their own hands, which is absolutely their right to do so.
And they should not be shut down for doing so.
But the obvious implication there is don't get too comfy with all of this freedom.
They're more than happy to break out all of their responses, everything they've learned again, at a moment's notice.
And when you're talking about people like Professor Chris Whitty and all of SAGE, to be fair, don't trust people who have a financial incentive to keep a problem going to solve that problem.
How we've not learned this after time and time again at this point, I don't understand.
But...
This all seems to have come about, as stated, because of the fact that things are looking better.
The narratives themselves are being destroyed.
And we've got a few examples of that from surprising sources.
So we've got this Guardian article saying why one shot after a COVID-19 infection should suffice to be considered fully vaxxed.
Which, in and of itself, is quite impressive.
A walk back from the whole two shots to be fully vaccinated...
indefinite boosters moving forward.
But would you like to see the original title of this article, which they changed?
It's time to consider natural immunity to COVID-19 as equal to one shot of the vaccine.
That's right.
Natural immunity is a real thing now.
Oh, really?
We've only just discovered it, don't you know?
It's an incredible admission coming from the Guardian of all papers as well.
So the US Census for CDC has failed to recognise that people with confirmed COVID infections, also known as natural immunity, have achieved some level of protection against subsequent infections and severe disease.
Well, it's not like that's something that we knew happened with most diseases for...
Most of recent history is shocking that we've only just rediscovered this.
A recent CDC report for COVID in California that included the Delta wave, the cumulative hospitalization rate for the vaccinated was 0.7% among vaccinated and 0.3% unvaccinated with prior infection.
So if you've Been unvaccinated but had a prior infection, you are less likely to end up in hospital if you get it again.
Notably, a tenfold lower risk of subsequent infection was found in the people with natural immunity.
And this was done through a survey that included 52,000 people, so that's a decent enough range of people to be testing on.
Reinfections among those with natural immunity throughout the pandemic until the recent Omicron wave have been very low.
Less than 1%.
A United Kingdom study of about 9,000 people with prior infections demonstrated higher than 90% protection against subsequent infections, even among those who had COVID-19 more than 18 months previously.
This is something that if you'd said two years ago...
Hey, if I get infected, I'm probably going to have natural immunity to it.
You would either be an anti-vaxxer or a conspiracy theorist.
I'm sorry, the natural immune system that humans have developed through evolution is just a conspiracy.
But, no longer.
the wool has been pulled from our eyes and we're allowed to talk about this stuff now.
Hooray.
Past critique of natural immunity protection is still relevant though.
Ooh, it's the Guardian so you can't let them be too good about it.
These studies have survivor bias.
They only include people who survived their infections.
Wouldn't that be the same with people who got the vaccine, got infected, and then still die?
Oh no, but that would be death bias.
Can't have that.
We know that the symptoms of long COVID can be reduced by vaccines, which is an important added feature of the controlled vaccine approach.
So that's a great job that we have all those vaccines and all of those people vaccinated and people are still able to go and get vaccinated if they feel it's necessary.
Wonderful, because none of the things that are rolling back is the actual vaccination program.
They're still keeping that going, so if you do feel that you are needing to get vaccinated against the virus, you can go ahead.
It's your free choice to do so, which is absolutely brilliant.
It's now clearly overdue for the United States and the CDC to acknowledge natural immunity as partial path to protection, as has been previously done in several countries.
For people with natural immunity, with proof of a positive PCR test, one shot is all that is necessary to be considered fully vaccinated.
So maybe if we did have a bit more pushback from the media before now, these sorts of changes could have been enacted sooner.
But they weren't.
And if we wanted to see a real clear example of the change in the narrative, we can see this excellent picture here.
I don't know what Mother Jones is, but they've got a headline that kind of sums it up.
If you just want to click on that for us, John, that'd be great.
Thank you.
Anti-vaxxers have a dangerous theory called natural immunity.
Dangerous theory.
Dangerous theory.
Natural immunity.
Now it's going mainstream.
Did you know that they've been talking about this for up to 20 years, maybe even longer than that?
And then move along to the next image.
Natural immunity superior to vaccines against Delta variants, CDC study finds.
Which is the one that the Guardian was quoting there.
So...
I'm glad that we could finally make the common sense recognition of natural immunity being a thing, but there are still people who are very happy to live in their little authoritarian bubbles and want you to be scared, such as this Atlantic article.
Mask mandates are illogical.
So what?
Once again...
Once again, this is not the original title.
This one was worse.
It's not like The Guardian where they made the title worse.
No, this one they made slightly better because of the original title, if we move along.
Some mask mandates don't need to make sense.
That's right, Citizen.
We don't need you to understand why we're forcing this boot onto your head.
So there's actually a religion surrounding mask mandates now.
I mean, if it wasn't obvious enough already.
Yeah, but they've actually just declared it.
Yes.
Rachel Gutmann says they only need to align with community's goals.
And couldn't you just hear that in a German accent?
Yes.
They really do.
It's purely collectivist framing.
They just want individuals to go against their own better judgment for the good of the community, whether or not that makes sense.
They want you to be brainwashed for the betterment of everyone.
Mm-hmm.
When the mayor of Washington DC announced changes to the city's mask mandate last week, spit hit the fan.
I guess that's some self-censorship right there.
As of March 1st, district residents will need to cover up in order to attend school.
And this is an article from a few days ago as well, by the way, so this is very recent.
District residents will need to cover up in order to attend school, go to a library, or ride in a taxi, which honestly sounds awful.
Move!
Move out of these big metropolitan blue state cities, for the love of God, if you haven't already.
But gyms, sports arenas, concert venues and houses of worship, you know, all the places where people like to breathe hard or sing and shout in close proximity, will be facial free-for-alls.
If the goal of mass policies is to reduce transmission of the coronavirus as much as possible, then DC's new rules are difficult to reason out.
And you don't say.
Honestly, you don't say.
It doesn't make any sense.
Well, I'm glad you finally picked up on that.
Why should children, who are generally at low risk of severe disease, have to mask while sitting quietly in class when the more vulnerable elders can sing unmasked in church.
It seems arbitrary, inconsistent, and absurd.
Yes.
One argument against mask mandates is that they don't actually change people's behaviour.
People who would have masked anyway cover up.
People who don't want to wear a mask where there's badly ignore the rules.
Anyone who has been at any source of public location at any time during the pandemic recognises that mask mandates are not followed consistently, says an epidemiologist at John Hopkins University, but even disregarded mandates could affect people in other helpful ways.
So it's that nudging.
It's that nudging you into compliance that it's really all about.
It's not about protecting you.
It's not about keeping you healthy.
It's about making you compliant.
It's about making a virtue out of conformity alone, isn't it?
It really is.
From my perspective, the main benefit is not so much the masking itself, but the message to society that this wave is not yet over.
A mask mandate may magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space.
So it makes no sense on purpose, just so they can control you.
This is Soviet levels of misinformation.
I wish I could push back on that, but that is a true account of it.
There is literally no reason to keep these mandates in place.
It is just as a means of mobilising.
This is Solzhenitsyn saying, we knew, they knew that we knew, and we knew that they knew that we knew.
This is a circle where everybody knows that this is all a load of rubbish, not to go any further in terms of the actual efficacy of masks, more the application of them, but we're expected to go along with it anyway.
It's ridiculous.
Mask mandates are easier to enforce in highly controlled environments, such as schools.
So you're just saying children are more susceptible to our brainwashing, so let's get them while they're young.
Fantastic.
That's actually sick, given how dependent children are to pick up on facial recognition in order to actually stimulate basic psychological responses.
Mm-hmm.
It's ridiculous.
And that's what's going on in America.
Thank Christ I'm not over there.
And if you are, once again, stay out of blue state metropolitan cities.
They hate you.
But it seems that this wave of freedom that England is experiencing might be moving to Scotland as well, as they...
Remember that they're a bunch of freedom-loving Celts, or at least you would hope so.
So Scotland is also looking to end all restrictions on the 21st of March.
Scotland's legal COVID-19 restrictions, including the wearing of face coverings, will end on that date.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said people will still be advised to wear masks in shops and on public transport, but all legal restrictions on people and businesses will end as part of an effort to return to a normal way of life.
Thank God.
Meanwhile, the country's vaccine passport scheme will end on 28th February, and we know how successful that was.
Not at all.
The plan is part of a new strategic framework the government has drawn up for dealing with the pandemic in the future.
And like most government schemes, I hope it's the most useful a government can be, which is a big whiteboard that says, do nothing.
Because if governments just did nothing, we'd all be in a much better place, as far as I'm concerned.
Certainly if they act in the way that the Scottish Parliament has on this issue.
Anyway, we need to talk about Russia, don't we?
I wasn't done, but I guess...
Do you want to round up?
I was just going to say...
I'm sorry.
Sturgeon said that it would seem...
I'm sorry I was boring you so much, Thomas.
Said it would be great to see Scotland move away from legal restrictions relying instead on vaccines, treatments and good public health behaviours.
So even though she was one of the ones like Starmer complaining about England moving the restrictions, she's going along with it anyway, which just says all you need to know about Scottish Parliament.
But the main point I want to get across here is that even if this all does stick, the damage has already been done to people's businesses, people's relationships, people's lives, and they have the power in place now that they can re-enact all of these policies at a moment's notice, If they get enough people whipped up into a frenzy, so be cautious.
Yeah, that was the most interesting thing I've ever heard.
Thank you.
Thank you, Thomas.
I know, I know.
No, no, thank you for that.
Anyway, it was...
Now it's your turn.
Now, yes.
Now, it was an ineventful day yesterday, as we know, on the Russia front.
We began knowing that Vladimir Putin officially declared Russia's recognition of the separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk, like he did with Georgia in 2008, and sent troops without insignia into the region as a means of keeping the peace in both regions.
I was watching it all day.
The Western media's response was not only to declare both Putin's announcement and his moving in of troops as breaches of international law, but to announce it as the beginning of the invasion of the entire country, which, as we know, is yet still yet to happen, unless something has happened in between.
Some of the frontline headlines yesterday were quite extraordinary.
But if we get this first one up here, here is Boris Johnson hyperbolically saying yesterday that Putin is bent on a full-scale invasion of the country.
Which to me is an extremely undiplomatic thing to say, especially when the collective response is supposed to try to de-escalate the tensions, not the other way around.
But even though it's looking more and more likely that a full-blown invasion is indeed where we're headed, it's a few steps ahead of where we are at the moment, and it's a bit weird that he should use this rhetoric.
Nonetheless, Boris proceeded to announce sanctions in light of the supposed invasion, if we get the next one up.
He announced the sanctions against Russian individuals and banks in a statement to MPs after an emergency meeting early on Tuesday.
The efforts came as part of a coordinated Western response to the crisis, which has also seen the EU and US impose sanctions of their own.
The Foreign Office later announced the UK would also sanction Russian parliamentarians who voted to recognise the two rebel-held areas as independent last week.
The sanctions will be similar to those already imposed on the three billionaires, but could take weeks to enforce as new legislation will be required.
The department said that in coming weeks, British firms would also be prevented from doing business in two breakaway areas similar to Crimea, a region Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
We added unprecedented measures targeting the Russian financial sector had been prepared if Russia went further and threatened to stop issuing sovereign debt on UK financial markets if it did not de-escalate.
Just to be clear, Russia's gold reserves have increased in recent years, which suggests that Putin has been preparing for such sanctions.
But there was unanimity in the House that these sanctions do not go far enough.
Everyone except the government itself, that is.
And if we scroll down a little bit, Labour leader Keir Starmer welcomed British sanctions but said that the UK must be prepared to go further.
He called for Russia to be excluded from the global SWIFT payment system, the banning of trading in Russian sovereign debts, an action to prevent Russia broadcasting its propaganda around the world, obviously a reference to the RT News Channel.
Don't take RT away from us, please!
They're actually, regardless of who owns it, they're an extremely effective counterweight to the, well, shall we say...
The unrelenting...
They're pleasantly based.
I don't want Russia today to go away.
Yeah.
No, neither do I. It's a terrible idea.
But Zakir said he understood the government, wanted to delay introducing some sanctions as a tactic to deter a rushed invasion of the rest of Ukraine, but without a full set of sanctions now.
President Putin would conclude that the benefits of aggression outweigh the costs.
And this was pretty much the view of all the opposition parties, as we can see from Caroline Lucas here.
He says PM's list of sanctions against Moscow doesn't go anywhere near far enough.
And if we move on, we can see Ed Davey pretty much said the same thing today.
I challenged the PM to adopt a much stronger sanctions regime to cancel his cuts to our armies so we can better support NATO allies and to push UEFA to move the Champions League from Russia.
Boris later, I think, confirmed that he would try to do that.
And then there was a backbencher, Tom Tugendhat, who pretty much said the same thing.
We shouldn't be waiting for Russia to attack others to clean up corruption in our country.
Sanctions need to be clear and strong.
And to be perfectly honest, I think this is a, I mean, insofar as, I understand why Boris has been light, because we don't actually have that much in our roster.
If we play too many cards too soon, we'll find ourselves, I think, as an even worse diplomatic position.
So I'm kind of sympathetic to Boris Johnson's predicament here, though again, I'm not a fan of the entire strategy.
Anyway, Estonia and Ukraine proceeded to issue a response shortly after.
Speaking alongside his Estonian counterpart, President Vladimir Zelensky said he was weighing a request from his foreign ministry to break off ties with Moscow.
He said, I've received a request from the foreign ministry.
I will consider the issue of severing diplomatic ties between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
immediately after our press conference.
I'll consider this the issue, Mr Zelensky said.
The foreign ministry said it had recalled a senior Ukrainian diplomat from Moscow for consultations.
He also urged Ukraine's allies not to wait for a further escalation to impose new sanctions, which should include the shutting down of the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
And yeah, Mr Zelensky played down the prospect of a large-scale conflict with Russia, but said he was prepared to introduce martial law if that happened.
The reported appearance of the military vehicles came hours after Putin signed friendship treaties with the two separatist regions and ordered Russian troops to deploy on what Moscow called a peacekeeping operation.
What I actually found to be quite surprising is that Germany did indeed postpone the use of the Nord 2 pipeline indefinitely.
And Chancellor, if we get the next one up, you can see that Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and it made the announcement, he said that the country has ordered the withdrawal of the key documents needed for certification of the pipeline from Russia.
It comes after Russian President Putin declared that he recognises the independence of those two separate states.
So I know that when the heat dies down, the Germans could just turn, it's already built, isn't it, turn the power back on without it even being noticed, given that But realistically speaking, I don't think this heat's going to die down for a while.
If Putin, for example, does commit to a full-scale invasion, I very much doubt that's going to be the end of the matter.
He's going to have to put up with tension from within.
Given the state of the economic, the extent of the economic sanctions, there cannot not be internal consequences for Russia which could trickle down to its people.
I don't think that Peter Hitchens' claim that this could lead to Putin's overthrow I don't think that Peter Hitchens' claim is actually that much of an exaggeration.
You do have to start wondering, given what's at stake, whether Putin is acting as the Machiavellian guy on steroids, if you like, or whether he's actually trying to enact a romanticised vision of what Russia once was and trying to restore it in that image.
Yeah, I mean, I say this because ever since Putin made his public appearance, effectively explaining that Ukraine wasn't a legitimate state, and that was, I think, on the eve of, I think it was Monday evening, NATO has actually, especially in light of Germany's response, seems to have come back to life as a united front.
Again, as propagandistic, I think, as it is, they've actually very much peddled this idea that a full-scale invasion is imminent.
They have nonetheless mobilised And I think that maybe Putin has been momentarily wrong-footed a little bit.
But anyway, speaking of Vladimir Putin, the big baddie bad man was next to issue a response.
And at first, he just exchanged pleasantries with the president of Azerbaijan, saying how much he appreciated their closer relations since the pandemic.
But eventually he turned to address the present matter of concern.
I literally couldn't find the transcript anywhere else, so I had to use the Azerbaijan website.
Of course, I would like to take this opportunity to inform you about what is happening in Ukraine.
As you know, yesterday, Russia decided to recognise the sovereignty of the two people's republics, of the Donbass.
I want to say from the beginning that we are seeing the speculation on this issue about Russia's preparation to the restoration of the empire within the borders of the empire.
We saw it almost from the beginning.
This is not true at all.
That part is very, very important.
That should be taken away.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia accepted the new geopolitical realities and, as you know, it is actively working to strengthen our relations of all countries and independent states in the post-Soviet space.
Even in acute situations such as the settlement of the Nagano-Karabakh conflict, we always acted very carefully, taking into account the interests of all states involved in the process and always tried to reach mutually acceptable solutions.
Unfortunately, after the coup in Ukraine, we do not see this level and quality of relations with Ukraine.
The previous level is gone.
I want to emphasise that this happened after the coup and the illegal seizure of power by those who carried out this coup.
He's referring, obviously, to the Euromaidan protest that led to Yanukovych basically being ostracised or sent into exile, basically, by Ukraine.
But anyway, this is really interesting because the angle of the Western media, particularly Sky News, which I was watching yesterday, was to question Putin's sanity and whether he's even a rational actor at this point.
But his primary motivation, I don't think, is to restore the glories of the motherland, as I've said.
I think it's...
He's clearly, at least this is what I think he's trying to make people take away.
He's saying that it's a rational response to the potential threat of NATO existing as a nuclear state, and a nuclear state that is a member of NATO, and that it's an act of defence rather than explicit aggression.
But there is also the matter of geography, and this was actually pointed out to someone in one of the comments of the video that...
I think it's also very, very far to the east.
Actually, they've got Crimea as well.
It's very, very far to the east.
I don't need to explain the problem with the Arctic Sea, obviously, for a fleet.
But anyway, the question bears as to how long he would be able to make use of that asset and whether he would have a strong enough economy to expand Russia's military to the extent that he would like.
I think that NATO would probably, or the Western Alliance, would clamp down on it far too quick for him to truly utilise it.
But I picked up on something which Putin...
Shortly after, NATO's General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg issued a response, predictably, saying that Moscow's decision to recognise the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic was a serious escalation by Russia and a fragrant violation of international law.
He proceeded to say that it undermines Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, it damages efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and it has grave consequences for European security.
Nothing really unexpected there.
We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and its government, as everyone is saying.
If we scroll down a little bit, he says, Allies are united in their full support for Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders.
We will continue to provide Ukraine with strong political support and allies are providing equipment to help Ukraine defend itself as well as sustained financial support.
NATO is resolute and unified in its determination to protect and defend all allies.
We will continue to do whatever is necessary to shield the alliance from aggression.
Since then, Putin has received permission from Russia's upper house to use military force outside the country, which has, of course, sent more nerves down the direction of the West.
So yes, this article says Russia's Upper House of Parliament has given Putin permission to use military forces outside the country.
Putin asked the country's parliament on Tuesday for permission to do that, to use military force outside, a move that would presage a border attack on Ukraine after the US said an invasion was already underway there.
His letter to the Upper House of Parliament formalised a Russian military deployment to the rebels' regions.
Lawmakers are expected to quickly rubber-stamp Putin's request during a session on Tuesday.
Then, of course, the much-expected statement from President Biden came.
We woke him up from his nap.
Yeah, we woke him up from his nap.
And as with everyone else, he was pretty insistent that this...
If we move on to Biden now...
Yes.
So he was pretty insistent that this marks the beginning of a full-scale...
The US president said that penalties would be slapped on Russia's banks, oligarchs and the country's sovereign debt.
So this is the sanctions that they are going to impose.
He told reporters that Russian troops being ordered to eastern Ukraine after Vladimir Putin, recognizing independence of the two separate regions, marked the beginning of that invasion.
Mr. Biden said that his Russian camp department was setting up a rationale to take more territory by force, and he warned that Moscow would pay an even steeper price if it continued its aggression.
The U.S.'s pressure involves sending 800 U.S. military personnel from Italy to the Baltic region.
He's sending up to eight U.S. F-35 jets from Germany to Sites alongside NATO's eastern flanks, He's strengthening the borders of NATO but not helping Ukraine directly.
Mr Biden said, I'm going to begin imposing sanctions as a response far beyond the steps we and our allies and partners implemented in 2014.
It has been acknowledged that these are far more severe sanctions than the ones that Boris Johnson has issued, interestingly.
And what was actually, this wasn't quoted in what I've got, but he proceeded to say something along the lines of, who does Putin think he is creating two states out of thin air?
Which was probably the most...
I suppose it is a fair point, but Vladimir Putin has his own...
I mean, Callum and I were talking about it yesterday.
Along the sort of Eastern Bloc, there are a lot of countries that are very small and only really recognised as existing by the Russian Federation.
Yes.
Yeah, and most people hadn't even heard.
A lot of people, at least from the comments I've been observing, didn't realise that Donetsk was actually, we knew it was a city.
I don't think anyone regarded it as a region.
No.
No.
And Lehansk, again, I don't think people even knew of that for the simple reason.
It's just not recognised as a sovereign province in the US world order, I suppose.
In the Anglosphere.
The Anglosphere, yeah, there's probably a better way of putting it.
but in Putin's eyes these are both regions that I mean we've seen coverage of Russian flags being waved upon upon news that they had actually entered to keep the peace you can see that there is pro-Russian sentiment there that some very much do see themselves as identify more of Russian culture than their Ukrainian counterparts on the west closer to Kiev those who probably see the Euro Maidens more in contempt
there's it's of course I'm trying to draw a balance here but I honestly don't know that much about the whole that whole area of geopolitics that's going on in the east which is why I don't know enough about it I don't know enough about Ukraine itself to understand the plausibility of it, but Putin has said explicitly, and again, he could be outright lying, I don't know, again, if this is incorrect, please correct me, but he said that he's actually honoured the sovereignty of Ukraine.
Of Ukraine's constitution has not actually crossed the border for it to qualify as an invasion.
He's basically claimed that there is some legal legitimacy for Russia's presence there given the state of those regions.
I don't know where he gets this legitimacy.
It's news to me.
Probably the only thing I could really add was that I saw a long Twitter thread by, do you know, Constantine Kissin from Trigonometry?
Yeah, he's Russian, isn't he?
Yeah, he is Russian, and he put a big thread saying about, you know, just because there's a split within these regions of people who are pro-Russia or anti-Russia doesn't mean that it necessarily says anything prescriptive about what should be happening to those areas in terms of, you know, like military aggression being pushed in. just because there's a split within these regions of people And just because he made the claim of being, oh, it's like people in Ireland speak English.
Does that mean that we should go and invade them?
But I don't know if the parallel is relevant given Eastern politics rather than Western.
It sounds like a bit of a simplification.
Well, I'm just going off the top of my head from what I saw in that book.
No, it's interesting nonetheless.
But very shortly after Biden's statement, another statement was released by Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, questioning who, like Putin himself, questioned Ukraine's sovereignty in Putin's fashion.
So let's have a look at this video.
If we talk about the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity, one of the key documents that all lawyers consider as basic for interpreting the Charter is the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning friendly relations among peoples.
It was adopted in 1970 and has not lost its relevance.
I don't think anyone can claim that the Ukrainian regime, since the 2014 coup d'état, represents all the people living on the territory of the Ukrainian state. represents all the people living on the territory of the Many of Ukraine's regions rejected such an anti-constitutional step that started tragic pages in Ukrainian history.
What happened in Crimea, what happened in eastern Ukraine, shows how much this government, this regime, was rejected by millions of Ukrainians at the time.
So in short, he's saying there is no democratic basis for Ukraine to exist in the form that it currently is, and that a line was very much crossed when the...
When the whole Euro Maiden protests happened that led to Yanukovych basically being purged out.
And of course, the West very much supported the movement, given that they self-identified with NATO's ideals, the European Union, very, very Eurocentric ideals.
And that was, I think, a watershed moment for Putin that, look, this is a country that's probably beyond, irredeemably corrupt.
To the point that it has no legitimacy as a nation-state.
And of course, it's extremely ironic given the irredeemable corruption endemic in Russian politics.
But you get the impression that there is an actual intent to iron that out.
And from that, it does seem as if they're trying to transmit the idea that they are...
At least fascinating with the idea of a full-blown invasion.
But yeah, so that's that.
That's Sergei Lavrov.
Since then, and this is of course since this morning, and news broke around, actually no, sorry, this is 9.20pm last night.
Ukraine had called up some of the country's military reservists to counter the Russians, who ever added there was no need for full military mobilisation.
The US Secretary of State, Andrew Blinken, shortly issued a statement after that.
Mirroring that's already made by Biden didn't really say anything that was oppositional.
The only news that we have in so far as conflict is concerned, other than the obvious fact that the full-scale invasion has not yet happened, is that an explosion happened in the city.
It's alleged to have happened in the city of Donetsk last night.
The West is claiming that Russia has done it and Russia is claiming that Ukraine has done it.
Of course.
No one has made any claims about a false flag, to my knowledge, presumably because it would be repetitive to do so at this point.
As I said, the US has sent 800 troops and 12 helicopters to Poland and with 20 going to the Baltic regions to strengthen the border of NATO.
The ever-useless Liz Trust has since said that whilst a full-scale invasion of Ukraine is yet to happen, there are strong signs that it will.
Thank you very much for that contribution, Liz.
And she says, He has also talked about turning the clock back to the 1990s and Russia has control of vast swathes of Eastern Europe.
Actually, no, Vladimir Putin has not done that at all.
He's actually done the opposite, Liz.
You should probably listen to his statements with the Azerbaijan president yesterday.
Again, it's another huge overstep from where we are.
And, I mean, Putin needs to be called out perhaps for glorifying or perhaps disfiguring Ukraine's history a little bit, given that what he claims that Lenin created it, which I don't think is entirely right.
I think all Kiev is recognized in particular to have a history that far predates Moscow.
But anyway, I'll move on because we need to we need to press on.
The latest is that Ukraine has officially declared a state of emergency.
Zelensky has called up reservists and has urged citizens to leave Russia immediately.
Russia, however, has claimed to have taken in, you'll find this quite funny, I think, to have taken in 93,000 Ukrainian refugees from the Donbass region.
I've got a sneaking suspicion, is that the population of the Donbass region?
It might be.
I feel like that might just be the entirety of the population.
I'm not sure if that's a trolling tactic from the Russian state.
Yeah, we've taken the region and they're all Ukrainian refugees.
I've got that from Russia today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, that unfortunately is where we have to end.
We're just going to see how it plays out.
We'll move on to something a bit lighter.
Music theory.
Music theory, yes.
Well, contrary to what some people might be trying to convince you that you may have heard recently in the past few years, music theory is in fact not racist.
And I thought this would be a good one to do with my good friend Tom, because I'm aware that you did at least three years studying music at university, is that correct?
And I had grade seven in electric guitar.
Yes, I own an electric guitar, I am in a band, and I have a very, very basic idea of music theory, but just for anybody out there watching who may not be aware of what music theory is, because I do think that there may be larger portions of our audience who don't,
Music theory is kind of mistakenly seen by some, often those who don't really know much about music theory, or snobs within certain musical traditions, as rules on how to write to good music, in terms of harmonic structure, the way that a song should crescendo, and all that sort of stuff.
Whereas by people like myself, and I don't know about you, but certainly for me, it's seen as more of a guideline of how certain things that you can do with music will make them sound.
So for instance...
There are notes that you can play on a guitar.
I'm just going to go all from a guitar-based framework here.
On a guitar, there are notes on it and different notes.
If you play, say, an E and go to a G, which are three frets apart, three notes apart from one another, that's called a minor third.
And if you know that it's a minor third, you know what a minor third sounds like in that interval.
Which will create a specific effect.
So if you write a song entirely comprised of minor thirds, it will have a very specific effect as opposed to something else like that.
Do you want to give your explanation just to probably add a bit more and round it off?
It's an indexical way of understanding harmony and just how two different notes or two or more notes actually sound good in coherence to one another.
We universally seem to realise dissonance, for example, as bad, hence why an out-of-tune guitar sounds bad.
But, at the same time, you can also apply it in a place that is musical.
Yes.
Yes, of course, as the Turks do.
Yes.
But, would you say that music theory is a Trojan horse for white supremacy?
I'd like to hear the argument.
So would I. So would I. But absolutely not.
Yeah, absolutely not.
There are many criticisms of the way that you can say that music theory is taught and respected by some in certain fields.
There's a sort of fetishisation of it by certain people who I would assume don't know much about music theory in that if a song has to fit to music theory then it's a good song and if it doesn't then it's a bad song.
Which is wrong because realistically with music if it sounds good to your ear then it is good.
That's the only real scale.
The ear rules supreme.
Yes, the ear is ruler.
But people have been trying to make it seem that music theory is racist, because obviously, of course they have every element of Western music theory, that is, because every element of Western cultural traditions and cultural heritage has to be racist because it's Western, and Western Europeans are white, which is bad, don't you know?
Yeah, they just can't see outside the paradigm of race.
Yeah, so this is a story that's kind of been developing for the past few years.
Here's where it sort of started.
Back in 2020, music theory professor hounded by anti-racist campaign threatens to sue university after they join unconstitutional witch hunt.
So a professor and editor of a music theory journal named for a 19th century German composer has threatened to sue the University of North Texas after student demands for the racist journal to be dissolved launched a school probe.
Timothy Jackson, a UNT professor who founded the school's journal for Schenkerian studies, named for a 19th century German-Jewish composer and musical theorist, Henrik Schenker, is threatening to sue the school after the administration opened an investigation based on is threatening to sue the school after the administration opened an investigation based on a student-led campaign to smear the journal as a
UNT announced a formal investigation into the journal, appointing a panel to examine objectively its editorial processes to see whether standards of best practice in scholarly publication were observed and recommended strategies to improve those processes.
It also reaffirmed UNT's dedication to combating racism on campus and across all academic disciplines.
So, you can see up to there...
They're going, oh, you know, we don't think that maybe they're adhering to our standards, we need to make sure there's standards, and we need to do that to make sure that we don't encourage racism in the university, which is implying something pretty strong there.
It's implying the breach of standards is promoting racism, which is, as we'll come to see, is not true, because you may wonder, why have they started this inquisition into him in the first place?
It's very strange, but we'll find out.
According to Jackson's lawyer, at least one new individual was coerced into signing the student and faculty positions, demanding his exile and his journal's dissolution.
The journal came under attack after a group of graduate students at UNT's division of music theory, music history theory, and ethnomusicology, because that's a field now, ethnomusicology.
What ethnicity is music?
This is just saying jazz equal black music.
That is implicit in the term, isn't it?
It really is.
And there is an argument for you can trace the roots of particular musical genres and sub-genres back to certain peoples, but I'm of the rather old-fashioned at this point opinion that music doesn't belong to any particular culture.
No.
And I actually appreciate...
I love so much different music.
I appreciate blending of different styles.
I'm a big heavy metal fan.
A band I'm a big fan of are called Orphaned Land, who are a progressive death metal band from Israel.
I'm a huge dubstep fan.
Really?
Really?
I was not expecting that.
That is multicultural, as multicultural as it gets, but it's brilliant.
Yeah.
I think you can make new art.
The point I was going to make was that Orphaned Land, they incorporate all of the Western-style heavy metal tropes with traditional Middle Eastern musicianship and scales, which makes it sound really exotic, very interesting.
It's a kind of palette that you don't typically get over here at the West.
And I appreciate, I want that sort of cultural mixing of styles from music, because honestly, it just makes really interesting music.
Yeah.
And I don't want to segregate different genres out, dependent on race.
No, and to make one just inaccessible for others to engage on those grounds.
These are the sorts of people who say, like, Eric Clapton stole clout from black people for playing blues music.
I hate that argument.
in its 12th edition, demanding UNT administration dissolve the journal entirely and hold accountable every person responsible for the direction of the publication, including through discipline and potential removal of faculty who used the JSS platform to promote racism.
The students exaureated the toxic culture at UNT.
The UNT faculty then piled on, publishing their own letter, praising the graduate students' efforts, and slamming the journal as replete with racial stereotyping and tropes, including personal attacks.
Despite acknowledging that not all the journal's contents were offensive, they insisted the epistemic centre of the journal...
So this is the woke mob descending on him, and then his colleagues decide to join in as well.
And just keep beating him with the woke stick.
They still haven't explained the grounds of how these things have come about in the first place.
And trust me, when you hear the explanation, you will be no wiser as to why it is that they've tried to do this.
This is just another case of woke cancel culture, if you ask me.
And honestly, if my colleagues decided to all pile on me in a way like that, I would just quit.
I would just quit, but he's decided not to go that route, and we'll find out in a moment.
But here's why it all happened.
The discourse began with a November presentation by Black Hunter College professor Philip Yule, who declared that music theory suffers from a structural and institutionalized white racial frame.
Yule singled Schenker out for a particular tongue lashing, denouncing the Jewish musical theorist as an ardent racist and German nationalist whose ideas were formulated to benefit members of the dominant white race of music theory.
Schenker, you will charge, believed non-white people were an inferior race.
Music theory instructors, the professor said, must mention his problematic opinions because those racist views infected his musical theoretical arguments.
So what they want is for you to go into your class for music theory and they go, by the way, the guy who came up with these ideas is a racist.
Has Philip Yule ever listened to black music?
Because he'll find that it adheres to the same harmony, actually.
Well, in the West.
In the West.
But he would probably make the argument that that means that black music in the West has been subverted by the white supremacist structure.
Ice Cube, even in his more, shall we say, rebellious phase, had white privilege?
By his own standards?
He was successful perpetuating white supremacy, don't you know?
He must have been.
This is, of course, a massive case of moral relativism, is going into the past and trying to desecrate and discredit our traditions, foundations of our traditions, I'm just trying to...
Point out the contradictions and other such things, but honestly, we know what you're trying to do.
You're trying to subvert us.
But music theory, no matter who wrote it, should be an objective and descriptive field.
Not prescriptive.
It is guidelines that will tell you what effect A particular thing a musical characteristic will have rather than telling you have to do this or else the music sucks.
If you want to contest the standards of theory then by all means do that but surely appeal to a bit less of, well, an obnoxious moralistic framework.
I'll let you continue.
The Schenkerian scholars opted to focus the journal's next issue, after this statement, on responding to Ewell, presenting a variety of thoughts and perspectives on race and music theory.
In his own essay, Jackson accused Ewell of scapegoating Schenker for the paucity of African Americans in the field of music theory, and suggesting that Hunter Professor's words were part of a broader current of black antisemitism.
So this is where it starts to get into a little bit of name-calling on both sides.
Although...
There is the point that is made, because I've read a bit of the actual response that he put out, there is the point that was made that, one, Schenker was not a white supremacist, he was a German supremacist, which is different, and you're trying to apply modern standards of the way that we have discourse about race to how it was back then.
He hated French people, which I respect, but he also hated British people.
So he's a Sivnat, basically.
Yes.
Yes.
Absolutely.
He was also a Jew, and as you can imagine, being Jewish in 1920s and 1930s Germany wasn't a nice time to be.
I don't necessarily think that it's anything to do with anti-Semitism, that they're throwing all of these racist accusations at him, however, so I don't agree with necessarily just labelling it anti-Semitism.
That's just...
Throwing names back and forth.
But, in fact, Jackson said the journal did invite Yule to respond.
Yule denied this, but he also admitted he hadn't read the issue and wasn't interested in doing so.
Surprise, surprise.
Instead, he encouraged his Twitter followers to sign yet another open letter condemning the vitriolic responses published in the journal and claiming that the anti-black racism evident in many of its essays was proof that the structural force of white supremacy still dominated music theory.
Isn't that convenient?
If you disagree with me, you're a racist.
It's the go-to tactic.
It's just the false consciousness argument renewed.
It really is.
I'm sorry, and if you're black and you disagree with me, I guess you've just internalised white supremacy.
Good God.
Epistemic laziness at its worst.
To actually read the content he was encouraging his followers to attack would be participating in my own dehumanisation.
Oh, really?
So he doesn't read the journal.
Concludes it's racist anyway.
Yeah.
Great.
Wonderful.
This is the level of academic thinking that's going on.
The potential bolstering of his own argument that he believes so ardently is an act of his own dehumanisation.
Yep.
And now the original professor, Timothy Jackson, is suing the school.
Move along.
This is much more recent.
This came out just a week or so ago.
So a professor at the University of North Texas, Timothy Jackson, suing the school for punishing him after he pushed back against the idea that music theory is a function of white supremacy.
The lawsuit, first reported by Campus Reform, claims that the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of Professor Timothy Jackson were violated by the school when they removed him from the academic journal he co-founded after he published several articles that students and faculty deemed racist.
The university took action against Jackson after he held a symposium that promoted differing opinions on a speech by Hunter College professor Philip Yule entitled Music Theory's White Racial Frame.
So the university basically just said to him, that's sacred knowledge, you can't question that.
You've been labelled racist.
You can't have a platform to disagree or counteract those accusations.
You just have to suck it up and take it, you obvious racist.
That's awful.
What is the point of a university if you can't disagree with ideas?
That isn't the point of university anymore, is it?
No, it really isn't.
It's to reaffirm your ideas that you already had before you started.
In the speech in the paper you all published, after the speech you all complained that music theory is white and argued that as a black man he feels uncomfortable that the vast majority of music theory professors are white.
Why?
Is there a bias in the hiring practices?
Even if there was a problem with music theory, then surely the colour of the people who are teaching it isn't directly the problem.
If I ascribe race to an abstract concept, and then see the race of the people teaching it matches the race that I forced on it?
If you're a critical race theorist, Then you understand race is a social construct.
So surely all these professors have to do is identify something else and then the problem's resolved.
I mean, the question is as well, with Schenker being Jewish, there is the question as well, if race is a social construct, are Jewish people white?
Yeah, well that's...
That's a really difficult question that I don't really want to get into.
No one wants to dive into it, no I won't, because it's just too inconvenient to It really is, and it will bog us down, but there is that question as well.
Jackson also dismissed the idea that music theory field is racist and suggested African-American women and men typically don't grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued and therefore lack the necessary background.
And that sounds harsh, okay?
That sounds harsh.
But where's the lie?
Where is the lie?
These people, including you all, are calling classical music and classical harmony in music theory whiteness.
So surely their own premise lines up with this judgement.
I'm not exactly seeing many composers coming out of the ghettos.
That's all I'm saying.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing if they're still writing good music.
It's the quality of the music that matters.
Yeah, exactly.
But we're talking about classical music, classical harmony, and you're just calling it racist.
that's how I have to view the world through.
Jackson's lawsuit states on July 31st, 2020, the school released a statement that it launched a formal investigation into his journal.
Jackson was then told by the UNT provost Jennifer Cowley to submit a plan on how to address a report from an ad hoc panel outlining problems with his actions, but a week before the deadline he was given He learned that he had been removed from the journal and that the university funding for the journal and the centre of Shankarian Studies was being halted.
So this is just pure mob justice.
He was involved in a struggle session with his colleagues and faculty, basically, all because of a woke mob creating pressure from the outside.
This is not how a university should function.
No, it's not.
This is not how objective knowledge is learned.
And this is not how you make, I suppose, music and music theory more accessible for those who are passionate about it.
Music scholarships and music theory is already bloody snobbish enough as it is.
Let's be honest.
Don't forget segregating it across racialized.
Musicians already segregate themselves across genre lines.
Jazz snobs and classical kids will not get on.
No, they won't.
And they will...
Equally take turns to say that the music that the other one plays is not real music, and that you're a pleb for even thinking it is.
Yeah, and it's like the producer-singer-songwriter distinction as well.
It is, it is.
And Jackson's lawsuit asks for several demands for judgement, including a declaration from the school that his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated, a request to prevent the Board of Regents from taking action against them, and a request for damages.
Timothy Jackson's goals have been consistent from the beginning, and that is to express academic freedom without fear of retaliation from those who disagree.
It's not much to ask for.
It really isn't.
UNT has failed to protect these rights and has allowed the situation to progress, forcing Jackson to file this suit.
In a statement to Fox News, the UNT said that the federal court is not the place for baseless allegations.
Baseless allegations?
That's what you did.
That's what you did.
You engaged in the cancelling and then took him off his own journal.
Yes, if you are the revolutionary class or racial group, if you like, you don't have to justify that base, do you?
you just immediately inherit more of an epistemic advantage on how society should be structured.
The defendants have formally notified the Court of Appeals that we are appealing to the District Court's decision to deny our motion to dismiss.
Dr Jackson's faculty colleagues have not harmed him in any way, you know, apart from taking away his funding and his journal, and "And federal court is not the place to try the plaintiffs' baseless allegations against them.
Further, neither the Board of Regents nor the university have taken any adverse action against Dr. Jackson." So you can't question us.
"We are above you, peasant," is basically the vibe I'm getting from that whole statement.
It's the only way you can interpret it.
The level, I mean, university I wouldn't recommend going to anyway, but at least there are still people trying to find new knowledge and carve out ideas.
And these people are not interested in that at all.
Well, there is a place for this in music and in society, but it's looking increasingly like that academia is not for that anymore.
I have got some more stuff, so I'll try and rush through.
Move on to the next one, John.
So this is the guy, Phil Ewell.
His...
Blog, I think it's on WordPress, that you can find, that I just want to take some excerpts from, just so that you can see the level of discourse that's going on in his side of academia.
You know, people are trying to talk about music theory, how you can apply it, make good songs if you stick to some rules, blah blah blah.
And this guy's going, "Confronting racism and sexism in American music theory" by Phil Yule.
And he states at the bottom of this page, "It is my hope that they can instigate constructive dialogue so that we can begin to make real anti-racist/anti-sexist change in music theory." This guy is not only an anti-racist, he's a cook.
Yes.
Because he's a male feminist.
Yes.
That's all I can say about him there.
Move along, and I've got some excerpts from just this big piece here.
So my turn towards race scholarship was born of two chance events.
In 2014 to 2016, as an untenured assistant professor, I went through a harrowing and bruising battle for reappointment and then tenure and promotion at Hunter College in New York City.
For almost two years, as time wore on, and as I wrote one legal memorandum after another, in defence of myself, it became abundantly clear to everyone involved...
That the efforts of those who sought my dismissal were not based on what I was doing as a professor, but rather on the dark colour of my skin.
He provides no examples to back up these claims.
Of course he doesn't.
He doesn't quote anything.
He doesn't even refer to any maybe documents that he's got left over.
No.
He just says it.
They don't have to.
They're lived experience.
It's enough to justify the claim.
Yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous.
Dismiss everything this man is saying immediately.
He's a paranoid narcissist, as far as I can tell, just from that statement.
But then, but then, Donald Trump was elected to the US presidency!
Gotta throw a nice sprinkle of TDS in there.
On the heels of America's first black president, these two chance events are summed up by Carol Anderson with two words.
White rage.
Black advancement triggers white rage.
Ugh.
Does it really...
Isn't this just a quote from Robin DiAngelo?
You mention her.
And this rage knows no political party, nor does it limit itself to certain geographical regions.
White persons in music theory are virtually all left of centre in terms of politics.
Interesting that he admits that.
And it's easy for such persons to think that white rage is often limited to those who are right of centre.
Thanks for the stereotype there.
This is a grave mistake, as Robin DiAngelo often states in her book, White Fragility.
Don't listen to this man.
He's crazy.
He's taking Robin DiAngelo seriously.
Ultimately, once I realised how whiteness works hand in glove with maleness in order to suppress both whiteness, non-whiteness, and non-maleness, I began to read feminist scholarship and authors such as Sarah Ahmed, Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kate Mann, among others.
After all, white supremacy is the child of patriarchy and not its parent.
So this man has radicalised himself, reading nonsense, Feminist, post-structural, critical, racery literature.
He's just made a philosophy out of the worst pick-and-mix imaginable.
This is music theory.
This is music's Colin Kaepernick right here.
I hate it.
I hate it.
In this and five upcoming blog posts, I draw on themes from recent work in hopes of achieving a more equitable music theory.
And who else does he quote?
Who else does he cite in this damning piece of academic genius?
Surprise me.
In How to Be an Anti-Racist, race scholar Ibram X. Kendi offers four key terms for my argument, and he goes through Ibram's ridiculous ideas that racist policies are something that produce racial inequities, even completely, as we all know, taking intent out of the idea of racism.
Completely ridiculous.
I hate that framing.
An American music theory is based on the racist idea that whites are superior to people of colour, a sentiment stated explicitly by significant musical theorists like François Josephetti and Henrik Schenker in the 19th and early 20th century.
Once again, he doesn't actually provide any links or quotes to any of this.
He just states it.
There are links and quotes that you can take from Schenker where he has a few anti-black comments.
There are also pages and pages of work about anti-French and anti-British, ironically white people, but he's not going to bring them up, is he?
No.
For those reasons, over 90% of music theory's full-time employees are white, over 98% of the musical examples in our textbooks were written by whites, and 100% of the music theorists discussed in typical classrooms for core classes are white.
That's the reason.
There is no connective tissue in here.
Did he just quote Richard Spencer?
I mean, he might have done, because honestly, if Richard Spencer had said that, he'd be bragging.
These people...
This is where a certain level of horseshoe appears, where it's like, these people agree with the hard racial collectivists on the other side of the aisle.
They just say it's a bad thing, whereas Richard Spencer...
You're right, actually...
You're actually right!
Racist is not, as Richard Spencer argues, a pejorative!
LAUGHTER I can't believe he's agreeing with Richard Spencer!
This is how far the critical race theorists have gone.
They're kissing cousins.
That's actually the best term for it.
But this kind of thinking leads to this, if we move along.
New York Times, how to make orchestras more diverse.
End blind auditions.
We need to racially discriminate so that we can make a more equitable orchestra.
Which doesn't look great when contrasted against how it was only nine years ago in this Guardian article.
How blind auditions help orchestras to eliminate gender bias.
So he wants more black men, but women...
Go away.
You're not oppressed enough.
This is what it leads to.
There is a Substack article from John McWater talking about this and responding to it, but I don't really have time to go over this.
I just wanted to point out that these ideas get started in academia, where they're obscure, they're weird.
Weird academics you've never heard of argue about them until they catch on and get to this level of exposure.
This music video...
By leftist cook lord himself, Wet Wipe Adam Neely.
Music Theory and White Supremacy, which has almost over 1.5 million views.
The original title for this, he changed very, very quickly, was Music Theory is Racism, which he then changed to Music Theory and White Supremacy when he probably realised, hold up, this is going to get me in a lot of trouble.
Just how dumb it sounded.
Yeah, and he references the Timothy Jackson case in this.
He interviews Phil Ewell directly.
He tries to make the assertion, the implication, that some of his old university professors at Berkeley University of California, one of the most liberal universities out there, might have been secret white supremacists.
He doesn't seem to realise that he's actually self-reporting because his music channel is all about music theory, meaning that he has been a secret agent of white supremacy this whole time.
But the comments are appalling.
They're so depressing because everyone's just agreeing with him.
Everyone agrees with him.
And the point, the annoying thing is that he brings up a good point, which is that music theory can be improved by expanding ourselves outside of a Western kind of snobbish framework and going, well, what other music theory is there that we can incorporate into the music that we play to make it a bit more interesting?
But he has to frame it from the perspective of we only do it this way because it's racist.
That completely undermines his whole point.
That ruins it because...
The worst thing about all of this is you can make good points.
You can say stuff that I agree with, that I and many others will agree with, but when you frame it in the way that you do from a racial lens, it undermines that point and makes it ideological and makes it partisan.
It ruins everything.
It really does.
But the thing is, I can engage with people.
And content who hate me, because Adam Neely would probably call me a white supremacist.
I just don't feel the need to needlessly smear them when they do so for parroting these racist ideas.
And in concluding, I agree with your point, but awful straw man arguments and purposeful misinterpretations won't get me on side.
It's an incredibly narrow representation of the whole matter, incredibly woke, and I think, bringing it all together, it's oh so American.
And that's about that.
I've gone way, way over, so let's get into the video comments.
Failed pushes for democracy in 19th century European states led to the rule of authoritarianism.
Laws were enacted to systemically persecute certain sections of society and blame them for the failure of governments, which made it easier to convince the public to ignore basic morality and accept brutal behaviours otherwise distasteful to them.
By Trudeau pushing wokeism, dismantling the Westminster system, buying out the media and indoctrinating the police, Canadians tend to become not ideological warriors, but just ordinary men with grossly miscalibrated moral compasses.
Sounds interesting.
Yeah, it does.
We talked about that yesterday, so it's good to hear a bit more about that book.
Hey fellow Lotus Eaters, DJ Chi here.
So basically I'm a commercial diver by trade.
I've been going through diesel mechanics school.
What I do as a profession is pile driving and dock building.
So I get to use all these skills in driving cranes and working boats.
And I get to work on these beautiful lakes here in Seattle, Washington.
Nice work.
That's great.
I imagine being on the lakes is the best part of Seattle in Washington, but that looks really cool.
The best part of Seattle, arguably.
Yeah, I do like the idea of just being out in the water, just getting on with it, you know.
There's something peaceful about it.
Yeah, I'd love to go fishing again sometime when my conscience for fishing goes.
I've never been fishing, so I've never experienced the heartbreak of smacking its head against the boat.
I did love it, but ever since I've...
Again, this is going to sound really, really...
Some would probably say gay.
But ever since I owned my own goldfish, for some reason, I just couldn't...
I had a conscience about dragging fish out of the water for fun.
I didn't do it to ease.
I did it.
I was a carp fisherman.
My point is, it's not my fish.
I don't care.
But then again, I've never done it, so...
Anyway, let's move on.
So the great thing about having a super woke sister is that she's a great metric for me to see if this woke stuff is even hitting its target audience, which is not me, it's her.
And well, she hates the lesbian bad woman TV show.
She has her original comic books and likes it.
She hates the TV show and she's really into Lord of the Rings.
She hates the new teaser.
She hates it.
She's the target audience.
She's into the Vogue stuff.
She's into the diversity.
She's into LGBTQ. And she hates it.
Even the Vogue people hate it.
Good, good, excellent.
Bring them over.
Was that your sister in the background by the door, I must ask?
Did you lock the door just in case?
And I can only really say about the Lord of the Rings stuff.
I think that people, outside of any sort of woke ideological lens they can view things through, they know deep down, secretly, that they're kind of forcing it into a position where they have to like it.
Mm-hmm.
And when it's something that people do really enjoy, really, really love to the level that people love Lord of the Rings, the woke ideology, the woke framing, just falls to the wayside because realistically they go, this isn't what I love, this isn't what I remember, I can't keep lying to myself about it.
I do think the tide very much turned after The Last Jedi on this.
There was certainly division.
I sensed a real...
A real awakening, I think.
This was an observation made by liberals as well, basically saying that, look, there are quite clearly narratives underway that have nothing to do with the narrative of the story, and it was very much collapsed.
All of the value in the story was collapsed into that.
The second that you start...
Because let's just be honest.
It's having political allegiances to the way that a movie is kind of structured and filmed is not new.
But the way in which the wokists are doing it is quite unique.
It's so transparent.
Yes.
It removes any other element of depth to a narrative.
As in that they're literally seeking to destroy the thing that people love.
It was definitely the first moment...
Coming out of the cinema for The Last Jedi was like I'd just been slapped in the face because I hated that film from the second I finished watching it.
It was awful.
But I think it woke me up a little bit because I knew it was a terrible film.
It's god-awful terribly written.
I'm a big fan of Mauler.
I really like his videos deconstructing the whole thing.
But it was seeing people defend it on purely ideological terms that made me go, something's up here.
And from there, the pipeline just sucked me in.
What was the name of the director again?
Ryan?
Ryan Johnson.
It honestly felt like I had been...
It felt like he'd been pissing on my face for two and a half hours.
That's to put it nicely.
Let's move on to the next one.
Why are men still explaining things to women?
Why are women still retarded?
LAUGHTER The eternal question!
And I don't think we'll ever get an answer, because you never get a straight answer out.
Every Friday night, if we don't go out, that is.
Let's move on.
So I had a quick recommendation, a Stuka pilot by Rudel.
He's the most successful pilot in the history of warfare, as far as I know.
And it's basically about his experiences on the Eastern Front, and just how things worked there, and how ridiculous they were.
And it helps that he's the embodiment of German autism.
And of course, Unfortunately, the book isn't actually like a revisionist read or anything.
None of it really contradicts historical events.
It's actually very tame, all things considered.
So it's actually a pretty good read.
And yes, there is an adaption for The Weeds.
Isn't there something intrinsically autistic about Germany anyway?
You can identify this in the structure of their language.
It's a point that Josh has made a number of times.
He says that Germans are autistic because of their language.
On the subject of music, for example, you know what we understand as wind instruments are?
The German equivalent apparently translates to blowing instruments.
I don't know the exact German word, but that is apparently what they call it.
Oh, they've got dirty minds, those Deutschmen.
Let's go on.
So I want to get your guys' thoughts on this.
I was having a conversation earlier with my dad, mainly about overbearing safety regulations and things like motorsports.
And I can understand you need to have enough safety to be able to catch a car going into a wall at 200 miles an hour or so.
But I think there also comes a point where your safety regulations go way too far and, you know, the drivers who are involved need to know the risks.
Your guys' thoughts?
I would still...
As an avid F1 fan, I would still remove the bloody halo because it looks so bloody ugly.
No, seriously, you know what you're getting into.
It's essential to the aesthetics of sport that these drivers are risking death to actually get ahead of one another, or at least, you know, flirting with death.
As close as possible.
That is part of what makes it beautiful.
Being on this trajectory that makes it constantly safer...
Is eventually going to come to the detriment of the sport itself.
It's going to end up go-cars, isn't it?
It is.
And go-cars is really fun, don't get me wrong.
Yeah.
Look, the unsafe element is something you can never, and you never should, overcome.
Of course, we don't want people to die unnecessarily, but let's just understand the beauty of motorsport.
We're going to get more and more snakes eating things now, because I don't mind.
*music* The music is just perfect as well.
I don't know what it is.
One, there's something shockingly cute about snakes that I just think is the weird little faces.
I love them.
And two, it's just cool.
There's something primal about seeing just a predator like that just chomp something, unhinge its jaw and chomp something down full.
We'll make this the last video because then we need to go to the comments.
Well, we'll do the video comments as...
Yeah, this is the last one.
There you go.
Tony D and Little Joan with the El Futuro house.
These houses were built all over the world, and they looked like flying saucers.
This one was converted at the Wildwood Boardwalk into a ride that spun around.
It was the Planet of the Apes ride when I rode it as a kid.
Instead of a haunted house, they had Planet of the Apes characters.
It was also turned into a Star Trek ride and a Star Wars ride.
They tried to sell it not too long ago, but nobody bought it, so the rumor is they're bringing back the ride.
I'd love to go on that.
Interesting, yeah.
Looks awesome.
Right, I think that's on to written comments now.
So the first ones are mine, so I'll just go through.
Student of History says, Chief Social Engineer of the WEF province of Great Britain Chris Whitty denounces Boris Johnson acknowledging of the consumer tax cows' ability to think on their own terms.
We are really getting into this sort of level of, I don't know what to refer to it as, a corpo-authoritarianism like that, because honestly, that statement feels like it's only a few years away from not even being parody.
I know.
I can't believe it.
Chet Enemy of the State Chism says, I'm so happy to hear that things have turned around in your country and some sense has returned, as am I. Thank you.
You can easily tell that none of this was ever about COVID. When those of us in healthcare saw what was on the horizon, we asked for help and resources.
We never received either.
Instead of the government abused us and everyone else said it was for our benefit.
You were treated like prisoners and we were treated like slaves.
They made it illegal for us to do our jobs and actively took steps to harm people and deny COVID patients the help they desperately needed.
It's been two years now and have they improved ventilation or installed HEPA filters in your children's schools?
Likely not.
And I think we're still quite a bit far away from early treatment as well, which people like Peter McCullough have criticised the government action response taken around the world for the fact that there was, apart from in a few states, maybe in India and here and there,
There was no effort made on a global scale to get early treatment sorted, and that would involve things, and I can say this now that we're outside of the YouTube sensor sphere, stuff like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other such things like that were very effective.
But we weren't able to do early treatments because it was all about the vaccines, and we're never going to be repaid for how damaging that was.
No, never.
How many lives we probably lost of people who were vulnerable because we just said, come back when you need a ventilator.
It's awful.
Shocking.
Christian Anderson says, I disagree with your pessimism.
I think a lot of eyes worldwide have been opened by the government's power-hungriness.
I believe a lot more people will take to the streets a lot faster if they try to pull this shit again.
I would agree, but at the same time, because of how, I don't know, globally centralised a lot of institutions are nowadays, we can recognise from the way that Canada's been treating the trucker protesters...
And Australia.
And Australia too.
And Australia.
But being part of the Anglosphere and one of the more recent ones, I think Canada's a good example.
These people haven't done anything wrong, realistically, other than maybe blockade some of the border entrances.
They've just gone to Parliament and honked their horns, for which they got a class-action lawsuit from a person who I'm pretty sure doesn't actually exist, either that or is a Chinese agent, if you look into it.
And they've had their bank accounts frozen.
They've been threatened.
They've been lied about.
They've been branded white supremacists and Nazis, including the indigenous people.
They've been trampled on by horses.
And the Ottawa police have said that they will hound them even after these processes are done, basically like the Jan 6 people, and that they will steal your pets and probably shoot them if you don't return to collect them in eight days.
It's horrible.
So...
As much as people are more awake to all of this stuff now, the government still have an outsized amount of power to be able to inflict punishments on the rest of us for stepping out of line.
That's what I don't like.
The only reason it's worked so well in England without a protest is because our leaders are spineless.
And honestly, that's a blessing.
One more from this one.
Student of history, the British government finally accepts reality.
And also, we the government will be returning your rights and freedoms as a filthy yank.
I find that phrase repugnant.
As do I. Let's go on to your comments.
Yes.
So, sanctions on Russia.
Student of history says a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would be insane even if the West weren't saber-wattling in its support.
One, the Russian economy, especially with sanctions from somewhere between 40-50% of the world economy, can't afford a full-scale military foreign occupation of a large country.
Yeah.
Two, this would cause a decade-long insurgency, most likely funded by the West.
That will be expensive in men and treasure.
Yeah.
And the Russians and the Ukrainians have a similar relationship to the Anglosphere countries, and invading them would be as distasteful to us as it is to the Russian people.
I actually very much agree with that, and I don't think this alliance that Russia has with China is as binding as people, and particularly the West is assuming at this point.
So that's a very good, all those points I agree with.
Anonymous Man says that the reason there is pro-Russian sense for the Eastern Ukraine is that they genocided the original Ukrainian population and replaced them with Russian colonists during the Soviet days.
That is true.
Yeah.
And Charlie the Beagle says, funny thing about the COVID narrative here in Ireland is that it was quietly shelved since the whole Russian-Ukrainian situation developed.
But it was interesting that there was an hour-long program that documented the domestic abuse women suffered during the lockdown.
Not once at any point was it ever mentioned or hinted that the lockdowns were a contributing factor.
Lockdowns have been a contributing factor to a lot of bad stuff.
Yes, 100%.
Kevin Fox says, Stammer in favour of banning Russian media.
Well, that's an effing surprise.
A lefty wants voices cancelled.
Yeah, I think we, of course, there are things that we don't agree on.
But this is something that we are, I think, We're all pretty united in the fact that we shouldn't be censoring voices like that.
That doesn't make us apologists for the Russian state.
It just means we're in favour of media pluralism.
And they are, I'm afraid, or many of these issues, actually a far better and reliable news source.
I don't care if they're funded by the Russian state or not.
It's objectively true that they're actually a bit more truthful than Sky News.
Not GBU, sorry.
They call there a lot of their news with what I would call editorialising.
Yeah.
But it's still more accurately represented, and let's be honest, it's not like our own media doesn't do a lot of editorialising, like you or I do on this podcast as well.
I said this yesterday on the Russian-Ukrainian topic.
Economic sanctions didn't help elevate rising tensions during World War II. They only escalated conflict.
Why will they work now?
Russia may not be Japan, but America is not completely led either.
Or the West in general, for that matter.
But Russia, I find, more convincing to avoid conflict.
They instigate it.
China, on the other hand, I think there's meant to be an ellipsis there.
I mean, not sure what to make of that, but...
I honestly don't...
I think Vladimir Putin and Russia will be the biggest losers if they're going to commit to a full-scale invasion in the long term.
I don't know enough about this whole area of geopolitics, so I can't really contribute much.
Yeah, and I really think that China will not come to their aid on this matter.
They've got no economic incentive to do so, to my knowledge.
And, well, they've already prepared.
They quite clearly have been making preparations for the sanctions anyway.
Anyway, music theory isn't racist comments.
Oh, okay.
Bass tape with the first comment saying, Harry, what's your band's name?
Tell us.
No.
Um, Bass State, I really appreciate the question, but I don't want to be that guy who uses this platform to plug my band.
Also, potentially, I don't want to get my band in trouble for me being on the podcast, because we are not unified in our opinions about certain things, which is great, because they know I'm on this, but I don't want to get them in trouble for anything I say here.
Could make five gigs awkward.
But, basically, if you are interested, if you've got Twitter, DM me at Harry Lotus Eater, and I'll be happy to tell you what my band's name is there, instead of just plugging it on the website.
I don't want to be that guy.
Zerank says, if music theory is white supremacist, then the originators of blues and jazz are the most supreme white supremacists there ever existed.
Yeah.
Blues, you could make an argument not, because blues is based on the pentatonic scale, which is a crossover from indigenous African music, when the slaves were brought over, to America, and then sort of mixed with other stuff.
Jazz, I would say definitely jazz, a lot of jazz is rooted deeply, deeply within music theory, and the people who are jazz cats and jazz masters are people who will know music theory inside and out.
The original Delta Blues musicians, though...
Were black slaves, weren't they?
They were.
That's where the music came from.
That's why it's so ironic that the music harmony that even they kind of cherished, and of course contested to some point, ended up being collapsed into this dialectic of white supremacy.
The whole thing's ridiculous.
Drew Doomhan says you don't even need music theory to write great music.
Absolutely right.
Hendrix, Cobain, Slash, Neil Peart, and so many more are self-taught musicians who don't use much theory when they created music.
Well, with Hendrix, I would say he used a lot of theory, he just didn't know that he was doing so, because theory just applies to certain rules and harmonic structures and things, and Hendrix adhered to a lot of them, he just may not have necessarily known that that's what he was doing, because he was following his ear.
Yeah, that's the thing.
If anything, it's proof that it isn't racist.
Because even if you state this in a framework, it's there.
Your ear recognises this, and that can't be for no reason.
Or is that performative too?
At best, music theory is a guide to help you create music that you can bend and break the rules as you see fit.
As you just said, use your ear.
if it sounds good to your ear and doesn't adhere to music theory, go with it because that's all that matters.
And finally one from Freewill2112.
Music theory is not racist, but it's simply an understanding of harmonic structure and the relationship between chords and scales.
They only attack it because it's another avenue for sociopathic prats to show us how retarded they are.
Excellent point, Freewill.
You and I should listen to some Rush together sometime.
And that, unfortunately, is where we're going to have to end, but that was an excellent final point.
Again, thank you very much for watching.
We will be back at 1pm tomorrow.
It has been a pleasure to present this podcast with you, Harry, today.
We will see you tomorrow.
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