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May 25, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #400
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 25th of May 2021.
Today is episode 400, which is 20 squared and about the number of EU bureaucrats it takes to change a lightbulb.
But today we will be talking about the prediction of monkeypox by Bill Gates.
He always seems to be able to tell the future, he does.
We'll talk about Ricky Gervais' appalling jokes, which have shocked many a person online, and we shall also be covering the mandatory black history training for UK police, who are now going to become scholars of some sort.
Yes, that's going to be fun, isn't it?
Yes, so let's get straight on into it.
What have you got to tell us about Mr Gates?
Alright then, well it seems that monkeypox is now a thing that is drawing the attention of the media and people outside of the media as well, because it seems to be spreading outside of Central and Western Africa, which is where it is normally to be found, and it's very intriguing that when you start to look into it, It seems that Bill Gates seems to have immense predictive powers because he was involved in some things predicting that such an outbreak might occur last year.
Before we go any further, I'd just like to draw your attention to a recent article, well, from a few months ago, that Josh and I collaborated on.
It was Deep Think number three called Do Antitrust and Competition Laws Prevent Monopolies?
Now, this was taking a deep dive into economic principles of whether the government can actually prevent the buildup of monopolies or whether they actually help them.
Spoiler alert, they only help to create monopolies.
But this is all important primarily because Bill Gates is only in the position that he is right now, primarily because the government back in 2000 or 1999, I think, threw a...
A massive antitrust lawsuit at Microsoft.
And wouldn't you know, it was only after that lawsuit that went through and got them told off for their monopolistic practices that Bill Gates started throwing thousands and, well, thousands of millions of dollars into lobbying the US government.
So if you want to learn more about that, check that out.
We also did a contemplations on monopolies as well, so you can check either of those out for a bit more context.
Let's get into it.
It's a bit of a racket though, isn't it?
I mean, in Britain, the story I've heard is that the government basically went to Bill Gates or to Microsoft and asked them what British children need to learn in IT. I would not be surprised.
And Microsoft thought very hard about it and came back and said they need to learn how to use Microsoft products.
Oh, what a surprise, eh?
And I'll just say, despite what the traditional knowledge would have people assume, it turns out that big government is the biggest boon imaginable for big business and big corporate interests, which is why it should be stopped at all costs.
Anyway, let's get on to it.
So, Monkeypox has...
It's been found in the UK. It's been found in East Yorkshire.
And I'll just read through a little bit of this BBC article.
So they have been detected in East Yorkshire, public health officials have said.
Across the UK, there have been 71 confirmed cases of the rare little-known disease.
Zoe Stevens from East Riding Public Health said it was inevitable that the virus would circulate around the country, which is contradicted a little bit by some of the other information that I've got coming up.
And unfortunately, she says, with any of the viruses, people move around the country.
We're all jumping in our cars, jumping on trains.
So these viruses do get to every area eventually, which is just the nature of them.
She also added, what we do need to be concerned about is the fact that this virus has such a long incubation period.
So that can be anywhere between 5 to 21 days.
So it sounds somewhat alarming, doesn't it?
I will also point out on the alarming note...
A lot of the photos that are being used to cover, to head monkeypox articles are not actually of monkeypox.
Oh, really?
There are many other pox diseases, like smallpox and so on, and things which look very dramatic, obviously, to get your attention and get clicks.
But I've seen a number of doctors and spoken to a few who have been quite exasperated at the widespread use of photos of some horrible skin conditions which have nothing to do with monkeypox.
Yes, well, I'm aware that they are sort of...
Conditions like monkeypox and smallpox and other such things are related because they're poxes, but obviously they are going to be different and show different symptoms potentially.
And going into it, I'll just carry on.
The UK Health Security Agency said many of the 71 people infected so far have been gay, bisexual, or men who have had sex with men.
And it's been asking these groups in particular to be aware of the symptoms.
Especially if you're those men who have sex with men but aren't gay or bisexual.
Yes, that might be concerning.
But what this has led many people to believe is that this is a sexually transmitted disease, which it isn't.
It seems to be mainly transmitted through close contact, and it's just because of the habits of certain subcultures across the UK, of people who are much more likely to come into close contact with one another, that this seems to be spreading through these communities, so to speak.
They carry on.
The virus, which is usually a mild infection, so this is what monkeypox is for everybody, spreads through close contact with scabs on the skin, bedding, and towels used by an infected person, and through their coughs and sneezes.
Monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted disease, and experts have stressed the illness does not affect one community more than another, so there should be no stigma, and we know we can always trust the experts.
Symptoms include a fever, headache, muscle aches, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills, and exhaustion.
A rash can develop, often beginning on the face, then spreading to other parts of the body.
The rash changes and goes through different stages, a bit like chickenpox, before finally forming a scab, which later falls off.
So, judging by that doesn't sound terrible.
It sounds like a pretty typical fever, except obviously you develop the rash with some scabs and other such things as well.
But it doesn't sound like anything to particularly worry about.
And under normal circumstances, I wouldn't be worried about it, and I doubt anybody would be worried about it.
But it has got a lot of people thinking that given the...
Massive reaction, won't qualify it one way or the other, to COVID-19 that happened from early 2020 onwards, that this might be the kickstart for a new series of lockdowns.
And I thought we'd just examine a little bit of that, because the funny thing is that if you go here, we've had monkeypox show up in the UK before.
This is an article from June 2021.
One, so last year, and it was just a little one where Matt Hancock announced that monkeypox had arrived in the UK, but you can go back as far, I think, as 2017 at least, possibly 2016 and 2015, to see articles talking about how monkeypox had arrived in the UK numerous times.
So it is something that sporadically shows up here.
People are worried that, oh, maybe it's more infectious now due to the fact that it seems to be spreading outside of Central and Western Africa at a...
Faster rate than it had previously.
But, thankfully, even what I would consider to be, I don't know, leftist shill publications, if I'm perfectly honest, like NPR, have actually been recommending caution on this.
Recommending not everybody panic.
They point out here, Monkeypox isn't like COVID-19, and that's a good thing.
I mean, this is the one time that I think that the...
and that's a good thing fixed at the end of it is possibly warranted.
But they go on to say monkeypox typically requires very close contact to spread, as the BBC said, most often skin-to-skin contact.
The current outbreak has seen some different patterns, particularly that the rash begins in the genital area first and may not spread across the body.
And monkeypox and smallpox are both members of the orthopox family of viruses.
Smallpox, which once killed hundreds of millions of people every year, was eradicated in 1980 And the smallpox vaccine itself that we've already got is actually already 85% effective against monkeypox, according to the WHO, although that effectiveness wanes over time.
So by the sounds of it, by the information they've given there...
Anybody who's worried about monkeypox should be able to go off and get a smallpox vaccine if they want.
There's no need for any greater intervention into people's day-to-day lives or restrictions of people's liberties.
We can all just go on as it is.
And that's what I'm hoping is going to be the response to that, but shock that I'm not particularly infatuated or trusting of our institutions as they currently stand.
Because Peter Sweden...
Has announced that apparently Moderna is already testing a potential monkeypox vaccine, and he asks the question, will we get monkeypox passports?
And I don't know where he's got this information from, but he does seem to be generally quite good at finding the cutting edge of a lot of these breaking news, so I don't think there's any reason to not believe him here.
And the media has already started, along with the NPR, to do a debunk of a lot of the...
The conspiracy theories that are going around it.
And I just thought I'd bring this one up, this Daily Mail article, primarily because the last thing that they debunk is relevant to the rest of the segment, which is that they say that Bill Gates has nothing to do with this.
Bill Gates didn't predict that it would happen.
He's not got anything to do with this.
What he actually did was say that there might be a smallpox outbreak.
It has nothing to do with monkeypox.
He's not telling the future.
future he's not setting this up they say now they have wrongly accused him of being a terrorist because he warned of the possibility of a smallpox terror attack in november 2021 others have called for him to be arrested smallpox is generally genetically similar to monkeypox but the two viruses different most claims are based on a false pre-existing narratives around the billionaire whose foundation has heavily invested in developing vaccines that may be true but as you have examined before that's not all that bill gates is heavily invested heavily invests in virtually
Yes, you will be damned to find an organisation, especially an international organisation, from anywhere in the world that doesn't have Bill Gates with his fingers in the pie somewhere.
He has hundreds of millions in every developed country, from Japan to France to Britain to the USA to Canada, in all sorts of different fields.
Every sector that you can think of is in it.
And so it's almost like deniability by monopoly.
By simply having everything, you can't be accused of partiality.
It's like, no, I invest in everything equally.
Now, of course, he doesn't.
These are well chosen.
And you have to wonder, he can't be sitting there picking all of these stocks himself, because there are so many of them.
There is clearly a team of people involved in doing this.
Who is that team?
What motivates them?
And so on.
There's a story there, if someone can get to the bottom of Yes, these are interesting questions to ask.
But the primary point is that Bill Gates has a lot of fingers in a lot of different pies across the world.
And also, the statement that they're making there, which is that, oh, they say that he made a warning against smallpox in November 2021, is not actually what people are referring to when they're saying that Bill Gates predicted this.
But before we get further into that...
So to just look at this, the thing that's actually worrying me a little bit is that countries like Belgium are already introducing quarantine for people who have got monkeypox.
So Belgium has become the first country to introduce a mandatory quarantine for people with monkeypox.
Those with symptoms will need to isolate until their souls subside, which is expected to be around three weeks.
So already we're starting to get the government restrictions in some countries come back.
Obviously this is not the scale of full-on lockdown.
Yeah, and I must point out that the real crime with the former lockdowns was that it was essentially quarantining of healthy people, whereas this is quarantining of people who are demonstrably monkeypox cases, not like potential monkeypox cases, not travellers from countries with people who've had monkeypox, but actual monkeypox cases.
This is true.
But once again, when the government starts to step in, I become very worried, especially given that Germany has started to mirror this as well.
They've started to recommend that people isolate for 21 days, but they have not come in with the official restriction, primarily because if monkeypox is as nasty as these pictures are trying to make it out to be, I wouldn't want to be seen in public looking like that, would you?
I think you would be able to trust most people just out of pure shame to not want to go into public, and especially not to rub up against people in public while they're at it.
I think you overestimate the standards of the general population.
I mean, maybe in Germany, but in England I'd like to think we're a little bit more proper than that, personally.
But let's go on to the actual predictions.
So, despite what the Daily Mail has said, the thing that people are referring to is not necessarily that Bill Gates warned against smallpox in 2021 in November.
It's more referring to this, which was the NTI paper, the Nuclear Threat Initiative paper, which was done in conjunction with the Munich Security Conference, where they were doing a tabletop fictional investigation Yes,
centralization.
Bill Gates has shown up a number of times at the World Economic Forum with Klaus Schwab so we can tell exactly where his agenda is going.
But the thing with this is that if we go to the next link, John?
Sorry about this, guys.
If we just go over to the next link so we can see further down on the page.
Yeah, if we just look here, you can see a Dr.
Chris Elias is involved in this, and he is the president of the Global Development Division of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
So once again, interesting how that foundation in particular finds themselves involved in funding literally everything, including the NIH and other such organizations in America.
And if we scroll down...
Whether this is cause for concern or not, it is very interesting how this scenario that they've got here.
Attack, May 15th, 2022.
The scenario, monkeypox outbreak in Brinia.
Yeah, so they use fictional countries and a fictional planet for this simulation.
They do use a fictional country for these simulations, but I think for a lot of people the idea that the timing of this and the actual specification of Monkeypox is just a little bit too close for comfort.
It was one day out, basically, between this becoming a news story and this report in here, which is very close.
It is very close.
Obviously not to say that this has actually been released by him or anything, but it does seem very interesting.
Technically, if it's within one day, then you have like a 1 in 120 chance of that happening.
That's fair.
From one study.
But also the actual designation of monkeypox as well, as being specific.
So it's not referring to smallpox...
And of course, all of the responses that they want are national responses, effects of early action.
They're talking about, like I say, greater globalized institutions.
And the prediction when they get to December 1st is that there will be 3.2 billion cases and 271 million deaths, which in this scenario...
I don't know what the rest of the parameters of the scenario is, but that seems pretty doom-mongering to me.
Well, that's the thing.
This is a scenario.
So if you're one of the people at the event, basically you only hear the information as it's coming out.
So you don't get to hear, okay, move two, this is what happened, move three, this is what happened.
You don't know whether the scenario is going to be move one, okay, and then that subsides, but something else comes in or something like that.
So it's designed to keep the players on their toes, basically.
Okay, very interesting.
And then if we move along from this, there's just everything else that Bill Gates has been involved in.
For instance, at the most recent World Economic Forum meet-up, he had this to say where he's talking about how in 10 years we'll be able to diagnose an entire population within a month, which is of course going to involve massive government overstep and invasions into people's lives.
Exactly, it'll be the end of privacy, permanent medical surveillance.
Yeah, well let's just check out the clip of what he says here.
We, you know, we're lucky if this had been 10 years ago, some of these vaccine technologies did not exist.
If it comes 10 years from now, we should have far, far better diagnostic technology.
That is, be able to scale up every country within a month to diagnose their entire population.
We should have much better therapeutics, some of which will be pathogen independent.
And then, you know, as we do come up with vaccines, we want vaccines that are infection-blocking in long duration.
At the end of the day, for me, whether or not he's doing this all with an altruistic purpose in mind, whether or not it's something that he's wanting to do to try and protect and save the world, I think there is a massive overstep to be able to say, well, I'm going to keep you safe, I'm going to wrap a safety blanket around the world, all you need to do is surrender your freedoms.
Because that's what these sorts of measures inevitably lead to.
Because, I mean, Bill Gates was at the forefront at the beginning of the COVID pandemic saying that we needed mass shutdowns.
Who cares about the economy?
Very easy for a billionaire to say.
Who cares about the economy and livelihoods?
We need to protect everybody because that's the only reason that we can do.
He was also very, very clear on his own website, and I've covered this before in a premium content, but I'd like to just draw everybody's attention to it as well.
He was very, very clear in a Gates notes, if we go to the next link, Where he's talking about the first modern pandemic in COVID-19.
This was in April of 2020.
Very, very clear that he wanted to change people's behavior.
Basically to get everybody compliant, get everybody pliable, so that we're able to get them to behave in the way that we want them to, for their own good.
He says in here, if people's behavior had not changed, then most of the population would have been infected.
By changing behaviour many countries have gotten the infection rate to plateau and start to come down.
It is reasonable for people to ask whether the behaviour change was necessary.
Overwhelmingly, he says, the answer is yes.
When people hear that an infectious disease is spreading widely So it's very clear throughout this entire thing.
We need to change people's behaviour.
Yeah.
Whether they know it or not, whether they want it or not, it's what's best for them, because we in the elite class have decided what is best for you, and now it's just a matter of getting you to change to what we want for you.
Yeah, you know, the fact that they used fear as a weapon to do this, causing many, many side effects and a lot of collateral damage, quite frankly, in terms of mental health epidemics and suicides and so on.
That just doesn't enter into this analysis.
And this is the whole problem with trying to engineer the world to your will.
When you have one problem which everyone thinks is important, that's great for engineers because it means they can immediately remove everything else from the analysis and just focus on optimizing for that one problem.
And it's true.
If the parameter you're optimizing for is deaths or infection rates from a particular virus, Then you can work wonders to do that, but you're going to cause a lot of collateral damage, as you did.
And yeah, as you say, they did massively because he's even come out recently and said, well, I recognize that the lockdowns caused a lot of issues for children going to school.
That time they missed out on at school has led to, I think, I've not seen the figures myself, but I'm aware that it's led to dropping literacy rates, social problems for children who didn't have the opportunity to properly socialize, a whole heap of different problems.
And he recently came out in a meeting, John, if you go to the next, thank you, It's pretty clear young people don't get sick from the disease very often.
And this is Bill Gates saying this, so I don't know what YouTube's guidelines are right now.
So, you know, this is Bill Gates' words, not mine.
We probably, if we knew what we knew today, we would have shut down schools a lot less than we did during this pandemic.
And this is from a man who, at the beginning of the pandemic, after we initially locked down, said there's no way that we are able to open up quicker or else everybody will die, basically, is what he was saying.
The reproduction rate of the virus will be so much that it will devastate the rest of the world.
We need to keep everything locked down, whereas now he's turned around and said, actually, maybe we got through a few things wrong, which is impressive to hear from a man who said, we need to make sure the people ask whether the behavior change is necessary.
Yes.
Overwhelmingly, yes.
Coming back two years later going, I Actually, we may have got a few things wrong.
Interesting thing about this as well is that there was initially a clip of it that I was able to find, well, I saw going around a few weeks ago, that I was going to use for this, but the only link I could ever find linking back to it was this one, the back to life underscore 20.
And wouldn't you know, that account has been suspended.
So I'm no longer able to find that clip just floating around.
I'm sure I'd be able to find it if I actually went to the original source.
But that account had been suspended and I don't know why that is.
But also, Bill Gates has of course said many things about how he wants to...
This was the thing that people were referring to where he was talking about smallpox terror.
He needs research funds.
He always needs research funds.
And many people think when they see things like this that what's happening is that a person like Bill Gates just wants to improve his portfolio.
He just wants more money.
But the fact of the matter is that when you get to...
I think people need to recognize that when people get to a certain level of wealth, when you're already one of the richest men in the world, getting more zeros at the end of your bank balance doesn't really matter as much.
People in powerful positions like that, they don't want more money.
They want more power.
Not necessarily for what they would consider selfish reasons.
They might want more power so that they're able to better help the world in their own vision.
But that power is a reward unto itself.
And the increase and influence and power of global government institutions is a fantastic gateway for people like Bill Gates to be able to exert the influence and mould the world in the vision that he wants.
So that's just what I want to bring everybody's attention to.
Absolutely.
And I just want to point out that when he says things there like, we wouldn't have shut down schools, part of me does wonder, who is we?
Who do you mean?
Are you speaking for the American government here?
I mean, he does have massive involvement in a lot of their different institutions, so I would not be surprised.
But anyway, on to something slightly lighter.
So Ricky Gervais' comedy special is dropping, Supernature, where he mainly has a go at supernatural phenomena and the community is obsessed with them.
So no love for Tony D and Little Joan in the Super Chat.
But the Mary Sue is not a fan, so let's just pump this up.
So it's impossible to overstate just how awful Ricky Gervais' new violently transphobic Netflix special is.
Oh, it was violent, was it?
Did he bring a trans person on stage and just start punching him in the face while the audience erupted in laughter?
That would be fairly novel comedy, but I'm not sure it would actually be comedy.
No, I don't think it would either.
They continue.
Gervais' special dropped today, and immediately people were sharing just how horrible it is.
Sounds good.
But however awful you're expecting it to be, I just don't think anything can prepare you for the level of violent bigotry Gervais put out.
Wow.
After just a few minutes, he starts on a tirade about trans women and rape.
There's a deep obsession with trans people's genitals, and he deliberately misgenders his hypothetical trans villains throughout.
I mean, sounds like a Ricky Gervais comedy special to me.
I know, but what else am I supposed to take with this?
But the sheer, like, emotionality in their description of it makes me think it's going to be pretty good.
Oh yeah, if it's triggering people this hard, it's probably pretty funny.
And another thing I found on there, so this is Ricky Gervais on his way to perform his new special in 2022, if we go to the next one.
Yes, that is Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 30s.
No, no, this is just Ricky Gervais coming off of stage after he's converted the whole audience, surely.
I'm looking at this and thinking, oh my god, what has he done?
What has he said?
Has he come out as actually I was Nazbol all along?
I mean, the thing is, obviously this is ridiculous, but if you were to believe the rhetoric of publications like The Mary Sue, and if you're reading The Mary Sue, then good god, there's no real help for you.
But if you believe that sort of rhetoric, this is the image that forms in your head when you're reading this.
Somebody who's more than willing to use violence, the violence of mean words to destroy and kill people.
So now that you're expecting more or less a mid-century German propaganda reel, you haven't seen the clip yet, have you?
No, I have not.
Let's all have a watch.
It's in the next one.
Hey, old-fashioned women.
Oh, God.
You know, the ones with wombs.
Oh.
Those fucking dinosaurs.
No, I love the new women.
I know the new women.
They're great, aren't they?
You know the new ones we've been seeing lately?
The ones with beards and cocks.
They're as good as...
They're as good as gold.
I love them.
No, it's the old-fashioned.
And now the old-fashioned, they're like, oh, they want to use our toilets.
Why shouldn't they use your toilets?
For ladies.
They are ladies.
Look at their pronouns.
What about this person that isn't a lady?
Well, his penis.
Her penis, you fucking bigots!
What if he rapes me?
What if she rapes you?
You fucking turf whore!
Old fashioned witch.
That was good.
That was pretty good, actually.
And also, as with all deep-cutting comedy, very accurate.
Well, I think you can immediately see why it's funny.
And yes, I am going to explain the joke, because I'm that kind of person.
Like, he's accurately satirising trans activists and their attitude towards TERFs.
And the audience can immediately see that the crime of rape is way more serious than the crime of my pronouns or misgendering.
And everyone knows it.
And it's just funny when you have it put in front of your face, that obviously in the way he does.
Excuse me, sorry.
And the interesting thing as well is that these people must not be at all familiar, or they probably are.
They probably are, and they've just forgotten.
With his comedy special he did for Netflix before this one, which was Humanity, where he makes many jokes about Bruce slash Caitlyn Jenner and...
A fictional experience where Bruce, pre-transition, so I'm allowed to say that, went to the doctors and just told the doctor who kept giving him nuggies and punching him in his big strong abs because, you know, he's a big strong burly man, he can take it, that he just wanted his cock off.
You know?
LAUGHTER And people just seem to have completely forgotten that that's a thing that he did, or perhaps they do, and I'm sure if you were to go back around that time you could probably find the Mary Sue in pink news, and all the usual suspects whining about it, and they probably wait for comedians like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle to come out with their latest special so that they'll have a whole new flurry of headlines to go with for the next month.
Absolutely, because the outrage machine is in full gear if we go to the Independent.
We have here Ricky Gervais, Super Nature Review.
As is all too frequent these days, the longest riff is reserved for the humiliation of trans people.
Did you feel like trans people were being humiliated in that segment?
No, I felt like it was trans activists.
Yeah, same.
The comedy wasn't actually targeted at trans people, but there's one thing that these sort of media outlets do all the time, which is they conflate trans activists and trans groomers with...
Just trans people.
They're completely different.
I mean, obviously, his portrayal of a character who's pointing out that this woman having a penis means that I'm very unsure that it's actually a woman is probably the closest it would come to actually being transphobic.
But, I mean, once again, just observing reality seems to be against the agenda right now.
Indeed.
In his new Netflix special, they continue, the comedian seems more comfortable with jokes that rely on a cheap shock factor rather than any emotional or creative truth, and the audience hoot and holler along with all the bigotry.
So if you were laughing at home, by the way, I hate to break it to you, you're a transphobe now.
Oh no, that means I am as well!
I laughed!
Oh no!
I forgot, I'm only allowed to, what is it, laugh at comedy that punches up?
That's right, we'll get to that.
The problem with Supernature, as with much comedy these days, progressive or irreverent, is that it finds itself sucked into the self-referential death spiral of the culture wars.
Gervais has always been a master of this.
Now, I actually think this is a really interesting statement here.
So, first of all, it only ever seems to be culture wars when one side is doing it.
The other side, it's stunning and brave, have you noticed that?
Or it's accountability, culture, or it's anything.
Right, right.
Any number of different synonyms for it.
frequency of comments like this peppered around even metropolitan society and mainstream media could be a signal that the mainstream is also getting fed up of the culture wars and that might be a prelude to the next paradigm shift in moral fashions.
We can but hope.
Yeah, I think there is a general sickness of just, ah, it's comedy, you go to see a comedy show and it's progressive, or it's comedy, you go and see a comedy show, it's anti-progressive.
You want to just see comedy that's neither sometimes.
And obviously the shame is when progressive comedy invaded this space, they turned it into a battleground, because then you have two choices.
Either you surrender it, in which case it's no longer what it used to be, it's a progressive institution.
Or you fight it, in which case it becomes a culture war, and you get both sides, and that's where we are now.
But eventually people get fed up of that fight, and hopefully it returns to normal or some new...
The problem is with that, and I do agree with you that it does seem that certain people seem to be becoming fed up with it, or at the very least, some people seem to claim that they're becoming fed up with it,
with it because a lot of this sort of thing, "Oh, the culture war is all so tiresome," seems to me to be the same kind of faux-exasperated performativity that you see from people who are like, "Oh, another day, another person being misgendered on comedy, it's all so tiresome." I'm just so tired.
Or people going like, in America, I just wanted free healthcare.
Oh, it's so tired.
Oh, I needed to go to my job.
I needed to work a nine-to-five shift at McDonald's.
Oh, it's so tiresome.
I'm so tired and sick of all of this.
It just seems to be that same sort of...
Faux, exasperated rhetoric that's basically just trying to say, don't you see what pain you're putting me through right now?
Give me my way.
Because the fact of the matter is that now that it is a section, sort of a battleground for the culture war, if people are going to just go...
Not give up, per se, but get tired of it and just try and hope things go back to normal.
That in and of itself is ceding ground to the progressives.
That's how it's always been throughout the past hundred or so years.
Anytime that people have retreated from it, not necessarily because they want to lose or think that they have lost the argument, but just because they think, okay, we're safe here now, people are tired of this, that's when the agenda just cements itself.
But what I'm saying in this case is that the victory comes when the progressives genuinely get tired of it and genuinely retreat from it, which is likely to happen after...
Because a lot of this exasperation, I think some of it isn't false, some of it is true, and it's the exasperation that comes of, ugh, there are people who disagree with me.
There are people who don't share the stunning and brave agenda.
I mean, if I'm honest, I get tired of talking about a lot of this sort of stuff personally, but I just know that it's necessary.
Because I forget what it is...
What's the saying about freedom?
You need to keep a constant watchful eye on it or something like that?
The tree of freedom is watered in the blood of martyrs, is that the one?
Not that one!
I'm not going to that sort of rhetoric right now.
But I do think that people need to be eternally vigilant to make sure that people...
Ah, the price of freedom is constant vigilance.
Yes, that's the one.
The price of freedom is constant vigilance.
Whether or not you end up getting tired of it in the end, we need to keep fighting these battles or else they will win.
No, that's true.
But I do also look forward to a time at some point in the future, even if it's 10-20 years in the future, when some of these grounds, like literature, like comedy, which have been invaded and co-opted, can actually be just good things again, where their value isn't contingent upon their side in a battle.
Well, there are still things out there that are good in and of themselves.
I mean, I know you weren't as big a fan of it as Josh and I, but The Northman, for instance, is just a classic historical epic, and the only amount of politicization that's been put on it has been external from the media, whereas the filmmaker, Robert Eggers, and everything else regarding it, and if you actually watch the film itself, there's nothing political about it.
It's just trying to be historically accurate and tell a good story.
Yeah, yeah.
No, absolutely.
We continue.
So another thing which has been doing the rounds is a 10-minute clip from James Acaster which has resurfaced, which people are talking about now.
And it has the punchline, trans people will be checking their privilege on the way home thanks to you, you brave little cis boy.
That's not funny.
It's not even a joke.
It doesn't even have the technical structure of a joke.
There's no expectation being subverted there.
But what is a joke, by the way, in this beautifully smooth segue, is Kamala Harris, if we go to the next...
If we go to the...
You haven't got it in the link.
It's in the doc, John.
The promotion.
So we have an article on our website by Bo Dade, also known as History Bro, about Kamala's fever dream, talking about how...
What is it this time is just the same as Pearl Harbor and so on and so forth.
It's one of the most ridiculous and farcical vice presidents that America has ever had.
And Beau absolutely takes her apart here.
So please go and check that out on our website if that's the sort of thing you'd be interested in.
But moving back to James Acaster, let's see this clip of him just destroying Ricky Gervais.
Let's have a watch.
They say whatever they like.
Edgy comedians, no one tells them what they can and can't say.
They walk straight on stage, top of their specials sometimes, do ten solid minutes just slagging off transgender people.
Just straight out the gate, just making fun of transgender people.
If people on the internet get upset about it, the comedian's always like, bad luck!
That's my job!
I'm a stand-up comedian!
I'm meant to challenge people!
If you don't like being challenged, don't watch my shows!
What's the matter, guys?
Too challenging for ya?
That's my job.
I'm a stand-up comedian.
I'm meant to challenge people.
If you don't like being challenged, don't watch my shows.
What's the matter, guys?
Too challenging for ya?
That's my job.
I'm a stand-up comedian.
I'm meant to challenge people.
If you don't like being challenged, don't watch my shows.
What's the matter, guys?
Too challenging for ya?
Oh, yeah, because you know who's been long overdue a challenge?
The trans community.
Oh, they've had their guard down for too long, if you ask me.
They'll all be checking their privilege on the way home now, thanks to you, you brave little sis boy.
I used to name one of the comedians that was about in that routine, but it always got really awkward in the room.
So apparently, it's 2019, most people, still more than happy to laugh at transgender people, not as comfortable laughing at Ricky Gervais yet, I've discovered that.
That's the line.
Why did you put me through that?
I know, I'm so sorry for the cringe.
You can put your earbuds back in, take it off me.
I hate that.
I just feel sorry for the guy.
I feel pity for him that his life has come to the point where he's doing that thing.
I'm glad at the very least that we could hear his mum laughing from the audience there.
That's the only person I assume would actually pay to go and see something like that.
There's that really awful, like, late millennial Zoomer humour, which is just, if I just say things loudly and in a stupid enough voice, laugh.
And he goes through that three times, and it's like, it wasn't funny the first time.
Yeah, he just kept repeating the same line over and over and over again.
Yeah, it's just, wow.
I'm amazed that people are actually sharing this being like, oh yeah, he totally destroyed him there.
No, he just whined.
Yeah, that wasn't comedy.
It was just a whine, a rant.
It wasn't even necessarily insightful in any way.
You know, the way that Dave Chappelle can occasionally go up on stage and have a discussion about something, and whether I agree with him or not, it's not a comedy section, but he is actually trying to discuss something in some kind of depth.
That was just a series of whiny straw men thrown out one after the other.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.
And I do want to point out just quickly that there is a small part of this that came close to humour.
And he's right that trans activists have been on their guard for years, I think it's fair to say.
With gender reassignment surgery often misprescribed for people with other undiagnosed, less fashionable mental illnesses than gender dysphoria, as you've been covering.
It's no surprise that some of these activists are highly neurotic, seeing an assault on trans identity in everything from the smallest of microaggressions to the funniest of jokes.
And neurotic people don't need to be challenged, it's true, it just makes them more paranoid and more neurotic.
But they do need to be told where to stop, where to draw the line sometimes.
The fact is that when there's a taboo against telling someone where to stop, the least you can do is make a joke out of the fact that they're making unreasonable demands on the rest of society.
And this mode of argumentation in transactivism is well known, and Douglas Murray puts it really well here.
Let's watch this clip.
Now, if somebody says to you, If you question whether trans children exist, you are being transphobic, anti-trans, you're disappearing trans people, you're making trans people kill themselves or other people kill trans people.
Sure, you might back off from the argument.
Should you?
No.
No, you shouldn't.
You should look at that.
You should use your head.
You should use your reason.
You shouldn't be subject to moral blackmail.
I don't like the tone of voice in any way that this is described in.
I don't like the Teenage girl suicidal tone of do what I want or I might harm myself.
I don't think that's acceptable in a society any more than it's tolerable in an individual.
Blackmailing everybody else in society with the possibility of your own self-harm.
No.
No.
And there need to be more people who say no.
We are going to look at this seriously.
We do not believe that Doing a mastectomy on a child or promising a child a mastectomy is simply the latest portion of the civil rights movement which we have to agree to.
No.
I thought that was really powerful, actually.
But that was back in 2020 that he was saying that.
Things have only got worse since then, I would say.
Yeah, but he did predict much of it as well in the rest of that interview.
And I do find it really quite sad that this is one of the major social issues that we're grappling with in our time, because it seems completely unnecessary to...
It's ridiculously damaging to a whole generation of girls who, a lot of these girls, as many people have pointed out, turn out to be autistic.
So these are girls who do have genuine mental problems.
They might have problems stemming from family life, they might have problems stemming from their own just general mental health illness.
Mm-hmm.
They're going from pro-anorexia to pro-trans and deciding that this is the thing that explains all of my problems, when in fact all it's doing is creating a whole heap of more problems for them that are only going to come out five to ten years from now.
Absolutely.
But that blackmailing mentality is what gives rise to the taboo against saying, oh, don't you think you're going a bit far with that when it comes to trans activism?
And I think Douglas Murray puts it very well there.
Like, this is the mode of argumentation.
You shouldn't allow yourself to be intimidated by it.
But anyway, going back to James Acaster, if we have to, his rant against Gervais was based on the assumption that comedians don't put any thought into their comedy, right?
They just repeat mindless slogans, like, I'm a comedian, it's my job to challenge people, or whatever it was he said three times.
But actually, most comedians are quite thoughtful about what they're doing.
Let's have a quick look at this interview with Ricky Gervais about his Netflix special, if we go to the next clip.
Ricky, I do love how you've managed to kind of create that real awkwardness and that feeling of tension and your audience feeling uncomfortable.
Yeah.
Is that, I don't know, is it something you've always worked on, you've enjoyed?
Yeah, well, I think that's what comedy is for, really, to get us through stuff, and ideally to boost subjects, because I want to take the audience to a place that hasn't been before, even for a split second.
And, you know, most offence comes from, uh, when people mistake the subject of a joke with the actual target.
So it starts, they go, what's he gonna say?
I tell the joke.
Phew!
They laugh.
You know, it's like a parachute jump.
It's scary, but then you land, and it's all okay.
And I think that's what comedy is for, getting us over taboo subjects.
They're not scary anymore, so I deal with everything, you know?
And I think we second-guess the audience too much.
Even in narrative stuff, like Afterlife, you know?
People saying, God, the audience take this.
Of course they can.
Real life's much worse.
These are just jokes.
They don't mean anything.
They're just for you to laugh for an hour or so.
So that's why I did interview subjects, yeah.
So did that sound like him saying, oh, I'm here to challenge you.
It's my job.
No, that sounded like somebody who'd thought about why he is doing what he is doing.
Yeah, he's genuinely thoughtful about the manner and the role of comedy.
He's not repeating empty slogans and saying BTFO woke tarts.
He's expressing his own original ideas about what he does.
And full credit to him.
Yeah, I'd like to point out as well, just to make it clear, I think you said it before the podcast came on, we're not thinking of Ricky Gervais as some kind of right-wing messiah or anything like that.
Ricky Gervais is probably what I've started describing recently as a 2008-era centre-left liberal.
As far as I can tell from what little of his political opinions that I have heard, he seems to be on that sort of side of the spectrum.
But that 2008 centre-left liberal type is the type who is more than happy to be a bit more edgy, be a bit more insulting, to be a little bit more charitable to ideas coming from the other side.
But in no realm is he a right-winger.
Just to make it very, very clear.
You're not mistaken.
And I also don't like the mentality whereby someone has to be on a particular side of the political spectrum in order to respect their views.
I think there can be some really good points made by people who have seen us right and people who have seen us left.
I'm friends with socialists, shockingly enough.
That must be an interesting...
Pub visit.
But there we go.
And the final clip that I want to show is this classic from Dan Carlin, which a lot of people have been talking about in a way to try and do down.
Do you mean George Carlin?
George Carlin.
Sorry.
Yeah, not Dan.
Goodness me.
Let's have a look at this.
I would defend to the death his right to do everything he does.
The thing that I find unusual, and it's not a criticism so much, but his targets are underdogs.
And comedy traditionally has picked on people in power, people who abuse their power.
Women and gays and immigrants are kind of, to my way of thinking, underdogs.
And, you know, he ought to be careful because he's Jewish.
And a lot of the people who want to pick on these kind of groups, the Jews are on that list.
A little further, you've got women, gays, gypsies.
Suddenly you find Jews.
Yeah, so, you know, I mean, obviously, he should do what he wants, and...
Why does he get away with it, do you think, then?
Well, because he's...
We have never laughed at jokes about the war.
Well, he's appealing.
I think he's appealing largely.
I think his core audience are young white males who are threatened by these groups.
I think a lot of these guys aren't sure of their manhood, because that's a problem when you're going through adolescence.
You know, am I really?
I mean, could I be?
I hope I'm not.
Well, I am.
And the women who assert themselves and are competent are a threat to these men.
And so are immigrants in terms of jobs.
So that's why we as an audience then will laugh.
You say we, I don't think you are.
I mean collectively.
I think that's what is at the core of that experience that takes place in these arenas.
Is a certain, you know, a sharing of anger and rage at these targets.
And I'm sure Andrew isn't that angry out there.
I'm sure he's playing it as a comic.
Yeah, so obviously this classic old progressive stuff.
But first thing you notice is, do you see how old that clip is?
It's from a CNN interview in like 1990.
I wasn't even born when that aired.
Things have changed a lot and that's still the best thing that you can share around to describe this thing.
But there's a lot of comedy that isn't about things like punching up or punching down or levelling a power structure.
Comedy isn't activism.
It's not about power.
There's a certain type of comedy that's satirical of power structures, but that's just a small subset of the whole thing.
There are jokes that are completely apolitical, like Peter Kay's joke about dipping a biscuit in a cup of tea, which is quite well known.
Whose power structure does that subvert?
Hovis?
Yeah, exactly.
But just the way that he said that is also quite strange.
He's appealing to a leftist idea, a progressive idea, through, well, traditionally in comedy, which is essentially a reactionary conservative idea.
Saying, well, traditionally, we've always been leftists.
I mean, he did also qualify with, obviously, he can say whatever he wants.
Yeah, yeah.
But that was the zeitgeist of the time, when the liberals still had some liberty, some liberalness.
But yeah, one thing I just want to underline to finish off this segment is that all of this sort of anti-trans or anti-minority comedy, etc., etc., it doesn't directly make a joke of the minority in question for their unchangeable characteristics.
It makes a mockery of the activism surrounding them most often, which is the people turning them into a mascot class, claiming to speak for them and using their identity as a bludgeon against the rest of society.
Very well put.
it's a Well, let's move on now to look at how black history, which is, of course, separate from British history, apparently.
I never got that memo, but according to the institutions, according to the College of Police, it is.
It's going to be made mandatory for UK police to learn about black history because this will help them solve crime somehow.
Hmm.
It's the old classic of, learn black history, question mark, profit.
I mean, makes sense to me, but before we go any further, I'd like to draw everyone's attention to this article, which is a very recent one that's on the website from an outside contributor called Connor Tomlinson, who's written a few fores in the past, called The Woeful Wokery of Doctor Who.
If you're wondering how this relates, it's because the police are very woke, and that's a very woke police box.
So it all makes perfect sense.
But in this article, it's a very nice one, he goes and just talks about all of the issues that are caused when you try to subvert fiction to fit a very particular political allegory or ideology, and he also makes a great point, which is that wokeness in this way, activist wokeness being infesting into our media, is actually just a way of trying to reshape people's understanding and perception of reality.
And you can see this, Kyle's pointed it out recently before, that people in America think that like 50% of the US is black, and people in the UK think that like 25% of the UK is black, and in America it's 13% in reality, and in the UK it's what, 3.5%, something like that.
But that shows the effect that this has.
It does actually warp people's perception of what's actually going on around them.
This is what happens when every TV commercial requires one black person to be in it.
Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure.
It was actually news almost, and I saw a Twitter post the other day from England saying that, oh my god, I saw a white heterosexual couple on an advert once.
Stop the presses!
It's actually a game you can play when you're home for Christmas and watching the TV. Don't play the drinking game with your parents.
You will all end up dead.
Let's move along though.
So the Telegraph has recently reported about the black history lessons being compulsory for all police.
So let's take a look into this.
Don't be afraid of being labelled as woke.
The officers are told as a new action plan launched to tackle racism.
And of course, given that woke is just an offshoot of intersectional ideology, it's fantastic to know that instead of being neutral, our police are actively being encouraged to be ideologically partisan.
That really instills faith in me that I'm going to get justice when I interact with the police.
All police officers will have to undergo mandatory lessons on black history and should be comfortable being labelled as woke as part of a major plan aimed at tackling racism.
This must cost millions.
Think about it.
All of the thousands and thousands of police officers we have in this country, every single one of them needs to go through these lessons taught by accredited teachers with a black studies degree, right?
Who we are just going to be shelling out cash towards, and I doubt they're being bought on the cheap.
I imagine they're on very cushy salaries or fees for these glasses.
I'm very sure they are.
I feel really stupid now, for in the past I used to make jokes about people going for black studies and black history degrees and such.
Because of the fact that you go, oh, it's a useless degree, all you do is you go back into teaching, and it's the endless cycle.
Not anymore!
I bet there's a load of money in it now.
Well, it is still the endless cycle, but this is the death of any discipline when it just degenerates.
So we had a lovely conversation in the office about how Egyptology is a pyramid scheme, because the idea is that, thanks to Carl, that if you train as an Egyptologist, then a lot of the careers you can get are just teaching other people Egyptology, who then teach other people Egyptology.
And that's kind of the death of a discipline in a way, when the only outlet for it is that you teach other people about it.
If that's the state of black studies, then you can tell it's an absolutely dead degree.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, though.
It's not just being taught to these people, because once these people are taught it, they're also being told to alter their behavior on behalf of what they now know.
Yes, it is praxis.
The police race action plan, I can't believe we live in a country where the police have a racial action plan.
Yeah, but was that country like post-Weimar Germany by any chance?
Possibly, or South Africa, perhaps?
I think they pioneered the race action plan, to be honest.
It's being launched on Tuesday and it aims to create a police service that is anti-racist and better serves black people across the country.
I mean, what you can do if you want it to better serve black people is you can make sure that it better serves everybody...
Because black people are included, in fact, in people.
They're not a separate category.
I know that political ideologues have told you differently than that, but they are actually just people.
And if you want them better served, just be better at being police.
But the UK police, plug their ears and go, la la la, I can't hear you.
Chief constables have committed to achieving zero tolerance of racism in their forces.
I would kind of hope that you'd already got there, to be honest.
Yeah.
They have also pledged...
This is actually like yesterday.
I was covering the Church of England saying, oh, we are institutionally racist, and everybody's going, well, you guys are the ones in charge, so retire then so that you can get someone who isn't racist.
And chief constables saying that they've not achieved zero tolerance of racism before, so it's like, what have you been doing?
Why have you been letting people get away with being racist, Mr.
Chief Constable?
This is your fault.
They have also pledged to ensure every officer undergoes training and education to better understand the history of the black communities they police.
As part of the Radical Action Plan, chief constables have also committed to identifying and addressing the disproportionate use of force on black people, including stop and search and the discharge of tasers.
As always with these things, there is no actual examination of why there is a disproportionate use of force on black people.
It's just assumed it's because the police officers are racist, nothing to do with the behaviour of the suspects.
I believe we actually have a significant body of research now demonstrating that it's not due to racism.
Yes, but that's not what these ideologues will be teaching them.
All forces across England and Wales will be tasked with explaining policies or practices where racial disparity exists.
If they are unable to justify the disparities, they will have to overhaul the way they operate.
And this is just ridiculous, because this is just telling them to prove a negative.
When they say disparity as well, they're not talking about policies where they're like, okay, if it's a black man do this, but if it's a white man do that.
They're talking about disparities in outcomes.
And nobody can ever control the outcome without a massive amount of totalitarian control.
I would be much more interested in identifying and addressing the disparities in practice themselves.
So, for example, when the police is hiring only people of a certain ethnic background for a certain role, that is a disparity that you need to address.
Or, for instance, if a particular group of people is, for instance, molesting a different group of people, often systemically and in groups, gangs, you could almost say, why they seem to just want to turn a blind eye to that, as opposed to actually tackling it.
But, once again, with this, what they're doing...
Because they are going from outcomes, they're just saying prove a negative.
So this happened differently for this type of person.
This is racism.
You need to prove to me why it isn't racism.
Rather than them having to prove to you that it is racism, which would be the normal thing to do if you're going by a burden of proof rule of law sort of thing.
But this isn't applying anymore.
Other proposals include developing strategies to make forces more representative by recruiting and training, retaining black officers and staff, So again, discriminatory hiring practices based on race.
Well, it's in one direction.
I tell you, the very fact that people thought that affirmative action back in the 1960s would be a good thing, I can understand why.
To address historic racism or whatever from Jim Crow.
But the fact that it's managed to come over here and go so far in the other direction, where we are discriminating against other people just because they're not black.
Mm-hmm.
It's just ridiculous.
Police officers will also be told not to be afraid of being labelled woke.
The barrister in charge of scrutinising the plan, insisting, I really don't see how you could be anti-racist and not comfortable with that terminology.
And to be fair, he's got a point.
If you are anti-racist, you are woke.
Therefore, yeah, you best get comfortable with being called woke.
The idea for the race action plan was launched in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the United States two years ago as a wave of Black Lives Matter protests that followed because...
Yes, indeed he did.
Chief Constable Sir David Thompson, the senior officer in charge of the race action plan, would not be drawn on whether he believed the police were still institutionally racist, which is basically an admission of guilt, like, generally speaking, in America, for instance, if you plead the Fifth, that sounds like you're guilty of something.
So the people who are in charge of this are basically saying, yes, I am racist.
At which point, step down then.
Don't waste all of our taxpayer money on this.
You step down and somebody who won't foster racism, if there is racism towards the communities that you're saying there is, can step in and do a better job and hopefully do a better job for everybody because that's what the police should be there for.
And this is especially funny, coming after very, very recently, there was a Guardian article, which I saw, John directed me to, where the HM Inspector of Constabulary, Andy Cook, has said that the UK police are not the thought police.
Why don't you just ask Count Dankula about that one?
and articles from a few years ago from a woman called Afua Hirsch saying that the woke police are a myth.
When the police are literally being told to, I mean, I tell you, whenever progressives make these sorts of claims...
Whenever anything is a myth, it's not a myth.
Yes, just wait a few years, maybe even a few weeks, and they will be proven dead wrong.
So this article says, there's a lot of talk these days about new political tribes, so allow me to introduce another one, the anti-woke.
The first curious thing to note about members of this group is that they define themselves in opposition to an identity that doesn't actually exist.
They are anti-woke even though there is no woke.
This just comes across like gaslighting.
So far, woke, a term once used by African-Americans to denote people who were alert to racism and injustice, has been retired.
As is often the case with black innovations overused by the white mainstream, killed off its authenticity.
It's always the white devil's fault, after all.
Today, the person using the word is likely to be a right-wing culture warrior, angry at a phenomenon that lives mainly in their imagination.
Yes, and in my police force.
Hang on, hang on.
Who has the power to retire words?
In the English language, right?
I mean, the left has granted it to themselves.
We do not have a central bureau that decides what words are in and what words are out, like they do, for example, in France.
I mean, I was going to say, not yet.
That's incredible.
Oh, it's been retired, so you can't talk about it.
It doesn't exist.
Oh, these people.
Goodness me.
And she just carries on further on, Dan.
She says, which leads me to the second strange thing about this worldview.
It's the idea that the woke have laws and a police force to enforce their wishes.
Don't you?
Don't you?
But the truth is, there are no woke police.
So as always with these kinds of ideologies, they want you to just shut your eyes, close your ears, and ignore everything that is so blatantly happening around you.
Because all I need to do is literally just go to the College of Police, the institution which trains police, and find, oh what's this?
It's a diversity and inclusion page.
What a surprise!
But diversity and inclusion isn't ideological or anything.
It's not ideological to want to focus your efforts on one particular race of people and almost mollycoddling them.
Yeah, it's not political to reorient your entire organisation around inequities when it comes to outcomes between racial disparities.
Exactly.
I mean, this is just what a polite and civilised society does.
And we can also see, just in the UK as well, because it's all over here, we've got rainbow police cars out to fight crimes.
These are the hate crime cars.
It's not woke, guys.
Woke doesn't exist.
I mean, this obviously isn't a police car, this is a clown car that I'm seeing in front of me right here.
But Julie Cook, a Deputy Chief Constable with Cheshire Police Department, oh no, oh no, this is where I'm from!
Oh god!
Said that the rainbow-coloured hate crime cars, well thankfully I've not seen them about myself, but they might be in Chester or something.
I think those cars are a hate crime against, like, good taste.
Yes, I'll agree with you there.
They'll be regularly driven by police officers and are now part of our vehicle fleet.
The cars are there in the communities on normal policing patrol just to show the community that we want you to come forward.
It is there to try and give confidence to our LGBT plus community but also to other underrepresented groups.
I mean, this is not here for most people and if anything, if I'm a criminal...
Wandering about the street, and I see that driving about, I know exactly where the police's priorities are.
And it's not on me if I go and rob a store later on.
You can join the lumpenproletariat straight away, like, rob that store, do whatever you want, because you know they don't care about you, because Because you're not a thought criminal.
They care about what's been posted on Twitter this afternoon in your local area.
So this sort of thing I just see as being empowering to criminals.
And we've had it in Cambridge as well where they've had police out with rainbow helmets to support LGBT communities.
And this is one particular police officer who's been dubbed by the Daily Mail the wokest police officer in Britain.
Right in front of King's College Chapel as well.
Yeah, but he's always out and about with his rainbow helmet and he's always out and about at Pride festivals.
I've seen pictures of him with, like, rainbows painted on his face.
He looks ridiculous and does not look like a respectable police officer because police, you know, they have to do two things.
They have to protect the community and they also have to inspire fear in criminals to make sure that they don't, you know, behave like criminals.
And if I see a man walking around with a big silly hat on, with a big rainbow on it, I'm not particularly...
Afraid of them, somehow.
And this is the tweet from Cambridge Police saying today is, uh, what is it, uh, International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia.
To mark the occasion, Superintendent James Sutherland donned his ever-so-colourful rainbow custodian on patrol around Cambridge.
Did you spot him?
I bet they did.
Similar to a number of other forces on Monday, Cambridgeshire supported...
Do you know what they look like?
Go on.
They look like...
A member of the village people?
They look like, as a kid, you've got some plastic miniatures and you've let your little sister paint one of them.
Oh, you're right.
That's what they look like.
You're absolutely right.
But Cambridge Police supported the LGBTQ plus community by marking International Day against blah-de-blah-de-blah, they told the Washington Examiner.
We are committed to being an inclusive force and ensuring our communities have confidence in our ability to protect them.
Sadly, members of this alphabet community are still victims of hate crimes and we want to use every opportunity to stand with those communities.
But...
I ask this question.
How is the community supposed to feel when you are showing an obvious bias and preference for a particular group?
Immediately, you can tell when you see this person that he has a certain set of beliefs and is likely to respond in a certain way to certain situations.
I do not trust this man to uphold the rights of man, but instead to only show privileges to certain people from certain communities.
And this is what we can expect from our police in the UK. And are you happy about this?
I am not.
Neither am I. And you shouldn't be either.
And let's go to the video comments.
Something I never picked up as a kid was that the primary conflict between the two married main characters was about how the husband wants to have kids before the biological time clock runs out while the wife wants to become a famous academic.
By the end of the movie, she decides that having a family is probably better than pursuing a banal academic prestige.
Disney would never make this movie today.
On a side note, I like that the two main villains look like Carl and Callum, just older, and they're leading a battalion of communist militia in a PG movie which has loads of swearing, people being killed everywhere, and naked aboriginals fighting a racial conflict with the local government forces.
Was it you who posted the similar video for me and Callum to watch yesterday?
Because I'm sure you told us about this yesterday because there's a group of, I think it's indigenous African people in that film who, from what he said in the video yesterday, just gunned down an endangered Brontosaurus or something because they're just too stupid to recognize how endangered and scarce it is.
So, based Disney, I wish they would make stuff like that nowadays.
Yeah, let's go to the next one.
Written as a critique of British invasions of foreign lands, H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds calmly tackles the subject of invasion by an implacable and uncommunicating enemy.
Film and television adaptations have always been bad, from the 1953 film to Spielberg's 2005 bowel movement to the BBC's descent into wokery.
I always felt the only way to adapt it would be with a dramatic episode of the science programme Horizon.
The book is a superb read, but, for Callum, the only acceptable alternate is Geoff Wayne's 1978 musical.
So, full disclosure, I'm a massive fan of this book.
I've read it about five or six times.
I've never read it, but I'm a massive fan of the soundtrack!
And I've also listened to the soundtrack many a time.
It's absolutely brilliant, and also...
I know.
Also notable for having Phil Linott of Thin Lizzy fame doing guest vocals on, I think, two tracks, which always is a pleasure to hear.
No, this is an absolute stone-cold classic.
If you have not read the book slash listened to the album before, like, what are you doing?
Do that right now.
Well, after the podcast.
Yeah.
I need to rush out and read the book, but I think on the way there I will listen to the soundtrack.
Really, really, really good.
Anyway, yeah, I'm not going to say anymore.
Let's carry on.
I decided my son should go to sea.
So I went to the woods, bought some tree, and built a boat.
I told the wife to assemble some sails with her sewing machine.
I assembled the crew and away we went.
Oh, so jealous.
That's just wholesome and ideal.
Yeah, I'm jealous as well.
I'm envious of everything you've got there.
I mean, I'm engaged, so I'm working on being a married man, but kids next, then a house, well, interchangeable order, and then I'll build a boat.
You've inspired me.
What I need to do, I need to forge myself a sword and knives of some form, and then also build a boat.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, I'd really like to get out on the water this summer, even just on a dinghy or something like that.
Yeah, that'd be nice, actually.
I've never been fishing.
We should go on a lotus fishing trip.
You should take Josh across.
He knows that.
Yeah, he does.
Josh knows, yeah.
Let's go to the next one.
So on one hand, I am surprised that it took Elon this long to realize just how bad the left is because they were taking shots at him before when they were trying to drum up That he was some kind of sexist because he didn't follow a certain amount of female Twitter users, even though most of his followings were government, business, and news corporations.
But on the other hand, though, I guess you could say it has gone so bad, it is not reaching the elites, which could be a good thing to wake more people up.
Yeah, I mean, despite the media's many attacks on him in the past for being an evil billionaire, he seemed primarily quite apolitical up until very recently.
Obviously, he had his projects that he was working on for, like, climate change and stuff, but that seemed like a passion project for him, something he was genuinely concerned about.
And this also seems like something he's genuinely concerned about.
I think that...
The good thing about Elon Musk is that so far he has chosen problems to solve that do not require controlling the world.
Yeah.
He's very happy for people to live their lives.
Whereas Bill Gates has chosen a problem to solve, like solving pandemics, solving global hunger and global poverty and so on and so on.
Even if we assume that he's doing that in good faith, of course.
He's chosen problems to solve whereby the solutions could only be totalitarian, whereas Elon Musk's problems, okay, get stuff to Mars.
You can solve that without press-ganging the whole human race into it.
Yes, you can.
Go to the next one.
Hey, Lotus Eaters.
I thought you might like this time-lapse of spring happening where I live.
It's from the last snow to, well, May 20th or so.
That's really nice.
Cool.
That does look very nice, actually.
Our pool's a bit small to put a boat in, though.
Oh, shame.
Maybe a toy boat, a little motor, onboard motor.
Let's go to the next one.
One of the problems with the classical liberal worldview is that it requires that the majority of people in a society be philosopher kings capable of deep introspection, and that the "moron" contingent remains rather slim.
But this is never going to be the case.
So whatever principles a long-term, functional society is based on, it would have to involve the recognition that the average person is never going to be capable of deep introspection or critical analysis.
Well, this is actually one of the advantages of traditional society in that you have a whole list of virtues which anyone can have.
You don't have to be born super intelligent or anything to be like loyal or faithful or brave or anything like this.
Whereas now I feel like in the more rationalist world, we've subsumed all human qualities down to how smart you are, how hard you work and that sort of thing.
And there's relatively little that you can actually change with that.
Yeah, I think most people can be trusted if left in, not in isolation, but outside of intervention or interference.
Most people can be trusted to go about their own self-interest.
Yeah, look after their own affairs without much need for other people to come in and tell them everything that they need to do.
What it is that right now the parts of the classical liberal worldview has led to through state intervention and such like that, that obviously wasn't necessarily intended from original classical liberalism but it's moved to, is that we've created a society, I mentioned this yesterday, in which everybody can recognize that they can get what they want I mentioned this yesterday, in which everybody can recognize that they can get what they want using government force if they just know Yeah, absolutely.
Which has led to a massive politicization of society.
No, I completely agree with that.
But I think it's also worth pointing out that many people have these utopian visions of how a future international world could be and so on and so forth.
The future is not international.
I'll just say that.
The future is small and local and communal if we want a good future, as far as I consider it.
But I think they miss the point that, again, there are people who aren't going to buy into that future, and they just sort of, like they say, the idiots, the hangover crowd, they just rub them out of the calculus that they don't matter.
But they actually need a framework, if you're going to go with this international plan, in which they can actually have a good life that's not provided for them, but that's free and that's built for them by them.
I think a problem with the framing there is that you kind of take on the...
Well, not you or you in particular, but we all kind of do.
Take on the idea inherently that this international man is the enlightened man, is the inherently smarter man.
Maybe because if we put them through a test, their IQ score will come out a little bit higher than everybody else's.
Whereas I'd say the true wisdom is recognizing where...
Where you're from and the fact that the community around you, the people that you're interacting with on a day-to-day basis, is what's important in your life.
And you don't need to have wide-ranging contacts throughout the rest of the world to be able to live a good life.
I'd say that's a wisdom in and of itself.
I agree.
Let's go to the next one.
Tony D and Little Joe with another Legend of the Pines, Royal Crown Ice Cream in Hamilton, New Jersey.
For the United States, Memorial Day weekend is the start of summer.
Last weekend was my start of summer when Royal Crown Ice Cream opened for the season.
They make ice cream with farm fresh ingredients.
This is made from actual farm fresh strawberries.
This is soft serve or as we call it custard with homemade toppings and whipped cream and Joan agrees it's the best.
That was fantastic.
I'm hungry now.
Let's go to the next one.
I think that was all of it.
So let's go to the comments.
Risto Rantanen, sounds Finnish, says, Happy number 400.
Thank you very much.
General Hyping says, Bo and John's Epochs episode on Henry VI was excellent.
Thank you very much.
I've always found the Wars of the Roses to be one of those time periods where you end up trying desperately to understand who's outmaneuvering who, only to end up slightly confused as to why the backstabber is now backstabbing the backstabber of the backstabber.
Like, just wait for the Sengoku Jedi, the Japanese Civil War, because not only are they all backstabbing each other all the time, they're also changing their names like multiple times for various different reasons.
So you actually don't realise immediately that the backstabber who's backstabbing the backstabber of the backstabber was in fact the backstabber originally.
Yeah!
I saw you post on Twitter saying, like, you put a little poll saying, like, who was the real winner of this conflict?
And you listed three names, and then you're like, trick question, they're all the same person.
There's four names.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, God.
And that was a good little try.
That was good fun, actually.
Do you want to do the Bill Gates ones?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So Justin B, well, here in the UK, Boris came and said monkeypox was nothing to worry about based on his record over the last two years.
I was expecting, I am expecting him to try and lock us down again in the next few months.
That's the thing I think that's got most people worried is not necessarily the monkeypox in the first place, just the government's reaction to it and the fact that we can kind of predict the movement of governments, what moves they're going to make now.
And, um, thankfully, I think in the UK we are mostly insulated against this because the cabinets still don't seem to have gotten over the embarrassment that was Partygate and the fact that you can just keep throwing that at them.
Because I know if they were to lock us down again, they would just be guilty of the same things again, and they don't want to invite that level of scrutiny to themselves.
But I do still think that the whole narrative around Partygate is wrong and has been wrong for months, which is that the narrative is, oh, look at these people partying, they should have been following the rules.
No, these rules were stupid to begin with and they knew it.
That's why they were partying.
That's the story.
I agree with you, but whether the narrative is right or wrong, the fact that it got them to stop in the first place, is in and of itself a good consequence at the very least.
I would prefer if that consequence had come from the truth, but people have been pointing out the truth for two years up to that point, and it hadn't made a dent.
Yeah, so it turns out that gutter journalism is, after all, the best and most effective journalism.
Oh, God help us all.
Soupcan Harry, who's a cousin of mine, obviously, says Bill Gates...
Yeah, that's Gravy Harry's.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, Gravy Harry is up north, Soup Can Harry down south, all over, dotted around the place.
Bill Gates appears to view people as computer code that he can manipulate and reorder to create the results he desires.
I'd say, yes, he does.
It reminds me very much of the intentions of every single communist regime of the 20th century, with the all-knowing elites reordering people's lives for ostensibly their own good.
A shocking display of hubris.
And I think, yeah, that's what this is.
the fact that he's involved in the World Economic Forum is not particularly surprising, although still not particularly comforting.
Have you seen the photos going around of Klaus Schwab in his personal office?
No.
Because he has a quite conspicuous bust of Vladimir Lenin in there.
What?
I'll need to show you it because it's quite shocking.
He literally just has a bust of Lenin there.
It's like, I trust this man to direct the world.
Lenin never committed any atrocities.
No. Lee B.
I can't believe Gates claims that most people would have been infected if it weren't for lockdown and vaccines.
Everyone I know and their dog, vaccinated or unvaccinated, lockdown or outside, caught COVID at some point, including myself.
I'm not vaccinated.
I managed to catch it, and it was fine.
Everyone I know, my dad managed to catch it, and people who locked themselves away for months and months and months on end managed to catch it.
My back caught it, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Freewell says, now COVID is dying down, they're looking for another way to re-scare us into compliance.
That is the fear.
Longshanks says, your concerns are wholly unwarranted.
Bill Gates is a world-class entrepreneur whose centuries have improved the lives of billions and has only ever been motivated by improving the general welfare of humanity.
I'm legally required to specify that this comment has been sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
He's got into the comment section.
It's too late now.
I hope the check was worth it, Longshanks.
Longshanks again says, just as the nurses put their dancing shoes away, here comes another disease on the horizon for the powers that be to exploit.
I've seen a number of funny memes where it's like nurses preparing for the next pandemic and it's just a bunch of women in front of the mirror dancing.
Justin B., I have never heard of any vaccine that is infection-blocking.
As far as I'm aware, nothing can stop you getting infected except sealing yourself in an airtight container.
But vaccines teach your body how to fight it once it detects the infection.
However, the whole rhetoric about vaccines nowadays seems to be about how they can block infections.
Seems like fake news to me.
Well, yeah, I mean, vaccines more so than anything have kind of been...
Bigged up as a miracle cure for everything.
But you can understand why they're talking about it in terms of reducing infection, because suppose you get a disease and you have it for a week and you're contagious for a week, you're more likely to spread it than someone who has it for a day and is contagious for a day.
So if the vaccination, if reduces it from seven days to one day, then it is actually reducing the overall rate of spread.
So that's the sort of argument they come up That is true, but then when the vaccine first came out, you can go back and see all the headlines and all of the talk from Dr.
Fauci and people saying 100% protection, you're never going to have to worry about anything in your life.
You won't even get the sniffles.
You'll never get a cold in your life ever again.
Bleach demon.
Still a great name.
feels like a Windows 3.5 right before the infamous blue screen.
Rather than erasing hard drives, Gates is erasing freedom.
Yes.
Maureen Peters, everyone should keep reminding themselves to not try to heal the sick with cuddles and kisses, but to be sure, we should force everyone who sneezes to wear identifying clothing and to carry a belt constantly.
I cannot wait for the WHO pandemic treaty to keep us all safe, healthy and warm.
Bugger, I forgot to mention the WHO pandemic treaty as well, because that combines with the two things that make this extra disconcerting, doesn't it?
Yes.
Baron von Warhawk finally says, this monkeypox is obviously a nothing burger cooked up by the Dems.
They are so unpopular and have so many failures that the only chance they have is more fortification.
They need more mail-in voting, and since COVID doesn't have the bite anymore, they need a new boogeyman.
That might have part Part of it, that might be part of it, but I think it's probably just more the general global elites like to stir up a fuss because in that chaos they can cement their own power even further.
And in the interest of preventing misinformation, I just want to claim that there has been absolutely no evidence for the speculation that this epidemic, this disease emerged from Bill Gates fellating a chimpanzee.
No, no, he was making love.
Fact checked.
False.
Mostly false.
Oh dear.
On to Ricky Gervais and Longshanks says, I've never seen James Acaster before and I've already seen too much.
Can I sue Lotus Eaters for emotional damage?
Sue him, personally.
Don't take the rest of us down.
It was his idea.
We've got corporate liability here.
But I just want to point out that James Acaster was cucked by Mr.
Bean himself, Rowan Hacker.
Wait, what?
I need to know this story.
You need to tell me.
His ex-girlfriend left him for Rowan Atkinson.
Beast Rowan right there.
Which kind of makes you a super cuck in a sense.
It really does, because Rowan Atkinson's quite old now, in fact.
Yes, he is.
Although I'm sure he's still a charmer.
I'm sure he's a charmer, but a looker, maybe not so much.
Ooh.
No.
It's just such a funny story.
But he actually made a proper joke about it, which is the real story.
Oh my goodness, he can do that?
Which was that until your girlfriend's left you for Mr Bean, you don't notice quite how omnipresent the Mr Bean masks and things are in London.
I bet.
That's actually not bad.
That's not too bad.
Anyway, carrying on, Chad Koala says, Even though Netflix has started putting their foot down against woke whinging within the company, I was still astounded with what Gervais was able to get past them.
Hopefully this means the woke dam is now cracking, and in time a deluge of baseness will make its way downstream from culture to politics, not just the trickle we've been making do with of late.
71 Percenter says, I managed to watch first 20 minutes of Supernatural in my lunch break yesterday.
He checked about Eddie Izzard, Boris Johnson, rich people, Muslims, Christians, babies, disabled toddlers, Twitter, cats and dogs.
In the first 10 seconds, he called his audience by the C word, trans community most affected.
Yep.
Lord Nerevar says, The transists have to freak out at Ricky Gervais because he's actually punching up.
Punching up always receives backlash by virtue of it challenging a current orthodox view, which the trans ideology very much is.
This is what actual resistance looks like.
Yeah, and that's a good point to make as well.
Once again, it's just reinforcing that he was not telling trans people themselves that they should go die.
He was making fun of the activists and the ideology that supposedly stands for them.
Bay State says, I think the reason the trans community or other woke movements are so sensitive about jokes being made at them is because in the back of their minds they know just how ridiculous their worldview is.
Ridicule doesn't cause offence to people who don't internally believe it's accurate.
Bass tape living up to his name as always.
Alfred the Beta says, Ricky Gervais is clearly innocent of being violently transphobic.
Violently punching and stomping a trans person on stage is exclusively Dave Chappelle's act.
And God bless him for it.
Bleach Demon says, On the culture war aspect of comedy, it is no longer tolerable to just reach a parody with the progressives.
It is necessary to press back firmly.
The old create culture saw comes into play.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
But this is the thing.
The objective in the end is not to have a culture space which has been colonized by our ideology.
It's to have a creative space that is free of ideology, which is actually a much more difficult objective.
That is true.
Henry Ashman says, As much as I think that Rick and Morty has massively damaged adult animation forever, almost as badly as Family Guy did in the end, I still do really like some of the earlier seasons of the show.
It's a shame that everything that's adult animation nowadays has to just be a blatant Rick and Morty copycat.
Oh, absolutely.
I just don't like the low-quality animation style.
No, I don't either.
I never liked it.
I know, I get why it's there, because animation is expensive and it's the best way to bring it economically to the screen, but Japanese animation...
Sorry, I can hear Carl groaning in the back.
General Hai Ping says, unfortunately, the bench in Nottingham that was inspired by Ricky Gervais' Afterlife series has been vandalised and utterly smashed in suspected response to his Netflix special, Sad Sad Days, but proves the violent rhetoric behind all these aggressive groups that resort to violence.
Yeah, you know, the peaceful trans activists are going around vandalising benches.
The people decrying violence.
Yeah.
Henry Ashman says it's actually refreshing to see a comedian like Gervais tell cutting jokes that are poking fun at the establishment.
The line that trans activists are a bunch of downtrodden untouchables was tenuous at best during the Trump years, where in the US the mainstream claimed they were the counterculture because they weren't in charge.
It's downright laughable now that Biden is in charge, with every major Western corporation being pro the message these days, and every cultural institution is trying to shove a trans gender or person into a skin suit.
Yeah.
And finally, on Jonah Lord, BBC comedians are all cringe.
They need to be told they aren't funny, and for them to just go to the comedian nursing home.
Well said.
Well said.
Onto the policing, Lord Nereva says, building on what John pointed out about this police racism training costing so much money, I'd like to point out that it's costing all of that money that was actually yours.
This is always my point.
This is why I hate taxation in the first place.
Because...
It is theft in the first place, because I have no choice to opt in or out, and if I choose to opt out, they break down my door and arrest me.
But also, even if I did opt in, I wouldn't opt in to what this government's spending it on, because they're spending it on useless BS. It's not going to help anyone.
Some of it's useless.
Some of this is directly counter to our own interests, deliberately and premeditatedly.
So they spend my money to actively hurt me.
Thanks.
Thanks, Boris.
Is your money the spapping on this stuff and they've sieved from you against your will?
If they want to deconstruct the notion that taxation is theft, they're doing a terrible job.
By the way, congrats to 400 episodes, lads.
Thank you very much.
As you can tell, we really put a lot of care into it by putting the two most recent starters on.
On to episode 400.
Yes, it was me, then you.
Longshanks, the subversion of the police from a locally accountable constabulary to the European-style agents of the state and all its political orthodoxy has been one of the most grotesque transformations of Britain that modernity has imposed on this country.
Any policing plan that does not recommend undoing a single reform since Roy Jenkins is not a serious policing plan and is just another excuse to make the money printer go brr as if we need any more.
That is true.
That's sad.
I never got to experience the time before the overt militarization of the police in the UK because I was born after it happened.
Yeah, I suppose I was sort of on the cusp.
I imagine you were on the cusp.
But it was much, much better, I'm told, way back in, like, the 60s.
Oh, yes.
Which is obviously before my time.
You just have to read Peter Hitchens on it, and there's plenty of things to say about it.
Oh, yes.
Longshanks again says, every time I hear the, in the wake of George Floyd, I want to stick pins in my eyes.
I swear we are only a day away from changing our dating system to before Floyd and after death.
Yeah, like, I honestly, there's part of me that wants to just carry around a little hit flask of whiskey, and whenever I see something like the phrase, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, just take a cheeky little swing.
And how long until they start repainting Jesus on the cross?
You know it's going to happen.
You know it's going to happen.
Ultra X Y N Z brackets E.
The woke cop story shows where the balance of power resides.
Dovetails with the Ricky story.
Therefore, it is punching up.
Yes, absolutely.
Lord Nerevar journalist.
White people are evil.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff.
There was one I saw, it was like...
If white people leave an area, that's white flight, but if white people go to an area, that's gentrification, so that's bad.
We can never win!
We can never win, because culturally speaking, right now, we are the bad guys.
White people engage in culture, that's cultural appropriation.
White people don't engage in culture, that's racism.
Yeah, because we're obviously just not...
It's colonization, guys.
No matter what way you look at it, it's always colonization.
Basically, whatever white people do, like the entire set of actions that what people define as white people can do, the entire set is just racism.
It's like a Venn diagram where both circles and all of the space outside the circle is just racism if white.
Callum Dayton says this last segment reminded me why I don't trust the police and law enforcement in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland with so-called enforcement like this.
How is it that illegals and criminals are not more rampant throughout our kingdom?
Yeah.
I would say it's probably because even though it's fading, there is still a vestige of the old British cultural attitudes that you should be polite and proper.
It's fading, but it is still there to a certain degree.
And once it's gone forever, all hell will break loose.
Alex Ogle says...
I-D-A-H-A-O-B-I-T. I love how it is the international day against.
Such a Soviet-style concept.
Internationalism, a day for it, and against, always, against, never, for.
That's very true.
I just want to get to one of the honourable mentions as well, which was Small L Libertarian, saying, this is directed at you, I assume, John.
If you ever subject me to that skinny-jean twat again, I'm unsubbing.
LAUGHTER Yeah, I think Skinny Gene Twat is a good name for James Acaster, to be honest.
And on that note, thank you very much for tuning in to our 400th episode.
That's a lot of episodes.
It is.
Thanks very much for your support all this way.
It's you guys who keep this show running.
And we shall see you again tomorrow.
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