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May 30, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:32:40
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #664
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*Music* Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Seaters episode 664.
Getting close to that dangerous triple digit number.
On today, Tuesday the 30th of May 2023, I'm your host Connor, joined as always by Stelios.
Hello, hello.
How are you doing?
Really well.
Feeling better this time?
A lot better.
Not 100%, but a lot better.
Okay, well I'll be sure to depress you over the course of our topics.
Today we're discussing how the UK has become a Soviet state, if you didn't notice already, how Roger Walters has walked back the wall with a uniform controversy, and how babies are not products because apparently We needed to be reminded of that in this day and age.
Just before we continue on with the podcast, I have been handed a note by our wonderful production team.
For gold-tier subscribers, the video comment submission system on the website currently has a couple of hiccups, so if you do want to send in a video comment and you are paying the gold-tier subscription, if you're not and you want to send in a video comment, you can still sign up and do so, then send your username in the email to
video.editor at lotuseaters.com that's video.editor at lotuseaters.com if you want to send a video comment and you are a gold tier subscriber hopefully we'll get it fixed in the coming days but until then we still want to hear from you so go and send it in but without further ado let's jump into today's stories so everything in the uk has gotten really expensive as of late i'm sure you noticed if you live in this
...bemoaned island, that your paycheck is not going nearly as far as you'd like, that you're probably quite cold and you're probably quite hungry, compared to how you were, say, about three years ago.
If we look at this particular piece in the Telegraph, they've found that food is to overtake energy bills as the main driver of inflation.
And bear in mind, the UK has the highest energy bills in Europe at this point, so...
Pretty drastic stuff.
Families are facing a £1,000 increase in their annual shopping bills.
That's 16 million households, 56% of all UK families, will face greater food than energy price inflation from this summer, according to cross-party think tank the Resolution Foundation.
Food prices have jumped by a fifth in the year to March 2023, Marking the biggest leap in 45 years.
That's pretty significant from post-war rationing, even.
The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has said, the rapidly rising food prices are now the biggest cause of Britain's persistently high inflation rate.
Other than the Bank of England itself, but then if he said that, he'd put himself out of a job.
But we'll get on to their mismanagement very shortly.
So, Stelios, if you were a Conservative Prime Minister or a Chancellor, What would you do to bring down inflation?
Any ideas?
I have plenty of ideas.
I don't know if I could bring forward my plan now.
I would not be at liberty to disclose that information.
Would price controls be among those ideas?
I don't think so.
No, no.
Well, unfortunately, they're... Usually they have the opposite effect.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, like in Turkey, where Erdogan put them in and he had police officers going round supermarkets checking the price of biscuits with a clipboard, and that resulted in 80% inflation.
And then Erdogan knew that was so bad that he just stopped reporting on inflation.
He made it illegal.
So, Rishi Sunak thought, that's a great idea.
He's actually proposed price controls.
We live in the Soviet satellite state, known as the United Kingdom now.
Dasvidaniya, comrades.
Anyway, let's go on to this next one.
They actually stole the idea from the Lib Dems.
You remember when Michael Gove said that there would be no Conservative more at home in the Liberal Democrat Party?
Obviously forgetting to refer to himself, and the Prime Minister, and the entire Cabinet.
So this is Ed Davey.
I refuse to call him Sir Ed Davey because I wish that... well... shame the Queen didn't bring him down the sword a little bit harder.
Anyway, so he is called on the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate whether any profiteering was taking place among supermarkets and food multinationals.
So, you can see here the smoke screen that's already been set up.
It's that those evil capitalists are exploiting the inflation crisis that we definitely didn't cause by raising their food prices to hurt the poor workers.
Okay.
Very good PSYOP there.
hasn't quite worked.
Now, there is an argument perhaps that supermarkets are raising their prices and then rolling them back through discount schemes like the Tesco Club card or the Nectar card to incentivize people shopping there.
But that's not the main cause of inflation.
And we're gonna be going over exactly why shortly. - Yeah, I don't want to anticipate. - No, no, it's fine, it's fine.
It's just usually these things are caused by government policy and not just money-grubbing capitalists behind the scenes.
Analysis by the Lib Dems showed the typical cost of a weekly shop has now risen by £12, or £604 in the space of a year, and obviously that was about a month ago, that was the 2nd of May, so less than 30 days, and it's already projected to go up by an extra £400 by the summer.
Last week, Sainsbury's announced profits of £690 million for the year to the 4th of March, And Tesco recorded profits of £753 million last year, half the level of a year earlier, when we were coming out of lockdown and lots of people were just buying food to go and make bread, because you had nothing else to do when you were sitting at home.
Point being, I don't begrudge the supermarkets for making profits, mainly because just looking at the numbers is not a multi-factor analysis.
How about the record levels of migration that you have been doing every year?
So net intake of 500,000, 600,000 people going up to a million.
Do you think those people might buy food?
Yeah, presumably.
When you have more money chasing the same amount of goods, the price of goods goes up.
Exactly.
And if you have more people with more money chasing the same amount of goods, then more money is changing hands, ergo more profits for the supermarkets.
I must say I'm very frustrated when people use the economic data of the last two years to talk against free market economics.
Whereas most of the ills we are faced with nowadays are caused by bad government interventions.
Yeah, command economy.
I mean, that's a secondary topic to discuss.
But the thing is that they are caused by governmental intervention.
And it's not just the government as well, because every party, including the Lib Dems and Labour, backed lockdown and money printing.
So Ed Davey is equally as culpable here, but he's given the government the talking point to try and wiggle their way out of terrible monetary policy.
When in doubt, print money.
Thank you, Zimbabwe.
Anyway, on to the next one.
So this is Sunak now picking it up and running with it.
This was a Telegraph exclusive.
So Downing Street is drawing up plans for retailers to introduce price caps on basic food items such as bread and milk.
Now, these are meant to be voluntary.
Oh, do me a favour.
It's an oxymoron to say a voluntary price cap, because if there's no enforcement mechanism, then it's just going to go up whenever they need to raise it.
So of course, it's behavioural nudge theory.
They're going to suggest it as voluntary, then they're going to make it mandatory, and then how a price cap works is, it doesn't become the maximum, it becomes the new minimum.
So everyone just raises their prices to the government-set standard, and when the goods stay static but the inflation gets even worse, they adjust the price cap.
So rather than a gradual increase in price, which allows people to budget, earn, save more to keep pace with the rate of inflation, it jumps up overnight and impoverishes people.
It's a stupid idea that has never worked where it's been implemented, but that won't stop the Conservative Party for chasing communism.
It shows a lot though that they just care about the next elections, and they don't care about this phenomenon long term.
They just care about putting forward a policy that sounds good now.
We've gone from a just-in-time economy to just-in-time policymaking because they are browning their pants about a year out of the election.
And they know that they have really screwed up and lost lots of people.
But this is also the problem.
In our halo-reach-match politics paradigm at the moment, what's going to happen is, about six in ten people that voted for Boris and thought they were going to get lower immigration and lower costs, and then got lockdown and record immigration instead, aren't going to vote, and then the rest of them are just going to bring up the pause menu and switch from blue team to red team.
Even though Labour and Conservatives are indistinguishable.
There's a roll of paper between the two in terms of their policy.
Rishi Sunak's aides have started work on a deal with supermarkets akin to an agreement in France in which the country's major retailers charge the lowest possible amount for some essential food products.
The move would amount to the biggest attempt to manage supermarket prices since controls established by Edward Heath in 1973, which then lost him the election to Labour.
History repeats itself again and again and again.
Number 10 insists that any action taken by retailers would be voluntary.
But here's what isn't voluntary.
The Telegraph can also disclose that continued inflation and increases in guilt yields are throwing into doubt Mr Sunak's aspiration to cut personal taxes before the next election.
10-year gilt yields are 4.33%, having peaked at 4.5% following Liz Truss' mini-budget.
Now, that's not quite true, because that happened the week before Liz Truss announced the budget.
The bond market was on the precipice of collapse.
I've already spoken to Dan about this, and he has confirmed this in his analysis.
And so Liz Truss's mini-budget was actually a convenient scapegoat for bad Bank of England policy.
They just coincided.
Because, really?
A 1% tax cut crashed the entire economy?
No.
There was mismanagement long before that.
But the point is here, is that Sunak is saying it's a choice for supermarkets to cap their prices, but what isn't the choice is that they're going to tax you even more at a time of record inflation.
And break their promises to lower taxes ahead of the next election, which would have been an election-winning platform for them.
So, you're right, they're scrambling, last minute, for any ideas.
And it's a farce to think that any of this is voluntary, because your paycheck has been plundered, which you never voted for.
It's a joke.
And inflation on its own is a form of indirect tax.
Yes.
That's one of the best ways to conceptualise it.
It robs you of the real value of money.
Yeah, it depreciates your purchasing power.
So you wake up one morning and your savings are worth half of what they're used to.
That's why we can't get a house.
Thanks, government.
One source told the Telegraph, it's very easy to point the finger at retailers and say they're making a fortune, but some of the margins they're operating at are not that big.
It's quite tight.
So Yeah, we're getting the raw profit numbers, but what isn't being reported alongside that are their operating costs.
So I can only imagine, especially with the price of energy, which is also driving up food inflation, because it has to be grown and transported with fertiliser and fuel, that it's going to be really difficult to even run these warehouses, these supermarkets.
Pay all the workers that are trying to distribute to an increasing amount of people that aren't even on the books as well.
Dan looked at the food metrics and estimated that there's upwards of 90 million people in the UK.
There's loads of people that are just not reported themselves living here.
And so that's factoring in.
And again, that's a consequence of government policy, which is not being recognised because it looks too bad for them ahead of an election.
Britain has the joint highest rate of inflation among the G7, alongside Italy.
And obviously Germany is just about to go into a recession, or technically has.
So it's not Brexit causing this, just to pre-empt the BBC's talking points and the Guardian, but I repeat myself.
If we go on to the next one, Sunek's already been warned that it's going to create food shortages.
Almost like that might be the plan, but I wouldn't want to be a conspiracy theorist.
Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrison's and Waitrose have all backed a statement by the British Retail Consortium saying that the plan, first revealed in the Telegraph, will not make a jotted difference to prices and accuse Mr Sunak of recreating 1970s-style price controls.
So it looks like that backroom deal, voluntary, with supermarkets isn't really going anywhere, because they've said, no thanks.
One retail boss said, it's a harebrained idea, and instead of trying to intervene in supermarket pricing, the government would do better, would be better advised to address the root causes of inflation.
Now, this is quite interesting.
If you could scroll down, John, there's a graph somewhere in this.
Here we go.
If you look at this, for all audio listeners, it's the CPI index and rate of inflation for food for the UK, Europe and the US.
And if you look, the US has subsequently dipped midway through 2022.
And that's because the US obviously makes a lot more of their food from home.
Now, US food is Questionable thing.
It's filled with all sorts of additives and inflammatories, and that's why their obesity rate and their healthcare outcomes are a lot worse.
But at least when a disaster would happen, they'd be insulated from the global markets a lot more than the UK and Europe, which are more reliant on exports from places like Ukraine, for example.
And so the issue you have here is the UK have bogged down its farmers with all sorts of DEFRA regulation.
DEFRA for the Department for Land, Agriculture, Rural Affairs, all that sort of stuff, are more interested in putting down innocent alpacas that haven't got tuberculosis, RIP Geronimo, than actually lifting lots of the regulations stopping farmers from producing their goods as we saw in Clarkson's farm.
So it's very cumbersome, it's very bureaucratic and very, very expensive.
And then in the meantime as well, they're also paying farmers to not to produce, to keep prices relatively adjust, and they're paying them to retire.
So we're sabotaging our own farming industry.
And as Callum's brought up plenty of times, the who-will-pick-the-crops, who-will-go-out-and-pick-the-potatoes, migrant seasonal workers, we've gotten addicted to this influx of low-wage people, rather than paying and investing in technological innovation that can harvest more of the food, more accurately, and get it out to more people.
But of course, again, that would be reliant on low fuel prices, and they've sabotaged our fuel supply.
All government policy has just been designed to immiserate us at this point.
There's no other way of reading it, frankly.
It could also be, as I've said, behavioural nudge policy, and it says in this article, an industry source warned shelves of basic goods could be emptied by the policy, worsening the egg shortage caused by high energy prices and avian flu measures.
So the avian flu measures have quarantined the chickens, which stopped them producing.
Then there was a problem with chicken feed, where some farmers had switched their feed and chickens were able to produce more eggs, so there was something bad going on there.
There are a bunch of food processing plants that caught fire, which caused a delay in supply chains, and of course, again, the cost of fuel.
So all of these policies seem to be coalescing to reduce us eating certain types of food.
I call to mind the WEF's predictions for 2030s where you will eat less meat, but again, wouldn't want to be a conspiracy theorist.
This is a quote: "If they can't get fair prices for their products, farmers could just stop producing, which is what's already happened with eggs.
Or they could switch production into something they could get a fair price for, which is not subject to a price cap." What are they not going to subject things to price caps with?
I would suggest all of the vegan meals which sit rotting on the shelves because nobody wants to buy them.
Again, more behavioral nudge.
Eat the bugs, eat the bean burger, live in the pod, you will own nothing and you will be happy.
I want to ask you something because it seems to me that, you know, those who are in favor of this way of operating, they are in favor of a top-down implementation of particular economic policy.
Managerialist.
Yes.
And it seems to me that the farmers in general, they are being assaulted in a way by these policies.
And I think it has to do with I know, I may be wrong, but I have the impression that there is a tendency to say that, you know, this and this and that place over here, you're going to be the farmers, and the other places, you know, they're going to do other things.
As in the rural-urban divide?
Not necessarily.
The rural and urban divide works usually within a country.
But when we have, for instance, coalitions of nation-states like the EU, there may be the agenda, for instance, say, you know, these nations are going to be the farmer nations.
They'll be producers, they'll be consumers.
Yes.
Other nations, you're going to live from tourism.
Yes.
And all of that is, you know, just centrally planned.
And also, I don't think it's... I did a segment some time ago about Germany closing down its nuclear reactors.
Yep, disastrous.
I don't understand why they're doing it.
But in the meantime, you have France multiplying its current nuclear reactors.
Yeah, they're net exporters.
The top-down implementation of a particular policy that disseminates, it makes a sort of division of labor within the union.
And I think that right now planners are thinking in this way.
I wonder if it's because they want to engender a sort of mutual material reliance that will keep the EU together despite ideological conflicts.
Yes, and this does not have to work only within the EU.
So for instance, I think Merkel's policy was disastrous for Germany because she based 100% of her energy on a foreign state that wasn't a member of the EU.
But it seems to me that right now We have many politicians who don't think of their national interests.
They think that, you know, for some reason we are beyond that and they are making trade-offs.
Yeah, they believe in the golden arches theory.
Mutual assured trade will always supersede conflicts of national sovereignty or ideology.
And that's why they think, delusionally, they can make a trading partner out of the Chinese, despite their egregious rights violations and their campaign of tyranny, and the fact that they're a foreign adversary set on deflating their currency, stealing our intellectual property, and subverting us.
And so what would be more sensible is to insulate our economies with food and energy manufacturing, particularly, because those are the things that see you through a crisis.
But unfortunately no politician seems to be interested in that.
Yes.
Frustrating stuff.
It is seen as being anti-integration.
Yeah.
Well actually let's go on to the energy point because around the same time, so if we could, this was from 2018, this was an example that Theresa May was criticised for because she brought in the energy price cap and they had the same thing.
Again, they keep jumping up in large increments.
And now, bear in mind as well, inflation has been reported to have gone down recently, and we'll talk about those metrics later, but it's because they've removed energy prices from the inflation calculation where it was last year, and they've only done that because now the government is fixing a subsidy to it, which you're paying for out of your taxes, which have been increased anyway.
So you're still paying more for it, the inflation metric as a rate of change metric.
Looks lower comparatively, but it's only because they've been fudging the numbers.
And this is all started, again, because Therese May put price caps on energy, making it way more expensive.
Instead of being the maximum that could be charged, in this article explains, it immediately became the minimum, irrespective of the quality and relevance, and they use university degrees here as a great example, of the degree course or the caliber of the institution providing it.
So, obviously, as I've already said, price cap tends to get an arms race between the suppliers and the regulators to accurately set the price, but because of the Way that information moves through complex knowledge systems is better than the market sets the price because no commissar can ever keep pace with the real-time supply of goods and the real-time market demand.
And the reason universities are a great example, and I'm sure that you'll agree, having spent lots of time actually teaching in a university, Humanities degrees, great example.
You did philosophy, I did English literature.
You have less contact hours, your reading materials are central to the library, but you don't have any lab time, you don't have any equipment necessary, but you're still paying as an undergraduate the same rate that a biomedical sciences graduate would have with more hours, more lab time, more facilities, more university costs, and better graduate outcomes for the average student.
And we already have a price-adjusted form of paying for degrees with the masters and the PhDs, so there's an excuse.
But instead they set a standardised price for all undergraduate degrees to increase university uptake, and now you've got loads of resentful humanities students who can't get a job but are saddled with loads of debt, and you're wondering why they're screaming at the sky for socialism.
Thank you, David Cameron.
Really appreciate that one.
Yeah, but they're being brainwashed in doing this because the thing is, I think it fits with what you're saying here and what we were saying before about the economy.
The way I think of it is like that.
I'm thinking of Hayek, for instance.
He's making the knowledge argument for more free market economics.
It goes like this, that when you have a freer economy, you have more economic experiments and a decreased level of risk per economic experiment.
The more centralized you get, the fewer economic experiments you have, and the more the chances of that economic experiment failing increase.
So, for instance, you had the five-year plan.
That's one economic experiment.
If it fails, everything fails.
Exactly.
And now it seems that we are close to having a planned economy.
We're moving that way really fast.
Mm-hmm.
If you put all of your eggs in one basket, and some of them break, then all of the errors and all of the fallout inherent to that faulty plan has a wider scope of impact versus one startup just failing.
And that's why you need a disseminated economy, and that's why you need to incentivize innovation, Rather than having this, which we are all suffering for at the moment.
Hence high taxes, hence high spending, hence high inflation.
And speaking of, again, the UK, if we go to the next one, has the highest energy prices in Europe.
Now, that's a little bit deceptive because it would have been Germany.
However, Germany had a very fortunate summer and they had record amounts of imports To make up for the shortfall in oil and gas they were getting from Nord Stream before the Americans conveniently decided to blow it up.
And so, this year, Germany will probably outpace us.
Pretty terribly.
But at the moment, the UK has mismanaged its economy so bad that we actually make Germany look slightly good.
So, I love living here.
And so, the incumbent Labour government, who are pretty much guaranteed to get in at this point, have decided to block all new North Sea oil and gas developments.
Yeah, that's my face as well, Stelios.
Just sheer... well, not confusing.
It's obviously sabotage, because Keir Starmer did say he prefers Davos to Westminster, so he is in the pocket of the World Economic Forum, and he is utterly obsessed with the Green Agenda, and immiserating us, and making us all contingent on renewables which can be rationed and controlled according to if we do things that the government likes, and they've already drafted legislation to do that with electric cars, for example.
I've written on this before.
So, Keir Starmer will announce plans to block all North Sea oil and gas developments and limit borrowing to green investment only as part of a radical new blueprint to make Britain a clean energy superpower.
Currently, the UK meets about 45% of its gas needs from domestic energy generation.
We could do much more.
So, by the way, if anyone doesn't know, if we tapped 10% of the North Sea reserves, we'd have 50 years worth of energy independence.
So if we did even more of that, we'd be able to export.
And I think there's a legal agreement which means that we can't actually nationalise production and keep it for ourselves slash sell it, but just tear up the legal agreement at this point.
Like, why are we allowing the Norwegians to tap it and they have a very prosperous country but we can't do it for ourselves?
Why are we subjecting ourselves to the global gas markets when other nations aren't playing by the rules?
Again, I can only assume the politicians want to sabotage us.
Despite the continued rise in renewables, 85% of British homes still rely on gas boilers for heat, and 42% of the UK's electricity comes from gas.
Without new licenses being approved, experts predict that domestic oil and gas production could fall by as much as 15% per year by the turn of the decade.
If so, output in 10 years would be about 80% lower than it is now, which is suicidal.
Because again, just to remind you, This is research that I did about two years ago now, so this was pre-inflation as well.
To create a fully renewable Britain would cost £2.9 trillion.
It would take the year's worth of battery production, most of which is owned by the Chinese, upwards of 80%, from now until 2031 to be entirely redirected to the UK.
That means no electric cars, that means no iPhones, anything for any other country.
And even then, it would meet 26.5% of energy demands without any protection from 21-day blackouts.
That's a stupid idea.
Let's not do that.
But they want to do it anyway.
Great.
A Labour source said, We are against the granting of new licenses for oil and gas in the North Sea.
They will do nothing to cut bills, as the Tories have acknowledged.
That's just not true.
Change the law.
They undermine our energy security.
What?
Pardon the pun.
Gaslighting.
Exploiting our own natural gas reserves undermines our energy security.
No.
No it wouldn't.
And would drive a coach and horse through our climate targets.
Yes, please.
Please do.
Because they're all ginned up anyway because the world's not going to burn.
But Labour would continue to use existing oil and gas wells over the coming decades and manage them sustainably as we transform the UK into a clean energy superpower.
Now, there is a suggestion that's a bit cynical here because the Scottish really like their wind farms and they obviously want to win...
Uh, SMP seats that have fallen by the wayside since Nicola Sturgeon has gone, so it might be a ploy to do so, but I actually went to the Scottish wind farm, Whitley, which is one of the largest in land in Europe, and the wind farm technicians went, yeah, they're just not up to snuff yet, so we do actually need nuclear or gas as a backup.
So, right.
Listen to the experts, I suppose.
No?
Great, we're all going to be poor.
Under the Green Prosperity Plan, Labour is aiming to double onshore wind, triple solar and more than quadruple offshore wind power.
Lots of money for the Chinese there.
The party is committed to creating a publicly owned renewable energy company, again, internalising all the losses yet to come, you pre-empted that, whose aim is to achieve net zero carbon power by 2030.
20 years just knocked off the clock with one policy.
That's okay.
Let's do five-year plans rather than actually go along with the technology, because that's not going to make anyone poor and cold at all, will it?
This time it's other people.
This time the experiment will work.
Yeah, sure.
Real communism has never been tried, guys.
So if we go on to this next one, the Conservatives aren't going to avert course either, because Jeremy Hunt has said that he's happy to have a recession to reduce inflation.
Again, it's not going to affect him, because he's very wealthy, and his wife works for the Chinese Communist Party, so it's almost like he has an interest in destroying the country, but okay.
And then he was saying that it's their responsibility to fix it.
But he doesn't blame himself, Rishi Sunak, who was the Chancellor, or the Bank of England, for creating inflation in the first place.
And we know how inflation works thanks to our wonderful colleague Dan's series, Broconomics, on the website, which, for £5 a month, you can get all of our premium content, you can help us keep the lights on, because we are demonetised by YouTube, if you're watching on YouTube.
And if you're watching on YouTube as well, come over to the website or Rumble, because you get the full podcast for free, you get an extra half an hour, After we're done talking in the segments where we interact with the audience and listen to your comments and have a bit of banter back and forth.
So you're missing out if you're watching us on the platform that still hates us.
But if you do pay £5 a month you can get excellent content where Dan explains inflation in here and he says it's obviously a rate of change metric so it's relative to the last year.
So if they say that you've got 100% inflation this year and then your bills go up by the same amount in the next year you've technically only got 50% inflation because it's the same monetary amount but it's comparative.
So you could keep having your bills increase by £100 a year, but they'll still tell you that inflation is going down.
Again, major gaslighting.
And it's because they're trying to define inflation as price change.
But no, that's a symptom of inflation.
Inflation is the increase of the money supply proportion to the static supply of goods.
When money supply outpaces goods, you get inflation.
And what have they done?
They've printed loads and loads of money.
And they've also been adjusting the interest rates.
And if you want to learn about interest rates, you can go on to this next one, which is episode 3.
Dan's on loads of pro-economic stuff.
You've got hours of content on our website to pour through, so it's well worth the £5.
And so I just wanted to talk about the Bank of England's interest rates just to finish off here, because last week's inflation figure was terrible.
Apparently, the headline was, it fell from 10.1% to 8.7% in the last year.
But this drop was solely caused by April's bumper increase in energy prices being taken out of the annual comparison.
They subsidised the energy price with your tax money, then took it out of the stats, of the goods that they were comparing, so they were patting themselves on the back saying, I haven't done a great job with inflation, but you're still paying for it anyway.
So they're just lying to you.
But the core rate of inflation, far from falling back as some had hoped, actually rose from 6.2% to 6.8%.
Because, partially, it's food prices, but the calculation here can't be blamed on food prices, because they were excluded from the core measure as well.
They took food prices out of the calculation, and it's still going up.
It's so deceptive.
This is why you can't really believe anything about the inflation metrics that are being reported, because the Bank of England and the Treasury are just manipulating the amount of goods that are in the basket they're looking at as being inflated.
They're just trying to make themselves look better.
One problem that this economist and others have highlighted is the bank's apparent complete inattention to the money supply.
Another is the excessive emphasis placed on expectations of inflation.
This was compounded by the assumption that because the central bank was devoted to maintaining the inflation rate at 2%, 2% would be the rate of inflation that was generally expected.
So they're marking their own homework.
They're saying, because we're going to reach the goal of 2%, all of our projections are going to be based around us achieving that goal.
They never thought they would fall short of the goal.
So the forecasting led to failures on policy.
Not only did the bank fail to raise interest rates nearly enough, but it also did not raise them fast enough.
The boldest move that it ever seems to have contemplated is an increase in interest rates of 0.5% rather than the usual 0.25%.
So basically, the government just keeps stepping on rakes.
And then wonder why they've got a headache, and then think another rake to step on will cure them of the headache.
And we've got to be the one paying for the rakes.
The major question here is who pays?
It's always us.
And so this is why my question is, is this just a series of systemic incompetences making fiscal dominoes fall down until they smack us in the toe, or is this deliberate sabotage?
Either way, I love living in a communist country.
Okay, so...
The good thing is that we're going to talk about music.
Okay.
I do like music.
I can't play, but I do like music.
Okay.
And we are going to talk about Pink Floyd and Roger Waters and the latest controversy with the uniform that he was wearing and he has been wearing for
43 years, 44 years when he is playing some particular songs but apparently some people found it a bit anti-semitic and the thing is that we are going to talk a lot about it and I think it's important to focus on what exactly happened and show how basically the main accusations against him are frankly a bit ridiculous.
OK, but the thing is that one of the important thing to understand about the wall is that it was a concept album.
So let me just make it draw a distinction between, you know, some video clips we watch now and the concept album.
So now if you watch plenty of video clips, you will see that there is a disrespect of the audience.
Because in what sense?
In the sense that the people who are shooting the video clip, they don't think that the audience has any attention span.
Every five or six seconds, the whole scenery behind changes.
Right, in modern music videos.
Yes, you see this tendency very frequently.
And you also see another tendency frequently, you see this in movies as well.
So for instance, I'll just say something, it may be a bit controversial for Star Wars fans, but please bear with me and tell us in the comments if you agree or not.
If you see the old Star Wars movies, they had sceneries.
They had some scenery, you know, they built a whole scenery and they focused on, you know, on that scenery for a long time, for, you know, half an hour, 40 minutes.
You know, it's in Return of the Jedi, it's 40 minutes desert in Jabba the Hutt, then it's 40 minutes... Endor, yeah.
Yeah, and then it's 40 minutes Death Star.
In the new Star Wars movies, you constantly see the planet scenery changing every two minutes.
Yeah, the new ones are garbage.
You frequently see this.
It's as if the people don't... It's as if we're... Those who shoot the movie think that, you know, we can't basically enjoy a scenery for more than that.
We need jingling keys at all times to distract us from the terrible writing.
So The Wall was a concept album.
It's not just that there is one theme per one song.
It's that there is a theme per album.
And one of the things is that it's one of the albums that are explicitly anti-totalitarian.
Now, speaking of totalitarianism, you can visit a website where for the really small amount of £5 a month, you can gain access to all our content, such as the video that… It's me and Bo, yeah.
I want us to watch this clip and I will ask you what it is that you are seeing.
form part one and there is also part two afterwards.
Be sure to check that.
Now, let's go to the next clip.
I want us to watch this clip and I will ask you what it is that you're seeing.
Let's play it.
Okay, so what did you see here?
So, I assume that's Roger Waters in the middle, because I haven't seen what he looks like in quite a while, because I'm not that big of a Pink Floyd fan.
And he is dressing up as a mid-century German, shouting at two masked paramilitary guys on his left and right, and shooting a fake machine gun.
Okay, yeah, so there is an obvious allusion to mid-century Germans, as you have said.
This seems like, you know, a uniform that I think some of them wore.
When you have two letters you put together.
But it looks a little bit like a Wolfenstein parody.
Like an almost New Age uniform.
Because it's not like he's a brown shirt or something.
He's wearing a Matrix-style trench coat.
So he's almost like a cyberpunk mid-century German.
You could say so.
And you also see the two hammers.
If you see he's wearing on his collar.
Yes, it's a symbol that there were that was played a lot on the war albums, and the movie that came afterward in 1982 with Bob Geldof and the video clip.
So basically, This is, someone writes this, Arsens Ostrovsky.
Wow.
This is Roger Waters imitating a Nazi while at a concert in Berlin.
This is just unhinged Jew hatred and Holocaust distortion.
The man is vile beyond words.
I don't think that was the intention.
Yeah, that was not the intention.
Let's go on the next click, link please.
Again, we have Stop Antisemitism writing, great news!
Berlin police have launched a criminal investigation into Roger Waters following his concert in which he dressed like a Nazi SS officer holding a gun and denigrated the murder of Anne Frank.
That's quite a big claim.
Did he mention her specifically or are they just saying this is just an example of one of the Holocaust people that have been You'll see in a bit.
You'll see in a bit.
I don't think that the issue was him mentioning her.
Right.
As you will see that he also mentioned another person.
So, and it says shockingly, AMC Theatres.
is promoting Waters currently.
Now, if we scroll down a bit the comment section, you will get an interesting idea.
It says here, "Roger Waters is in character as Pink, a rock star that overdoses and descends into madness.
Hallucinating, he is a dictator at a fascist rally and the audience are his supporters.
It is a role famously played by Bob Geldof in the movie Pink Floyd: The Wall, 1982." I love community notes.
So the Wall album was published in 1979, but there was also a movie afterwards in 1982, starring Bob Geldof.
If you see, this is not a uniform that Roger Waters wore right now.
This and, you know, relevant looking uniforms have been worn in his concerts for more than four decades.
And it's satirical, it's not sincere.
So if you look down a bit, if we scroll down a bit on the comment section, you will see, you know, very, very many people say actively promoting a rabid Jew haters like Waters as a form of complicity.
If we go down underneath a bit, you know, you have Lots of people saying that you're missing context and you're misrepresenting it.
Exactly, yes.
So, let's move on the next link please, which is an article by Sky News.
I will read a bit from it.
So, Pink Floyd star Roger Waters says he was opposing fascism, injustice and bigotry when he posed firing an imitation machine gun while wearing a Nazi-inspired uniform at a concert in Berlin.
Police in Germany have launched a An investigation of the British musician on suspicion of incitement after he was filmed wearing a long black coat and red armband featuring crossed hammers instead of swastikas.
Well, if there was anywhere that needed the satire, I would suggest it might be Germany.
And the thing is, he hasn't performed in Germany for the first time.
Yes.
I will show you some footage from a very famous concert that Roger Waters had in 1990, when the Berlin Wall fell.
And precisely because the Wall album is being seen as a sort of allegory Or it can also be seen as a sort of allegory for the problems that walls create between people, especially in the wall separating East and West Germany.
You would say that people from Germany, they actually liked the album.
They didn't find it weird or something.
And for decades, no one found it weird.
That's the issue.
Not just people from Germany.
For decades, no one was saying anything.
The thing is, though, that it may be that Roger Waters is engaged in activism.
Now, very frequently I don't agree with what he says, he's very left-wing.
Didn't he do trans rights as a giant banner around one of the concerts a little while ago?
I really don't know this.
Someone correct me in the comments, I think I remember a giant neon sign rotating around one of his concerts saying trans rights are human rights.
OK, I really don't know.
But the point is, whether I agree with him or disagree with him, it's irrelevant here.
Because the point is whether we should be focused on our criticism and whether actually we should just leave music alone, especially when we have done so for decades.
And this is not just for music.
This can also be seen for books.
We have, for instance, books that for centuries people were not unhappy with, and now we have people who want to censor these books and change their language.
So the thing is that if we scroll down a bit the Sky News article, I will read just from the end.
It writes, in the past, Waters has been criticized for his support of the BDS movement.
Which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
The musician has rejected accusations of anti-Semitism.
Authorities in Frankfurt try to prevent a concert.
They're scheduled for the 28th of May.
But what is challenge that moves successfully in a local court?
In Munich, the city council said it had explored the possibilities of banning a concert, but concluded that it was not legally possible to cancel a contract with the organiser.
So they wanted to, they just couldn't?
Yeah, right.
So the thing is that last year the Polish city of Krakow cancelled gigs by Waters because of his sympathetic stance towards Russia and its war against Ukraine.
So basically the thing is that Roger Waters is very outspoken.
As I said, for the most part I don't agree with what he says, but the thing is that he's so outspoken and people start now detecting, you know, making retroactive diagnoses of problems in his work.
Offense archaeology.
Exactly.
And what this shows is that, frankly, I don't know exactly the motivations behind every person who filed complaints against him, but it shows what they believe about the culture.
That it's a culture of people who cannot see context.
And they just see an image and they can't see besides that image.
So basically what is going on is that in his concerts, he did mention the name of Anne Frank as he has frequently mentioned the names of various victims of political violence, but he also mentioned the name of Shirin Abu Akhlaq.
There was a Palestinian journalist that died in one of the acts, let's say, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So the thing is, I really don't know about the conflict.
I'm not making any claims about this.
What I'm saying is that it's important to see things for what they are, and sometimes leave art out of it.
Okay, so, the thing is, if we go on the next link, you can just type Roger Waters on Twitter and scroll down a bit, you'll get an idea.
If we go on the next tweet about the event, it's what he writes about the event.
So, as he says, My recent performance in Berlin has attracted bad faith attacks from those who want to smear and silence me because they disagree with my political views and moral principles.
The elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice and bigotry in all its forms.
Attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated.
The depiction of an unhinged, Fascist Demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd's The Wall in 1980.
I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression wherever I see it.
When I was a child after the war, the name of Anne Frank was often spoken in our house.
She became a permanent reminder of what happens when fascism is left unchecked.
My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price.
Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.
So for those who would take the opinion as a sincerely held conviction, this is very well written because he's personalized it and he's not just being too abstract.
I think to say, I oppose fascism, sure, injustice and bigotry in all its forms, that's Basically, impossible.
You know, you're bigoted against your sexual partners, for God's sake.
So that's just too broad a generalisation.
But to say about, oh, when I was growing up I heard about the story of Anne Frank, or when my dad fought the Nazis and he died in the Second World War, so you're disgracing his memory by linking me to something I oppose, is a good way to frame it.
It's just that what he doesn't understand, probably because he's a boomer, is that these people are not interested in reciprocity, they are interested in forgiveness and apology.
They're interested in making an example out of you to make themselves feel better, and so they can bring their ideological scheme to its apotheosis, the offense-free utopia.
So we could check the next link, please.
We can have it playing.
This is Bob Geldof by the movie The Wall in 1982.
We can have it on mute.
I want to ask you, You know, to watch what you see.
Now, we'll give you some context about what the album of the wall is about.
Okay?
So, the thing is that this is a sort of, you could say it's autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.
Because the thing is that Roger Waters lost his father in the Battle of Anzio.
I think his father died when Roger Waters was five months old in February 1944.
So his father was lost in a battle against both mid-century German and Italian fascists.
So the thing is that he is In The Wall, we are looking at, for instance, Pink, who is a rock star, and has lost his father, also in the war, it's an obvious analogy, and has an overbearing mother, and he also has troubles with his marriage, and he begins to descend in an antisocial, let's say, rabbit hole.
Okay, and he is hallucinating at some point that he is a sort of fascist demagogue.
You can see here, and this is from the song In the Flesh, and at some point he will start saying that, you know, he is going to go against the audience and towards the end, if you pay close attention to the lyrics, he says, if it were up to me, I would have all of you shot.
But the crucial thing is that This is a very important realization for him because he understands in the album that when he is erecting a sort of wall, a protective wall, an overprotective wall between himself and the people, his audience, his mother, anyone, he is becoming like the people who killed his father.
Right.
So, there is no such thing as Roger Waters here being in favour of fascism or authoritarianism.
It's the exact opposite.
It's a condemnation of how isolation drives you towards murderous radicalism because you're acting out of hatred of everyone.
Yes.
Question though!
This is from 1982.
Have there been any allegations against Bob Geltoff?
Bob Geltoff was wearing the same uniform.
This is a rhetorical question.
Now, if you check down a bit, the comments, I saw a comment by someone on on YouTube that was talking about the song and says, Is it the CLD one?
Yes.
Not to be the this-generation-sucks guy, but it's a shame a performance like that most likely wouldn't fly now.
Sounds like a really dope way to include your audience while communicating exactly what the song's about.
And that's one month ago.
It's not two or three days ago.
So this comment was a bit prophetic.
Now, let's go to the next link, please.
Speaking of mental fortitude and the kind of mental fortitude that you need in order to not descend into the mental craze of pink, you can visit a website where for five pounds a month you can just watch the video
On the Stoicism of Epictetus I did with Bo, on how to be invincible, how to use Stoicism to basically step your game up and basically be more of a man.
Let's talk a bit about a famous concert in Berlin.
The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
Was it somewhere there?
I believe so.
Yeah.
So eight months ago, eight months after that, there was a very big concert that Roger Waters organized with roughly, you know, 450,000 people audience.
And basically they were celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall with Pink Floyd's The Wall.
We can just have this playing again on mute.
You see the same symbol there, the two hammers.
These are scorpions playing.
Now, one thing.
During the concert, a wall was being erected.
This is, again, Roger Waters.
Okay?
Question.
He erected the wall just like he, in Berlin, just like he wore the uniform.
Was he in favor of a wall there in Berlin?
No.
He went there to celebrate with many other artists, like, you know, Van Morrison, Senna de Conor, He went there to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So again, this is an issue of understanding context.
Just because there are thematic albums, it doesn't mean that, you know, people don't understand context.
Yeah.
Michael Jackson is not actually a werewolf from Thriller.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So if you see, I want to ask you when you see here, if you can recognize patterns and if you can recognize similarities with the previous videos I showed you.
Well yeah, he's wearing a very similar uniform.
Less leather, more general military dictator garb, and there's the lights and the red colouring that's still going on.
And again, it's in the same place, but there's no outrage, because it's jubilant.
It's mocking the fact that tyranny has been toppled.
Yeah.
And if you see, if we let this plane, you will see that there are also the same things yet again.
We have the two hammers.
We have people acting as if they are mid-century Germans at a rally.
Why?
Because this is a thematic album.
It's not a glorification of totalitarianism.
It's a thematic album.
Long story short, I'm going to give you a spoiler for the concert.
They broke the wall at the end, because the whole point of the album is about breaking the wall, is realizing the bad things that, you know, of isolation, you know, the ills of isolation, and then try to do something against it.
So it's a thematic album, okay?
It's not a glorification of authoritarianism.
Okay, now, if we can go on the next links, please.
Yeah, okay.
These are some fandom notes if you want to read about the concert because it was a very big concert.
And let's... Can we move forward to the... Okay, Animals was released in 1977.
No one called it anti-Semitic at the time.
The Wall was released in 1979.
No one called it anti-Semitic at the time.
In 2023, supporters of This Palestinian says Apartheid Israel, we're going to stay neutral on it.
Yes, okay.
Okay.
Now, I want to ask you if you think that role-playing is something that is frequent in art.
Well, yeah, obviously, because Henry Cavill isn't an orphaned Kryptonian, but he's still a good Superman.
Yes.
Can we move fast?
We have five links.
Can we move to the third link, please?
Yes, okay.
Now, do you know who this is?
No, I don't.
Okay, this is Bono from U2.
He's dressed here as Macphisto.
He's basically a character that he was playing in his, in their... He's emulating the devil.
Yeah, in the 90s.
So they had the Achtung Baby tour and then they also had the, I think, the Zuropa tour.
Yeah, and he was dressed as this character for some songs, like Lemon, and he was singing With or Without You like that.
He wasn't endorsing the devil.
Now, if we move on the next link, please.
Do you know who that is?
Yeah, it's Christoph Waltz in... Yes.
Oh, what's the film called?
It's From Inglourious Bastards.
Oh, yes, that's it.
Yes.
Is he glorifying anything, or is he participating in a movie that is a criticism of the movement, whose uniform he wears?
Him and Daniel Brühl are both German, so it would be a little bit awkward to go home after playing Nazis if they were sincere in their convictions, wouldn't it?
Yes.
Basically, it's called acting.
And if we can go on the next link, please... Why do we have to explain this?
Do you know who that is?
Yeah, it's Leo DiCaprio in Django.
Okay, so Leonardo DiCaprio was playing as the racist Calvin Kent in Django Unchained.
Quentin Tarantino was also playing as a racist slave trader in Django Unchained.
No one said anything about them.
And just one thing to note is that the Calvin Candy has good memes.
People throw good memes on it.
And my favorite, I couldn't find it and share it with you.
He has this face over there you see on top.
And there was a woman being very frustrated with him.
And he asks, No, why is it?
Is it always, are you frustrated because I always say I know this?
She says with a screaming face, yes, and he responds with a face there, I know.
Yeah, so that's it.
The thing is, as I, to recapitulate, Roger Waters is engaged in plenty of activism, he's very outspoken, I very frequently disagree with what he says, but it's important to draw a distinction between what he says and something that is basically now a sort of cultural artifact, because The Wall is.
I think The Wall is a great album and it's really important.
So just to underscore it, at the end of the segment, he's not teaming up for the next album with Kanye West?
I think he's not.
Safe to say.
He wouldn't.
Yeah.
Alright then, on to the final segment.
Thank you very much.
Human beings, particularly babies, are not products.
I shouldn't have to tell you this by now.
Well, I shouldn't have to tell all the family-focused conservatives this.
But, and I'm sorry Stelios, someone forgot to tell the rapidly metastasising, autonomy-maximising liberals that babies are not products.
And that people shouldn't commodify themselves.
And so we're going to have a conversation about the impact of that branch of liberalism today on the surrogacy industry specifically.
And I wanted to start off with this tweet from Planned Parenthood.
And they've said, it's not just about abortion.
Advocating for abortion goes hand-in-hand with advocating for gender-affirming care and birth control.
Access to healthcare is a right no matter what.
Now, Stelios, I can already preempt that you're going to disagree, but what do you think about the logic that they're exercising here?
The thing is that it's a very contested issue and you can interpret it in many ways that are consistent with liberalism.
Because you could say that, for instance, liberalism is all about protecting the individual's rights, and the fetus is a sort of person in the making, and abortion violates the rights of that person.
You could also run the other argument and be pro-choice and you say, yes, but at the end of the day, it's all about individual choice.
So it seems to me that this is one of those conundrums where it's compatible with all sorts of ideologies.
And I don't know if I would rush to make any Any quick rejection of a particular political theory because it's compatible with either position?
So, I would say they're actually correct within their own internal framework.
If we go to just this one, because I wrote this tweet, but I'll just explain my thinking here.
Obviously, with the birth control pill, which my friend Mary Harrington calls the first transhumanist technology, it made it so that women's default reproduction setting was off rather than on.
So you had an internal medical device which augmented your relation with yourself and your freedoms to your biological limitations.
So we started augmenting how biology could hold women back from, for example, equal participation in the workforce, because they didn't have to have as many babies.
Okay, once you open the door to that, you have two routes to go down.
Number one, you have the route of gender modification.
So if you can augment your body with hormones to stop you being pregnant, why can't you augment your body with hormones to swap your gender in line with your self-conception?
And if the only thing holding you back from being a woman is your ability to actually have children, then surrogacy or artificial wombs are the next step in that chain of technological evolution.
And so our conception of what constitutes human — gendered, male and female — is in a race against time, thought-wise, with the technology that allows us to break those boundaries.
So that's the argument for the gender one.
The argument for the abortion one — and Peter Hitchens, rather, made this in Abolition of Britain, but since folks like Louise Perry and Mary have made the same argument — is, Because the contraceptive pill was widely rolled out and it was promised that it would have less unplanned pregnancies, people were having more casual sex because there was no reason to abstain from casual sex because you didn't have to risk a pregnancy anymore.
And because more people had more casual sex, more unplanned pregnancies happened just because the pill wasn't foolproof, so then legal abortion became the next step in the evolution of freeing women from the tyranny of reproduction so they could be fully autonomous persons.
This is why also child care is downstream of that, which we'll mention slightly later.
And so Planned Parenthood's logic is, okay, it doesn't stop at birth control, it goes down the route of, You can hormonally redefine yourself, and if you're taking control of your reproductive freedom and you're subordinating your obligations to your children, to your own ability to manifest your ambitions, then of course abortion is connected to birth control.
The two are both contingent on the fulcrum of personal choice.
It's the freedom-at-all-costs version of liberalism.
And so what they're saying does make sense.
I don't agree with it, But it's logically consistent, and it's the dominant paradigm.
And this is something that you and Carl have recently spoken about.
in this new premium podcast, which was released yesterday, called Why Liberalism is a Universal Acid.
And you and Karl went over Sex, Culture and Justice, which was an essay about a liberal trying to reconcile her objections to female genital mutilation with her endorsement of breast implants.
And the contest was over whether women can have informed consent to FGM versus they can have informed consent to birth implants – sorry, breast implants.
And it was trying to reconcile the seemingly contradictory goals of equality and the complete unimpeded ability to make decisions autonomously.
Hypothetically as well, because if you start going down, okay, what constitutes economy?
You've got to ensure education, you've got to ensure no coercion, you've got to ensure no biology holds you back.
Exactly.
So it's an impossible standard.
If you pay us £5 a month, not only do you support the podcast, because we do monetise on YouTube, but you get access to content like this, and I really recommend you go and watch this, and the prior debate on liberalism that you did for Symposium, because I thought it was really good.
Were you convinced by any of Carl's arguments here?
The thing is that, for me, we sort of agree, but we are looking at the terminological bit from a different angle.
So, for instance, Karl is much more interested in the idea of sentiment.
I am interested in the idea of sentiment, but I'm also interested in the idea of liberty.
And I think that this is just a hill that we should die on, and we shouldn't give that to the other side.
Even if the other side is very aggressively conceptual.
Now, with respect to what you said before, I don't have any easy answers.
If I told you that I have any easy answers, I would be lying.
But I want to at least lay out my cards here about the issue.
It seems to me that When you are in favor of liberty, you are in favor of a more dynamic society.
For instance, take what we were talking about before about the five-year plans in economy.
A five-year plan in economy is a plan for a static economy.
It has no room for experimental spontaneity.
So, if we just make this claim, not just in the economy, and we use it and we apply it in various other contexts, we will see that when we are in favor of freedom, we are in favor of more dynamic societies that have, let's say, room for more experimentation.
Now, of course, there will be a problem.
Every now and then.
And many of these things are problems that we couldn't have predicted in advance.
So, for instance, when it comes to property rights and when people are, let's say, getting on each other's nerves with noise.
This is not something that could have been predicted.
It's something that arose in the meantime.
So, for me, when I'm in favor of a society that prizes liberty, I want a kind of dynamic society.
I don't want a society where individual creativity is stifled.
So, my focus is on having a bottom-up, spontaneously free society that will generate, undoubtedly, some social problems and then use, let's say, social organization as a means of mitigating that.
So, for instance, when it comes to, let's say, a lot of the atrocious things that take place now with the gender movement, yeah, of course, I do think that some of these things should be banned.
The issue you have, though, when you make freedom the highest possible value that we must seek towards, I don't.
Okay, okay.
I think these people do.
When you say you're most interested in freedom, I understand what you mean.
But when freedom becomes the maximum value rather than what is the moral direction with how to use that freedom, that sort of social prescription, then freedom itself, attaining that freedom, becomes a moral goal.
And because you can't quite quantify freedom, or informed consent, or rational self-interest,
all you can do is look for endless amounts of barriers to achieving that hypothetical perfect consent or freedom and so that's why a branch of liberalism has gone from protecting citizens from unjust state persecution to protecting citizens from having any bonds of obligation on each other to the point of infants and mothers and so it has spread like a cancer
and is now treating any bond of unchosen obligation as a pathological incursion on your autonomy.
I totally agree with you here, but I think that for me, liberty is not the only goal.
It is one among many goals.
And if you see the history of classical liberalism, you will see that at the core of it is the Reformation.
And the religious wars that came afterwards.
And it's the attempt to create a society that, despite massive disagreement about views of what constitutes a good life, can coexist.
To my mind, the classical liberalism I'm defending is the classical liberalism that says that, well, I don't want to recognize moral authorities who are going to coerce me into living the life that they think is best for me or anyone.
So this is compatible with not treating liberty as the only goal.
Which means that I want liberty because I want to be left alone to pursue my idea of the good life.
That doesn't mean that the good life will involve freedom, but it won't involve only freedom.
For instance, it may involve family.
It may involve, you know, friendship.
It will involve.
Not may, I think it will involve.
So for me, the problem is not so much with With that, the problem is when we have conceptions of the good life, and we have people who argue that family, friendship, and other people are not part of what the good life is.
So yeah, they do want freedom, but they want freedom that they know to do nothing They don't know what to do with it.
So just to draw a line under it, so freedom for you in the political liberal tradition is a means of attaining the good life, rather than freedom being an end state in and of itself that everything else has to be jettisoned in order to pursue, which is the comprehensive liberal position.
And the thing is with the comprehensive liberal position, and the reason I've brought this up, is because there's a paradox here which we've already spoken about in terms of involuntary obligations and relationships, and nothing is more involuntary than a mother and her child.
And a lot of these biomedical interventions have been to, and legal, have been to sever that bond in favour of making the woman a purely free and rational actor, a liberal subject who has no biological limitations or social obligations.
And there's a paradox here because you are sacrificing the sanctity of a child who cannot exercise that judgment, who doesn't have their liberal subjectivity respected, and you're also simultaneously infantilising the adult by saying that they're not capable of taking on responsibilities, and that you are suggesting that anything that puts a bond of obligation on them is a constraint on their freedom, so you're treating them like children until you come along and liberate them.
And nowhere else, I think, at the moment, is this debate better exemplified than the current surrogacy debate.
And I'm gonna shock everyone and play a clip from Keeping Up The Kardashians.
I really wanted to raise the tone on this podcast.
How did this occur to you?
Well, you're so smart, Stelios, I had to bring your IQ down to make myself feel a bit better.
But this is a really interesting clip.
This has been doing it around.
This is the family with Kendall.
I don't know which one's which.
All I know is that this woman's name is Chloe and then Kim Kardashian is gross.
The reason I'm playing this clip is because it's reignited the surrogacy debate on Twitter and among the commentariat on the dissident right, particularly the former feminists who are raising some good points.
So let's talk about Chloe Kardashian, listen to her talk about her recent experience with surrogacy.
Please play.
Surrogate process.
Kim knows it's really hard for me.
Well, what does that mean?
She had a really hard time accepting the whole process.
Oh, got it.
It's a mind f***.
It's really the worst thing.
I do think that there is a difference.
When the baby is in your belly, the baby actually feels your real heart.
Think about it.
It, like, touches your organs.
There's no one else on this planet that will feel you from the inside like that, like your heart, you know?
I got so many good jokes.
People can connect in different ways.
People could not connect.
Do you feel less connected?
That'll take a minute.
Yeah, people say it was painful.
I mean, listen, the other was 10 months of walking around.
Hers was like, easy.
This is not easy.
I definitely like buried my head in the sand during that pregnancy that I didn't digest what was happening.
And so I think when I went to the hospital, I really think that was the first time that really registered.
And it has nothing to do with the baby.
It's just, you're like, okay, we're having a baby and this is my son and I'm taking him home with me.
I definitely was in a state of shock, I think, from my entire experience in general.
Go, go, go, go, go.
Don't stop.
Don't stop.
I felt really guilty that, like, this woman just had my baby, and you're just... I take the baby, and then I go to another room, and you're sort of separated.
Like, I felt it's such a transactional experience, because it's not about him.
I wish someone was honest about surrogacy and the difference of it, but it doesn't mean it's bad or good.
It's still great.
Look at how the liberal programming kicked in right at the end there.
Sorry, I have to say this.
I wasn't in top form, but I have trouble understanding what the Kardashians...
I mean, it takes some kind of nerve if you have a family that is not exactly...
Whatever.
Are we going to take family advice from these people?
No, but it's a great example as to why we should listen to it, because they have been caught up in the wealthy liberal paradigm, which out... No, because the reason is, they all make money off their bodies, right?
They all sell photos of themselves or whatever.
This is why they use surrogates, because as autonomous financial actors, they don't want to impact their figure because it loses them money, so they outsource gestation to women either overseas or women that they're paying in the US, and then they've realised that actually the rational transaction
is kind of disembodying because she was talking about the pregnancy showing up to the hospital like she was actually pregnant and then you see her walking through the corridors having another woman do all of the work and then handing off a baby that she hasn't gestated and hasn't felt physiologically connected to and then right at the end she goes but it's still great it's like that's cope that's that's totally it is cope and the thing is that there can be no autonomy here because autonomy requires Understanding what it is that you are going into?
Yeah.
And I think that many women who claim to know in advance how giving birth to a baby is going to be like, and selling it then, I don't think they are really informed in what they're doing.
No, definitely not, because also, and we'll get onto exactly how later, but pregnancy and birth is physiologically preparatory, not just for a baby, but it makes a mother too.
And so to separate the baby from the mother it's been germinating inside of, to then give it to a mother who it might share genetic DNA with, or just an adoptive mother, and expect them to have the same bond, is going to be difficult for the baby, and also difficult for both mothers involved.
And the idea that you can just rationally consent to this and there's no biological limitations or emotional fraughtness in this process just because money is changing hands, it's a lie and it's impacting the children involved who never chose to be born this way and it's impacting the women involved who are either selling themselves into this or who think that they have to buy these women's bodies in order to maintain their physique because they're very wealthy and they make money off of it but it feels very alienating and it might not make them as good of mothers to their children.
Now, this coincides, interesting, with the UK Law Commission, and it's reforming its laws on surrogacy.
Now, this is actually a pretty good article for The Guardian, be still my beating heart, from Sonia Soda here.
And she says that surrogacy remains small scale in the UK.
Just about 300 to 400 orders are granted every year, limited by the number of women who want to become surrogates.
But in countries like the US and Georgia, commercial surrogacy is legal.
Economically vulnerable women can be paid to carry a baby, and surrogacy is governed by legally enforceable contracts that the UN Special Rapporteur on Child Exploitation says constitute the sale of children.
The Law Commission recently drove a coach and horses through the UK's moral frontier.
It framed it as an overdue modernization in the law.
It published draft proposals to reform the UK's surrogacy framework.
Implicit in them is the, I suspect, controversial assumption that single men seeking to have a child alone through surrogacy because he doesn't want or can't maintain a committed relationship presents no greater moral quandary than a couple seeking IVF.
So she's actually highlighting here, and she goes on to speak about later that the case studies involved were also women that were infertile or gay couples seeking a child that the law body tried to use to drum up sympathy for changing the law.
She's saying here that surrogacy commands you draw a blind eye not just to the developmental impacts it will have on the baby by being separated from their mother but the kind of family the baby is being given to.
Surrogacy for the sake of having a child as a product to make yourself a fully fulfilled liberal subject because it was your goal abolishes the family because the family is not necessarily chosen but it is normative and it is the best thing for the kid.
Yeah.
That's the issue.
And just to say, and I know there are plenty of guys in our audience as well who have had a marital breakdown, which, sorry fellas, like, seriously.
My heart goes to you.
Or find it difficult to maintain a relationship with some women that they have encountered so far, and believe me, I've suffered that myself, that doesn't mean that you should be able to do this either, because again, it's not about you, it's always about the baby.
And the baby never chooses.
But liberalism doesn't consider, this form of liberalism, doesn't consider how the baby has no ability to choose to come into the world.
And it doesn't consider that the parent, by the virtue of the baby having no choice, have obligations that go beyond their ability to maximise their autonomy.
Like, your autonomy goes out the window the moment a kid is involved.
The Law Commission has recommended wholesale reforms that make the surrogacy process more akin to IVF.
It proposes new preconception pathways governed by a surrogacy agreement in which the intended parents automatically become the legal parents of the child at birth unless the surrogate withdraws consent before the birth.
The family courts will no longer oversee these arrangements unless the surrogate applies for a parental order in the first six weeks after birth.
Instead, surrogacy will be pre-approved by surrogacy agencies, in the same way fertility clinics sign off on IVFs.
You're creating a surrogacy industry in the UK.
And also, at the moment where consent gets murky because of the physiological changes, and specifically the birth to then parent transition, that's where consent is the hypothetical grey area now.
You're putting it at the worst possible time to say who is the actual mother of the child and that's because you can't put a definite point of consent on a situation where there are more factors than just rationality dictating your choices, right?
The Commission makes sweeping but un-evidenced claims that this is in the best interests of children and that because it reduces uncertainty it will increase the amount of surrogacy that happens in the UK by discouraging people from making use of more exploitative regimes abroad.
So they're saying that even if it's a bit shaky, moral grounds, one, it's going to be better for the kid because they're not being flown from a foreign parent, but the child doesn't know.
Again, the child has no capacity to rationalise it.
And two, it's going to happen anyway, so it's better if it happens here.
I mean, again, this goes back to the abortion argument, the idea that if abortion were illegal, we'd be having coat hanger back alley abortions at the same scale as we would, which is not the case, by the way, never was.
And if you make something legal, you do basically make it permissible.
And as we've seen throughout the trends of history with abortion, the rates will just go up.
It becomes the new cultural ubiquitous norm.
So you will create a market for the commodification of other women's bodies, and that is not serving the interests of the kids.
She says here: "It is for us as a society to decide whether or not we want the law to actively encourage rather than tolerate this, not for the Law Commission to make recommendations without even exploring public attitude.
The Law Commission report is peppered with imagined case studies that invoke sympathy: straight couples where a woman is infertile, gay male couples who see their surrogacy is the only way to have a biological child.
They're fulfilling their own dream of themselves despite biological constraints.
This encapsulates the extent to which the Law Commission proposals are catering to the desires of adults with a vested interest in surrogacy, however valid their reasons, over and above child welfare.
It's an entirely selfish law and the child has no choice.
And this is why Louise Perry, who I've spoken to on the website before and I've reviewed her book, she's also fantastic, go on to her article, She wrote something on the Law Commission, in The Spectator, and she made the similar point about market forces incentivising the decoupling of gestation from motherhood.
Globally, it's estimated the market for surrogate babies will be worth $22 billion by 2025, up from $5 billion in 2018.
So, again, what's our argument against trans male womb transplants, for example?
If it's to maximise your autonomy and your self-conception, then there is no biological frontier which does not deserve to be demolished.
Planned Parenthood's logic totally holds here.
And so she argues instead for embodiment over autonomy, for embracing the constraints rather than making a virtue of destroying them.
Although it might suit the interests of the industry to claim otherwise, women's bodies do not actually function as neat vessels entirely separate from the child they create.
Such surrogacy cannot void the maternal relationship because of what on earth is pregnancy if not biological.
The child born to a mere gestational mother comes into the world composed entirely of matter produced by her body craving her charge Touch, voice and smell.
The only things a newborn baby will know.
It has long been recognized that maternal separation causes stress to newborns, potentially leading to permanent alterations to the brain.
And they've actually found that fetal cells cross-pollinate with the mother's cells.
They've seen it in in cadavers of women who are elderly.
They've been able to match fetal Yeah.
Stem cells in their body well after their pregnancy.
This is in Abigail Tucker's book, Mum Genes, which both Mary and Louise cite quite a lot.
And so she finishes here.
Pregnancy does not just create a baby, it creates a mother.
The long process of gestation causes irreversible changes to the maternal brain, priming her for the all-consuming task of infant care.
And it's a noble task.
I'd say it's far more noble than endlessly seeking to be free of every obligation.
You said yourself, when seeking freedom as a means of the good life, it will result in family, because that's the most meaningful thing.
And that's going out of your way to adopt constraints.
It won't always be this way, because many people, as you really well show, don't think that if you let them free, they won't choose family themselves.
But I think that, in general, this is a problem.
The majority of people that reach an age where they can no longer have children was 80%, as I've spoken to Stephen Shaw, interview coming out soon.
80% of women who don't have children wanted to have children, but just felt that financial and relationship pressures didn't allow them to.
So instead, you could actually make an argument there that materialist policies pursued by materialist autonomy-maximizing liberals have revoked the choice of having a family from people that would otherwise want to have one.
But they're not willing to countenance their role in revoking abilities to make choices.
And it's also another problem with how people think of their, let's say, mental abilities.
For instance, there is a tremendous pressure that many people feel that they have to answer all of their lives I feel that to be honest.
I think that it introduces a kind of pressure that isn't good.
It seems to me that many of the women who think of doing such a thing, they don't think that nine months from now they may feel really different.
Yeah, that's entirely true.
Again, there are no temporal considerations in the autonomy-maximising positions.
They just think of themselves as a sort of end-of-history state of perfect rationality.
And that's just not how humans operate.
Age is an entropic factor on your senses and your mental facilities.
It's just something to think about.
So Louise went from this article into a debate with A woman who is the head of Surrogacy UK, if we go on to this next link please, so you can listen to this in your own time, but I just pulled a quote from here.
So when Sarah Jones was asked why she had surrogacy, she said, for me, it was just a case of why not?
People volunteer to do things all the time which other people can't understand.
So she equates it to climbing Kilimanjaro, which is a personal thing.
But then she knows there's a difference between the two because then she acknowledges the baby puts an involuntary moral obligation on the mother that it's born to.
But she just doesn't like it.
Because then she says slightly earlier, as surrogates, we don't wish to be financially, morally or legally responsible for children that aren't genetically ours, that aren't a part of our family.
So financially and legally you can solve through government intervention, right?
This is the comprehensive liberal view of you need to intervene to correct a perceived injustice, right?
But you're always going to be morally on the hook for a child because the child had no choice but to be born to you.
And this is the contradiction that the pro-surrogacy side can't quite reconcile.
She said, I am ardently against commercial surrogacy in all its forms because she regards it as a form of financial coercion for vulnerable women.
Again, the hypothetical standard of, but if I rationally chose surrogacy, if I wasn't being financially coerced, again, what's the threshold for not being financially coerced?
Because you're always going to have to pay bills and things like that.
Then you can't answer surrogacy under the question of autonomy, even for the woman undertaking it.
You can't properly consent to this without biological factors playing a role, even before you become pregnant and it impacts you.
There is the incentive of Of marketizing fetuses and infants, which is something that should be resisted, I think.
Yeah, babies are not products.
Again, we need to remember this.
And that's not the only way we relate to each other.
We don't go and look at women and say, no healthy female of breeding age, and things like that.
Does that chat-up line ever work for you, Stelios?
No.
No, it's not like that.
It's not a resource.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The arch-misogynists on the podcast of the Lotus Seasons don't think that women are cattle.
We've made breakthroughs here, somehow, but we're still going to be accused of it anyway.
Oh well, don't care.
So where does this logic actually extend to?
Again, particularly with surrogacy.
Well, we go on to this Insider article.
There are gay couples, because of the price of surrogacy and demand, who are crowdfunding for IVF and surrogacy.
And so, many insurance policies, because they define infertility as the inability to conceive after a certain period of unprotected sexual intercourse, they won't insure gay couples for this, or they put their premiums way higher.
And it's because, we have a contradiction here, between obvious biological constraints of, if you bash two bits of the same kind together you won't get a baby, versus, I want a baby because it's part of my self-conception, despite the limitations, so we're gonna circumvent every ...uh, reality constraint to get what we want.
And they're still complaining that society's oppressing them.
No, it's just biological reality, and it's what you owe to the kid.
This is why it's been banned in Italy recently, because they were importing loads of babies.
And it seems it's only gonna get worse in other countries as they start legalizing it.
And this is a particularly gross example.
If we can go on to the next one, please.
Um, there's a Utah mother who's carrying her son's baby.
So it's using IVF from the daughter-in-law's eggs and her son.
It's gross but hang on, how under comprehensive liberalism can they object to this?
They're not sharing genetic material, they're rational actors, they're just engaging in an economic transaction which benefits both parties.
But you and I both go, that's gross.
And we rightly go, that's gross.
But the comprehensive liberal can't make a case against this.
This is why liberalism shouldn't be applied to social obligations where it's not appropriate.
I'm not a comprehensive listener.
I know you're not.
I know you're absolutely not.
I'm merely having dialogue because of your podcast with Carl, which was very good.
I'm mainly addressing civilization.
Sorry, this is ridiculous.
Is that a true article or is it just… Yeah, Nancy Huck offered to be a surrogate for her son Jeff Huck, 32, and his wife Cambria after Cambria had a life-saving hysterectomy, so her womb was removed because she had some kind of… disorder that could have threatened her.
The pair had been struggling to conceive for six years before they had two sets of twins.
They wanted to expand their family and Nancy said she had a feeling she was the one who should carry the next baby.
Is she gonna be a mother and a grandmother?
Yes, at the same time.
At the same time?
Yes.
It's very ancient Egyptian.
But again, this is the thing.
If we're just economic actors engaging in transactions and familial bonds are just arbitrary, what's wrong with this?
I would say everything, personally, but I'm a conservative.
So, here are some moral arguments against it.
And I'd like to go to Mary Harrington's article.
His father is also his grandfather.
No.
No, it's not.
The genetic material is from the parents.
It was a bit messed up.
Yeah, it's very messed up.
I don't blame your brain for breaking.
So Mary wrote an article about, again, go and check my interview with her out on the website, it's free, about Khloe Kardashian, the clip that we watched at the start.
And I think Mary puts the arguments very well.
So we'll finish.
on this other than one more link.
Research shows that while non-gestating parents, surrogates, undergo similar neurological changes to a pregnant woman when they're trying to bond with the infant, this takes longer and comes via contact with the baby.
In contrast, the physiological process of pregnancy doesn't just create a baby, it also creates a mother, which is where Louise got that quote, priming the pregnant woman for attunement to and devoted care of her newborn.
So we can't simply say that because some babies need adoptive parents, the relationship between birth mother and baby is of no importance.
Surrogacy bakes mother loss into a baby's earliest experience.
It inflicts this loss on a profoundly vulnerable infant in the name of adult desire.
Parents have a duty to put their children's needs first.
This is an inexcusable inversion of that duty.
And She's referencing, as well, the sort of blood cortisol level.
This actually plays out in daycare, for example.
So, once the baby's born, your obligations don't end to it.
You should be around, you should be present.
The economy should be reformatted to incentivise stay-at-home motherhood.
If we go on to this final one, please.
Uh, if you would like to pay us £5 a month, you can get access to all of our premium content.
And this is something I did with Josh recently.
Two hours on the literature, scientific literature, of daycare, single motherhood, preschools, and government interventions into early childcare.
And one of the studies we found is that if a baby is separated from its mother early in its life, its blood cortisol remains from its peak when first waking up, remains higher throughout the day rather than dropping off to normal levels if it has contact with his mother.
And if you do that when it's an infant in daycare, blood cortisol remains at high elevated levels all throughout their life.
So that might be An explainer of why we're having massive mental health epidemics at the moment.
One of many factors, of course.
But you're physiologically priming infants to be in a state of distress all throughout their adolescence, and when they grow up, they're going to have difficulty forming deeply attached relationships.
So this is the point.
The comprehensive liberal perspective.
The idea that you should have no unchosen obligations to other people, including children who did not choose to be brought into the world by either you or a surrogate mother, is a lie.
It's doing a disservice to the women who buy into it.
It's doing a disservice to the children who did not choose to be born this way, but have to bear the psychological and physiological brunt of this for the rest of their lives.
And so, the surrogacy industry is the commodification of women and babies.
It should stop.
I totally endorse it to be banned.
Stop commodifying kids.
On to the comments, I suppose.
We don't have any video comments today.
Just to remind you, you can email those in to us.
What was the email again, John?
video.editor at lotuses.com if you're a gold-tier subscriber.
If you're not a gold-tier subscriber, well, we won't be able to play them, but you still have time to sign up.
So we've got a few minutes to go through some of the comments.
Sorry, I've got a nose itch.
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Vladimir Lenin, as quoted by JJHW, in reference to the fact that Rishi Sunak is becoming a communist.
Seems about right.
There's also the Lenin quote that is that communism starts off... 90% of communism is the control of a central bank.
Yeah, seems about right.
Spring Valley, Itland.
Don't envy us Norwegians too much, Connor.
We are electrifying the offshore rigs to the cost of 10 to 20 billion.
Installations have run on their own generators since they were built.
We produce all the electricity we need.
We'll export it for three pence per kilowatt to Germany and sell it onto our own population at 10 to 20 times that.
Our electricity cost has risen more than 2,100 times since 2021.
Our government is hell-bent on screwing us over a barrel at every turn.
I see more and more where the French deemed The revolution, a necessity.
I can't read that last part out.
Stop getting me to Fed posts.
But yeah, I wasn't aware of Norway basically sabotaging its energy grid, because you didn't need to, but it does make sense because we're all signed up to net zero and we're going to destroy our own countries.
Sophie Liv, not to blackpill even more, now that Russia, China and Saudi Arabia is forming BRICS, what are the chances they plan to just turn off the oil tap this winter and just sit back and watch Europe crumble?
Yeah, it's a realistic prospect.
They've also captured pretty much every mineral processing plant and all of the rare earth minerals in the Belt and Road scheme.
So, even if the politicians try to sell you the lie of renewables insulating you from the global gas market, we'll be buying it straight from China anyway.
So, we're going to be broke and cold.
Not great.
I think Josh and I are going to do a Contemplations on the Belt and Road at some point, so stay tuned for that.
Do you want some of your comments?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, JJHW.
Roger Waters is on Ukraine's Myrotvorets kill list.
The actual Nazis want him dead.
Alpha of the beaters.
If the prosecution of Count Dankula taught us anything, it's that context is obsolete.
Yeah.
Ethelstan95, I think Pink Floyd might have been off the mark.
People do need education as to critical thinking.
The constant removal of agency of entire groups has also seemingly removed the ability to contextualize actions with an individual's intent.
They definitely don't want D.I.E.
training education though.
Bass tape.
I guess me, my dad, and two brothers are all Nazi sympathizers then, as we will all be watching the Roger Waters concert in Glasgow this Saturday.
And yes, Connor, Roger Waters is known to be a massive lefty, but music is good and he's the pride of Cambridge, so we will look the other way on that stuff this one time.
I now feel vindicated in still liking Billie Eilish despite her intolerable personality.
Sophie Liv, fun story.
My parents actually went to see that The Wall concert in Berlin back in 1990.
A few years ago we went to see a local reenactment of the show.
It was super cool.
The entire audience shouting, bring down the wall, bring down the wall is really something.
Omar Awad.
Leftists would love nothing more than to erase Nazis from history, not to rid the world of evil.
But so it's easier to smear you with a wrong-think label as the image of what a Nazi actually represents fades away.
JJHW.
Roger Waters is just advertising Hugo Boss.
Average Mercedes fanatic.
I'll do a couple just from mine before we go.
Trevor Box, would you think that adoption is similar or is it because it is biologically related to the parents?
No, adoption is slightly different because surrogacy deliberately creates a child to then take it away from the parents, whereas adoption is often the product of a tragedy.
Or an unwanted pregnancy.
I think the mother should probably still raise the child, because that's best for the child.
But if that is the case, the mother wants to give the baby up for adoption rather than kill it under the abortion laws, which should also be illegal, then that is making the best of a bad situation rather than creating, deliberately, a bad situation which disadvantages the child.
So adoption, fine.
Surrogacy, wrong.
Joan of Arc's actually put a couple of comments here.
She says something really nice, because she says, as soon as I saw the third topic in the thumbnail for this episode, I was hoping, please may Connor be the host, and I was not disappointed.
Well, I'm sure plenty of people were disappointed, because I take a hard-line stance on these things, but I appreciate.
And it's also vindicated, because she says, I've been infertile since 9th grade, I'm sorry about that, and I'm the first to say that I have no rights to a child, these people are demonic.
And it's actually a shame that that's the case.
I don't know you personally, but the fact that you're part of our audience and engage with these ethical debates means you're probably better qualified to take care of a kid in the right way.
So, don't know your circumstances, but hopefully you can find a way in the future to give back.
That would be wonderful.
Wish the best for you.
Anyway, that's all we've got time for today.
Thank you very much for watching.
Subscribe to the website if you like all our content.
Thank you very much for being on with me, Stelios.
Enjoyed it.
Always a pleasure.
As always, we'll be back tomorrow at one o'clock.
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