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June 15, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:13
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #676
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Hello and welcome for the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 15th of June 2023.
I am joined by Charlie Downs, who I'm very pleased to talk to, because last time you were in we actually had quite a good conversation off camera, didn't we?
And we've had another good one off camera as well, hopefully not spoiling what we're going to talk about, but I think we've got some good things to cover.
So I think We're going to be covering the UN's recent report that 90% of men are sexist, and you're going to be covering the America question.
So whether we as conservatives, as people concerned with tradition and culture and civilisation, should view America as a political project, as our friend, our ally.
Okay, and the third one, I have completely forgotten what I'm actually going to cover.
Oh, it's Dystopian Technology, and I've basically stolen Carl's funder because he's been doing the Cyberpunk Dystopia series on the website, so I've stolen loads of links from him, basically, so he's not going to do one for a while.
But it's also worth mentioning as well that tomorrow at, I think, is it 4.30?
Is that right?
3.30, it must have been typed in there wrong, but at 3.30, the usual live stream time, that's British summertime as well, I think it's Harry and Connor are talking about, is James Lindsay right about Christianity?
And the basic premise of it is that they're analysing Lindsay's criticisms of Christianity, particularly Christian nationalists, and looking at if liberalism is the viable solution to fighting wokeness, which it's not.
Yeah, I think they'll probably say much the same, to be honest.
But with all that out of the way, let's go on to the UN being ridiculous misandrist, shall we?
So, I recently saw an article from Reuters titled, Gender bias is not improved over past decade, UN says.
And the fact that Reuters is reporting on this is very important because lots of other media outlets basically take their news from Reuters.
And so that's why you'll notice if you read the Reuters coverage, lots of phrases crop up in the Reuters coverage that also crop up in the subsequent articles from other outlets, because of course journalists are not known, mainstream journalists are not known for their integrity, their creativity, but it's important because this sets the agenda for the news in a certain sense, so they're always a good outlet to pay attention to.
And I'm going to read a little bit from it, but not very much, and then I'm going to look at the actual report itself, break it down, say why it's insane, I use poor research methods because, of course, I specialised in research methodology, I've got a Master's in it, and so this is pretty low-hanging fruit for me, to be honest.
It's your wheelhouse.
It is indeed.
So the article says the survey draws from data sets spanning 2010 to 2014 and 2017 to 2022.
And so it is meant to be roughly a 10 year span from countries and territories covering 85 percent of the global population.
And it says despite a surge in women's rights groups and social movements like Time's Up and Me Too in the United States, why are social norms and broader human development crisis heightened by COVID-19 when many women lost their income have stalled progress on inequality?
And this is a misrepresentation because they deliberately cite the United States and I've looked at the data that they collected both in 2020 which is a different one but the same methodology and the one that was published recently and they actually found that bias is reduced by about four percent in 2020 and I'm going to break it down why these biases are nonsense but just for the time being I'm going to talk about it in their own terms before saying it's Silly.
But yes, it showed that actually it decreased, so it's not exactly stagnant.
If anything, you could say perhaps there's even an inverse relationship that women losing their jobs reduced gender biases.
I mean, based on that data, they're making the conclusions about it.
I would say there's not enough quality data there to make any conclusions about these things, but they're the ones doing it.
And if you're doing so, you could even argue that, yeah, well, taking women out of the workplace seemed to have reduced inequality according to their I don't actually believe that to be true.
Yeah, well, I mean, you see in Scandinavia, places like Sweden and that, where men and women become more equal, if you want, but what it actually means is more similar in terms of their function in society.
You find that sexism actually increases, and actually, when they're more differentiated, it decreases, and actually, more importantly, happiness goes up.
Yeah, I heard that from the very good Dr Peterson.
As did I!
Funny that.
But yes, Al Jazeera as well also reported on it, which I thought was quite funny because it's of course an Islamic state media outlet.
I find the notion of them covering this as if it's some sort of problem kind of amusing.
That aside, the elephant in the room, which you probably haven't noticed, is that, well, they keep using this word woman, but what is it?
Has the answer, hopefully, in his article.
He's a very good writer.
I really like what he has to say.
He's always got something interesting to say, an original.
And here is his article, Pride Month and What is a Woman?
And I hope that he finally manages to answer that very difficult question that I just can't get my head around, you know?
It's so hard to define.
Yeah, epoch-defining question.
But yes, definitely check that out.
It's on the website.
You have to become a member to read it, but you also get an audio track from our very own Jonathan Crowe.
Who is a silver-tongued devil, if ever I heard one.
Yes, he's very talented.
But yes, make sure to check that out and you can then proceed with the segment because of course you'll know what a woman is.
But here's the report itself, or at least the UN page talking about it.
A decade of stagnation, UNDP data shows gender biases remain entrenched.
And I'm going to read this and break it down because it's a bit nuts and I think it kind of needs a data analyst eye as well as someone who's been covering this for a long time to pick out the actual intricacies of where it goes wrong.
So it says, the latest Gender Social Norm Index, GSNI, report has revealed no improvement in biases against women in a decade, with almost 9 out of 10 men and women worldwide still holding biases today.
That's not how it's reported.
In the mainstream media, though.
It's funny that, isn't it?
They're all framing it about men, but they at least acknowledge here that it's men and women, right?
Yes.
So it's almost like you have societal attitudes that both men and women share, and in fact, as we'll get onto later, women tend to be the ones who enforce it more.
Yeah.
Furthermore, it's almost as if, you know, it's almost as if there's something beyond mere social conditioning at play here.
It's almost as if there's maybe something intrinsic about these things.
God forbid it be influenced by biology.
I mean, that would be terrible, wouldn't it?
So it says half of people worldwide still believe men make better political leaders than women, and more than 40% believe men make better business executives than women.
A staggering 25% of people believe it is justifiable, or justified, sorry, for a man to beat his wife, according to the new GSNI report launched today by the United Nations Development Programme, reflecting the latest data from the World Value Survey.
First and foremost I'd say I approve of the first two things that they said are somewhat prevalent in that you know there are perfectly good reasons why people might believe men make better political leaders.
I think one reason that comes to mind is that to be a political leader you've got to have solidarity, you've got to put down dissenters basically, you want to be unified because then you'll be more effective and to do that you have to be quite disagreeable and that means that men Because they tend to be more disagreeable by disposition, as many, many Big Five personality trait inventories have shown.
There's a very, very robust effect that this is something that men are good at.
And so, if someone is aware of that, I mean, it's not...
It's not too beyond the realm of reason that people can figure that out for themselves.
You don't need academic research.
It's kind of common sense to understand this.
Now, again, from Peterson, I am aware of the Big Five model, and I recognize it's kind of considered the most reliable personality model out there.
Is that right?
It's the most widely used.
I think that there are other ones as well, and I think that taking a bit more of a holistic look at it is normally better, because by trying to reduce things into categories, it is inherently reductionistic, and so you lose some of the nuance there, and I'm all about the detail.
But nevertheless, as you say, it's not sexist to observe that statistically speaking, on average, women are more agreeable than men, and actually that's not a bad thing either, because where does the maternal impulse come from otherwise?
And there are so many good things that we're going to talk about, like agreeable people tend to be perceived as warm and friendly, they work better in teams, they have a better understanding of emotions of others, better at resolving conflicts civilly, tend to be more altruistic and less aggressive.
These are all really good traits.
Excellent social traits, but not social traits that select for business leaders and political leaders.
Yeah, you ideally want someone who perhaps isn't like that, because if they're quite warm and friendly and altruistic and you're running a really stressful business, I mean it depends on the business, sometimes a warmer, friendly person would be suited to it.
So that's again somewhere where the detail is key.
What industries, what kind of thing.
If it's like finance, something kind of quite male-brained as an industry, where, you know, systematic thinking, which men excel at, would lend itself well to, then it might make sense that there are more men there.
So there's a bit of nuance there that is missing in the questions here that they're asking.
Obviously, I don't approve of men beating their wives.
I think that it's actually a sign of being a weak man, and that if you can't resolve things civilly, it's a sign that you've failed.
Yeah, well I mean losing your temper in that way is the most unmasculine thing imaginable.
Well yes, we're going to talk about basically men's complementary role towards women.
And the main pillar of masculinity, the one that's most exclusively male, is the protect.
And you're very much failing in protecting women and children if you're hitting them.
It's pretty obvious, really.
And that's why it's always been abhorrent.
I'll never forget something my grandmother said to me when we were just talking about attitudes back in the day.
And she said, oh, if your granddad hit me, I'd hit him back.
And she grew up in World War II, the time when supposedly gender roles were so stratified and evil and terrible and they were oppressing women.
And it's funny that you actually speak to someone of the time and they have a very different thing to say.
Like actually men of the time frowned at other men hitting their wives.
They saw it as weak, as we do, right?
And it is weak.
And so, yes, there is a part of this report that I kind of agree with is bad, but some of it, I think, misses some of the detail that you need to understand the world.
It's simplified to a fault, I would say.
So it carries on to say, the report argues that these biases drive hurdles faced by women manifested in a dismantling of women's rights in many parts of the world with movements against gender equality gaining traction.
But wait a minute, didn't you say it's stagnated, that gender bias has stayed the same?
So you kind of want your cake and eat it too, in that you're saying that things are getting worse in terms of women's situation in the world, and yet you're saying that all of these biases are remaining stagnant.
So doesn't that suggest that these attitudes perhaps are separate from the measures that you're saying women's rights are changing?
If that is true at all, which I am not sure it is to be honest.
And it carries on to say, biases are also reflected in the severe under-representation of women in leadership.
Oh, this is ridiculous, isn't it?
On average, I mean, imagine if they did a poll just asking women whether they desired leadership roles against men.
And we would probably see a very big difference.
I'm sure that literature probably already exists.
Believe it or not, I've not read all of the scientific literature in existence yet.
One day.
It carries on to say, on average the share of women as heads of state or heads of government has remained around 10% since 1995 and in the labour market women occupy less than a third of managerial positions.
The report also sheds light on a broken link between women's progress in education, economic empowerment, So I really hate this framing because it's just, you know, these people who wrote this would probably describe themselves as left-wing or liberal.
Undoubtedly.
If you work for the UN, it's kind of a prerequisite.
In some capacity.
But it's just so funny how their metric for success and their understanding of the good life is being, you know, a corporate drone.
John, would you mind just scrolling up just a little?
Because there was a phrase there.
Yeah.
Economic empowerment, as if the mere number in your bank account is what constitutes success as a woman.
I think that's actually a sexist attitude.
Well, I think it's also wrong for men as well.
Well, yeah, it's wrong for both sexes, but I think at the very least the male brain can be predisposed to just generate as much money as possible at all costs, like work an 80-hour week and pull all-nighters and so on.
It's not healthy.
It's not healthy.
You know, there are men who find that fulfilling.
I wouldn't find that fulfilling.
But actually, I don't think that... I don't think most people would find that fulfilling.
And, you know, I don't think women in particular would, because that's just not... Again, we were talking about the kind of predisposition towards warmth and, you know, nurture and so on.
I don't think somebody like that is going to be fulfilled by just being a ruthless careerist and striving to be at basically the top of the hierarchy.
That seems counter to those principles and I don't think they're making a mistake in not pursuing it to be honest.
As Peterson says, I'm quoting from him quite heavily today it seems, it's a very very select few number of men that make those positions.
It's more interesting to ask what is it about those men that make them inclined to do that in the first place, because that's not for me.
I would hate to be a prime minister, for example.
Under no circumstances would I want to do that.
But again, just this pure managerial view of success, where it is purely what can be expressed in a statistic.
Have you picked up on the lie of omission here?
Go on.
So, notice how they talk about the economy and labour markets in terms of leadership positions.
They don't talk about rates of employment, they don't talk about salaries.
No, yeah.
In university and education they don't talk about the fact that Western countries now have more women than men in attendance at university.
Yes, that's true.
To quite a degree.
I mean, I did study psychology so my experiences are probably a bit biased because it was 85% women.
Wow.
There was no ulterior motive, I promise, I was just interested in psychology.
No, it's the same thing.
My university was female-dominated and there were occasions where I was, I mean I studied politics, but there were occasions where I was in seminars where I was the only man in the room.
I remember, this is kind of one of my wake-up calls to the evils of feminism, I chose to do a criminology module and I was the only man in the room of 30 women, even the lecturer was a woman, And there was a woman talking about how misogyny is behind lots of crime and I kind of pointed out the fact that I'm the only man in the room in a higher education institution.
Do you really believe that misogyny is still going on?
Yeah.
Like, look at the makeup of this room.
No one's deliberately selected the people.
It just so happens that it's all full of women.
Of course, they're naturally inclined to be interested in criminology anyway because of the The apparent fascination with serial killers that is universal, it seems.
But I'm going off on a tangent on anecdotes.
But anyway, it ends by saying, or at least the part I'm going to stop reading says, women are more skilled and educated than ever before.
So surely that's good, right?
By your own terms.
And yet, even in 59 countries where women are now more educated than men, So there's an acknowledgement that, you know, just saying.
The gender income gap, oh for goodness sake, remains a staggering 39% in the favour of men.
I can't believe they brought that up.
I know, it's this discredited idea.
Even the EU discredited this.
I mean, that is a left-wing, almost socialistic, utopian project and even they're saying this is nuts.
Don't talk about that.
So yes, well done UN for outdoing the EU in most annoying, supranational organisation.
Yeah, congrats.
So I did mention earlier that there was a similar study in 2020, which is this one, which found the same thing, which is interesting to me.
Make of that what you will.
I did go in and look at I did go in and look at the data and I did see that there were differences, they're not just reporting the same thing.
So it seems like they went out and did record new data for the countries they did sample and took a bigger sample this time.
So it's not that unusual, I think it's just a bit unusual that they found the same percentage.
We're going to look a little bit about what their actual methodology was, because figuring out how they can get to these conclusions is a really good way of dismantling their conclusions in the first place, which I think are illogical, irrational, and not based in facts and logic.
But let's have a look, shall we, at this next one, which is some of the dimensions.
So we're going to have a look at some of the outputs later, which they uploaded in an Excel spreadsheet, and I've screenshotted the countries that I thought were interesting.
But these are the sort of statements that they asked participants on a Likert scale, which is like 1 to 7, or some variation thereof.
You can have 1 to 5.
And so they have the political ones.
Men make better political leaders than women do.
Women have the same rights as men.
I think those are quite uncontroversial statements to try and get attitudes towards women.
Fair enough.
And that feeds into the political empowerment index.
I hate the term empowerment personally, but there we go.
Educational.
University is more important for a man than a woman.
I mean, there are lots of reasons that someone could believe that without being biased or sexist.
For example, you could make the argument that men don't mature as quickly, and therefore going to a university at 18 forces them to mature.
That was my experience.
Yeah, and mine, to be honest.
And so that would be a fair argument, where you're not being discriminatory towards women, actually, you're saying that they've matured more quickly, which is a positive thing.
Yeah, this is what this comes down to, is are men and women the same, yes or no?
No, obviously not, because I have been around men and women my entire life and you recognise that obviously they are not the same thing.
And so it's illogical and irrational to treat them the same.
And that's not to say that I think that, you know, that I, well, there would be those that would say that's a sexist remark, but actually I would say to that, well, okay, if a woman came up to me and smacked me in the face, I actually wouldn't want to give her one back because that's not, that's just wrong for me as a man.
Whereas if a man did that, then I had, you know, I wouldn't hesitate.
You understand?
But equality, you know, this drive towards equality would have me, you know, smack the woman back in the face.
And that's just so wrong, right?
And so, you know, university is more important for a man than for a woman.
OK, well if man and woman are two different things, then that may actually be the case.
Well, I think part of treating people well is acknowledging They're sort of intricacies, they're idiosyncrasies, what makes them who they are and then treating them accordingly.
There are certain things that people have views on whereby you could do something wrong and it would annoy them and someone else wouldn't mind and things like that and so you've got to treat things by a sort of case-by-case basis.
I also think, on a sort of tangential point, that This sort of value of equality comes from a misunderstanding of English liberalism.
It quite often gets accused of being French liberalism, not to be accused of being a quizzling of the French, but I don't think that's actually the case.
The English liberal looks at equality before the law, right?
And so these sorts of things are kind of couched in that language, but equality before the law just means that the government doesn't discriminate against you.
It was originally couched as like a negative liberty thing, that we do not have the right to discriminate against individuals based on these criteria.
Which makes sense, but also explicit in the law are laws that protect women in different ways to men.
Which I actually think is right.
Well, of course, yeah.
Again, speaking as a conservative, I do think that it's actually kind of right.
I was on a talk TV show the other day and I said, actually, I don't like this overbearing, more feminine manifestation of protecting women, where it is this kind of Again, this sort of smothering mother-type view of it.
It's a very Jungian archetype, isn't it?
Yes, very much.
But actually, the masculine, sort of chivalric, traditional way of protecting women, if you want, that's something I'm absolutely in favour of, right?
Yeah, well it's clearly a good thing, right?
But again, that's sexist, that view.
It would be branded as such.
The funny thing is, the best feedback I've had in having those attitudes is from women.
I've had women, I've had girlfriends in the past say, being with you makes me feel safe and that makes me feel comfortable and happy.
And they explicitly said it, right?
I mean, if you're not taking women at their word, you must be a sexist.
Revealed preference is one of the most powerful things in the world for discovering knowledge.
The funny thing is, Gavin McInnes pointed this out many years ago, that lots of the hardcore feminists, the really belligerent ones, have very masculine boyfriends.
Is that a coincidence?
We have to wonder. - Mm, but carrying on to the economic, oh sorry John, if you could go back.
It's the economic ones are men should have more rights to a job than a woman, and men make better business executives than women do.
Obviously we've addressed the business executives one.
But in developing countries where they still have the so-called traditional gender roles, that division of labour makes sense in that you can't pay someone to look after your children like in a Western country.
You actually have to have someone physically there to look after them and bring them up, and it makes sense for that to be the mother.
It doesn't necessarily have to be.
Well, but it's actually preferable.
It is though, yeah.
Like, you know, as you will no doubt know more than me, psychologically speaking, that is better for the child.
Well, infants form their bonds with a mother more easily because they came from their body.
Yeah, what a surprise, right?
I know, yeah.
I mean, it's very intuitive really, isn't it?
And I mean, there's also this sort of conditioning aspect of they're also the one that provides them food.
They're breastfeeding them, ideally.
And so, you know, all of these criteria, if you want to even tame an animal, what you do is you make them feel comfortable and you feed them.
I mean, we understand it when it's non-human, but I think it's an act of hubris to pretend that we're so different, really.
But again, to bring it back to this, you know, the problem with this managerial view of the world is it does have all human beings as basically being like fungible goods, fungible economic units.
You can just replace the mother.
It doesn't, you know, the fact that she's the mother doesn't matter.
She can just be replaced by an employee, someone you pay to do the same job, and the outcome will be the same.
But we obviously recognise that's not That's nonsense, right?
Well, yeah, it separates the sentiments you have towards the people around you.
And as someone who kind of had an experience of both, I mean, both my parents were working very professional jobs quite late, but my grandparents also stepped in there.
So I had familiar familiar figures.
Let's try saying that pretty quickly.
But I also sometimes, when they weren't available, had to go into a care thing.
Explains a lot, Josh.
I didn't go there very much, but it was so much more preferable to be with my grandparents because you can also just pick up where you left off and they actually have a vested interest in developing you.
Some of my best earliest memories are being looked after by my grandparents.
I was going to say, when you're with family, there is a qualitative investment in you, whereas when you're with some employee, some paid worker, it's a quantitative investment in that they're going to work a set number of hours and be paid however much, and that's where their interest ends.
I'm sure there are people that do genuinely care.
Oh yeah, of course.
But again, it's never going to be to the same level.
No, of course not.
I think having blood ties to a child, you know, your biology kind of kicks in and you do have this even more protective instinct over them.
But finally, this is the one that I think is the most egregious.
So they've got physical integrity, proxy for intimate partner violence.
Okay, that kind of makes sense.
Physical integrity.
Proxy for reproductive rights.
So, is this a bias against women?
I mean, there are a lot of conservative women in America, there are a lot of Islamic women that might argue that this is actually not women's rights whatsoever.
No.
Actually, it's women's wrongs.
Yes, indeed.
And immoral.
So lumping those together and saying that this is some sort of bias against women is really jumping the gun, missing the nuance of the discussion really.
But the very fact that that's included in here tells you the type of people that have put this together.
Exactly.
Even using that, I would never use the phrase reproductive rights.
That comes from a very It's also a very dehumanising thing saying reproductive.
It's putting it in almost cold scientific language and although I've used my fair share of it, it makes me feel a bit gross when applying it to something as beautiful as producing life.
It seems wrong.
It's not reproductive rights, it's the opposite if anything, because we're talking about abortion.
It's anti-reproduction.
So, let's have a quick look at some of the data.
I've taken some screenshots.
Oh, this is some of the methodology.
This is the Likert scale stuff.
I forgot that I had that, but yes, I've already explained that.
So, we can move on to the UK data.
Here we are.
Sorry if you have to squint to see it, but here's the UK.
Share of people with at least one bias.
In women it's 27%, men it's 32%.
So there's about... Those are rookie numbers.
There's only about a 5% difference between men and women in the UK.
Yeah.
So is that really a problem at all?
I would say, well, maybe that 5% is just like an experiential gap.
Maybe, yeah.
In that women have experienced the world a bit more.
Also, they're probably more prone to be feminists and therefore... Well, I was going to say, we have to wonder how much of that is as a result of feminism.
Yeah.
Right.
I think there are still differences in countries that haven't been penetrated by it.
It looked at places like Pakistan.
There's still a slight increase in the male one over the female, but there's a lot of similarity between the two.
But if you could scroll towards the right, John, so we can see some of the individual... So here we have the political ones like 19.4 and 22.36.
So they're basically the same, which is probably why they have couched it as men and women's attitudes towards women, like women can be sexist against themselves.
So they've done that to try and reflect the data, but then also the way that they've presented it suggests that it's men's fault somehow, that we're telling women what to think when in reality, quite often, Other women help reinforce each other's attitudes in the same way that other men do the same thing for each other, right?
Yeah, but this has the same kind of flavour as when you see Americans typically talking about how there are people of colour, to use the vernacular, who are racist towards themselves by being conservatives.
The black face of white supremacy being Larry Elder, which was ridiculous.
That was the LA Times, wasn't it?
Yeah, and I think this comes out of this kind of, actually a kind of Rousseau-ian impulse, the idea of forcing someone to be free.
You'll be free or else.
They're going to tell you that, no, you're being sexist towards yourself and that needs to stop, or you're being racist towards yourself and that needs to stop.
Whereas actually, you know, maybe these people haven't just been duped, maybe there are reasons for them holding these opinions.
Yeah, well, exactly.
That's one of the main points I'm trying to make here.
It's more complicated than you're presenting it, Yuen.
So let's have a look at the United States, shall we?
So here they are.
They're clearly more biased than the UK, apparently.
I mean, I'm not necessarily surprised based on the dimensions, of course.
The reproductive rights thing is splitting the country.
That's kind of an unfair criteria to judge America by because men and women are probably on equal parts or roughly equal parts on either side there because it's red versus blue.
So it's unsurprising given that the general consensus in Britain on abortion seems to be permissive of it.
There's no dialogue around it in the mainstream at all.
You almost seem like you're being a bit left of field and bringing it up a lot of the time.
So, if you can scroll to the right, John, a little bit, so we can have a look at some of the other dimensions.
So, the economic ones, there's quite a difference there, but also educational, they're pretty similar, right?
Only three percentage difference.
Political, there's about five percent there.
So, it's not too unheard of.
Now let's go to somewhere a bit less Western, Ethiopia.
Here they have 98.73% of women have biases against women.
Kind of suggests that it's a bad metric if nearly all of the women have biases against women.
They must just have internalised misogyny.
Look at how close it is in a more traditional society, a developing society, economically developing of course.
98.73% for women, 98.81% for men.
Yeah, it's so small.
And why do you think that is?
It is probably because...
Sorry, you were about to say something, weren't you?
I think it must come down to the fact that somewhere like this, we could even think of it in terms of they're almost closer to the natural condition by being...
That's pretty much what I was going to say.
In being an economically developing nation.
I was just going to say that in the West we have somewhat of an economic abundance, so we can afford to have these luxury beliefs that men and women are exactly the same, there are no differences, which isn't really true.
That's nonsense.
These sorts of things kind of illustrate that actually, well, basically 100% of them at least have one bias, right?
They're very comparable levels, and so it suggests that developing countries that don't have the ability to... The capacity.
Yeah, they don't have the ability to avoid the gender roles, even if they wanted to, which they don't, because they understand the value in them, that women look after the family men provide, That's the only way their society can operate.
And so it makes sense that their attitudes are like that.
And it's actually a form of cultural imperialism by the UN.
I sound like Putin or something.
But to try and impose Western attitudes on places where they don't belong.
And it's silly.
And so I'm going to quickly go over some other data.
So we can have a look at Sweden, the supposed egalitarian utopia.
27.91% of people have a bias.
And yeah, it's less.
Most of the countries with a reduced bias here, by their own metrics, are European, South American.
They're sort of in the Anglosphere.
They're places far removed from, again, what we might call the state of nature.
So let's have a look at the communist utopia of Venezuela.
And, oh look, people with at least one bias, 92.35%, much, much higher than the horrible capitalist imperialist West.
But you wonder where that comes from, because you tend to find in South American countries that they are, in terms of their social values, they are very, very conservative.
Like communist Cuba.
Was probably more socially conservative than current day United States, right?
Which is kind of counterintuitive.
But I don't think that that... I mean, I think there's probably an amount of, you know, Venezuela is not a good place to live.
So again, they are pushed, you know, they don't have the capacity to have these luxury beliefs about men and women.
But also there is this, you know, the underlying social conservatism there that still remains to this day.
And then finally, let's have a look at Japan.
They're sort of along Western lines, but not quite to the same extent.
And I just thought that was interesting, because they're an example of a country that's remained quite conservative, quite traditional, but also they're of a comparable economic scale, if not perhaps more developed than some European countries.
And so it kind of suggests that there is a social dimension to it as well, in that, well, it's not entirely economic development.
There's some social aspect as well.
So there are things you can tease out, even from this poorly gathered data, conclusions that you can make.
Obviously, you know, it's only an interpretation of the data.
I think it's also worth mentioning as well that countries that are most likely to take action on this report tend to be the ones that have the least so-called biases.
Yeah.
And so it's going to eventually end up aggravating situations in the West whilst not really being acknowledged in countries that they would probably term as needing it the most.
Yeah.
But those countries just love flagellating themselves.
Our countries love flagellating themselves, don't we?
And of course it's also worth mentioning as well that a lot of social attitudes are shaped by women.
Let's point out the fact that ISIS, their enforcers, their cultural enforcers were women.
Obviously the men were fighting, so there's a certain practical dimension to it as well.
But I think it's a good sort of analogy.
Obviously it's not quite as militant.
I mean, you had Shamima Begum pictured holding an AK-47.
I don't think our women do that so much.
No, I thought so.
But no, I think our mothers and our grandmothers tend to shape our social attitudes more than men.
I think, just talking from my own experiences here, my father and my Grandfathers tended to focus on encouraging me to develop practical skills, or physical ability, knowledge, and kind of toughening me up a bit.
It's not so much those other things, but in sum, together, they make something really good, don't they?
Yeah, absolutely.
And beyond that as well, I don't know if you've ever encountered this, but where I live right now, it's a village, and the neighbourhood I live in is very sleepy, very quiet, populated by probably 20% uni students, and the rest is just pensioners, basically.
And there's this one particular lady who I, she's always out in our garden, so I speak to her most days.
And she is, you know, she's the Don, right, of the neighborhood.
You know, she is the boss.
And everyone kind of, you know, everyone knows her, everyone knows who she is.
And she's always the one, I mean, she, you know, she puts people's bins out, cuts people's lawns and this sort of thing.
You know, she is this, this kind of bulwark of order in my little neighborhood.
And I think that that role, that kind of, You know, the older woman who maintains the local culture and traditions.
That's a tale, certainly in England, that's a tale as old as time.
I was actually talking to Daisy, our social media manager, earlier.
She had a phrase that I thought was quite nice, that women are like the managers of the household, in a way.
They're managers of a different sort, but they keep order, they keep things running smoothly.
And that's really important.
I don't know about you, but you should be working to live a good life outside of what you do.
Your job doesn't define who you are, and so you should be, at least I do, living for your family in a certain sense.
So I think that's actually a very rewarding thing, and by demeaning it, you're not helping anyone, you're helping fracture families basically, which is already a massive problem.
And one final, somewhat facetious point I want to make is that for every dollar a man earns, his wife spends 77 cents.
Is that so?
That's obviously not an actual fact, that's playing off of the gender wage gap thing in America, but my point is that The reason that most men do anything is for the benefit of either their family or their potential family in the future.
And so the reason that men go for high-paying jobs is so they can treat their family well, raise their children well.
That's why we have this impulse to do these things.
Not to get too soppy and personal, but...
You know, I have a girlfriend of nearly four years and I'm crazy about her and everything I do is kind of in service of building a family with her, right?
You know, I love doing that.
That's the right thing to do though, right?
It's very wholesome to hear.
Yeah, and that's not to say that I'm incredibly passionate about politics and the commentary and doing this sort of stuff, but actually all of it is in service to that one prime goal that is support her, protect her and build a family with her one day.
That's exactly the right thing to do though, isn't it?
I feel the same, although I'm between girlfriends at the minute.
I've said that on the internet now, so I'm going to be harassed.
You're going to be inundated.
Please, no.
But it's also worth mentioning as well that if you go back in the past to the so-called sexist times, you look at things like World War One.
Men dying in the trenches, in the mud, in Passchendaele, in the Somme.
Were they really privileged?
They were fighting on behalf of protecting their women and children at home, weren't they?
Is that really a male privilege?
I mean, when the Titanic was sinking, who was it who had priority on the life rafts?
It was the women and children.
Always the case.
And it's not the women and children making that decision either.
It's the men saying women and children first.
And if you are a man who cuts in front, you're scum.
Yeah, I agree.
It's part of being a man to acknowledge that, yeah, to a certain extent we are a bit more disposable.
Well, I was going to say, there is actually something to the argument that men are actually kind of more expendable than women.
Just on a biological level, right?
One man can impregnate however many women.
One woman can only hold one baby and that's for nine months, right?
So in terms of the rate of reproduction, it's important to have There's an acknowledgement in paleoanthropology that one of the theories, obviously we can't prove this, but one of the theories as to why Neanderthals died out are sort of cousins and Homo sapiens survived is that we had defined gender roles and they didn't seem to have as defined gender roles, as in more female Neanderthals were found with wounds associated with hunting, which of course puts the baby at risk.
Potentially affects the rate of reproduction.
Yeah.
So, there's some food for thought there.
Indeed.
But I wanted to end on a bit of a positive note because, you know, quite often when we're talking about these things the tendency is to be resentful and actually I think it's nice to acknowledge that we serve an equal role in building a good society.
So, I think men and women are good and bad at differing things and we complement one another, we co-evolve together and so we work well as a team, right?
We mitigate each other's shortfalls, and there are lots of things that women are good at, and I'm going to talk about men as well, but they tend to have high levels of empathy and emotional intelligence, that means they connect better with people, means they're better in caring roles like nurses and social care, which are essential for the function of our societies.
They score higher on average verbal fluency and reading comprehension, they tend to be better at working as part of a team, they tend to have greater appreciation of the value of family, At all.
And then on the flip side, for men, you can talk about the three P's of masculinity, protect, provide and procreate.
And protect is the most exclusive to men because we have 30% higher physical strength, particularly in the upper body.
Provide is self-evident, right?
And procreate also means, you know, raising the kids as well.
It's a whole thing that complements one another.
And also, of course, men are less risk-averse, so do almost all of the dangerous jobs.
And so that means that women are protected to have children.
And that's good for our society.
I think that the differences are a benefit to us.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I really do think, again, not to sound too sort of soppy and sentimental, but I really do think that if If the feminine and the masculine are allowed to express themselves, if you as a man cultivate masculinity, or you as a woman cultivate femininity, it does, it sort of, it shines through as this kind of, and there's something divine about it, I think, something really irreducible and kind of magical about it.
And there's no recognition of that by people like the United Nations who, again, view it all in terms of statistics and spreadsheets.
But actually, again, the masculine and the feminine are complementary and sacred and beautiful.
I think the problem here in the West is we've got two kind of I don't want to say bigoted because it's a spoilt word, but two sides of the same coin.
You've got the feminists and the incels.
Both make generalisations about all men based on their selected experiences.
And normally when I hear people generalising about all women or all men, I think, oh you must be a low status person because you've associated with bad people that have burned you.
Maybe you're right in saying they're bad people.
Normally people have a good nose for that.
The fact that that's your experience says more about you than it does about society.
I think you're right.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Okay, so that went on a lot longer than I thought.
That was a whole 40 minutes, but hopefully you've got some time.
I'll be able to speed through my second segment.
Yeah, sure.
So we're going to move on to my segment now, where I want to discuss the American question.
So this is the question of whether we as British conservatives, as people who are concerned with things like You know, culture, tradition, civilization.
Should we view America?
as an ally, a friend, a positive force towards our ends, or an enemy, as something that we should will the collapse of, if you want.
You're talking about the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction?
Yes, yeah, fundamentally it does come down to that, because, you know, we have to make these judgments as people who are, if we want to be serious, if we're serious about, you know, our political movement, then we have to look at these, ask these questions and be completely certain about our view on them.
So, this is a conversation that's been had.
It's been going on for quite some time among certainly the online sort of distant right kind of circles.
And there's a lot of different perspectives on it.
But I wanted to kind of talk about it, because again, I think it's important.
Now, what prompted me to cover this segment was seeing this tweet from Biden, Mr. POTUS himself, saying, today the People's House, your house sends a clear message to the country and to the world, America is a nation of pride.
And this was the image of the pride flag Flying front and center on the White House, flanked by two old American flags.
And I said of this, you know, America is a nation of pride, right?
Pride being the, you know, the capital sin in Christianity.
Those words are going to be etched into America's headstone.
Now, John, if we could just move on to the next picture, because this shows what this looked like from the other side.
I mean, that is, you know, just deeply disturbing.
I find that deeply disturbing.
But, of course, in America they have a policy of having the American flag above any other.
Yes.
But, of course, it's not on a flagpole.
No.
It's symbolically occupying the same role being front and centre.
symbolism of this you know it's all it brought to mind for me kind of emperor palpatine flanked by his two royal guards right the old america is just is standing you know standing by the new america um so i mean what what is that saying about this right the This image is completely, it represents everything we stand against.
So it's not, you know, I don't think it's particularly controversial or surprising to say that the Biden regime specifically is obviously opposed to our interests and our ends.
Of course, yeah.
Like that much is clear.
It's also opposed to many interests in America itself.
Yeah, absolutely.
I feel very sorry for those that have to tolerate Biden, not that, you know, we're much better off here with No, indeed.
But you've touched on something there.
The Global American Empire thesis has it that the British government is essentially a subsidiary of the American government.
John says they also look back to front.
Is that right?
See, I must admit, I did think that the stars had to be top left, but I might be wrong about that.
But anyway, you know, the idea that the British government is this kind of subsidiary of the global American empire, a kind of enforcer in Europe type thing.
So it's actually kind of no surprise that our government has the same effect and has the same problems as the American government.
Well, we share a culture with the Americans in a certain sense.
I mean, their constitution is like a treatise, a love letter to English liberalism.
It is, yeah.
And that's why it's so good.
Well, we're going to be talking about that actually because, as I say, it's not controversial to say that the current regime that we have in America is not opposed, is not In line with our interests as conservatives, right?
No, certainly not.
But what I want to... I want to go a little bit deeper into this.
I want to ask the question, well, beyond the mere Biden regime, America as an idea, America as a political project, is it something that we should consider to be our friend, let's say, its supporters?
Is it our friend?
And I'm going to make the case that it isn't.
Because I think that it's the kind of the inevitable logic of, you know, the kind of propositional, rationalistic, liberal project that America is.
It has to tend towards this kind of, you know, what Karl and Stelios have talked about recently, this comprehensive liberalism, where it's just this universalizing, essentially imperial force that seeks to remake all traditions and places in its own image.
That's kind of an Oakshottian view, is it not?
Yes, very much so.
Yeah, he's a big, big influence on my thinking.
But I do want to read very quickly, so going into this, I want to read a passage from a certain rat-like scholar, a one Dr Nima Parvini, if you could just go to the next link there.
So he says that the British Empire, he contrasts it with the British Empire, so he says the British Empire was at its very best a civilising force and at its very worst a ruthlessly efficient exploitation engine.
But at no point did it seek to fundamentally annihilate the cultures and traditions of the people it subjugated.
The G.A.E.
does.
The G.A.E.
is a uniquely evil force in history, totally unlike previous colonial empires.
The G.A.E.
seeks the total transformation of a culture in its own image, and using mass psychological warfare on its subject populations and even on its own.
It is a sick anti-civilization cancer, a kind of all-consuming, all-destroying vortex that will not stop until everyone in the world has lost their history.
Now, what do you make of that?
So, first and foremost, saying it's not unlike any empire in history is just Factually incorrect.
There are lots of examples, like Julius Caesar in Gaul killed a third of all the population.
If that's not for cultural transformation regions, it did become a core province of the Roman Empire after that.
He basically eliminated the culture.
For example, the city of Bath, the Roman baths there, were built upon a sacred Celtic site and it was destroyed in the process.
AA would probably make the case that that's a kind of... the American effect is... I don't quite know how to put it.
It seems a lot more deliberate and intentional when it comes to America, because it is the imposition of liberal values on places that... I mean, we saw this in Afghanistan as being one of the best examples, you know, with pride flags and George Floyd murals, you know, in Afghanistan.
I mean, it's an imperial, uh, it's an imperial, uh, attitude, right?
Um, but I think that it is a lot more intentional when it comes to America because that kind of, you know, the building on the, on the sacred sites, I don't think that, I may be wrong, but I would imagine that's more of a, it's more of an apathetic thing from the Romans where it's just like, we just don't care.
With the Americans, there is an almost evangelical aspect to it.
Well, they wanted to wipe out the opposing religion and impose their own, didn't they?
And so that's why they took these sacred sites, although they... I mean, you could argue some historians might take a different view, but that's at least my interpretation of it, because it happened in so many cases, and I can use examples of lots of other historical empires as well doing similar things.
But I think that my general approach to this sort of question would be that The same regime that is having a negative influence on the rest of the world is also the one that's subjugating the American people.
So it's a very select few number of people that are holding the apparatuses of power.
Basically spreading their beliefs to their own ends to the rest of the world indiscriminately.
They're throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick because it helps their agenda to push these certain ideas.
Now I do wonder, this is the kind of eternal question of power, is this just purely an expression of power and purely towards the end of maintaining hegemony, or are they true believers?
Do they really believe in what has become the American ideology, which is intersectionality?
I think the optimal strategy for them would be to have a mix.
Yeah, and I imagine that's the case.
Yeah, I think there are true believers in there, of what they're doing, but I think there are also cynical people who are going along with it for careerist reasons, but also they lend themselves to different fervences of that ideology, in that the pragmatists would probably be better at sort of the subterfuge, that side of things, just because of how their manner of thinking works.
Whereas the ideologues would be good for kind of getting on the ground activism and that sort of thing.
So they kind of lend themselves well to furthering it in different ways, if you will.
So John, if we could just move on to the next link here, this tweet from Carl.
Now if you just scroll down so we can properly appreciate this image, right.
First of all, I want to say, aside from the horrible flags, London looks great.
Yeah.
It's actually a beautiful picture.
And notice the architecture that's been chosen to be shown as a representation of London.
It's not the glass and steel skyscrapers.
No, it's not.
It's not the concrete brutalism.
It's the parts of London that actually look nice.
Yeah, the beautiful, you know, sort of classical traditional architecture.
But again, with this foreign imposition hanging above it.
I also don't think it's any mistake that they've got the red bus in there either.
No, well again, just an icon.
An icon of London, right?
But again, with this, this Nasty sort of foreign, the flag of a foreign regime hanging above it.
So Carl's take, if you could just come off the image here, John, as he says, a sign of a foreign occupation and to demonstrate the government's fidelity to this new regime.
I think that's right, because I think, you know, those on the left will say that this flag purely represents the LGBT and so on uh struggle for equality right and struggle for rights and this sort of thing um and even those on the right would say that this is like an ideological thing but this flag represents intersectionality or or um do you mean on the left sorry even on the left they would say it's an ideological thing
Well, some would, but I'm saying that the argument that the mainstream right tend to make is that this flag is a symbol of an ideology first and foremost.
But I would say that, in keeping with what Carl has said here, this flag must be considered first and foremost a symbol of America.
And it's hanging over Regent Street like this, over all of these iconic British things.
is an expression of power, first and foremost.
It's an expression of power and control and fealty as well, by those who put it up.
And if we can move on to the next image.
Now, it's a tired comparison, right?
But the Red Headed Libertarian here said, you know, essentially made the comparison to Nazi Germany.
But again, You know there will be those that say the Nazi flag is first and foremost an ideological symbol but actually I would say it's first and foremost a German thing and if you see it flying in your town then that's an expression of power and domination by the Nazi regime and in the same way that's how we have to consider the progress pride flag.
I don't think it's any mistake that when The Americans went to Nuremberg, they blew up the swastika or whatever it was, I think it might have been a German eagle as well, or some sort of symbol of German power where the mid-century bad man held his famous rallies and they were destroying the symbol of his power.
They wouldn't have done that had it not been a symbol.
Yeah, well there's tremendous power to that sort of imagery.
But again, You know, nobody would argue that the mid-century German flag is not fundamentally rooted to Germany, right?
They wouldn't say that it represents some abstract ideology that can be applied to any time or place, no.
It's a fundamentally German thing and it's fundamentally a mid-20th century thing.
In the same way, I think we have to look at the progress pride flag as a fundamentally American thing and a fundamentally sort of early 21st century phenomenon.
So yeah, but moving beyond the flags because you know it's it's quite a sort of low-hanging fruit to look at all the all the LGBT stuff because it's so in your face and so obvious and just fills the airwaves.
I do want to go I want to go beneath the more obvious examples that are given of the global American empire and talk about The actual way they maintain the actual nature of the of the GAE, right?
So, John, if we could go on to the next segment.
Oh, yeah.
So I included this just because, you know, as I said, it is kind of the inevitable logic of liberalism to tend towards this kind of comprehensive liberalism out of political liberalism.
Because if you don't have the underlying society, the pre-existing set of values, then the liberalism will just leak into the society and go to all places.
What do you make of that?
Because you said that the constitution is something that you are in support of.
So what would you make of that?
Yeah, so I think that to say something inevitably leads to something else, it somewhat is a self-fulfilling thing in a way, because something always leads to something else.
And so I think that political systems are a bit like fairies and Peter Pan.
So long as people believe in them, they work.
Obviously to certain limits, but if everyone in the Soviet Union believed in the actual policies of the Soviet Union, it probably would have ran for a lot longer before the actual material reality took hold.
I think belief of individuals is more important than the system in and of itself.
And I think systematic analysis, although it's important, perhaps gets overemphasized because I think you can have an otherwise A really good system that functioned in the past, that did lots of great things, and then the people change, and therefore the system doesn't function in the same way that it used to.
And I think that that's probably a case in the United States of, you know, their system did work.
It worked very well.
I mean, it brought them to be the most powerful country in the world, and although they, you know, Did so through making us dismantle our empire.
That's also not the fault of the American people, that was the people in charge.
And making that distinction is always very important because there are so many Americans in our audience that feel the same way that we do about this sort of thing.
And so I don't want to tar them all with the same brush, not saying that you are either.
to condemn them to being associated with these horrible things, because they see it as un-American as well.
And I think that we also have many quizlings, to use mid-century German analogies, who will do the bidding of American academics who first devised this intersectional theology, if you will, and they're more than happy to pick up on that and spread it, and so to suggest that
America is solely to blame when we had people already pre-programmed to adopt this sort of thing and spread it, and also the fact that we've got a cultural interchange.
English culture helped shape America, and so to say America is something other You know, when we've got this link between us.
Yeah.
Which is, you know, something we should be quite pleased about, because America is... If I could live anywhere outside of Britain, it would be the United States.
And I don't say that lightly, right?
No, yeah.
I can't say I agree, because I do think that it's going somewhere dark pretty soon.
I mean, if not Italy, but that's partly because of the weather, and I like wine, olives and their food.
Indeed, yes.
But as I say, Yeah, so, moving beyond the really obvious stuff like the pride flags and so on.
It's the mindset of American power that I take issue with here.
So we've got Biden himself just yesterday saying, I know America can and will win the economic competition for the 21st century and lead the world once again.
Now, that's what we were saying in the previous segment, that framing as if the world and as if the great game is merely economic competition, merely coming first in the league table.
America's economy is kind of a deified thing, in a sense.
It is very impressive, so I'm not demeaning it.
But part of the reason they did so well in, say, World War II, is they were just ridiculously more economically efficient than the other involved powers.
And so their economy, in many ways, has become a point of pride.
It makes sense that Americans would compare themselves to other countries based on economics because I mean you've also got the American dream and that's all about basically you will have a job and eventually you'll work your way up to having land but that's an economic dream.
It's a unifying economic idea.
Yeah but again what does it tell you that again one of the fundamental well the American dream is economic in nature?
I think that says a lot.
Because, to me, any kind of national dream... Now, I have a problem with the idea of a nation having a teleology, being an enterprise, as Oakshaw would say.
But if we're going to have a national dream, surely we want it to be first and foremost something spiritual.
Yeah, and I think it's a product of necessity really, in that America, as they say, was a cultural melting pot, in that there were lots of cultures, lots of different cultures coming to the same place, and so you couldn't really make a cultural argument because you had Protestants, Catholics, Jews, even later on Perhaps Muslims and other religions migrating to the United States.
So how can you have a unifying cultural goal when you have such a disparate group of people?
Everyone needs the economy.
Yeah, well that's true.
But again, this is the nature of what I'm going to go into next.
This is the nature of managerial capitalism.
You know, a system in which the only thing that ties man to his countrymen is is mere economics yeah there's no shared history no shared culture no shared traditions no shared values just mere a merely transactional relationship um so john if we could go on to the next one um if you want to learn more about this you can read my article that went out uh what was
Exploring this concept, because I do think that this idea, managerial capitalism, is at the root of the problem that I have with America.
Because it is this economic system that seeks to just, it's this kind of roiling machine that just commodifies everything, flattens everything out, turns man himself into a fungible good, right?
And it's out of that that we get massive immigration and that sort of thing, obviously.
But this is an American import, I believe, because, you know, you go, you walk through the streets of Britain.
Yeah, I mean, we were saying before we came on, you can go to the most sort of backwater rural town in England and you'll find a Costa Coffee, right?
You'll find a McDonald's, you'll find a Starbucks, whatever else.
And if you go to the high street, you know, if you walk along the high streets of even, you know, Swindon, you know, not being from here and only having visited here twice, Swindon looks the same as the town that I grew up in, which looks the same as the town- I'm sorry to hear that.
Which looks the same as the town I went to university in, which looks the same as the town, you know, where any number of towns I visited, they all just look the same.
They're all populated by the same five or six fast food chains, you know, the same clothes shops and so on.
You know, wherever you go, you'll have the same places to eat, the same places to shop and so on.
And the American, you know, to use a stereotype, might love that.
Because there is, you know, a certain convenience and ease to it, and a certain familiarity to it.
Well, you know what you're going to get, because they're the same everywhere, right?
Yeah.
So, you know, that's the kind of American mindset.
But actually, I would say the English mindset, and hey, maybe I only speak for myself here, but the English mindset is far more keen on kind of weird local particularities, you know, quirky, quaint businesses.
We like eccentricity, don't we, over here?
Yeah, well I'm actually going to Cornwall in a couple of weeks time and you go down there and it's one of the last bastions of English society.
Devon and Cornwall are kind of their own entity compared to the rest of the South and I actually argue this all the time that the North is its own entity and Devon and Cornwall are and then you've got kind of the South which basically has a bunch of London satellite states.
That's my kind of view of England, at least.
Yeah, no, for sure.
But, you know, you find in places like that there are these family businesses that stretch back, you know, decades, even centuries.
And they have very particular ways of doing things.
They sell and serve very particular things.
And there's a real beauty to that.
There's something really nice, really sort of...
Yeah, just sort of comforting.
It's why I'm here, basically.
I grew up in Devon.
I know why it's valuable because I've experienced it.
I've lived in it.
It's well and truly beautiful to live there.
And I don't use that term lightly.
I lived in a small sort of town on the edge of Plymouth.
It was basically a village.
Yeah, people would leave apples and fruit at the end of their driveway, paying for them with an honour system.
In the pandemic, people would put books for people to borrow at the end of their driveway.
People say hello to each other on the street and stop and have a chit-chat, even though they're strangers.
Everyone's Friendly and nice.
That's beautiful.
Everyone has good intentions for one another and they know that other people have good intentions for them.
But again, you know, the drive towards turning all relations into transactions, that is completely anti what you were just talking about.
And, you know, back to Parvini's point, you know, where he says that America seeks to turn its colonies, essentially, like the UK and the rest of Europe, remake them in its own image.
That is this in practice.
This is, you know, you see the streets that all look identical, you know, all populated by the same businesses.
And, you know, this, again, just this drive towards absolute economics, you know, where it is just, you know, everything, success is understood as only that which can be expressed through statistics.
There's no recognition of quality.
Everything is understood in quantitative terms.
And I think that's the true poison of the global American empire, because it's that that is destroying our civilization.
I mean, there's certainly a case for it, isn't there?
Yeah.
I'm being very diplomatic here.
Indeed.
So to finish up then, I just want to cite Julius Evola, of all people.
We recently had a book club about him.
Yes, you did.
It was very good.
So he described America and the Soviet Union, because obviously that was around at the time he was writing, as two prongs of the same pincer squeezing themselves permanently around Europe.
In two different but converging forms, the same foreign and hostile force acts in them.
The forms of standardisation, conformism, democratic levelling, frenetic productivity, a more or less domineering and explicit brain trust, and piecemeal materialism in Americanism can only serve to pave the road for the last phase that is represented along the same direction by the communist ideal of the mass man.
So he's making the case that the effect of what I'm calling managerial capitalism is essentially the same as communism, which is it does turn everything into this grey sludge.
Because of course, if you're managing capitalism, it's not really capitalism, right?
Well, that's a great point, yeah.
And James Burnham makes the case that he doesn't actually call it managerial capitalism, he just calls it managerialism, because it's not actually capitalistic.
I guess Sam Francis and he says the managerial capitalist system that we have now is completely, it's inseparable from the state because all of these different organizations are so deeply interwoven into each other you know whether it's Starbucks is owned by Blackrock and Blackrock has links to all the different governments of the West which has links to the Tony Blair Institute which has links to various different universities.
So it's this massive, I mean, Parvini calls it the octopus, right?
It's this massive edifice, this huge machine, all of which is interwoven into one another and whose effect is just this, again, this homogenization.
I don't disagree with that, no.
You actually brought up the idea of the melting pot, which at one point was held as this kind of beautiful ideal.
But actually, what is that saying?
You're melting down.
In fact, in communist China, there were stories of them taking ancient artifacts melting them down melting them down because they just needed the resources right that's what i think of when i hear the melting pot i hear these you know these beautiful old art you know antiques essentially things that belong to a particular time and place and which are completely you can't replicate them completely infungible right and you put them in this pot and melt them down with all the rest because it doesn't matter you know because it's just resources right it's just quantity it's a good way of putting it i think yeah so i'll leave that there
well ted kaczynski recently committed suicide and um obviously i don't approve of the man's actions um but i have read his manifesto and he did raise some interesting ideas about technology He's not the first to mention them but in light of his recent suicide I'm going to read some of his quotes.
Obviously he was a terrible person, he hurt innocent people, killed innocent people, also was a hypocrite in that he used technology in the form of bombs to try and And I also think that his manifesto could have been written and published academically and it would have lent more credibility to his arguments.
He was a prominent academic.
Would it be remembered in the way that it was though?
Yeah, I think that there is a case for that.
But I think that he was a very successful academic.
He flew through school, had a ridiculously high IQ, that sort of stuff.
And so he could have succeeded on normal footing had he actually tried and not given up.
So I think it was weakness that made him turn to political violence.
Or MKUltra, one or the other.
Yeah, he was a participant in MKUltra and one of the things that they did was brutally questioned his deeply held beliefs, which I don't doubt probably disillusioned him to the world.
Cooked his dome a little bit.
So here are some quotes.
The industrial technological system may survive or it may break down.
If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.
And I think that hits the nail on the head.
It comes back to what we were just talking about.
You know, the view of man as a mere economic unit, a mere fungible good.
You know, a cog in the machine.
That's the perfect way to put it.
And he's right.
Fundamentally, he is right.
I mean, it is a bit bitter to agree with him because he is such a bad person, but he does raise good points.
And he also says, as a society, the problems that face it become more and more complex, and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines take more and more decisions for them.
Which we are in the midst of right now.
I think we are in this sort of time when the technology is going to increase human suffering.
I do think that there is a sort of a good ends there, but I think that a healthy attitude of blending technology and human nature Acknowledging human nature exists for a start is a good start and then understanding it and then applying that to the world and that's what I've tried to do in my own life.
I feel like I've got some very profound experiences from trying to do so and it gives me a very good perspective and balance on the right thing between living true to your nature and embracing technology.
The technology question has got to be one of the most fundamental questions that we have to ask because I mean I think even I forget specifically what era it was but there have been times in history where written language if we consider if we can consider written language to be a technology which I think we kind of can I suppose obviously a very basic form of technology but written language was viewed with suspicion as being something that would affect you know affect memory and it was viewed as a kind of decadent
And to this day we still are asking this question of, well, what's the proper relationship between man and technology?
I don't think anybody has a comprehensive answer.
And I think my general view is that technology are just the tools and our attitudes shape how we use them.
So the people are the things that ideally need to change, although AI is an entirely different beast because of course there's the possibility of it having its own consciousness down the line, which is terrifying to me.
Also, the power that AI already has is also kind of amazing.
So I see the potential and the sort of darkness of it.
I'm not going to scaremonger about it, because I think we're a long ways off yet having that sort of sentient AI that will potentially take over, so to speak.
But it's worth mentioning as well that Carl likes talking about this sort of thing, and he does lots of Hangouts, the Cyberpunk Dystopia series.
This is, I believe, part four, and Carl basically does a review.
of all of the dystopian technology that is coming out.
And I basically nicked all of the stuff for his next one.
So, sorry Carl.
But anyway, let's move on to this next one.
This is a story that I saw in the Post-Millennial, titled, Amazon Renders Man's Smart Home System Unusable After Delivery Driver Alleges He Heard Racist Mark Via Doorbell.
And supposedly he had lots of Amazon projects.
Products.
Products, yeah.
My brain's being fried already talking about technology.
It's all these cameras, I swear.
Yes, and he had a delivery driver from Amazon, and he had a doorbell that spoke, and I think it said, um, excuse me, can I help you?
Is it programmed to do?
Yeah.
And the guy had headphones in, misheard it, and it's presumed that there was someone in the house that was racist towards him.
I don't understand how you can, I mean, excuse me, can I help you?
I don't know what that sounds like.
I mean, you have to, you have to wonder whether there's a certain amount of maybe wanting to hear Is it something like that in this situation?
I don't know.
You want to be the next George Floyd and then you get millions of payouts.
I mean, come on.
There's an incentive there to lie, sure.
But let's presume that he just misheard and be a bit charitable.
But what is not something deserving of charitability is how Amazon responded.
They shut down all of his devices in his house.
It's so dark.
But were owned by Amazon.
Yeah.
Or produced by Amazon.
So yes, even if you own something, Amazon has the power to just shut them off.
So he had things that adjusted like temperature in rooms and things like that.
Just nope.
You can't order things on the internet, ask questions from your Echo.
This is why I take the Bill Burr approach to these sorts of things.
Why would you voluntarily bug your own house?
Yeah, quite right.
I was like, no way am I doing that.
No, no, indeed.
I went home to my parents not too long ago and I saw they had one.
I was like, are you mad?
I was going to say, my mum and dad love this stuff.
It's like, I know it's cool and all that, but have some common sense.
Yeah, no, but again, the powers that be.
Yeah, I don't think you want to have that sort of thing in your house.
But it's funny, I don't know if you're going to go on to this.
This is a kind of, this shows us what's possible.
With a kind of social credit system, right?
Because this would be possible.
If you fall below a certain score, the powers that be can just turn off your house.
Well, this is kind of going on to some extent in China, and I've actually covered this in Contemplations before.
Like, hotels won't lend you an umbrella if you have a poor social credit score on a rainy day.
You won't be able to hire a bicycle.
Just so, like, vindictive.
And also, your associations, it was a regional thing, so each individual city did it slightly different, but you could be associated with someone with a low score, and that would damage yours, and so it's basically like, I can't associate with you, you've got a poor score.
Yeah, that's so dark, that's so dark.
And it's just evil.
It gets between the bonds that bind society together and imposes this horrible quantitative managerialism upon them.
And it makes my skin crawl.
I get physical disgust talking about it.
So talking of things I find physically disgusting, and mentally for that matter, the EU and the World Health Organization signed a global vaccine passport deal.
So this is using the infrastructure that was developed to vet people for their vaccine passports for future pandemics.
So next time they can just spring this on people rather than saying, oh we're gonna have vaccine passports, at least in Britain.
And they kind of floated the idea and then there's lots of pushback and then like actually, we weren't actually going to do that.
Never mind all that Discussion of, well, maybe we're going to do it, we're going to implement it.
Because they saw the writing on the wall that people, that was a line that shouldn't have been crossed.
I mean, that should have been locking them down in the first place, but... Well, of course.
Convenient that this is all in place now, though.
Thank goodness for that.
You know, for the next pandemic that they seem so sure it's going to happen.
Yeah, that's strange, isn't it?
So here's another dystopian thing that I've seen, and that is this.
I didn't know this was going on.
So this is Aldi, which is a supermarket, if you're not from Britain or Basically Europe.
I think they're all over now, aren't they?
And you have to scan a QR code to get in, and it's completely staff-less.
So I think... Oh, that's weird.
I don't think anyone actually... I suppose people must put stuff on the shelf, and that's about it.
But you don't have any cashiers or anything.
Do you know, whenever I go to the shops, I always make a point of going to a person.
I never use the self-checkout, because it's like...
I'm contributing to the problem.
I'm quite a hypocrite.
I pay by card, I don't use cash, and I go to the machines.
I'm just like, well, I'm quicker than a person.
But this is the problem here.
It is.
Let's be honest.
It's no, but it's convenient.
And you know, Apple, I mean, I don't use, I still use my card and contactless and Apple Pay and all that sort of thing.
It's just easier.
It's just easier.
You don't run the risk of, you know, losing physical cash.
But this, that's how I get you, right?
Yeah, it's really quite concerning, and Connor did a good job breaking down all that was wrong with it, if you go to the next tweet, John.
Technology is already estranging us from each other, and it will only get worse, and he goes on to talk about ESGs and all that sort of thing, but I think we've already used up quite a lot of time, so if you want to see this, go check out Connor's Twitter.
I'm unintentionally giving him a bit of a plug there, because I couldn't read out what he had to say, but it's all good stuff, and I very much agree with what he had to say.
So, moving on to the next one here.
This is a bit of a different kind of dystopian thing.
This is not so technological, but the government wants to ban buy-one-get-one-free deals despite their own analysis showing it will only reduce calorie consumption by 2.5%.
And this is the idea that they're trying to reduce obesity by telling the supermarkets what deals they can do, which makes the free market economist in me squirm with displeasure at the fact I'm not necessarily a big fan of processed food.
I try and avoid eating it because it's not good for you, funnily enough.
healthy options as cheap as possible yes and allowing people to make their own decisions and furthermore incentivizing local produce natural produce not stuff that's been gone through half different half dozen different processes before it arrives on the store yeah i'm not necessarily a big fan of processed food i try and avoid eating it um because it's not good for you funny enough um everyone knows that but you know you can still treat yourself every now and then not some sort of Just like, oh, you're eating a Big Mac, slapping out your hands.
I mean, I'm partial to one every now and then.
Oh yeah, of course.
Now, when it comes to this issue, I am actually... I wonder if we'll disagree on this, because I'm actually very... I have a far more authoritarian view.
of food and this sort of thing because i think it's an issue that's never spoken about in certainly in mainstream politics nobody's gonna nobody wants to touch this but the fact that you know probably the majority of the food that we see in supermarkets is this is this nasty processed like garbage i've actually thought this myself when i've been walking around a supermarket and i try and buy and eat healthily yeah and i'm just like 75 of this stuff is just disgusting yeah Just trash.
It's like, if I eat this it'll make me feel worse.
Why would I do that?
Just eat something that makes you feel bad.
But again, thinking of convenience and that sort of thing, for one thing it's convenient, a lot of this stuff, like ready meals and so on.
And it's nice.
And those two things together, it's going to be impossible, outside of legislation, it's impossible to stop people, the average person, from buying and consuming that sort of thing.
Because why wouldn't they?
And you know, I don't blame them for that.
But I mean, I sincerely believe that there needs to be you know, strong legislation around the food industry.
And when we win, that will be what I do.
I think that I take more of an informed consumer thing.
I want there to be perhaps legislation on what nourishment there is.
So if you want to be healthy, you can.
But I take the American view that if you want to balloon up and look like a land whale, that's your prerogative.
If you want to kill yourself by eating.
I'm far less liberal than you, Josh. - It's not liberal, that's a sort of aristocratic indifference to Okay, okay, I see what you're saying.
I'm kind of flanking you on the right here now.
But I mean, what I'm talking about is forcing people to be healthy.
And maybe that sounds a bit Rousseauian, forcing people to be free.
It does, yeah.
But actually, if you make it impossible for people to buy unhealthy foods, then shock, they won't buy unhealthy foods.
They will just buy what's available.
It also punishes people that are responsible, doesn't it?
In that I occasionally treat myself to something, but I tend to eat quite healthily.
And so, things like the sugar tax, for example, I now pay More money for my treat that isn't a key part of my diet because fat people can't keep their mouth shut.
And I don't think that's fair.
I want my junk to be cheap because I don't spend that much money on it.
I would say you're probably the exception though.
I am probably.
Because the masses have to be told.
Well, I care about me, alright?
Yeah, fair enough.
No, obviously I care about other people as well, but I think that you've got to be able to make your own decisions to truly appreciate the value of what you're doing in the first place.
If you're coerced into being moral or good, then it ceases to be moral because it's no longer your choice.
There's a much longer conversation to be had about that, but I see where you're coming from.
I'm kind of throwing out very long-winded conversations here.
Just one final thing on this.
It's deeply fatphobic, I just want to say.
It is, yeah, of course.
Of course, even those in the Conservative Party have been opposing this.
As in this next article, Rishi Sunak is accused of nannying nonsense by his own backbenchers after pressing ahead with plans to outlaw buy-one-get-one-free deals on unhealthy food despite the cost-of-living crisis.
And I think they're right to object.
Because we're running out of time, let's move on to Scotland and knives.
You've got to get a knife dealer licence.
This doesn't necessarily go for...
Domestic knives, you don't need a license to sell kitchen knives and stuff like that, which you think would do the job if you're up to no good anyway.
We've seen that happen many times.
Well, yeah, of course, but this seems to be just a good sign of our possibility of having gun rights is so far away that you need a knife license.
You've got a licence for that?
Yeah, so my point in bringing this up is I think that we should have like a second amendment style thing of yes, my home is my castle, anyone who tries to break in should have holes, they should look like Swiss cheese.
I think that's my right as a man to do that and I think it's an abomination that the government gets between me and my own security and I have to outsource it to the police who sometimes will take ages to turn up and I'll be like oh right yeah I'm bleeding out now thanks a lot Yeah, and again, to use the tired talking point at this point, I'm more concerned with policing nasty words on Twitter.
They genuinely are, and I've heard this from actual police officers as well, saying that it's rubbish, and they joined to do actual good.
So I'm not tarring all of the police, I mean there are some annoying bureaucrats out there, and I know Conor's fallen afoul of them before, but I also know police officers who are really good and actually care about reducing violent crime and theft, which is the main thing that the public expect of them.
So this one, this next one, is just ridiculous.
Sadiq Khan Just taking ice cream from children.
Ice cream vans set to be banned from another 33 streets in London.
This is because of their emissions.
Of course.
I thought it would be like a traffic thing, you know, London's quite dense, they hold people up, they stop on the kerb, they limit the flow.
No, it's Green Agenda stuff.
They're literally taking ice cream from children to stop the planet from heating up.
Yeah, thinking about the symbolism here, though.
I mean, not only is it literally taking ice cream from children, which is just, like... Hilarious.
Hilarious, yeah.
But actually, you know, the ice cream van is a kind of... it's a cute, quaint, British, traditional thing.
You know, I remember when I was growing up, you'd always hear the ice cream van going around, and that was kind of an exciting thing.
Although I was told that If the music was playing that meant that he'd run out of ice cream, which I believed for many years.
My parents never pulled that one on me, thankfully.
But again, you know, it's just in the name of the agenda, in the name of this technocratic, managerial, completely abstract idea of net zero, we are banning ice cream vans.
It's just so... it writes itself, you know?
If you want any evidence that this is evil, look no further.
There's also, of course, the ULEZ stuff, where the City of London, if you want to drive through it, you've got to pay a fine, a toll, a green tithe, to Sadiq Khan, the pontiff of London.
Yeah, Sadiq Khan's pocketed more of my money than I care to think about because of this.
Very depressing.
I make a habit of avoiding London, even though I've got lots of friends there, which is a bit of a shame.
But there we go.
I also found this article from The Guardian, which is talking about surveillance and pointing out a good concern, but also terming it in ridiculous ways.
So I'm not going to be able to have the time to go on about this.
But they're talking about how employers, now everyone's working from home, monitor people's screens, key log, and all this stuff, and how it could be abused and be seen as a step too far.
And now I kind of understand, I've worked in management before, and I noticed the difference between when I was there and when they didn't know I was there, in that people all of a sudden just, oh, he's here, we need to behave ourselves.
It wasn't even like I was that harsh.
I was actually quite laid back with what I was doing.
I was quite understanding.
I was young myself.
If I can notice that, there's got to be some element of, well, if you know your boss is watching, like if you know God is watching, you will behave yourself However, I do think, I share the concerns here with the Guardian, I never thought I'd say that, that this is a weird precedent that your employer can watch you, potentially, installing software that can then look at your computer screen.
What if you're doing something that's nothing to do with your employer, out of work hours, and they have this infrastructure?
That seems scary to me.
It's creepy.
It is creepy, yes.
But they are saying it targets young female minority workers.
Surely it just targets everyone who works from home, you weirdos.
Don't make it about that.
Finally, two more things before I'm done, and before we run out of time entirely, is the UK Ministry of Defence has signed a deal with Google to use their artificial intelligence, which puts the fear of God deeply within me, because that's like Satan and malaria forming a pact together to do more evil.
Literally Skynet.
Yes.
This is absolutely terrifying.
And then finally, this one was just in the news, so I didn't actually get any time to look at it before presenting.
But I thought I'd give it an honourable mention.
Synthetic human embryos made without eggs or sperm have been created in a scientific breakthrough.
So we don't even need human beings anymore.
We can be replaced.
We are now replaceable as of today.
Which is terrifying to me.
It's very dark.
Very, very dark.
Right, I think we've got the video comments.
Apologies to all the commenters, I was enjoying the conversation so much that it went on a little bit over.
But we always read the comments, even the ones we don't mention.
Or at least I do, I can only speak for myself.
There were some very kind comments on the last one which I thank viewers for.
Last one I was on, I mean.
Tony D and Wee Scurvy Joan here with another tale of Pirates of South Jersey and Captain Kidd again.
He buried so much treasure here in New Jersey.
I know, it doesn't look like New Jersey, but here it is.
Right in the middle of the Matawan Creek there was an island.
It was called Treasure Island after someone found Spanish doubloons, and treasure hunters came from all around.
Digging into the island was no more, but no one ever found the rest of the treasure, and now it's beneath the waves.
Fetch me Shovel Joan!
I always love your video comments.
Not only was the accent good as well.
I was going to say that was spot on.
It's like I'm already back home again, that sort of south-westerly, city-urban accent that pirates have.
As well as great information there as well.
So, I've seen Connor and Harry grousing about how fanfic writers have taken over the comics industry with, like, new Spider-Man movies and whatnot, and I was curious, have they ever made the mistake of going on to fanfiction.org and looking at what the top 200 movies to get fanfiction are?
Some of them make sense, you know, like The Matrix, but there's others.
The Mighty Ducks?
Titanic?
Brokeback Mountain?
What does this say about, like, that genre of interest?
I would have thought that Brokeback Mountain was probably already fan fiction for some people with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Steamy!
But no, that is an interesting point.
It's a very weird world where it's almost like everything has to be meta.
Everything has to refer to previous things before.
It can't be its own self-contained piece of media and I think that's a shame.
I like a self-contained story.
It's a good thing.
But I think we've got some time for some general comments here.
We've only got a minute left, but it says, Sophie Liv, well, I'm just going to say it.
Today's guest can be as sexist towards me as he wants.
That's a fine specimen of a male race you brought out on today, sharply dressed and everything.
Thank you, Lotus Eaters.
That's very, very kind of you.
Thank you.
And GeneralHyping says, it's always good to see Josh release from the weekend premium content.
You're welcome, Josh.
That's alright.
You specifically requested it, didn't you?
Thank you very much, that's very kind.
Yes, they keep me locked away in the basement because if they unleash my full power they would be very much undermined.
That's definitely it, and not just that it works with my schedule.
But anyway, it's been a blast actually.
I've really enjoyed this.
I've had good fun.
We've had some good profound conversations and hopefully you at home enjoyed it as well.
I kind of forgot you were there to be honest.
But thank you very much for watching.
Don't forget to check out the live stream tomorrow at 3.30 with Harry and Connor talking about James Lindsay's view of Christianity.
And also of course, as always, the podcast tomorrow because I've actually remembered to mention it unlike some of our load suitors here.
So yes, same time as always, tomorrow.
And you can find me at cfdowns underscore on all platforms and my website is cfdowns.uk where you can find all of my work.
Very impolite of me not to say it.
Well remembered.
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