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July 25, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:32:34
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #704
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Good afternoon folks.
Welcome to the podcast.
The Lotus Seat is for the 25th of July, 2023.
I'm joined by Nick Buckley and Helen Dale.
Very pleased to have them both in.
And today we're going to be talking about Sadiq Khan's MATE initiative, how you can actually make money from the homeless and why women need to get back to work.
But before we begin, Helen, thanks for coming in.
It's been ages since you've been in.
You haven't seen the studio, have you?
No, I haven't.
Only, all I've seen is the little video that you put out showing bits of it where, to be fair, you did actually pan the camera around so I got a bit of an idea of what it was like.
The closest I've actually seen to it I've seen it.
When I came down last time, which I think was March, February or March, round about then, it was all being built.
There was builder stuff all over the floor.
But this is very Sky.
Oh, thank you.
The big screens at the back, very Sky.
Cost a lot.
Anyway, we'll talk about some Substack stuff later.
So I'll save all this for a bit later, actually.
Just because, come back to it.
But anyway, right, so let's talk about Sadiq Khan's Lace Initiative.
If you see one of your friends, Nick, saying something misogynist, I am apparently obliged to say mate.
That's bound to stop me.
Yeah, exactly.
That's bound to make you stop doing it, isn't it?
So it's not going to piss everyone off.
So yeah, that's Sadiq Khan's guilty conscience leaping out of his mouth and telling us that we have to do what he wants.
How do you feel about it?
We've had these sort of things before.
I remember in East Manchester, we put up 10,000 posters of police officers saying, don't commit crime in this area.
Good thinking.
And it was like, oh, is that all it takes to stop people doing something you don't want is a poster of a saying.
People are more complicated than that.
People.
This is a policed area.
Yes.
Don't commit crime.
No, I think we've all been policed.
Um, the weird thing is though, it comes across weirdly like a kind of A budget version of They Live?
Of?
They Live?
Have you ever seen the film?
No.
Have you ever seen They Live?
Long, long time ago.
It's the one with the glasses.
Yeah, it is.
He puts the glasses on and suddenly he can see all the... The conceit is a bloke gets a pair of cheapie sunglasses and that's it.
He needs some sunnies and he doesn't realize that they're special sunglasses and what happens is he just casually comes out, gets them out of his jacket pocket, puts them on and suddenly all the totally normal Advertising, whether it's for cars or aftershave or whatever all around, has got things like obey written on it, or comply.
He sees the hidden messages.
He sees the hidden messages.
The film came out when this idea of subliminal advertising was considered a real thing, which is that you could get to people's subconscious Some conscious through their conscious mind.
If you designed your adverts in the right way, it's since been debunked.
But the science fiction behind the idea that if we didn't have that kind of technological progress in the future is actually quite creepy.
And the film is still quite creepy as long as you're willing to accept that conceit when you watch it.
Yes.
And if you want a more lengthy breakdown, go to our website, sign up.
I did a probably an hour and a half long analysis of it because there's loads in it.
And actually, I think it's really worth your time because of what we're going to be looking at next.
Anyway, so let's let's start with Siddiq Crime.
Siddiq Crime.
Siddiq Crime.
I nearly did call on that.
Yeah.
Which actually does fit, doesn't it?
Have you got an image of the ridiculous sign with MATE on it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I'd like to take it apart for you.
I did used to work as an advertising copywriter, that's all.
We will get there, we will get there.
But anyway, so Siddiq Khan thinks that there's no place for crime in London, but we can't arrest ourselves out of the problem.
But they're not arresting anyone.
Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?
Yeah.
How do you feel about that as a mayoral candidate for Manchester?
Do you think we can't arrest our way out of crime?
You can arrest your way out of crime.
And what annoys me with these is the fact that he talks about women and girls, violence against women and girls.
It should be, we need to stop violence.
Well, in his defense, in this one, he actually does say, well, we need to remove knives from our streets, provide young Londoners with meaningful and engaging activities.
I'm committed to being tough on crime and its complex causes, which is ironic, considering he was literally the reason there was a crime spike in London, because of course stop and search was racist.
So, but yeah, Harry makes a good point.
You actually can just arrest yourself out of the problem by arresting all of the problem.
Have you been following the current president of El Salvador?
Well, his logic is based on, you find, he's got a name I don't wish to repeat because it sounds like a genre of pornography.
Yeah, I can't remember.
Yeah, so I'm not going to say it, but just the president of El Salvador has In criminology, he has applied one particular element that's a standard part of criminological study if you're a lawyer, which is most crime is committed by a tiny portion of the largely male population.
It's known as a power law in mathematics.
The standard way it's described is that 10% of the people commit 90% of the crime.
It's actually more extreme than that when it comes to crime.
This applies to other things.
It applies to earnings in tech startups.
It applies to all sorts of areas, but with crime.
And so basically what you do is you come down like a ton of bricks on repeat offenders.
You have to show some lenity with first time offence because sometimes people do just need a good scare.
And they go back on the straight and narrow.
The classic talking to by the police officer.
But then when they repeat, then you have to come down on them.
And that's what he's done.
When they get it tattooed on their chest.
Yeah, and the country is virtually crime free, but it has exploding prisons.
So you just have to accept that sometimes the appropriate responses lock them up.
Yeah, but the problem is that when you're actually dealing with things that aren't a crime, pre-crimes, if you will, Sadiq Khan has decided that in fact, no, misogyny is not banter.
So when men are away from women and having conversations with other men, Nick, I'm looking at you, you look like a bantering kind.
He's from Manchester, of course he is.
You've got to make sure that you're not making any jokes that a woman might disapprove of if she hears you.
Let's watch this clip of them explaining it to us, shall we?
A new campaign to help tackle violence against women and girls in London is emphasising the role men need to play in calling out their own friends.
It encourages them to challenge misogynistic behaviour and comments, but campaigners say it doesn't go far enough.
Extirpated misogyny from every other aspect of life, now we're reduced to little groups of men making jokes.
And even then, the campaign is like, well, at least... No enter.
The first thing I want to say is there's no such thing as misogyny.
Good point.
It doesn't exist.
In my third book at the moment on feminism, there's a chapter on violence in there.
I think you might have to qualify that somewhat though.
Misogyny doesn't exist.
Social scientists cannot find the trait misogyny in dozens and dozens of experiments they've done.
The closest they've come to it, they can't find it in men at all.
They suspect they may have found it in other women, directed at other women.
Do women hate women, Helen?
What you get, and this is one of those behaviours that is both gendered and oriented, is you get intrasexual competition.
Male-on-male intrasexual competition is very obvious.
It involves punch-ups outside the pub.
We all know what it looks like.
The great Scottish line about the squirrel, that's male intrasexual competition.
Female intrasexual competition is denigrating rivals.
And it's something I mean, because I was always the sort of the resident homosexual, I would watch other girls doing it to each other.
Would periodically intervene along the lines of, have you ever considered that this behaviour is a bit shit and you might want to stop?
You know, this is running people down behind their backs.
Don't do it.
It's bad behaviour.
But I was responding the way blokes do because there's quite significant cognitive cross-matching amongst homosexuals, which is why the stereotype of the gay male as a hairdresser exists and why the stereotype of the lesbian as the champion athlete exists.
The reason stereotypes exist is because they are true.
I mean, there's an enormous amount of research on this.
No one needs research to know that.
No.
And so, what Nicky's talking about is almost certainly true, because it's part of female interests.
Among straight women, it's female intersexual competition.
But moreover, this just seems to be the sort of, what was it Jordan Peterson called it, the devouring mother, sort of stereotype, the insatiable demand for control over every single space.
Josh Slocum in America is an American podcaster, runs a podcast called Disaffected.
I will have to do his American accent because it works better when said like an American.
He calls it Mommy tone.
Your mommy is telling you how to behave.
Yeah.
She has mommy tone.
Yeah.
And so just going around being this maternal controller, treating everybody in civil society like they're a toddler, basically.
Yeah.
A behaviour that's fine for toddlers, but not fine for anybody else.
Not even fine for an older child or a teenager.
Yeah.
Because I mean, going back to his statement, misogyny is not banter.
It's like, well, who gets to decide that, actually?
Because I've decided it is.
And how is your word any less legitimate than mine?
So it is actually, Sadiq.
But no, this is the point though.
There is no end to any of this.
Can we go to the next one?
No?
Maybe?
I don't know if I should have done that.
The mayor has teamed up with comedian Romesh Ranganathan and social media influencer Max Sellwood to encourage men to stand up to misogyny.
They say it can lead to broader violence against women and girls.
Every three days, a woman is killed at the hands of a man.
These killers, these murderers, didn't just land from Mars.
Something happened during the course of their early years, their adolescence, and their adulthood, that make them behave in this way.
Blank slate is, and it's not true.
No, it's nonsense.
You know it's not true because of the power law.
Yeah.
We know they didn't land from Mars.
We can check their flight manifesto.
We all know some men are capable of the most horrendous crimes.
Yes.
And as a society, we need to crack down on them.
We just had this thing about prisons.
That's what prisons are for.
Also too, if someone's going to murder someone else, they generally don't tell the world about it because they're worried about being caught.
And also, most murders are not the habit of the person.
Most murders are kind of a crime of passion.
One of the things I found when I was first in practice at Australia at the criminal bar was the phenomenon of the murderer with no rap sheet.
Yes.
You would get someone, not always, sometimes you had others who were escalating criminals.
They were the Wayne Cousins model with a whole series of escalating offences.
But very often you would get the murderer with no priors, no prior convictions.
You would find like someone had just killed outside the pub because there are more murders of men killing other men than there are of men killing women.
That's very important to remember.
But you would find 20 years ago there was a utensil or something, which is the fancy police word for a bong, and that was it or nothing.
This is a real thing that exists.
Murderer with no rap sheet.
But that's the point, isn't it?
Like Sadiq Khan's acting, well, it's just habitual that these men end up abusing and murdering women.
It's like, but actually, you know, a lot of it is spontaneous as in she caught him, he caught her cheating on him or something like this.
And then there's a murder and it's, you know, terrible, don't get me wrong, but it's not really something that you can actually plan for.
Just things that people do and they should be punished for.
And where's the evidence for this?
So he keeps saying, he keeps saying that Jokes women don't find funny leads men to commit horrendous violence.
Where's the evidence of this?
It's all of the piece, the claim.
This is the very standard claim and it's part of why people are trying to control speech now.
That whole idea that speech is harmful, that speech causes violence.
First of all, they're redefining harm.
So you get concept creep.
So that's one part of it.
But the other part of it is that speech leads to violence.
And the thing is, we've had this debate.
Multiple times now, we had it with porn and discovered that it doesn't lead to violence, doesn't lead to sexual assault.
And the other one, and you may recall this in more detail because you were involved in the Gamergate controversy, was the claim that playing violent video games would turn you into a school shooter.
Also not true.
And so if it's not true for those huge areas on which there have been multiple studies of very, very high quality, it's not going to be true anywhere else either.
Well, uh, top behavioral psychologist, uh, scientist.
Sorry.
Disagreed.
This one.
Things that are misogynistic and unacceptable are branded as banter, and I think that we need to be better at recognising when that's not the case.
And I think that's not a problem for women to sort out, that's a problem for men to sort out.
After working with behavioural scientists, the Mayor of London says a simple, friendly intervention is the best way to challenge misogyny.
Behavioural scientists.
They must know what they're talking about.
The nudge unit.
Yes.
They're here to manage us.
They're here to make sure.
Behavioural economics is absolute cobblers.
And even if it's not, it's still evil.
Every single time these papers are put to the test in a real world environment, they fail to replicate.
Do you remember when various Tory politicians, this is back in the days of Theresa May, were standing with their legs wide apart?
Yes.
That was called the power posing.
Yeah.
Because they believed that if you did that, it would mean that you presented more effectively rather than looking ridiculous.
The study involved 28 people.
Amazing.
And that has never replicated.
It is nonsense.
Nearly all this nudge unit stuff, it's just crap.
Yeah.
Should be ignored.
But even, even if it's not crap, it's also evil, right?
That's the problem with it.
The idea that the Mayor of London is sat there going, right, I'm going to use my executive power that I have been invested in to essentially attack segments of the population in order to engineer their behavior to my liking is actually not how a democratic society should work.
I don't think it's that.
I think you're giving him far too much credit.
Well, this is what he's doing now.
I think what he's doing is, crime's out of control in London.
I'm going to be blamed for this.
I need to perceive that I'm doing something.
I actually think Nick's right.
Here's something, I will do that.
I don't think these are two distinct things.
The politician's syllogism, isn't it?
Hang on, I don't think these are two distinct things.
I mean, I think that is, of course, the reason that Sadiq Khan gets out of bed every day.
But it's the method by which he feels that he's going to be able to do something is weird and dystopian and horrible.
It's presupposed that the people in charge should be crafting the constituency to their liking.
But that's all just presupposed.
Of course I am allowed to do that.
I'm the mayor, aren't I?
I'm allowed to micromanage you.
Exactly.
That's the exact problem.
So it is what you're saying.
That is the motivation.
He just wants the headlines.
So it looks like he's doing something.
Sure, but the mechanism that he just naturally defaults to is essentially brave new world tyranny.
And it's like, right, okay, this is a horrible future.
And what's most horrible about this is the person that he conscripts into it.
We're told reliably that Ramesh Ranga is a comedian.
Sometimes we are guilty of not calling our mates out when they do awful ****.
Like, you know, I think we've got ourselves into a situation where somebody might be talking to a woman and they say something inappropriate and we don't call it out enough.
So, for example, you know, just going, mate, saying that is rank.
Or, mate, she doesn't want to talk to you anymore.
Or, mate, you need to move away from her.
I think that's something we should be doing more of.
And I am imploring you to whenever you see anything like that, you throw them a mate and you let your friend know if they carry on behaving like that, they're not going to be your mate much longer.
Pathetic.
According to Francis Foster, that guy is actually capable of proper comedy.
I saw his tweets about that as well.
And the thing is, If you want to burn your career to the ground, he's probably just done it.
Well, I mean, there's always going to be... I mean, attaching yourself to an utterly cringy advertising campaign.
Sure, but there's always going to be a segment of progressive, love-actually-watching early 30s who are going to want to be berated for being what they are.
And he's just tapping into that coveted demographic.
He wants to be on live at the Apollo.
I guess he does, yeah.
It's easy to be like that when you've never grown up surrounded by real men.
That's a fair point.
Because if you're surrounded by real men, you understand the banter.
That's how men bond with each other.
That's how we hold each other to account.
By ripping into each other.
So we'll rip into women as well.
It's a minority of men who would insult women to their face like that.
You would do it behind their backs.
Because that's how men bond.
But he's obviously not hung around men.
And even if he has, like, there's this... He may also, too, does not have very much money, and Sadiq Khan's Mayor of London is just paying... He's just very cynical!
I'm sorry, I used to be a corporate solicitor, I'm not... Anyway, so Sadiq Khan put out this video.
I'm not going to make you watch it, because it goes on for a very long time.
As you can see attached there is a link that you can follow and I went and watched this entire thing because as you see there it's a full interactive film and sort of this is kind of a skit where you've got these four or five friends sat around and one of them, the Englishman, is a raging misogynist, bound to be a rapist, probably going to cause an Xera Everard, right?
And all of the diverse people around him are like, oh, I don't know.
saying that and what you've got to do is click on like uh you know the sort of skip ad link you got on YouTube where you've got to click on one of those that just says mate on it and then it will skip you to a relevant part that makes the story follow on right and so you know after a few minutes he's like oh I hate girls football or something and you click mate and then they go oh but go the girls football was really good actually and it's like yeah right that's one minute
Um, but if the thing is, if you don't touch it for like after like four minutes, the guy just looks at the camera and goes, are you just going to let me go on like this?
I was like, maybe, but no, no point in there.
Is there any violence against women and girls?
Obviously, um, it's insufferable, but, uh, but then they put out this to go with it.
So this is the video, obviously.
Um, so we'll skip that, but, uh, they've got a load of things at the bottom here, which I found interesting.
I'm not going to scroll down to because take too long.
So they say that misogyny, the problem with all this, is that problematic behavior includes disrespectful and harmful attitudes or actions that can condone and normalize abuse against women.
Right, so there's a big big jump here, isn't there, from disrespecting someone to abusing women.
Character is not shown by your opinions or by your thoughts.
Character is shown by your conduct.
This is the most basic stuff.
Yes, indeed.
But they do say, whilst we may not think that words have a direct impact on violence against women and girls, then why are we doing any of this?
Sexist jokes and banter can contribute towards a culture of abuse against women and girls.
It's a big leap, isn't it?
You've just said that words do not have a direct impact on violence against women and girls.
Probably one of the behavioural scientists in there has at some point made this and said, there's an argument and put evidence like I did on the table.
And they've gone, oh crap.
Yeah.
Well, we still want to do this.
So if we just bury this halfway down the page.
Bury the lead as they call it in media work.
Exactly.
But if we just have that there.
So if anyone actually who knows what they're talking about comes up and says, well Hanson, no proof of this, you're making this up.
And you say, well, we did say that words don't have a direct impact on violence against women and girls.
So what are you doing, Sadiq?
Like none of this makes any sense whatsoever.
You've just made this up.
This is just essentially a desire to stigmatize men, right?
Yep.
Anyway, so they, uh, they do explain to us what misogyny is because I think that's important, right?
So misogyny is objectifying women.
So TikTok women are the most misogynistic people.
They objectify themselves.
Instagram is literally an objectifying machine for women.
Okay, I'll give that, but as you said earlier, words have no effect on violence against women and girls.
I think women's behavior needs to be controlled.
But as you said earlier, words have no effect on violence against women and girls seeking to control women's behavior.
I think women's behavior needs to be controlled.
Am I wrong?
This is collapsing multiple things into each other.
They're collapsing coercive control, which is actually defined in legislation, with stuff that's just irrelevant.
They didn't say coercive control, because I would agree with them.
I'd be like, yeah, coercive control is bad.
But seeking to control women's behaviour?
I mean, that's what literally every insult is about, the attempt to control someone else's behaviour.
We're always trying to control each other's behaviour.
Why are you dressing like a slag?
You know, that's an attempt to control someone's behavior and you're just using your words and it's totally normal and everyone does it.
So, but any amount of trying to mediate a woman's behavior, that's misogyny.
You've seen the videos of, um, the American woman who gets naked in the middle of a Walmart and starts rolling on top of the produce.
Yeah.
You've seen those videos?
Oh, good grace.
Yeah.
That's controlling women's behavior.
You're a misogynist.
Honestly, if you think she shouldn't be doing that.
She thinks it's some kind of performance art or something.
I have no idea.
It's just completely bonkers.
I have no idea.
But they're all over the internet.
But carrying on the, you know, say, well, using intimidating or humiliating behavior to destroy a woman's self-confidence and undermine her.
Okay, sorry.
Discriminating against... Concept creep again.
Yeah, yeah.
Slight concept creep, right?
But we go down all the way going, oh, well, you know, treating women differently from men in social and professional settings.
Like, are you serious?
In what social setting can I treat a woman like a man?
She's just insulted me right outside.
You know, there is just no way that it can be called misogyny to recognize that men and women are different.
Mental.
Well, this is blank slatism again.
It's tied to the same problem with power law and criminality, which is where what you want is the use of prisons to incapacitate that small group of repeat criminals.
The final one I really like here.
Controlling confident and self-centered behavior as well as competitive.
So if you're now confident and competitive, You're a misogynist.
Well, that's done the whole UK team, Team GB, hasn't it?
Yeah.
Everybody, everybody.
Never mind winning a medal.
You're all stuffed.
Can I just jump in with a word misogyny?
Yeah, absolutely.
None of that means misogyny.
Misogyny has a definition.
It means the hatred of women.
Yes.
So misanthropy.
You're confident though, Nick.
You hate women.
Yeah.
I mean, there are people out there changing the meanings of words.
And misanthrope is the old word for it.
Misanthropy is a real thing that exists.
And you know who shows it?
People like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, the ones who say that, you know, who are making arguments against, for example, fertilizer, which fixes nitrogen from the air, which is basically the only reason we can feed So Sadiq Khan wrote an article for LBC about this, because of course he did.
You wouldn't just have millions of deaths.
You would have billions of deaths.
That's misanthropy, you know, hatred of the human race.
That's a thing that exists.
So Sudeik Khan wrote an article for LBC about this, because of course he did.
But he says, I describe myself as a proud feminist and that's not something I claim lightly.
Why not?
Everyone else is male feminists.
I know, it's the worst.
Be wary of any man who says he's a feminist.
There's a cartoon about that.
Are you going to show the cartoon?
It's a very famous cartoon.
They're all like little bald figures.
I don't know who does the cartoon, but basically the male feminist is like all the other animals that conceal themselves as prey, but are actually predators.
Yeah.
He says, as a man, I'm aware that being a meaningful ally to women requires taking responsibility and not simply adopting a passive mindset.
Why would I want to be an ally to women, Sadiq?
You know, haven't women destroyed enough yet?
We'll get more on that in fact later on the podcast.
But he says, at school there were instances in which I heard women and girls described in derogatory or demeaning ways, too often in the name of banter.
Growing up, I called most of it out at the time, but I'll admit, not every single time.
Guilty conscience.
Didn't do it every single time.
There we go.
Sadiq Khan loses his feminist card.
But so basically this is just him whining constantly, as you might imagine.
And then he's like, right, so what we need to do is impose this on everyone.
Oh, there's the advertising campaign.
I mean, that's just the most ugly thing in the world.
Didn't you want to explain why this is?
Right.
OK.
This use language structure, the.
And I'll have to do the accent, mate, mate.
You hear the Australian accent.
This is the way Australian men, not in the context that Sadiq Khan is talking about, but this is Australian men will use this construction, the double mate with the different vowel length, the diphthong at the beginning and the short one at the end.
This is the way Australians will speak to each other as blokes.
You don't hear it amongst women.
And I've seen it in the wild in Australia relatively last time I was in the country and then before when I was working there.
It's not the way Londoners speak.
Londoners don't use this construction.
But don't they also say it when it's like, mate, you forgot the beers?
Yes.
Mate in Australian English is a very, very flexible term.
It can even be derogatory.
If someone says to you, for example, you've done something really stupid or really annoying, particularly in a social context like Poured, come back with all the beers at the cricket and then managed to spill them all over the stage or something.
Mate!
That's not happy.
That's not a happy sound.
Okay.
It's like the way Australians use bastard.
It's a very, very flexible term.
It can be very derogatory or it can be, hey, y'all bastard.
It can be completely friendly.
This, I joked at the time, I put a tweet out about it because I thought, oh my goodness, an Australian ad agency has taken Sadiq Khan for an enormous ride here.
And then another advertising background person said it was actually done by a UK agency.
And I had, meanwhile, all these people with backgrounds in linguistics, because this is what professional linguists, people like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, are interested in, saying underneath, this is an Australian construction.
Why are they using it in London?
Has Earl's Court taken over the whole of London kind of thing?
or Wilsdon where all the Australians live because it's not the way Londoners speak they do sometimes use mate but not in the same way no and uh it's really annoying because it seems to be I don't even know how to describe it like there's a kind of
there's a kind of man who was became an adult in the early 2000s so it's like 2010s who seems to think that's still the 90s and that things are just as good as they were then and that Tony Blair is the best politician ever and we actually want to live in a version of love actually that just has diversity right There's a kind of person like that and that's the kind of person that Ramesh is.
It's the kind of person Sadiq Khan is.
This kind of affluent, middle class, very insufferably liberal early 2000s person who hasn't got the memo that actually the country's falling apart.
Nothing is working.
Britain's state capacity is going down the pan.
And it's not that the people who are like, can we have fewer immigrants are racist, it's because they would like to have the NHS.
These people, this is their brainchild.
And it's very obviously their brainchild because it's that kind of really annoying, important advertisement.
It's like, shut up you whiner.
As soon as you approach me like that, I'm not listening to you.
But also it's just evil and dystopian.
And this is where the They Live billboard comes into it.
I mean, like, It looks just the same actually.
And the thing is that you, oh dear god, I didn't realise that, that's years since I've seen a photo out of the They Live thing.
Not only does it look just like it, right, but it also shows that the evil overlords in They Live are actually less evil than our evil overlords, because at least their evil overlords will have a pretty picture on top of it.
You don't even really need the special sunglasses.
Yes.
You know, our ones are just, okay, no, we don't need the fig leaf.
But anyway, moving on from this.
So, uh, Ladd Bible came out and we're like, men, you need to be better.
Is that what Ladd Bible was about when it was founded?
No, it used to be about funny videos of university students.
It used to be a lad's magazine, didn't it?
It used to actually have banter on it, but that's gone because men need to be better allies.
Uh, there are a lot of people who are saying mate to the Pakistani community in Britain.
Good point.
Maybe Sadiq's got a point here.
Maybe he should go to his friends and say mate a few times.
What do you think?
Should go to the mosque?
Yeah, say mate when you're down the mosque, Sadiq.
Dark, right?
There are also a lot of people saying mate to the transgender activists.
We're getting away with the most extraordinary.
Some of what that one was saying at the demo, I can't remember which one it was, there are so many now, they all bleed into each other, was sailing very, very close to incitement.
What was incitement?
Incitement requires proximity in time and in place.
There is a reason why the criminal, it's a crime, and it's one of the few places where language is criminalised.
So libel and slander is not criminal, it's a civil wrong.
At common law, the traditional rule is very much incitement is the only time you have criminalised speech.
And the classic one story that you're told when you study it as an undergraduate law student and when you see it in practice is the rabble-rousing politician delivering an excited speech outside the corn dealer's house.
And of course, the reason for this is because this was developed, the concept in its modern form was developed during the period of conflict over the Corn Laws, when there really were very, very high prices for a lot of agricultural produce in Britain because they were artificially pumped up by trade protectionism.
And so, yes, that was a great way to burn the corn dealer's house down with him and his family inside it.
So that was your classic incitement.
You need proximity in time and proximity in place.
Now, obviously, this has not come to trial.
No, but they did get arrested.
He's been charged and has now been remanded because he breached, I think, a... Got recalled to prison.
Yeah, he got recalled because he breached whatever order he was under.
I want to say community payback order, but you don't have those in England and Wales, they're Scotland.
So I breached an order recalled to prison and the thing is, one of the charges I'm reasonably confident when it does come to trial will be incitement because it was just, it was the classic nexus of proximity, time, place.
So she was yelling punch and turf?
Yeah.
To which Sadiq Khan should have been saying maids, really.
But anyway, just as a final thing, Sadiq Khan has just a few things to say to women, actually.
Let's watch.
I'm a proud feminist.
I saw the mayor didn't have a problem.
Sorry, is that a question?
Could you stop interrupting the Member and allow her to ask her question?
No, no, not really.
Thank you.
OK.
The thing I would reflect on, Mr Mayor, stop interrupting me.
You interrupt all the women in this chamber when we speak.
For those young people watching, not all politicians are rude, like Senator Susan Hall.
Some are very polite and courteous.
And some answer questions, everybody in the audience.
Chair, I've got to say this in a way that doesn't appear patronising, but the naivety of the Chair of TfL saying publicly a figure... I'm asking for an estimate today, Mr Mayor, not a figure.
Well, I'm not giving you an estimate.
I think it just demonstrates why, with respect, Londoners were right to reject you twice when you stood to be Mayor.
I have no further questions.
If you spent more time thinking about how you could answer these questions and less ways you could try and insult me over a petty word choice, then you'd probably be in a better position for London.
What's that, pothead or black?
I don't know if I've offended you in any way, but thank you.
Pothead or black, is it?
Assembly Member Best, have you finished?
As she's finished, I can assure you that, Chair.
What a little bitch.
But I would suggest that that was possibly intimidating or humiliating behaviour designed to destroy a woman's self-confidence and undermine her.
He's just being rude to the two women who were speaking.
He is.
It wasn't the same one.
There was a Tory, I think, and a Lib Dem, and he was just being rude to both of them to shut them up.
To which we have to say maids.
It's not a good look, is it?
Anyway, we'll leave that there.
Next section.
Did you know you can make money out of the homeless?
Not by selling them things.
Do we have to cut them all in half?
Well, not even selling them stuff per se, just by saying you're pro-supporting homeless.
So if we look at, in 2019, the UK spent over a billion pounds On homelessness in one year.
Before the pandemic?
Before the pandemic.
It's gone up every year since, but the last figures I could find was 2019, over a billion.
Where's that money going?
How can we get some of it?
Business are making a fortune out of it, from shelters to, you know, all sorts of things.
I'm going to go into some real local examples now.
I worked with Rough Sleepers now for nearly two decades.
So projects, getting them off the streets, into accommodation, into employment.
I even set up a library for homeless children who were living in B&Bs so they could sort of keep up with some of their education.
Because when you're Become homeless, you can be moved 50, 60 miles away from your school, which means you don't go to school again for six months.
So you need some, so I've set up those sort of projects.
Some of the things that really annoy me are some of the simplistic projects people engage in thinking they're making a difference.
So the first one will be, you go to coffee shops, When they're in a coffee shop and there's a sign going, why don't you buy a coffee for a homeless person?
So pay it forward.
Yeah.
So buy a £4, £5, £6 coffee, buy another one.
And if a homeless person walks into the shop today, we'll give them that coffee you've paid for.
I mean, it sounds sweet on the face of it.
It sounds nice.
From a marketing It makes the coffee shop look good, but there is absolutely no way of guaranteeing that that money is going to a homeless person.
I'm sorry.
So you're getting both the marketing side makes the coffee shop look good and the cynical lawyer here, which is that goes straight to the bottom line.
Well, as I say, awesome extra profits.
Yeah.
Well, let's, let's dig a bit deeper than that in a minute.
So let me give you my examples and we'll dig into them.
There's lots of small companies who sell socks, who sell little woolly hats.
And if you buy one, we'll give a homeless person one.
And they're always quite expensive to buy.
Another one in Manchester, this drove me crazy.
There was a pub in Manchester City Centre that opened on Christmas Day to feed the homeless.
Christmas dinners.
Sounds fantastic.
Sounds great.
Why wouldn't they do that?
Why am I coming down on these examples?
Let's go into some of these examples that someone who understands.
If we can have the first link.
I would, but I couldn't.
Even the people who work at Starbucks to pay it forward, even they hate this scheme.
And their biggest complaint is, A, it messes up the orders, because we've now got a coffee, did someone order this?
So they're basically saying, most of these coffees go in a bin, because we've made it now, because we didn't know it was paying it forward coffee.
And the staff are saying, we're paid that poorly.
Why aren't staff don't tip us?
Because they're buying coffee for invisible homeless person.
That's what the staff are saying.
What am I going to say?
A coffee has never helped a homeless person.
For two decades working on the streets, if we could buy someone a coffee or a cup of tea and that would help a rough sleeper, believe me, we wouldn't have a problem in this country.
These are complicated, broken people who need professional help and support.
A coffee does nothing.
Again, if you are buying them a coffee, why is that coffee full price?
Why is it not half price pay it forward?
Why is it not at cost?
Why is the coffee shop goes back to your bottom line point then?
Why is the coffee full price?
It's not a charity, Nick.
They're running a business.
And that's exactly why they're doing it.
It's some virtue signaling that costs them nothing.
That's profitable.
It doesn't even cost them nothing.
Karl's already said it.
It goes straight to the bottom line.
There are no goods involved here.
Think in terms of the accounting equation and costs of goods sold.
You've sold something, but you haven't actually provided a product.
It's just pure money.
In defense of the cynical capitalists, they're selling people dreams, actually.
They're selling them the dream that they may have helped a homeless person.
Yeah.
I won't put a price on that.
Have you ever been in a high class coffee shop and seen homeless people sat there?
No.
Because you know what?
Weirdly they're not allowed in.
They're not allowed in because they're dysfunctional, they smell, they're drug users.
And stubborn.
You then get the thing, I mean, this is one area where countries like Australia and the UK are different from the US.
When they do let them in, you start seeing footage of what San Francisco looks like now.
I mean, I went to San Francisco in September 2019.
My partner and I drove the Pacific Highway.
And we strongly suspect we're not going to be able to go back now because there was a serious homelessness problem in both the major cities in San Francisco and in Los Angeles in 2019.
The whole area now, a good friend of ours who lives in Los Angeles and who we took out to supper, I mean, her street, which is a very nice street in a nice part of Los Angeles called Venice, is now just a homeless encampment.
She can't even walk her dog anymore.
Do you not remember a few years ago in Starbucks, there was a viral video of a black guy being chucked out of a Starbucks.
So he was apparently meeting with a property mogul, which is weird because, I mean, this guy didn't look like he owned any property, right?
But he was meeting with this property mogul and it was filmed and he was kicked out because he wasn't buying a drink.
And after that, Starbucks were like, oh, well, I actually was going to, you know, allow all the homeless to come in and use our toilets.
Well, unsurprisingly, it was heroin.
All over the toilets.
Needles all over the place.
They learn first-hand the hard way.
What happens when you open your stores to the homeless?
Well, McDonald's in Manchester City Centre, there's several branches, open at 7 o'clock in the morning, I believe.
And they always have issues.
They have security on the door now of McDonald's in Manchester City Centre from 7 in the morning.
Not because of fights or drunks.
No, no.
Because of homeless people coming in.
It's the wrong time of day.
I mean, pubs have their problem when last orders are called.
They're using the bathroom, shooting up.
Using the bathrooms as showers.
So by the time they've left, the bathrooms are a complete mess.
Needles everywhere.
So they've had to employ security.
Now, it's a different argument about what do we do with these individuals?
We'll get to that in a minute.
But they're the issues we have in some of these chains.
But buying someone a coffee or buying Starbucks an extra coffee doesn't solve anything.
But the general public think they're helping, but they're not.
If we have the next thing.
They're helping the owner.
The bottom line.
Yeah, they're helping the Starbucks chain.
Honestly, you're way too cynical.
So I mentioned before about hats and socks.
So there's lots of these.
Oh, now you're dumping on hats and socks?
Yes.
There's lots of companies now advertising, if you buy one of my 12 pound socks, we're going to give a pair to a homeless person.
Okay.
Have you ever been in Primark?
You can buy a pack of five socks for a pound in Primark.
They're the only socks I buy now.
Well, there we go.
So, but why are people buying £12 socks?
This is purely a marketing ploy.
To pull at your heartstrings, that you'd do nothing else for the homeless, but as long as you buy a pair of socks, you've helped a homeless person with a pair of socks.
There's one born every minute, Nick.
There is!
Going back to those Love Actually Blairites though, I am actually okay with them being totally ripped off because they believe in nonsense, and I feel that they're the sort of people who'd fall for this.
So there's a part of me that kind of wants to see them getting ripped off.
What now?
They've got enough money to make a difference.
The thing is, Nick's actually run a charity in a very poor part of Manchester.
And if those idiots who are willing to spend 12 quid or whatever donated 12 quid to an actual homeless charity, there might be a difference.
That's what annoys me.
It does not annoy me that people are being ripped off for buying £12 socks and making them feel good.
Well, if that makes you feel good, that's fine.
Who am I to say you shouldn't feel good?
Feel good.
But if the point was you actually wanted to help, That £12 could have been sent to a frontline small charity in the city where you live.
That would pay for breakfast for 30, 40 people for the day jam and toast or something.
That would have done something.
You would have got those people given an incentive to get off the streets to access support for some free breakfast.
And maybe then the support workers or social workers could have worked with you a little bit and actually moved you one step closer to a better life.
This, Virtue of signalling does absolutely nothing for the people on the streets.
But also it kind of keeps them on the streets, right?
So if they're on the streets and you can get free coffee, free socks and all that, why would I need to leave the streets?
Exactly.
But if my feet are cold and I need a drink, then I actually have to go somewhere.
I have motivation to do something.
People say to me all the time, I don't give money.
I don't hand stuff out.
I buy people a meal deal on the streets.
Surely that's doing good.
And to begin with, you think, well, how do you criticise that?
And you criticise it like this.
Those support centres are supplying hot, decent meals.
So if you give someone a meal deal, that person now isn't hungry enough to visit that support centre where they could sit down at a table in chairs with a knife and fork and feel human as they're eating.
Because you've just enabled them to sit on a damp, wet pavement on the floor like a rat to eat the sandwich in a Mars bar.
At least at the centre they would have felt human.
It's only when they're in the centre Can professionals start working with them, unpicking decades of brokenness and issues and the complexities of their lives and try to work out the path they can go down?
And one visit doesn't do that.
We're talking dozens and dozens of visits before you start making hay way.
Every time you buy someone a meal deal on the street, you've stopped that person getting help that day.
Again, that's what annoys me.
It isn't the fact you've spent your money on socks.
It's you've stopped someone getting professional help because it made you feel better that you think you did something.
That's what annoys me.
So we're pro-ripping off the Love Actually crowd, but we are anti Preventing homeless people from actually getting help.
Is that clear?
We've got to soda you on that one.
Yeah, we're just stopping them accessing help.
The Christmas pub one, people had a right go at me this one.
Same principle though.
Yeah, if we go to the next link.
What's wrong with Christmas Day opening your doors and getting rough sleepers in?
Because the centres are closed on Christmas Day.
It's not like you've stopped them going to a centre.
You haven't, so I can't complain about that.
But what's wrong with this?
Well, go on then, Scrooge.
Scrooge!
Go on, tell me.
These individuals were rough sleeping on Christmas Eve.
The rough sleepers while they're eating that meal and they're going to be rough sleeping that night and they're still going to find themselves homeless on Boxing Day.
What's changed?
Nothing's changed.
You've not changed that person's life.
All you've done is give them a meal on that afternoon.
Now, is that damaging them?
No, it's not.
But on the grand scheme of things, the money spent on that project hasn't helped one person.
I mean, I suppose the argument would be, well, at least they're not hungry that day.
So there's human compassion there.
You could argue that case.
The point on this for me is it's a difference between medicine and a cure.
So what this is, this is medicine for Christmas Day.
This is taking ibuprofen for your sore knee rather than actually going and getting it scanned and working out why you can't use the treadmill anymore, basically.
And what we need is we need cures.
But on the question of Christmas Day particularly, if everything's closed, maybe I'll have some ibuprofen that day, right?
Possibly, but let's look at the people who did this.
So what did they get out of this to pull?
They got a full page in the Manchester Evening News as a story.
That must be worth thousands of pounds.
After Christmas, they did the follow-up.
They got another full page in the Manchester Evening News.
It's advertorial.
Yes, it's that kind of thing.
So if they wanted to do something for rough sleepers, there were better things they could have done, but they picked the one where they also benefited as well.
We're getting two pages of free advertisements in the Manchester Evening News.
Yeah, but I mean, again, they're running a business.
I can't feel that cynical about it.
Well, no, that is quite cynical.
They're running a business.
Most of the time, people have got short arms and long pockets, but on Christmas Day, they're less likely to behave like that.
On all of the other ones, I'm with you, but on this one, I'm a little more on the left on this one.
If you're the homeless person, sure, you've made all these mistakes.
You need proper help, right?
But that doesn't help on Christmas morning when nothing's open and you're hungry and you're cold.
And okay, so there's a business that's prepared to do this.
And in exchange, they get a bit of free advertising from the local paper.
I mean, I don't see that as being a problem.
Let's say there's a choice.
They can either do that.
And let's say they help 30, 40 people on that afternoon.
Yeah.
Or the money they're going to spend on that, they invest that more wisely and do a different project that gets three people off the streets for life.
Yeah.
But they're not going to invest anything to anyone.
Getting off the streets, because they're a business, right?
They're a business.
So I actually don't blame them.
You know, this is for them.
This is savvy marketing, but it also does help some people very temporarily.
I don't blame any of these businesses because they're doing what businesses do.
Yeah.
They're trying to increase their bottom line.
I mean, I'm more than happy to criticize businesses.
I think this is really small.
You know, these are all small, just local to me that I've had to deal with.
That's why I've picked these.
There's bigger issues out there, but these are small ones I've had to deal with.
But for me, This just emphasizes why we have a rough sleeping problem in the UK.
As in, we're never looking to fix the problem.
We're always looking at sticking plasters.
That's a good point because, I mean, like you said, okay, so they spent like £500 or something feeding the homeless this day.
Well, A, that's half the cost of the advertising, at least.
And that's not someone who wants to cure the problem of homelessness because now this is a part of their business model.
Yeah, and I believe they've done it lots of Christmases since.
Now, at the same time we did this in 2016, this isn't an excuse for this, but there was a football ground in Manchester, not with the two big ones, a small one, who worked with the council, who was putting on Christmas dinner for homeless and rough sleepers, for several hundred of them, and they arranged for transport to pick people up.
So they drove minibuses to the city centre to pick people up and drive them there.
The same morning we had an organisation, it wasn't the Masons, it was something similar to the Masons, I can't remember what they're called now, who drove around the city centre Christmas day morning with 100 bottles of brandy and whiskey and every rough sleeper they found they gave one to and wished them happy Christmas.
So when those minibuses turned up, these people were blotto and it was like, well, health and safety now, we're not taking you in our... All were left on the streets with no Christmas dinner because someone thought it was a good idea to go around Christmas cheer and give bottles of whiskey and brandy out.
And I presume, I mean, I have no expertise in this area at all, but you can presumably tell me the answer to this question, that alcoholism plays a significant role in homelessness.
Absolutely.
Sorry, homelessness-ness.
Yeah.
Drugs are more so now because drugs are a lot cheaper and easier to get than alcohol, but alcohol is still a major factor.
Alcohol kills people quicker than drugs kill them.
That doesn't surprise me.
I work with prostitution charities in Manchester and they say the biggest issue they have is when one of the female prostitutes says, oh, I'm off drugs now and tell them I've replaced it with vodka.
You're now at a sort of higher risk of dying now.
So alcohol is even more dangerous than drugs.
So I just want people to understand there's no quick fix to rough sleeping.
You're going to throw a couple of coins in a cup or buy someone a sandwich or support a business that do these things.
You're not helping.
It just doesn't do anything.
It's a waste of your time, money, and energy.
Find something that works.
It also, again, just reinforces the paradigm as well, right?
Yes.
It helps them to remain where they are.
It's not even that it doesn't help.
You pay organizations to do what makes their budget go up, basically.
But you're actively retarding the ability of these people to get off of the street.
Yeah.
A lot of these agencies and charities, by the way, lots of charities are bought into this of the medicine, not the cure because they've got hundred million pound budgets.
They've got chief exec 150,000.
That's my pension gone.
Well, yeah, they've got great pensions.
We don't want to cure this because what am I doing for the job?
Just like we had the LGB.
That's why Stonewall went, because they achieved same sex marriage.
And so their purpose had come to a natural end.
And the whole trans bandwagon is an attempt to remain relevant.
They were suffering after the same sex marriage went through and they were suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome.
That's all that is.
I'm sorry.
It was deeply cynical that.
Totally true.
It is.
If we can have the next link.
So this might, you might go, Oh, is that the wrong link?
What's this about?
This is about if businesses will only do what they think is in their interest.
So Hollywood going woke, companies going woke.
They only did it because they thought it was in their interest and now they realise it's not in their interest.
You know, they're sacking their DEI leads now in Hollywood because there's no more money in it.
That's what we need to do with buff sleeping and homelessness.
We need to get rid of the stuff that doesn't work but was just either woke or made us feel better.
Can I have the last picture?
This is how you help off sleepers.
It's face-to-face contact.
It's sitting down on a call payment and having a chat with them face-to-face, finding out what they want.
It's not sitting there going, do you know what I can do for you today?
Because the problem is that's what everyone's always done for them is told them what they need.
You start building people up by having conversations, by saying, what do you want in your life?
What can I do for you?
Is there any suggestions?
Because until you get them taking control and responsibility of their lives, nothing changes.
And sometimes it's as simple as saying, do you want a tea or a coffee?
Instead of going, There you go, mate, I've just given you that.
Ask them what they want, because the more you do that, the more they realise their choices influence their lives.
Forcing them to think, basically.
And then once they start realising, making better decisions gives them a better life, they carry on making better decisions.
But when you get to a stage where, it's called learnt helplessness, it's where the state has taught you to be helpless because someone's always going to do everything for you, you don't have to think.
The entire system just treats them like a problem, right?
Rather than individual people with real issues and a real backstory.
Like, oh, I'm the homeless person who's here to collect the tea.
I'm the homeless person who's here to collect the Christmas dinner.
You're not Mark, the person who has made mistakes and has fallen on hard times.
You're now in the category of homeless.
So you feel yourself to be trapped there, right?
Best example I can give you, and this will be the last thing I say on this, was I met a gentleman for the first time on Deansgate in Manchester City Centre, which is the Mick Bowden City Centre, sat down and said, oh, can I have a chat?
I'm too busy, I'm working.
He went, you're working?
I went, yeah.
He goes, my job is to shake this paper cup.
And when people put money in it, it makes them feel better.
That's my job.
And it was like, you get this.
There was one of them in Swindon who had a house and a car and everything, but he would, you know, act like a homeless person.
People would give him money and that was better than working in a proper job.
Yeah.
I saw a comedy routine years ago, when the Edinburgh Fringe was still very good, by a bloke who admittedly he had an advantage.
He had cerebral palsy from the waist down, but normal from the waist up.
So he was in a wheelchair.
So he had the disabled person look.
And on different days, he went to the same part of town, each time with a bucket, with different things written on it to try to get people to give him money.
Man in wheelchair, remember.
And he had the most ridiculous things written on there.
He had, like, pay my mortgage.
He had, you know, My dog needs a tooth extraction.
And people were just putting money into it because of Man in Wheelchair.
And the only one, he didn't get any money for it.
He had video footage of this, which was, it was very funny.
The only one where nobody would put money in his bucket, he'd written on the bucket, free Gary Glitter.
That didn't work.
But all the others... I'm not surprised that didn't work.
...have the automatic reaction of just putting money in this guy's bucket.
Right, well.
Don't help the homeless.
Help the homeless in ways that are productive, not ways that damage broken individuals.
Okay, well, enough of Nick's crusading against homeless people.
Let's fire them all.
Ladies, you like working, don't you?
Of course you like working.
Get back to the office.
Because that's basically what the entire messaging of society is, and every time that you make a TikTok saying, hang on a second, I didn't sign up to be a wage slave for the rest of my life while my ovaries start drying up and I never get to see the few children I get to have, you can thank your feminist bettors and priors who made this world possible for you.
But before we begin, if you want to support us, go to Delosius.com, sign up, watch the Battle of Blenheim, which is an absolutely epic series of events and in no way connected to what we're talking about now.
It's just a really good palate cleanser, some greatest English heroes and all of human history.
English history, which is human history.
It's the only bit of human history that's worth watching.
Anyway, go watch that.
And so we'll begin, if we could, this is the next one.
We'll begin with this.
So I saw this going around.
And I feel bad for her, actually.
I feel bad for this young lady.
Let's watch.
Whoever fought for women to get jobs... Why?
Why did we do that?
I am so tired.
I wanna just put my feet up.
like i am oh my god it's very performative yeah Well, everything on TikTok is.
It's very hard to work out what's real.
And I'm not even sure if that's real or not.
No, but there are lots of people who this resonated with, because I think there are lots of young women who are... I can tell you exactly why it did too, because there is a mountain of evidence why this resonated.
Basically, every time you have anything that looks like feminism, and the modern variety is only one example of this.
It's existed throughout.
Any society that produces a percentage of women with reasonably high status going back to antiquity, you will see this pattern of behaviour.
Some women don't enjoy parenting.
They don't enjoy children.
They don't find it fun.
And they're not necessarily homosexual.
I mean, obviously you expect that with people who... It's kind of part of being a lesbian.
It's also in the opposite direction, kind of part of being a gay male.
You get this cognitive crossover with homosexuals.
We're one to three percent of the population.
So you're not going to see this elsewhere.
So you get a minority Of straight men who absolutely do not want to be dads.
They want to be playboys and they'll try and get away with it if they can.
And you will get a minority of straight women who do not want to be mums.
They are career focused and if they're of high intellect combined with disagreeableness.
So we're talking Jordan Peterson's The Big Five here.
So you combine high intellect with disagreeableness.
You get a desire to be a high achiever in the workplace.
And what percentage of women are those characteristics found in in conjunction?
The traditional argument that I have seen made by statisticians is that you get it very strongly in about 10% and weakly in about 20%.
So you're 20% of the women who might want one or two children, but still are largely career-focused.
That is nowhere near the majority of women.
But the thing is your feminist movements inevitably are led by women of that type with, and this is the other thing because it's quite depressing to understand, because women, because of female intersexual competition, straight women struggle with solidarity.
You tend to finish up needing in these female-dominated groups a reasonably disproportionate percentage of lesbians in there because they can do the traditional male-style trade union type solidarity, which is why you get so many lesbians prominent which is why you get so many lesbians prominent in feminism because they need the blokey ones to run it without it exploding.
But I've seen, I mean, this video was just the most recent.
Most women are like her.
They don't want a job.
I could have gone back and found probably half a dozen other videos of, you know, reasonably attractive young women who are just like, I don't want to work.
I want to be a housewife.
I want to have kids.
I want to, I want to just, you know, be a domestic goddess.
I want to do nice things.
And for that, they can literally thank the suffragettes and the feminist movement.
This is just from the Wikipedia page, which I just think is the most hilarious line I've ever read in my entire life and tells you everything you need to know about democracy.
Right.
More American women organized against their own right to vote than in favor of it until 1916 when, of course, they were given the vote.
Anti-suffragism was associated with domestic feminism, the belief that women had the right to complete freedom within the home.
In the United States, 1916 is not when they got the vote.
Americans were very late because feminism, obviously there must have been a numbers flip in 1916 because the 19th amendment went through in, I think, 1919 or 1920.
You will have Americans who will say so.
And one of the reasons why there were problems for feminism, this is very specific American history, is because they were associated with prohibition.
And it was already becoming clear as the 20s progressed.
The period of prohibition.
One of the reasons why feminism in the United States has historically, particularly amongst black people, had a bad reputation is because it was associated with prohibition.
Because white women voted dry and where they had the franchise, which was mainly in the northern states, black men and immigrants voted wet.
So that's why you had this sort of long period of conflict in the United States over the status of feminism and the status of women.
It's why American feminism has achieved nothing, basically.
Abortion rights came from abortion in America, whereas over here it was actual proper agitation because women actually achieved things here on their own behalf as a group.
It depends what you consider an achievement.
I mean, if ruining the lives of Generation Z women is anything, then they've achieved quite a lot.
Well, I'm speaking in positive terms here!
But the point is, women have not actually overwhelmingly been on the side of women's suffrage and women in the workplace and feminism and female empowerment.
Actually, most women kind of haven't, and they don't get to have a say.
Going back to the article, sorry, no, they have an article about this that is essentially a woman saying, yeah, you might be tired.
Get back to work.
The owner of your company's yacht is not going to pay for itself.
We need you in those cages.
During 2020, when working from home became a big deal, there is a TV psychiatrist Who is quite popular usually in her presentation.
Her name is Emma Kenny.
And she made, you know who I mean, and she made a point once on one of her shows.
I think it was like Good Morning Britain or, you know, the kind of things that she goes on.
She tries to keep it very light and bright.
She said, if you are a woman with a job and a young child, there is no way you can get adequate sleep.
The only way someone working can get adequate sleep, a woman, is either to, you can have the commute and no child and you'll get adequate sleep because you just sleep through the night.
You just have to get up early and that's fine.
Or you can have the child but no job and you will get adequate sleep.
You cannot do both.
It's actually impossible in terms of the way people's sleep patterns are.
So she knows this kind of thing.
It's totally true.
I can see it firsthand.
Yeah.
It's just not possible to do.
And she maintained, this is why support for lockdown and working from home was so intense among so many mothers of young children, because what they were doing during the course of 2020 and a significant part of 2021 was catching up on an enormous sleep debt.
And I have never seen anything to contradict that claim.
And I'm reasonably confident.
I mean, she's a careful researcher.
My wife has a two-and-a-half-year-old and a five-month-old at home and she has to have naps in the afternoon.
She's the one who gets up in the night to deal with them when they're upset or need bottles or whatever it is, right?
But you are absolutely right, there is just not enough sleep for a young mother.
You can do one or the other, but you can't do both at the same time.
Sleep when the baby sleeps, that's when you get a nap.
When the baby sleeps when it wants.
Anyway, so I found this article fascinating and I thought we'd go through it, right?
Because it's got a lot of the sort of feminist fictions in it, but it's also just young women, just get back in line.
We need you on the plantation.
If you think that sitting at home while your husband goes out to work, And you, you know, having a nice house and having some pets and having some babies sounds like fun.
You're part of the problem, right?
That's what this article is.
They say, it's no secret that many of us would dream of earning a full-time salary without having to complete a strenuous day of work for eight hours, five days a week.
That's literally what being a housewife is.
Literally what that is, right?
Even if most of us were not required to work and did not make much money that we do at our jobs, it'd be nice to be able to kick our feet up and relax more often than we can imagine in current times.
One woman believes, and that's the woman in the clip, that this lifestyle was once right at her fingertips before it was stripped away by women's rights activists in the 1900s.
She reminds us that there is once a time when women were not allowed to work outside of their households, and she admits that she is more suited for that life than the one she's currently living in.
Well, that's interesting.
This is also not true, right?
I can scroll down on here.
We can actually see what the labor force participation of women was.
Now, in 1940, say, five, there's about 33%, which isn't massive.
They would be the poor women.
Yes.
Poor women have always had to work.
You've got to be careful with 1945 as well, because you have significant labour market recruitments throughout the developed world, and not just in Western countries.
I mean, the Soviets and the Nazis were doing it as well, even though it was against Nazi policy, because they had the whole... This was specifically in the United States.
So you get that because of the war.
Yeah.
But even then, after the war, you can see that women, of course, were in the labour market, and women have always been needed to work, because, like you said, people aren't rich.
And so they have always needed to work.
So it's not like... I love the idea that they think there was some sort of law or statute that prevented women from working.
I mean, you're a legal expert.
What year did that come in?
What you would get, historically, this is always a bit more complex, is that women would be denied access to the professions.
And this is something that has existed for a long time, once again, in societies going back to antiquity, where you had societies where some women, it was always only some, had high status.
For example, you had female advocates in pagan Rome.
You even have a word in Latin for a barrister, advocata.
In modern Italian, there wasn't, until relatively recently, a word for female advocate.
In romance languages, because they're gendered, in order to show an improvement in status for a woman is to give them a feminine form of the word.
So, women would be l'avocado, so they would be referred to using the male form, which is typically ending with a zero, with an O, not always.
So one of the things, for example, when you know that politics or government has changed, one of the things, for example, that one of the Christian emperors, Theodosius, did was took from female advocates the ability to have rights.
That was going back a little further than I was expecting.
But no, you had this all through the 18th and 19th century is you had denial of entrance to the professions.
The one historically that actually mattered was law.
Medicine didn't matter.
And the reason it didn't matter is because doctors used to kill more people than they were butchers.
But lawyers, I mean, there are two great ways of discovering the truth about something.
The scientific method, which is relatively new, or the laws of evidence, which evolved in two civilizations that are a couple of thousand years old.
So denial of entrance to the professions, once again, for that group of 10 to 20 percent of women of high intellect and disagreeableness, really chase.
It really grates on them.
So they're the ones that ran these campaigns.
So that's why you can often document very, very easily the first female barrister, the first female solicitor.
That is why when they talk about denial of access to the labour market, they're talking about, they're not talking about being a washerwoman or a cook or that kind of thing.
They're talking about being a barrister.
The labour market.
Yes.
So it was a status job.
It's a status job, which is why we've got this weird situation where there's a class of clever people of both sexes who effectively rule over us, this sort of new elite.
And they come from the same social class as me.
I have to be completely frank about this, best to be honest.
But then underneath the labour market is completely segregated into classic working class jobs, mostly male, pink collar and blue collar jobs that are also segregated once again by sex.
You know, the only The problem I have is that you're, as Nick points out, speaking about very elite jobs that are at the top of society.
I'm guessing that woman isn't doing one of those?
No.
What they're referring to here is our women were just not allowed to work.
Women were not allowed to work outside of their households.
Nonsense.
There's never been time.
There's never been a law.
And it's never been possible because as Nick said, people are poor.
Like you said, they need to be washing women.
They need to be whatever.
Even in modern times.
Okay.
She's may not be working as a cleaner or, or a nurse assistant or something.
She's working in an email.
What if she's working in, in a call center?
I cannot imagine.
And I've had a friend go through this when he had a loss in status and had to work in a call centre for NewsPoll in Australia, which is the Aussie equivalent of YouGov.
It is the most soul-destroying job and it is very poorly paid.
I worked in tech support.
It's insanely boring.
You know, why any woman would choose that over being a housewife is beyond me.
Because of the continuous propaganda that's been pumped to them over decades.
It's not just propaganda, it's pressure as well.
Rising house prices, decline in salaries.
So you finish up, and I don't mean overall, but salaries relative to the amount of money that you need to buy a house.
So you've got the classic Not enough housing, declining salaries relative, you know, you need multiples and multiples of your salary to buy a house.
The idea that a bank can take into account both male and female incomes, that was when people apply for a mortgage, that was something that Tony Blair introduced.
Before Blair, you could only choose one of the two salaries and it was nearly always male, not always, but you could only choose the higher of the two salaries.
And so what you finish up with now is you need two people to buy a house.
Two people with a job isn't enough.
You need two people with good jobs.
Anyway, going back to the article, we're told a lie that women weren't allowed to work outside their homes, which is not true.
And then they say, while working full-time is undoubtedly difficult and draining at times, the rights women have gained in the process are worth it.
sacrifice for us, we the elite class, who've decided that your happiness was the worthy sacrifice to make so we could get the job being a barrister or whatever it was that my forebears wanted, that I have access to.
Which also means that you can, what you finish up with is the posh woman Yes.
Paying for a poor woman, respectively, to raise her children.
That is why the joke done by Matt the cartoonist in the Telegraph during the Brexit debates in 2019, where a posh couple and the woman says to her husband, oh, we sent our Romanian nanny on the people's vote march, That is why that joke was funny, because it was true.
You can see here the exploitative nature of it.
You've got young normal women who are like, look, I actually just wanted like the dream of, you know, being a housewife in a picket fence house and, you know, sending my kids off to school and then baking all day or something like that.
And this one was like, no, no, no.
The rights women have gained, quote unquote, are worth it.
So now you get back in the wage cage and you sit there data entering or whatever it is you're doing.
That's exhausting you and making you really despondent and depressed.
So just literally you are the inferior class to these women.
That's what is being said.
It's a combination of a belief, class distinction, always important in Britain.
The other one is mistaking your own preferences for everybody else's preferences.
That's the other one, which is a different psychological component.
We're watching a distinct conflict of this.
Young women are like, this is not my preference to be the wager.
And she's like, yeah, but my right to be a wager is more important than that.
So you can just suck it up.
In fact, these women need to understand Feminism really is a trade union for other feminists.
Yeah, but it's a trade union for posh women.
Yeah, who are feminine.
That's what feminists are.
The credentialed class.
The average woman on the street never identifies themselves as a feminist.
Well, the big survey-tion poll Fawcett Society got an embarrassing result when they got Servation, who are famously the best polling company in Britain, in 2016 to when you don't define feminists as legal equality between men and women.
As soon as you define that, you get something like 90% agree, but even most Muslims agree with it.
It's incredible.
But if you don't define it and just allow people to form their own image based on it, I think Servation found 7% of men and 9% of women Would voluntarily call themselves feminists.
On average, 8% of the population.
8% of the population.
Everybody else just takes one look at that and says, you're all bonkers.
Yeah.
Well, 90% of women are like, but I don't hate men.
Yeah.
That's the answer they give.
But anyway, sorry.
They say it's important to acknowledge that women weren't forbidden from having the financial independence that we do now.
To which I have to laugh because now we're going to talk about women's financial independence.
So let's talk about how much taxes women pay.
Shall we?
I mean, you're obviously not in this group.
You are obviously a net taxpayer.
Do you think women overall are net taxpayers?
We have such, we are such net taxpayers.
My partner and I, you know, the bank that debanked Nigel Farage, the same week that they debanked Nigel Farage, my partner got an email.
saying asking we have some investments okay but not enough for them to be dedicated to have for us to have a dedicated banker with them would you like to bank with us you know and we do this based on your net worth and so on and so forth and basically this led to an explosive scenes from my partner along the lines of right
so you've been checking my social media activity and getting on property data surveys to find out what what we own both individually and jointly and have decided that you're going to offer us banking facilities after debanking nigel farage and among other things the email involved you You do know we both voted for Brexit, don't you?
So you being a statistical outlier, I think is the thing to take away from this, because I went through the charts that the government give you of just total amounts of tax paid by men and women.
So the overall amount is £196 billion, out of which women paid £56.7 billion, men paying £139 billion.
Which means that men are responsible for 70% of all tax paid in this country.
Does not surprise me at all.
In fact, I'm surprised that it's as even as 70-30.
I mean, I thought it might have been 80-20.
I think in the United States, it's something like 80-20.
It probably is.
But the point is, women are only paying 30% of the tax.
And you think, okay, fine.
I mean, if we were living in some sort of Lockean state that had minimal commitments, then perhaps that would be a problem because women would have financial dependence.
They'd have their own money, they'd be working, blah, blah, blah.
Except no, because of course we have benefits in this country.
We have lots and lots of benefits.
So last year, the UK government paid £231 billion in benefits.
131 billion pounds in benefits.
Where do you think that's going?
Exactly.
We know that, according to the UK government, women made up 56% of people on universal credit and claimed, basically saying they claim 56% of benefits.
Well, universal credit's not a good statistic.
Housing benefit's the better one to look at in terms of a big hole in the finances.
It would be, but even by this metric, women as a class are £72 billion in debt.
They do not pay in any way.
They're not even like halfway.
They are massive deficits in the public purse.
So I don't want to talk about financial independence.
You aren't financially independent.
You're massively dependent on men paying taxes.
And also the phenomenon, and this is a somewhat crude Americanism, it's not a swear word, but it is quite crude.
They talk about, with the breakdown of the contemporary family, instead of marrying a man, women marry the state.
So you've heard it as well.
I can't remember which American said it, but it is a very witty line.
And it's totally true, and we have the numbers.
As you said, it's probably worse than I can summon here, but this is all I can find.
Well, it also can be, too, because Britain is a different country from the US, and there's different labour market patterns and different productivity patterns and that kind of thing.
But I'm specifically speaking to the British experience, where men are...
Literally getting into debt.
I mean, women need to more than double the amount of taxes they pay to cover the benefits they receive, at least.
But it's probably worse.
Anyway, going back.
So women's rights advocates had to continuously fight for equality.
You mean a special privilege.
Given that just a little over a century earlier, married women had been granted the right to own property in their own name.
To many, they were considered property themselves under the ownership of their fathers and husbands.
Yeah, I wonder if it's due to the debt.
Even in today's workforce, women still earn significantly less than men due to the wage gap.
The wage gap exists because it's a motherhood gap.
As soon as you can enroll for childbirth... Everyone knows.
Everyone knows.
Everyone knows.
Sorry, I just hate statistical fails.
I hate it.
Everyone knows, right?
But look at the way that's framed.
Women earn significantly less than men due to the wage gap.
The wage gap is what you're using to describe the disparity between men and women.
There must be some prior cause before that, before you can even describe such a thing as a wage gap.
This is how bad this person's thinking is.
The wage gap, as if that's a magic word that explains this natural thing.
Look, I was taught labour market economics by a socialist, but he was an honest socialist.
Oh, really?
And they do exist.
Yeah, I was going to say the few and far between.
And when we were taught the stuff, and he refused to call it the gender wage gap, he thought gender was a load of cobblers, like, and not being, it wasn't a TERF, this is years before TERFs, this is back in the 90s, it was just, it's to do with sex, and it's to do with women having children, and we just exhaustively went through, in this case, the Australian Bureau of Statistics data on point, and it's, it is the most obvious thing
in labor market economics it is the most difficult to ignore it is also the easiest to understand if you're one of those kids who's not who didn't do brilliantly at your applied maths a level you know if you only got a c i was never into maths though um But anyway, they carry on saying, look, basically, the problem is women feel overwhelmed by balancing their jobs and taking care of their families.
Obviously they would.
54% of heterosexual marriage households where both parents work full time report that it's mostly the mother that manages the household and children's schedules, as per Pew.
Yes, the husband's out earning the majority of the money and paying the majority of the taxes, as we've just covered.
This could be a major factor contributing to burnout in so many women employees in today's workforce.
That's correct.
So one thing to do would be for them to not be in the workforce.
That would be one solution.
It would be, as I discussed with Louise Perry on this point, because she talks quite a lot about it, it would involve, there are policies you could introduce to deal with aspects of this, like transfer between spouses of the personal allowance.
Or income splitting, which used to be an old policy that exists in Australia, where you split the higher income, usually the male, not always, into two.
You have to do state mandated structures to set up a separate bank account for the woman where basically he's paying for housework and then she leaves the workforce.
That's known as income splitting.
There are various policies you can introduce to help ameliorate this problem that would encourage family formation and would also encourage women to be homemakers and probably happier, but you would have to get treasury.
You have to get it past Treasury, which has built this entire structure based on mass labour market participation to the point where, for example, education and the NHS, if you pull just 20% of the female labour force out of both schools and the NHS, so even if only a fifth of women took One of these opportunities, if you set your tax system up in that way, you would collapse both.
This is an enormously complex policy problem.
And what I'm repeating to you here is basically what I told Louise Perry, because she's identified it.
And like most of the post-liberals, she's not strong on policy.
None of them are.
Whereas I'm coming fairly typically out of the policy won't classical liberal background, which is Policy, policy, policy, cost it all, cost it all, cost it all.
We have created a monster and I'm good at policy development and I don't know how you fix it because the howls from the Treasury, my God!
Well, that's because, like you say, you've literally created a monster that's conscripted young women and has conscripted generations yet to be born into paying for itself rather than them having their own money.
It's actually a Ponzi scheme.
The whole of the state pension is a Ponzi scheme.
Current contributions are funding current entitlements.
It's a literal Ponzi scheme.
And this is why everyone complains, oh Maloney has just opened the borders to 400,000 new immigrants.
Yeah, because she got to the top of the Ponzi scheme and was like, oh God, I can't let this collapse.
If I let this collapse, then I'm the one holding the bag.
I'm the one who's allowed grandma to starve.
I'm the one.
And so they have to keep going.
And so immigration will never end because the boomers want their pensions.
It's taken 100 years to get to this state.
Yeah.
That is true.
To change it, it will take another 100 years.
Yeah, you're taking the long view.
I'm just sitting there and- You couldn't do it short.
It'd have to take a 100 years.
It can't be done without the system collapsing, basically.
So essentially, at some point, we're going to have to- You're going to have- It may happen in the US first, although it depends because there's still the global reserve currency, but the United States social security system may completely collapse.
I mean, you keep seeing predictions of this amongst sort of libertarian-ish economics, but it's the classic case of economists have predicted the last 257 of the three recessions.
They're just useless at forecasting.
But the thing is, eventually, and this is the line from Steve Davies at the Institute for Economic Affairs, is that eventually the merry-go-round will stop.
Yes.
It has to.
It has to.
Yes.
And this is what this person is trying to defend in doing all of this.
But anyway, they say that basically men can stop picking up the slack by helping out at home.
It's like, yeah, but you've been saying that for decades and that's not happened because it's just not natural for men to do that.
It's just true.
And so you have to be a wage slave to make sure that the commitments that have been made don't go unfulfilled.
Have fun.
We'll leave that there.
This went on a lot longer than I expected, so we won't have much time for comments or anything.
John, can we get Helen's substack up, please?
Thanks.
That's where I work.
Foreign Liberty.
That's the tank I work for in America.
So go and check Helen out there.
But what was it you were saying about substack in the last five minutes?
Ah, right.
I thought we'd have more time.
OK, well, basically, many of you may be aware that Elon Musk and Substack had a fight.
And the terms of the dispute are quite difficult to ascertain.
Musk thinks that Substack notes copied Twitter.
He now thinks Meta have used threads to copy Twitter.
I am not a computer programmer.
I can't comment on the substance of these allegations.
But what it has turned into is Musk's behaviour is very much that there can be only one free speech platform and he wants obviously because he owns it, he wants Twitter to be it or Twitter X as it is now.
No, just X. Yeah, he's not going to get X. Twitter X maybe because SpaceX is part of the same stable but He's not going to get X, I'm afraid.
That's not going to happen.
Not when something's entered the language like this.
So what he has done has throttled sub stack links.
Anytime people tried to share things, Nick has experienced this and I've experienced it.
You're basically, your Twitter account reach shrinks.
I stopped getting Twitter followers after about April and you as well, because that's when it happened in April.
And the only way around it is to do the techie thing and get a custom domain because if Elon Musk tried to silence all of the custom domains on the internet, he would break the internet, basically.
So, what I've found in the last week is suddenly my Twitter has come back.
People have been able to find me again and also sign up to my Substack and you will have to do the same thing as well.
It's the only way to get your both your Twitter reach back and your Substack back to pay attention to it because they're both free speech platforms.
Elon Musk fighting with Substack using Twitter X to fight with Substack is just it is a right wing version of the traditional lefty circular firing squad.
It shows you this happens on both sides of politics.
But yes, if you want to read my stuff for Law and Liberty, just go where Carla's got up there.
If you want to bring up my sub stack, I think you've got it there.
Yeah, just go notonyourteambutalwaysfair is the name of it, and it's www.notonyourteam.co.uk was the domain that I bought and set up.
The person who is of most interest, and Carl's helped me brought up the pinned post of both of ours.
John did all the work there.
is Lorenzo Warby.
Now I'm going to at some point come back to Lotus Eaters and talk about Lorenzo in more detail.
I think he is a major scholar.
I think he is the kind of person whose work we're going to be reading in 200 years time.
Now he was, at about the same time as me actually, he was cancelled in Australia.
He underwent a cancellation.
But unlike the cancellation that the three of us experienced, he was successfully cancelled.
We actually, the three of us here... We've all been cancelled.
We've all been cancelled, but it didn't, it was unsuccessful.
OK, as you can see, we came back from it.
Most people, you need to understand that Nick Buckley, Kyle Benjamin and Helen Dale do not represent the normal pattern of these things.
We've got a particular kind of temperament.
Lorenzo Warby does represent what normally happens.
He was driven out of public life in Australia.
And over a number of years, because I think he's such an important thinker, I have tried to use the fact that I have a decent amount of clout, particularly within Australia, to get his work better known.
And until Substack came along, I have failed in that.
I'll be quite honest.
But he is writing this series of essays.
He's written about half of them so far.
They're all on my Substack.
They're all under that headline, Worshipping the Future.
Substack liked it so much.
You will see, you will find, if you go to my Substack, you will find it very easily.
They gave me the featured Substack 2023 and it's on his Worshipping the Future.
Is he located in Australia?
He's in Australia.
Yes.
I'd love to have him in.
Well, when the time, I don't know whether it's going to be possible, but it would be really good when we do write about what he went through to patch him in from Oz or something like that.
I'd just like to hear about his ideas.
But just because his ideas are, he's extraordinary.
He's just an extraordinary scholar and intellect.
One of the true independent scholars.
People, I mean, people who started to find out about his work, Historically, we're comparing him to Curtis Yarvin.
I think he's cleverer than Curtis Yarvin, and he's certainly a better writer.
I mean, Yarvin struggles with clarity of expression.
Lorenzo is a very clear writer.
He was very charming on Trigonometry.
Sorry.
He's charming.
He was very charming on trigonometry.
He is.
Very charming.
He comes across as a charming bloke.
But it's just this silly fight between Musk and Substack is just so unproductive because they both effectively believe in the same thing.
But it's insufferable they can't somehow integrate themselves, right?
There should be some agreement, hang on a second, there must be a massive profit sharing agreement we could have if we could integrate the technology so that essentially Twitter... Work together rather than fighting.
Exactly, rather than directly competing.
I mean, outside of Substack, I am still on Twitter.
I'm easy to find.
I look exactly like I do now.
I'm probably wearing the same jacket.
I hate this X thing at the top.
Oh, by the way, we've got a Substack.
Oh, yes.
John told me to mention.
I had to search for it.
Yeah, I've got a Substack.
And Nick's got a Substack as well.
Yeah.
But anyway, we're out of time.
So go and follow Helen.
She's at 38,000 followers.
Do we have Nick?
Yes, go and follow Nick as well, because Twitter has been turning him down.
Yeah, there he is.
Go find him.
23,000.
That's great.
But anything you want to promote before you go?
I'm raising money for my campaign.
So if you go on to Democracy 3.0, I'm taking donations.
So thank you very much.
I'm going to make a little suggestion for Nick's campaign, speaking as someone who comes from the classic compulsory voting democracy.
Nick needs canvases.
If you like the idea of him being Mayor of Manchester, the only way he has a hope in Hades of doing the classic independent end-run around the big parties, in this case Labor in Manchester, is to do what Ken Livingstone did in 1999 in London.
Which is recruit an army of canvassers for an enormous ground game.
If you live in Manchester, get hold of Nick, get hold of his campaign, it's all on the internet, and just volunteer.
A ground game makes an enormous difference.
It's the entire reason the Liberal Democrats have got any seats in Parliament.
Exactly.
And it's why they always do so well at by-elections, because they can saturate an entire constituency.
And it's why they tend to lose those seats to the two majors at the General.
Exactly true.
Anyway, go follow those folks.
Thanks for joining us.
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