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Sept. 6, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:28:48
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #735
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lothar Seaters episode 735 for today, Wednesday the 6th of September 2023.
I am your host Connor, joined by my co-host Stelios.
Hello.
And today we're discussing how the decline just doesn't end because everything's quite literally falling apart in Britain at this point.
Muddy Burning Man, because Stelios wants to put me through an obstacle course of hilarities and the church is dereliction of duty.
I regret to inform you the Protestants are at it again.
Just before we start, a little personal thing.
Hello to all the viewers that I ran into at March for Life on the weekend.
I didn't go there to make it a meet and greet because it's not about me.
It's a very solemn event but it was very joyful to see lots of families and thank you for everyone who came up and shook hands and the nice girl that bought me a coffee.
So cheers!
Very heartwarming.
Get offline, get out into the real world.
Things will get better.
I sound like Tony Blair, don't I?
That's not good.
Anyway, without further ado, let's jump straight into today's stories.
So it turns out schools and hospitals are literally falling apart.
Schools have just gone back this week and as soon as they stepped through the door on the eve of pupils returning to classrooms, over a hundred had to close at least partially or fully because In the 80s they built them with really rubbish concrete, they've known about this for ages, and they just haven't done anything, and now it looks like the roofs might literally cave in on a bunch of children's heads!
So just another thing that is declining and deteriorating right before our very eyes.
The collapse just doesn't cease, does it?
Speaking of bugs, or rather features of industrial society, if you'd like to subscribe to our website for as little as £5 a month, We can get all of our premium content, including our book club series and the latest episode where Carl and Josh decided to go through Ted Kaczynski's The Industrial Society and its future, so the Unabomber's Manifesto.
Of course, we cannot endorse any of the Unabomber's Manifesto because, well, he was the Unabomber, but he makes some interesting observations about how industrial society slowly renders human beings obsolete as things get more and more complex, and how that will lead to deterioration and alienation from the environment.
Yeah.
Good points, bad solutions.
Anyway, speaking of useless solutions, this is a whole list of all of the schools that are on the precipice of closure.
I'm going to be citing times for quite a lot of this because they've done quite a lot of Freedom of Information Act reporting and the likes.
And the government is shutting 156 schools at the time of writing, this is on Monday, and this is confirmed to have RAAC inside their buildings.
104 of them will have to partially or fully shut.
Now, the RAAC is Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete.
Do you know those light grey breeze blocks that you see?
Yeah.
They've just been sticking them in there.
They suck up moisture and they slowly erode over time because they're not very strong.
And they've been using those in roofs.
So basically the whole environment is completely inhospitable.
Yeah, it's structurally unsound and they were doing that in a bunch of buildings because it was cheap, it was easy to knock up.
This is kind of the prefab building philosophy of where you can take it out of a flat pack assembly thing and knock up a block of flats or a government building in an afternoon.
And I'm sure there are issues with mold there.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I don't know of any, but if there's moisture retention, probably.
And any brick-and-mortar bricklayer will be able to tell you this was a bad idea from the off.
Brick-and-mortar lasts, whereas these new buildings just get knocked down after a few years because they don't stand.
That's what they've been doing with China, with loads of the ghost cities.
They knock them up cheap to register on a state development graph.
Because no one lives in them, they then pull them down, and it's an excuse to go and keep building again.
So, this is the National Audit Office, and They surveyed 196 schools and they found R, A, A, C in 65 of them.
24 needed emergency action.
A further 572 schools were then surveyed by the Department of Education.
The audit office found that 38% of English state school buildings, that's 24,000 in total, had already passed their recommended lifespan.
So 24,000 buildings are already obsolete, they need updating, or even pulling down because they're not fit for purpose.
And yet no maintenance is being done, no investments being done, and kids are sitting in possible death traps.
Yeah.
Because we just don't have the wherewithal or possibly even the skills on hand.
Yeah, but the weird thing is that the government does not seem to be hesitant to tax people.
So it's not that there aren't enough taxes.
Yeah, but have you considered that we need to pay trillions in climate reparations to nuclear-armed Pakistan?
There's nothing to say to that, exactly.
Angus Drummond from the RIAC Consulting and Solutions said his firm's working hypothesis was that about 10% of UK schools around 2000 could be severely affected.
In 2018, they did a substantive review and they found that 700,000 pupils were attending a school that needed rebuilding or refurbishment.
So that's not great.
Dane Rachel D'Souza, the Children's Commissioner for England, she criticised the government's handling of this issue because it's been known about for years.
Quote, I'm extremely disappointed and frustrated.
There wasn't a plan in this for happening, for this happening, she told the BBC.
The government might not have known that it would happen this week, but it knew there was something, the newest stock in this situation.
So first it was the concrete.
Now there's asbestos.
So for people that don't know, asbestos is a potentially lethal building material.
It's not good to inhale it.
No, it can cause lung cancer and all the like.
So asbestos could be exposing the schools by that crumbling concrete because asbestos has been built up.
As long as it isn't revealed, it's totally fine.
But as soon as the building starts to deteriorate and you inhale it, you might get lung cancer.
There are fields at such a scale of the problem is that some schools may even have to be demolished.
Asbestos contributes to 5,000 deaths of Brits every year, and it's present in more than 80% in schools.
It's said that in some situations, the RAAC planks may have even been coated in Artex, a material that contains asbestos.
You've got a double whammy there of really dangerous and stupid building materials.
Probably should have been updated when we found out how bad they were, but again, The decline is just stewarded.
It's not being reversed.
And this is the ex-engineering chief.
So this is Dr. John Roberts, who is president at the Institution of Structural Engineers.
He helped build the London Eye.
So, I mean, it's a bit of a monstrosity, but he at least knows what he's doing.
He wrote an open letter to The Times because he was quite upset about this situation.
And he said, as a chartered structural engineer in active practice since the early 1970s, I have never considered using RAAC as I did not feel it was correct for permanent structures.
He explained that the aerated blocks, breeze blocks, are used extensively to this day because the air bubbles in the material provide a huge insulation benefit.
He said the material is safe to use in walls, but the problem arises when it's reinforced with steel and used in roofs to span wide spaces.
If it's used in a roof, and there's any kind of moisture up there, the steel bars will rust.
The rust causes expansion, because rust occupies about six times the volume of the steel that is turned into rust, so you might get expansion and cracks, and that's what can cause the concrete to fall.
I included that because I was not nearly smart enough to have explained that, and he's done that in a very, very sound way.
And so we'll look at some of the schools here, and the reason I've included this is because this is a one of these schools in here is St.
Thomas Moore's in Eltham near me and I know someone who's explained this to me what happened in this school is that the dining halls the toilets and the sports halls and a few of the classrooms had to shut because of this exact problem and so now not only do the kids have to eat outside under a marquee So they'll be dropping all their packed lunches and sandwiches everywhere and they don't actually get to go in and have a hot meal because the kitchens are shut, which means it will attract rats because it's right opposite the main road.
But because the toilets are shut, that's opposite the school gate, basically.
That seems like a festival.
Yeah.
So there was an old TV soap drama that's been revitalized recently called Waterloo Road.
And so they've taken to calling the school Portaloo Road.
Because it looks like a car boot sale.
This is not the fault of anyone that actually works at school, really.
They just didn't have access to the funding or the resources in order to get this problem addressed, and the can's been kicked down the road by the government, specifically the Department for Education.
Yes, but I'm sure that right now they're saying that this is a temporary solution.
Yes, it's until Monday.
Yeah, it's until Monday, yeah, mid-August 2029.
Well, on Monday, apparently they're putting up metal scaffolding within the school to keep the roof up so they can go and use the toilets.
But like, what else can the teachers really do in all fairness?
The teachers kind of do much, but it's not their job to do it.
Exactly!
It's the government's job, because you centralise education.
I would prefer that education be decentralised, but I suppose I'm just a far-right conspiracy theorist, you know, whatever.
And then there's also happening in hospitals.
That's quite interesting.
So, you know that massive NHS waiting list that's also killing people off?
But it turns out that even if you do get an appointment at hospital, the roof might just cave in on your head and kill you anyway.
Which I suppose is slightly better than sometimes some of the treatment you're going to get in this country.
This is West Suffolk Hospital.
It was told in April that its main building risked a likely and catastrophic caving in.
The report said that if the building gave way, it would cause loss of life and major injury at the 500-bed hospital.
Asbestos and dust inhalation was also cited as a risk at the Bury St Edmunds unit.
So if you go to hospital to treat lung cancer, you might also come out with worse lung cancer.
There are at least 41 other hospitals and six courts also closing over this risk.
Again, something they've known about for ages.
The buildings are literally falling apart.
And there are huge spendings going on.
So, for instance, in the NHS, there are kits with, let's say, 20 materials, 20 tools that may be helpful for a particular operation or something.
And very frequently, doctors may need just one or two of them from that kit, and they throw the whole of it away.
Well, lots of the problem with the NHS is bureaucratic bloat at the top, and their ability to keep things on file and communicate is very antiquated.
They still use fax machines in the age of email and immediate document scanning.
And so, more people at the top, money's trickling upwards, particularly to diversities.
Ours is getting paid $70,000 a year, whereas people on the front lines aren't getting paid nearly as much as inflation.
The resources are being rationed because the amount of money that's going to care resources cannot meet the demand by the amount of people coming into the country.
And then the buildings are literally crumbling because no one's paying attention to them.
Yes.
And unfortunately, this is a huge problem with many institutions because you see that There are, let's say, huge incentives for people to just use them, not in order to deliver a particular service.
But for personal enrichment.
But for personal enrichment, and also for political support.
And you regularly see this, the more governments become centralized, and the more they increase their reach within the economy and society, they regularly have more and more people who are less meritorious, Why?
Because they attract voters.
So the more we have centralization, the more centralization we have, the worse the product gets.
Because people who deliver these products and services, they are not hired on, let's say, a meritocratic agenda.
They are hired because they are going to help some people to virtue signal.
Yeah, and if the demand is exponentially increased year on year, then that manufacturer's consent to continue to increase at record levels the budget for the institution, even if they're not delivering as promised.
And so, because the budget keeps swelling, and people still need it, and they have a monopoly on healthcare in particular in this country, or education, then what happens is, even if you aren't delivering the service, there is no accountability for the people who are often unionized, and can go on strike and revoke the service at any time, to be market competitive in their behaviors in delivering that service.
And so when the service stops working, people just don't get fired. - Yes. - And the complacency continues until the thing falls apart around you, as we're seeing.
And so there was an open letter recently.
This was the NHS bosses across hospitals, across England, all the NHS trusts.
And they've told their staff to be ready to evacuate staff and patients if the buildings start falling apart.
So this is NHS England and they issued the instructions to all 224 health trusts on Tuesday, so this was yesterday at time of recording.
The letter was sent to the chair, chief executive and estate leads for all 224 trusts and 42 integrated care boards across England, which are the regional groupings of the NHS trusts.
So all of the hospitals have received advance warnings Because I don't know the scale of this problem yet, because this hasn't been fully investigated, that your hospital may collapse around you at any time and kill all your patients and staff.
We're meant to be a first world country.
Yet, the complacency, the staffing full of diversity hires, the personal enrichment over the accountable delivering of services has led to a situation where we have inherited a civilization that we could not only not reconstruct because we don't have the competency in many of these complex systems, but also we can't keep it running because as soon as problems arise, we just don't know how to fix them.
We'll paper over the cracks rather than properly plaster them.
It's like, have you seen the film Brazil?
No, but I know that you have been talking about it.
I've referenced it a couple of times because I saw it fairly recently and Josh and Harry have a video coming out on it soon.
But what ends up happening in it is that it's a satirical version of All Wars 1984, except the government constantly keeps the people in fear because it keeps talking about terrorists.
And there are always explosions going off.
We don't know who the freedom fighter terrorists really are.
It's just a dream in the protagonist's head.
And so you end up coming up with a theory that it's just complex systems breaking and people are attributing the cause to air ducts exploding and gas mains exploding because they can't be maintained to revolution when actually it's just people at the top are so stupid and so mired in bureaucracy, they can't continue upkeeping this civilization.
So that seems to be But you see, there's constantly a shifting of responsibility and blame to other people.
There's always a blame game.
So for instance, instead of saying that, well, there is enough taxation or maybe there is excessive taxation, let us rationalize our use of taxes.
They are just saying, no, let's do nothing of that.
And let's just ask for more taxes.
Oh, here's a perfect example of that.
So this is the education secretary, Gillian Keegan.
the woman who said that students can choose their identity from 16 onwards.
And I can't say more about that because we're on YouTube, but I disagree.
What does she think about children who are 15?
You don't have to answer.
Because there is no logical answer, of course.
If we can just play this clip, because I think this exhibits the kind of arrogance typical of the government that's been in place for 13 years.
They are Blairites, so I'm not a fan of the Labour Party either, for anyone who's just stumbled on this channel and doesn't know how we feel over here.
And the Conservatives don't understand why they are losing.
Well, it's because of the complacency and conceit demonstrated in this offhand remark.
but we will get a plan and every single one of them will be done.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Does anyone ever say, you know what, you've done a f***ing good job because everyone else has sat on their a** and done nothing?
No signs of that?
No?
Well no, because you've sat on your arse and done nothing.
You knew about this problem five years ago.
Not specifically her, because they keep cycling through education secretaries.
Mainly because they're all so incompetent, and because they imprisoned children in their homes for two years, and impaired their development irrevocably.
But do you really think you look good doing this?
I mean, I know ITV released this outside the parameters of their down-the-camera interview, but I'm glad they did.
And I know ITV News just want to topple the government because their political path stands because they support Labour, even though there's no dissent.
There's like a cigarette paper's width between the two.
But it does show the utter contempt and only self-concern that the political class have, and they regard us, who, you know, plenty of people have their kids or their loved ones stuck in these schools and hospitals, they just regard them with, well, yeah, it might be a threat to your life, but why don't you give me a pat on the back?
I'm the one that's truly oppressed.
I'm the one that's just not being thought of here.
The arrogance just frustrates me.
Not just that they came up with a plan, it's that they will come up with a plan.
Yes, they don't know what to do about it.
It would be ridiculous either way, but it's way more ridiculous this way.
And then when she was asked, do you regret saying that?
Her eyes suggest the answer.
Yeah, so she retweeted this thing to Sky News, and she said, I'm sorry for my off-the-cuff remark about my choice language earlier.
I know parents are concerned I've been working non-stop to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.
Now, I didn't put a clip in here, because then she went later on BBC Radio and said, head teachers need to get off their arse and do things about this, and then laughed.
So she still believes this.
She still believes it's just the head teacher's fault, despite the Department of Education holding all the purse strings, and knowing about this problem for ages, and not communicating Whatever.
I just wanted to play this video of her non-apology response, because she practically doubles down while also saying, I apologise.
I mean, you apologise for the language, but it showed you're frustrated and that you think some people aren't doing enough.
I mean, is it councils?
Is it your predecessor here at the Department for Education?
Is it the Prime Minister?
No, it's not.
It's nobody in particular.
But, you know, we've had a change of evidence, which has happened very, very recently.
And that's where we've had ceilings, which are graded as uncritical, non-critical, so you could keep them in action, where they've been failed panels.
Now, that means that we need to find out where they all are.
Now we've done a really good job, the department and everybody, we've been working really hard on this.
We've done a really good job at identifying 156.
But we've still got, and we've got more surveys to do where we've had the questionnaires back, so we're working on those the next two weeks.
But we've still got some questionnaires we need to get back.
And without that, we can't really make the first steps.
No, no, to whoever it is.
Anybody who can give us the questionnaires back would be very gratefully received.
To be fair, the evidence has changed very recently.
It was only last Thursday.
And who's to blame for that?
You're obviously frustrated with someone.
Actually, it was the interviewer, because the interviewer was making out it was all my fault.
And that's what I was saying, do you ever go into these interviews where everyone ever says anything but, you know, you've just done a terrible job?
And he was basically saying, you know, all these things, I mean, you know, he mentioned 1994, he mentioned 2018, I mean, they're all...
It's partly because he'd done a lot of work, a huge FOI back in March, so it wasn't new information in August.
The new information was the three cases that came to light over the summer, so way after his Freedom of Information.
It was new information that came to light, where Those that are assessed as non-critical, there were panels that failed.
I was able to send in our structural chartered surveyors and they went in and said, yes, these are assessed as non-critical and they've failed.
That's new.
That's why we've changed the advice.
It's very recent and I do understand, by the way, the frustration for parents and for children.
But safety has to come first and when you have that happening, you have to act on it.
Now I need everybody else to give me all the information I need so I can make sure that we can mitigate the situation and minimise the disruption on children's education.
Sorry, what has she done?
Because what did she do that she thinks that she deserves so much credit?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, did you notice that throughout all of that, when she was asked who you actually frustrated with, she only blamed the interviewer who put the camera in her face and asked to explain where the buck stops.
But she can't allocate blame to any single institution or person or even her predecessors.
And so she's just caught in this trap of where she's just not being honest.
And then she says, oh, the evidence changed.
What?
The evidence changed from 1994 with the original knowledge where you knew this wasn't structurally sound.
Then 2018 where you had five years worth of data of knowing exactly which places on this list were not a good idea and that they might be caving in.
There was another place, I think it was a primary school, one or two years ago now, that actually did have its roof caved in while no one was in the school.
So they knew this was an issue.
Oh, but the evidence changed.
This reminds me of the pandemic.
Oh, the science is settled.
Oh, wait, the science has changed.
Never mind the fact that we were just making really terrible policies beforehand.
Actually, it says we didn't have the right information.
Suddenly, we now have the right information.
So the party is always correct.
And it fits with attack on free speech because it's the job of the interviewer or the reporter to be critical.
Yes.
It's not their job to tell, to basically present them in a Pravda style, that no, hey, MP, you're God's gift to human nature.
Yeah, especially not because most of these people are midwits.
And again, not like the mainstream media has that as their principle, they're still political partisans, but you're correct, the politician should not be expecting Fair, um, they should be expecting fair treatment, which means scrutiny, not flattering treatment.
And she's not, I don't think Gillian Keegan's even remotely smart enough to use it as a politically savvy tool.
She's just taking it personally that like, oh, well, you're blaming me.
Yeah, because it's your job to fix it.
But, I wanted to finish on this.
It's not like the other party are going to fix it, of course, because the Labour Party, the government incumbent at this point, because the Conservatives, hashtag 13 years, have been continually screwing up, despite a few backbenchers that want to change it, they've made a smart play.
And this was a play that I haven't seen anyone else analyse.
Keir Starmer had a cabinet reshuffle.
Now he's appointed some pretty terrible people, like the Shadow Justice Secretary was one of those women that signed a petition that kept migrant criminals that were going to be deported grounded on the tarmac so it never took off.
But one of the people that has been appointed is Angela Rayner, Rory's girlfriend.
And so she has been moved up, she's not just Deputy Prime Minister, she's been moved to Shadow Secretary of State for leveling up housing and communities.
Now the reason that's significant It's because the person that's currently occupying that position is Michael Gove.
Roundly hated by the public, particularly people like me who had to go through his education sector reforms as GCSEs struck and screwed up our GCSEs, and also bad reform sway level systems.
And anyone who is in the housing sector because he keeps doing really bad housing policy and won't address the demand problem, only the supply issue which will never keep pace with demand.
And also he is just a bastion of the last 13 years of conservative complacency because Despite his incompetence, he has failed upwards, he knows where the bodies are buried, he has been a failed leadership candidate twice, he helped assassinate Boris Johnson's original bid at it and then helped him get in, and so lots of the failings can be laid at the feet of Michael Gove.
Angela Rayner, one of the most vociferous Labour Party ambassadors, a lot more firebrand both in hair and in voice than Keir Starmer who's meant to be the Stable robot leading up the Labour Party is now going opposite him on issues like housing, on HS2, on the issues that matter to the Red Wall they're trying to rewind, and the hospitals and schools that are crumbling.
So it's very astute that the Labour Party have put her in this position to capitalise off of the various infrastructure crises that the Conservative Party have presided over.
But again, they're not going to fix it.
And so, the decline will continue, unabated, utterly relentless, because everyone is incompetent and everything's made out of rubbish.
I love Britain these days.
I want to start a happier topic now.
There's a fly in here as well, sorry.
It's really distracting.
I'm getting in the spirit of this segment already.
Yeah, I mean, it's okay.
We'll have to accept it.
If you can't avoid it, join it.
This is the spirit of Burning Man.
So basically I'm trying to find a festival to go to and ask you to come with.
And I think that I found the perfect one.
This is Burning Man.
I thought you were going to take me to Notting Hill Carnival, Stelios.
Oh, come on.
No.
With all these machete attacks.
All these machetes.
No.
I want to suggest Burning Man 2024.
Right.
Well, I have my prejudices, but I'm open to being.
Well, I have them as well, but you know, I have this reputation in the office for sending stuff to people.
You're a curator of degeneracy.
Yes.
I like to think of myself as a messenger.
Okay.
But the thing is that I do this because I love your reactions.
You're a human distraction machine.
Yeah.
So it's not that I suddenly fell in love with the burning man.
Okay.
But I just want to see your reaction.
OK, all right.
This is Stelios's Torture Hour.
OK, so before we start, you could visit the website and you could check out the latest Rumble Live on the humiliation of Logan Paul.
Speaking of dirty women and left wing men.
Have you seen this yet, by the way?
I've seen parts of it, but I must say that we've all seen parts of Nina.
Yeah, it's yeah.
Anyway, and with £5 a month, you can gain access to all our premium content and watch our lovely series.
Now, back to The Burning Man.
The way I like to think of it is because I want to sell it to you, okay?
I want to sell it to you.
There are places that are tough to enter, easy to exit.
Places that are easy to enter and tough to exit.
I've known many women like that.
And then there are places that are both tough to enter and exit.
OK, now this is Burning Man 2023, but I hope next year is going to be better.
So let's say we went this year.
We try to walk into our car, fire the engine and just go to the lovely roads of Nevada highways and go there.
Let's watch the first clip without a sound.
Yeah, so basically, for some reason, There was a huge line of vehicles that are not moving.
It looks like when people were trying to escape the cities during a zombie apocalypse.
Yes, but in such cases, you have the whole road blocked with cars.
But here we have one lane that is completely free.
So what has happened there?
What do you think has happened?
Well, they're queuing up to get into the festival, I would assume.
Well, not exactly.
Right.
I mean, usually, you know, in this festival, there are around 70 to 80,000 people who go and they form a spontaneous city called Black Rock City in the desert of Nevada.
I have heard it's just a bunch of people taking drugs and having sex in the mud.
I mean, that's part of it, but I think that you're way too materialistic.
There is the spiritual element of changing your spiritual awareness and you're altering your state of consciousness.
Maybe you get into higher frequencies and being in touch with higher realities.
I'm not thinking about Burning Man from the Apollonian standpoint.
Just look at the whole thing.
People create an effigy.
It represents the old self and they burn it because they embrace the future.
It sounds like pagan nonsense.
Well...
It's not nonsense because, you know, we want to think of the new day, OK?
We want to say, to bid farewell, the past farewell and embrace the future.
Are you getting it?
You sound like a fortune cookie.
Are you getting it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I want to convince you to come to Burning Man next year.
I'm listening.
OK.
So what has happened?
What happened?
I'll tell you what happened.
We had Just stop oil protesters blocking the road.
So what happens here?
Let's watch this clip.
We have a very determined ranger who went in and basically destroyed the blockade.
Everyone is... He went on a rampage.
Completely justified rampage.
Is this like a GTA clip?
Yeah.
So I have heard about this, and part of the reason is this is a tribal land ranger, so they actually govern the, he's not state police, it's almost like private security that the Native American reservation governs themselves, and they got a call that there might be a firearm, that's why he shouts, where's the gun?
So that's why they were so forceful.
But I just endorse every single police force treating all justifiable protesters like this.
Yeah, I haven't heard what he said with a gun, but I just think that, you know, just, you know, just doing this is annoying.
And, you know, they have the right to protest.
They can do it on the side of the street.
They could go on the Burning Man Festival and talk about stuff.
It's, I mean, it's OK.
You don't have to torture everyone.
And having them on, let's say, low gears that are increasing carbon emissions.
Yes.
You see?
Yes.
That's it.
These people are not prudent.
Spoken like a true environmentalist.
Yes.
Now let's see this clip here from Climate Defiance.
It says, breaking today in the USA in the year of our Lord 2023.
Oh, you don't believe in gold.
Brutal cops are slamming, tackling and pointing guns at peaceful climate protesters.
Oh, I can only get so erect.
Right.
Let's go to the next one from The Guardian.
Uh, it's by Michelle L. Hook.
I will just, I won't read all of it.
Don't worry.
Those of you who hate me reading stuff, I'll just, uh, say some stuff.
It says the road into Burning Man is a rural two lane highway winding through Northwest Nevada.
Approximately 80,000 people make an annual pilgrimage to the beloved Bachanal, many hauling trailers and RVs across miles of scorching desert in order to make it to their fabled Gomorrah.
I hope it gets treated the exact same way.
In recent years, Burning Man has drifted from its hippie roots and become better known for luxury RVs, wild orgies and Silicon Valley bros.
Now, question, is this actually for getting hippie roots?
Because, I mean, I think hippies, they have had a reputation of wild orgies and also for inclusivity.
I remember the free love movement coming out of the hippie movements of the 60s.
I also like the fact that it's protesters from the Seven Circles were the people that were sat on the road there.
I'm glad you caught up.
The Seven Circles.
To quote Alex Jones, they're demons.
Yeah, they thought it was a good marketing trick.
Let me just give you some of the paraphernalia here.
They say, we have to shift away from burning man's green capitalism and focus on degrowth.
We're not moving fast enough to reach the 2030 net zero goal, said Christina Chu, a member of Solarpunks.
Bernie Man has served as a catalyst for people like myself to create projects like this, but there's a lot of room for improvement.
Anyway, and also my personal favorite statement, the individualization of systemic problems on the late state capitalism is crazy.
Diakono later said, there's this mentality that I just need to change myself and the world will change.
But this current economic system has driven us to record inequality and record carbon in the air and they are correlated.
Yeah.
And this is exactly the same, you know, message that people on the left give that, no, no, you constantly talk about personal responsibility.
It's not personal responsibility.
The whole system has to change.
So I'll change.
I mean, she is the anti Jordan Peterson.
It's clean up the world before your bedroom.
And I'm not shocked.
These people have messy bedrooms and they look as they do if they think that way.
I do agree.
There's major problems with consumerism and materialism.
They don't have the answers.
So I want to show you a bit about the core values and principles of the Burning Man.
So if we see here, thanks, John, it says it's time for people to do what we do every year at Burning Man.
Don't be a spectator.
Get out there.
Connect like crazy with people you don't even know.
Tell them that they must participate.
And above all else, please welcome them home.
So one, that sounds like an orgy invitation.
Two, why is the giant robot spider from the end of Wild Wild West their logo?
It's not that inviting.
It looks like a thing from War of the Worlds.
But the point is, do you like post-apocalyptic aesthetic?
Like Mad Max?
Yeah, but that's not meant to be intentional.
No, no.
I think the whole aesthetic of this, and this is why I'm inviting you into it, is Mad Max-y.
I don't think that's... Is that deliberate?
Or is it just they're really bad at building this city?
No, no.
I think it is.
Okay.
It's not that they necessarily glorify Mad Max.
It's a festival.
Lots of stuff there.
I could be Immortan Joe.
I hope you're not going to wear the mask or something.
But Immortan Joe, he had good wives.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of.
Exactly.
Now, for those of you who are interested in joining us next year, there's a survival guide, but it's not going to be fun because, you know, I like increased risk.
Right.
So I'm not going to read it.
You like to live dangerously.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Like Austin Powers, the movie you remember with Black Jack, he stops at four and says, I like living dangerously.
Anyway.
Okay, so I'm not going to read the survival guides, but I am going to talk about the 10 principles of burning man.
So number one, radical inclusion.
Anyone may be part of burning man.
We welcome, by the way, they don't say we're going to burn anyone indiscriminately.
But don't you have to pay for it?
Well, I don't know.
Maybe you get people, sponsors.
Oh, okay.
Right.
Maybe get sponsors who say, no, we need a quota.
We need a diverse community of burners.
And if people don't have... That sounds like a slur.
No, that's how they're called.
They're called burners.
Yeah.
You see?
You see how fun it is?
Okay.
Now, we welcome and respect the stranger.
No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
This sounds a bit weird.
Yeah.
This sounds, you know, you have red alert.
It's just going off.
Progressive gobbledygook, but yeah.
Okay.
Gifting.
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving.
Um, what other acts are there?
Gift receiving?
I mean, I am more of a giver.
Okay.
The value of a gift is unconditional.
Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Anyway, decommodification.
But what is interesting, it's radical self-reliance.
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on their inner resources.
That sounds like a tourist brochure for a torture chamber.
Radical self-expression.
It arises from the unique gifts of the individual.
No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content.
It is offered as a gift to others.
Right.
In the spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
This is a sex cult, right?
I don't know.
Maybe you're rushing.
Okay.
Maybe you're rushing.
Let's not skip the foreplay.
Communal effort.
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration.
And it's really fun because they have radical self-reliance.
You know, you totally rely upon yourself.
You don't rely upon other people.
It's a commune.
Yes.
And then another value is, you know, radical collaboration.
You know, we need community.
We need people helping each other, you know.
Sorry, I just read one.
Leaving no trace.
Out of context.
That sounds like they're never going to find the body.
You'll see because you have anticipated one of the conspiracies.
Anyway, let's go.
What happened this year?
Basically, the problem with this year, which I hope it doesn't happen yesterday.
We'll watch that in a second.
The problem is that it rained.
But let us see before it rained.
So we have here a massive... Yeah, let's play this.
Oh, you're right.
It is just Mad Max.
Yeah, we have, you know, this Mad Max-y aesthetic.
We have women dancing here.
Now we have a pyramid of cars and we have all people who are radically included twerking, basically.
Because this is a form of radical self-expression.
They are sharing the gifts of individuality to the people while they're doing it in front of a camera.
This is a Darwin Award waiting to happen.
Yeah, here we have Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome aesthetic.
That is Thunderdome!
See?
There's even a man with like a skull stick, like a shawarma.
Yes, I must say it's too bad we don't have Tina Turner singing there, because I really love her.
Mid.
No, no, no, no.
Tina Turner was great.
I just... Oh, come on!
Yeah.
You remember that?
I must say Beyond Thunderdome is my least favorite Mad Max.
Yeah, it's... Yeah, it's... So actually, yeah, Fury Road...
Not good.
Okay, so we should definitely do a Fury Road review and Mad Max review of the Mad Max universe.
I don't think so, but anyway, let's go afterwards.
So basically, it rained.
There was huge rainfall and there was, let's say, about an inch of water that fell and the mod there went No, actually, the ground turned into mud and it led many people trying to flee.
They just didn't have it in them to stay there.
You see this person with really great, with a really great Jeep.
I love the horsepower of it.
No, it's no nonsense.
He left.
Let's just watch it.
Yeah.
And they're fast and furious, right?
Yes.
He could get out, but other people were not as fortunate.
And you know, there were other celebrities there, like Chris Rock, Joel Kinnaman, other people as well.
And they didn't have cars with them.
They had to hitchhike.
So I hope they had cash or gas with them.
Otherwise they'll be engaging in that giving and receiving to get out.
Wait, wait, wait.
This violates the principle of the givers respecting the individuality of the recipients.
Yes, yes, you're right.
So it does violate the principle.
I thought you were worried a bit.
I'm still learning.
I'm still learning.
Okay.
Now let's watch the next.
We see here, Chris Rock having hitchhiked.
He left.
So yeah, we have people there.
He, there he is.
Yeah.
It's, this is not a place where Will Smith should slap him because he would fall under the vehicle.
Well, okay.
Now, but there are others who just said that, no, Quitchway Burning Man, we're staying here and we're Going to just love it.
And we are going to be true to the principles of Burning Man.
Now, let's watch the next clip.
So here is I'm just giving you some images from from the muddy terrain.
Stelios, is this segment just an excuse to show me bare ass cheeks?
No, no, no, no.
But I haven't shown you anything.
I'm showing you because I want to show you that this is one of the crises that, for instance, the US government thought that it had to respond immediately.
Now, if you're one of those people who definitely want to listen to the political content of something, this is the political aspect of it.
But there are other people who want to listen to other stuff and want to see, let's say, people dancing in the mud.
Maybe you're contemplating of where to, of festival to go next week.
Well, maybe you like Mad Max stuff.
Anyway, now let's watch the next clip as well.
Yeah.
So we have here people who just stayed here and kept it real.
You see how they go there and they're trying to just like, look at this, look at this one.
This is like Mars in Total Recall.
Yeah.
What on earth is going on?
They're giving people air.
Yeah, it's like, you know, just radical self-expression.
It's one of the zones in The Running Man.
Yeah.
Now, so there have been also some conspiracy theories here, because the question is, who knew?
Who knew in advance what was going to happen?
If you watch this clip, there was a Balenciaga fashion show some months ago, and they were saying Balenciaga just staged their latest show in a huge mud pit.
Right, and they're obsessed.
There's a conspiracy theory that they knew it was going to happen, or that they are actually controlling the weather and they caused this mud.
Right, okay.
Yeah, so what do you think of this?
Balenciaga do worship Moloch, so it's not impossible.
I can't believe I'm saying that, but then when Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile island was real, I am eligible to believe anything at this point.
So you're maybe not encouraging me to go when I may be flooded at any time and buried under mountains of mud by demon worshippers.
And let's see this article here.
Hundreds of three-eyed dinosaur shrimp emerged from mud pits at Burning Man.
70,000 revelers escaped.
So we have this really weird creature that seems to have manifested out of nowhere.
It's one of the plagues of Egypt.
Why would you want to go?
It's a plague.
Yeah.
This isn't a selling point.
I must say, that's not exactly selling it.
No.
Yeah.
So yeah, if we can scroll down a bit, we'll see this really weird and bad.
I just don't think this is appealing.
It's just, it's not a good place.
Yeah.
I should definitely not want these creatures there.
Great.
Anyway, and let's go to the next one.
Now, it says the hysteria over the Burning Man flatting reveals so much about the U.S.
class divide.
When tech bro types spend a few days in the mud, it's treated as a national emergency.
When working class people suffer, you barely hear about it, says Jenny Holland.
And then there's an article from The Spike that I think we could talk a bit about, if we just scroll down a bit.
Read a bit.
It says, finally, U.S.
President Joe Biden has found a crisis that actually interests him.
A mass emergency event has, perhaps for the first time in his presidency, managed to elicit a speedy response from the leader of the free world.
Was it a toxic train derailment that poisoned the water of a small blue coral community?
No.
Was it a raging fire that killed a still unknown number of residents in a historical indigenous island community?
Also no.
It was Burning Man, the orgiastic pilgrimage undertaken by Silicon Valley utopians, Instagram influencers, and rich kids, and which has become something of an obsession among young people from the most privileged demographics in the Western world.
So, It says Burning Man has a sort of Mad Max meets OnlyFans aesthetic.
Spot on.
It's a festival where tech pros and conceptual artists go in search of spiritual breakthroughs in the desert and they post videos on social media saying things like, shh, what you're about to hear may change your life forever.
Whatever you think it is, it's more.
Or it could be nothing at all.
Cool.
Why I'm saying this is because it shows how, basically, we have lots of people who are basically trying to portray themselves as being pro-nature, as constantly lambasting Western civilization, and they want to try to find new experiments of living.
And they want to say that for instance, you know, let's embrace radical self-expression, radical self-reliance and basically a kind of festival communism or something, which is completely confused.
And we have people who really, you know, it's weird because lots of people from the managerial class that we're constantly talking about, they go to these festivals.
And they go there because they want to pretend that, you know, that they're closer to nature and they are somehow leading the way to something new.
But, you know, it's really fun when you see that some mad completely stopped them and they left.
I'm not talking about Chris Rock because I like him, but there were many other people who went there and that's a bit telling.
That's why they've declared it a national emergency over the other things, because it actually affects their propagandists and their voting base, and also their enforcement arm.
Anyone from Silicon Valley there is the digital infrastructure of the regime narrative, so they know they have to bail them out, because these people fundamentally are incompetent.
And it's good that you use the word regime narrative, because it's entirely abstract.
It's entirely divorced from, let's say, first-person experience and communities.
They talk about communities, but they don't know nothing about it.
What they mean is having sex in the mud surrounded by a weird shrimp.
Possibly, yeah.
But it does show stuff.
It is telling that this was considered to be a national emergency.
Yeah, so that's why.
So are you visiting Burning Man 2024?
No.
You have time to change your mind?
No.
Right.
OK, let's... I think I'm pretty resolute on that one, actually.
Yeah, I'm OK with not being covered in mud shrimp.
That would be really nice.
OK, on to the last bit then.
So there was a recent time survey with a bunch of Anglican priests, and the Anglican priests came to the conclusion that the Anglican Church must be destroyed.
And destroyed either by being hollowed out as a new mouthpiece for progressivism, or they're just throwing their hands up and giving up because not enough people are coming to the congregation.
Reason, see the former reason.
And so I just thought I'd go through that time survey today and go through the fact that the Church is I'm saying this as a Catholic, you know, I have an interest in this.
The Church is falling down on its duty to provide moral guidance in an age of excessive materialism and spiritual bereavement.
People are very lonely, people are committing suicide, people are having fewer relationships, and it's very difficult to find a normative value structure that people can adhere to to give their life meaning and direction.
And lots of the church, particularly the Church of England, are just failing in this regard, and I think it's pretty inexcusable.
If you'd like to learn more about how progressivism and Christianity are incompatible, you can subscribe to our website for as little as £5 a month, get all of our premium content, and you can watch this podcast that I did with Carl, who is still in the limbo of atheism, on how Jesus Christ is definitely not a socialist.
The two, if you judge with Marxist texts, Marxist life, the history of Marxism versus the Gospels, They just don't add up, not even remotely.
So I thought I'd go to this.
Here's this lengthy survey.
May I ask you something before we start?
Because I didn't understand exactly the statement.
I want to understand a bit more.
What do the Anglicans say, you have in mind, say about it?
So what do they mean that they want to dismantle the church?
They want to restructure it?
Yes.
So some of them are Sitting by while their congregations wane, and they're complaining about being overworked because they're working across multiple churches, but then their solution for this is just to become more progressive and wed themselves with the spirit of the age.
And this is something that the Venerable Fulton Sheen once said, and this is a thing that's quoted far too often, but it's a great phrase.
A church which marries itself to the spirit of this age will be widowed in the next.
So if the church bends with the progressive winds, then when those winds change with a backlash against those progressive policies, then the church will be seen as a stooge of the prior order that didn't serve anyone, and so people keep abandoning the church because it hasn't stuck to its core principles.
And this is something very evident in this Times survey.
Now, the Times say that this is the most wide-ranging poll carried out among frontline Anglican clergymen and the first survey of Church of England clerics conducted in almost a decade, and it's found that a strong desire among rank-and-file priests for significant changes in Church doctrine on issues such as Sex, sexuality, marriage and the role of women to bring it into greater line with public opinion.
Majority of priests want the church to start conducting same-sex weddings and drop its opposition to premarital and gay sex in results described as absolutely huge by campaigners.
Now, the church is not a democratic institution.
It has a foundational document, namely the Bible.
And if you're Catholic Church, you've We've got things like the Catechism for further reading.
And so, who are these campaigners?
Because they're not dedicated Christians.
What they are are progressive infiltrators.
We know that that has happened throughout various churches, not least of all, unfortunately, the Catholic Church, where Dr. Bella Dodd inducted a bunch of communists and liberation theologists throughout the Cold War to subvert the church.
And that's how you get Pope Francis.
Not very happy.
And the Anglican Church has a similar problem with Justin Welby, who is a very untrustworthy man.
So just to preface, there's a bit of a sampling bias here.
So the Times contacted 5,000 priests serving clergy members of the 20,000 Anglican priests in the UK.
They only got 1,436 responses back, and they only included 1,185 in there.
back and they only included 1185 in there.
So that's less than 10%.
So, what was I actually about?
5.56% total?
So, not very representative.
And so, the most vocal people, the people that have the least amount of services to their congregation, are probably the ones that are going to answer this.
They're the most activist inclined, and it's being used as manufactured consent to change the church in line with what is already decreed by establishment narratives, particularly with The Times, as popular opinion, and now the opinion of most Anglican priests, which it doesn't seem to be the case, particularly when they've been gatekeeping out people like my friend Reverend Calvin Robinson.
So when asked whether they think Britain can or cannot be described as a Christian country, only a quarter, 24.2% answered yes, Today, two-thirds, 64.2%, said Britain can be called a Christian country but only historically and not currently, while 9.2% answered no.
I would suggest the reason why it cannot currently be described as such is because you are not making a normative and affirmative enough case for Christian values because people don't realise how free-floating their ideas are when they rest on Christian presuppositions.
This is something I've spoken to Louise Perry about before.
It's that in pre-Christian Rome, babies would be abandoned to die if they were unwanted or had a defect on rubber sheets.
And it was only the Christians that came out and rescued them, because they believed in the inalienable dignity of each human life, that a prohibition on infanticide got instituted as Rome began to Christianize.
And we're seeing, with the dechristianization now, the movement of abortion up until and even after birth in certain US states.
So they had the idea that there are natural moral rights.
Yes.
Or, yes, that the Romans were disrespecting in the case of babies.
Exactly.
And also Spartans in the...
Absolutely.
There's a famous chapter.
Yeah, they would leave them on the rock, and if the baby survived, then it was a strong warrior.
If it didn't, then oh well, they died.
They were weak anyway.
And that sort of attitude just didn't rock with the Christians because they believe in the inalienable dignity of human life imparted into each person by a soul derived from God.
That just wasn't a concept that people had.
And now, a lot of the time, if you de-Christianize liberal Western democracies, What are you founding that value of human life in?
It's founded on consent, which means if the mother doesn't consent at any point, which is to revoke her consent, you can institute the old Roman idea of babies again.
And having those policies is because people aren't making an affirmative case for Christianity in the public eye like the priests are meant to do.
So it's no wonder that the priests themselves, who aren't doing their job, are thinking the country isn't Christian.
Let me say something which may sound a bit controversial for some.
I think that one of the good elements in Christian ethics is the propensity to respect universality.
Now, this is a really weird and pretentiously sounding statement, but I think that to a very large extent it has lots of good stuff going for it.
Because if you see prior to morality, moral systems like that, The kind of ethical codes that existed were very much geared into, let's say, creating warfare.
Now, I'm not saying that warfare has disappeared from the face of the earth, far from it, but tribal ethics is much more difficult to use if you want to maintain a society.
It's a civilizer and it's a mediator.
One of the best things, frankly, for Africa is the fact that Christianity was imported to it.
Yes, and sometimes what we need to think is that a lot of people are criticizing Christianity for this.
They say that, you know, Christianity has destroyed the West and stuff like that.
I don't believe this.
Maybe there are some issues when it comes to ethics that have been You could say that they have caused some troubles.
So, for instance, I'm thinking a statement by Machiavelli that I think he has sort of a point here.
He says that, for instance, Christianity makes people more likely to endure evil than to avenge it.
I don't know if that's true or not.
It depends on the certain type.
There is definitely a Ned Flanders style Christianity where a hidely doodly neighbour will always turn the other cheek, which isn't what Christ did himself.
This is a huge discussion, maybe we shouldn't have it now.
No, but I think it is important because actually, even those Anglican priests who are the Ned Flanders types, who are just complacent, it's that banality and the reticence of the fact that their organisation is being used by activists that allows the fertile soil from which progressivism can grow.
You need that muscular forthright Christianity.
Yes, and let me add to this, to qualify what I was saying before about universality, it's very telling that you talked about the babies and the Spartan and the Roman custom.
And I do think that Christianity here has been a civilizing force in that respect.
And the counter argument is that if you have excessive Christianity, then you have, let's say, things like you destroy national identity.
That doesn't have to be the case.
You have people like, for instance, St.
Thomas Aquinas, who had an idea of natural law, and he did have the idea that human beings have Well, he also believed in a kind of natural science that observes things as they are.
This is what C.S.
beings or beings who live in communities.
So that's not necessarily a criticism of Christianity that holds water.
But he also believed in a kind of natural science that observes things as they are.
This is what C.S. Lewis wrote about in Abolition of Man.
And so they have the same conception of where there's an objective moral undercurrent to reality.
But because of times, places, cultures, geographical limitations, the types of people that are in a space convening with ideas, we all have subjective routes to that objective moral norm.
So even if you import Christianity elsewhere, often, like when it was introduced to Germany and the German tribes by the Romans, it wasn't that Christianity changed Germany, it's that Germans Germanized Christianity, and that's how they adopted it to become actually a lot more muscular and warrior-like.
And there are issues that the West, let's say, faces that maybe Christianity could help there.
Because it has been historically a force that has created a kind of Western identity, which has been, let's say, necessary when there are, let's say, threats to Western civilization.
It's a bulwark against tyranny, that's why they wanted to excoriate it, particularly the Marxists.
So a majority of priests, according to this survey, again, numbers manipulated, want the church to start conducting same-sex weddings and drop its opposition to premarital and gay sex.
So, figures from the 2021 census show that the proportion of people who identified as Christian in England and Wales had fallen below half for the first time, to 46.2%.
With the strongest growth among those who say they have no religion, the figure has trebled since 2001 to 37.5%.
When asked if they felt under pressure, one priest cited the pressure of justifying the Church of England's position to increasingly secular and sceptical audiences.
Yeah, that's kind of your job.
You're meant to defend your beliefs.
This kind of complacency is why it's waning.
Very frustrating.
And this sort of manipulation is typified by the following quote, in here, from Professor Linda Woodhead, who's one of these activists.
She's head of the Department for Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London.
You'd think she would just be observing the religions as they are, and teaching about them, but no.
She says, it's extremely important to hear the clergy's views, it's hard to carry out these surveys, which is why we have so very few of them.
She said the church had found itself in recent decades, quote, pushed apart from public opinion on what's right and wrong, on issues including sex and sexuality, and that priests seem to occupy a middle ground between traditional church teaching and broader public views.
This survey shows the clergy take a more moderate position than their leaders.
Frontline priests are more in touch with their congregations and ordinary people.
If they had been listened to more by leaders, the church might be in a better place today.
No, the popular secular opinion is not meant to lead you away from your convictions.
The point of a priest is to lead his flock.
Let me ask you, though, another thing, because I think that in any way things can backfire.
I mean, what if you had, let's say, a kind of leadership that functions exactly like the managerial class in the business world?
Could there be the case that you have, let's say, a religious leadership that thinks that the church should embrace some ideals that the people do not want?
And not only that they don't want, it's not an issue of wanting.
It's an issue sometimes that people understand that they are not the right ones.
So, for instance, you can have a woke religious leadership You can, but then that's straying from the Scripture rather than adhering to it.
Oh, that's a really big discussion.
It could, but also, you know, people have debated ancient texts and Scripture for a long time.
But the reason... I could definitely see how someone could make an argument, well, we need a Christian community and this community is a community of people, you know, from everywhere.
It's radically inclusive and we need to, you know, they could start going woke.
But that's only if you disregard the fact that people are bearers of culture and not just interchangeable actors.
And so if you were to adequately gatekeep a Christian community, you'd have to demand that people that enter it abide by Christian values and not retain their own values.
And the reason that you should not have a religious leader who is sticking to scripture and falls to tyranny and wokeness is because the metaphysical concerns of Christianity are different from the material concerns of the managerial class.
Because if you are abiding by Christian doctrine, you are always in healthy proximity from the highest ideal that you cannot usurp, and so that engenders humility in you.
And so it means you cannot create a utopian heaven on earth.
Instead, you just deal with the times as you are given them and practice virtue in and of yourself until the time that you are judged.
So that creates that healthy distance.
It stops you from being a tyrant.
So I'm not saying that it must be the case that a religious leadership will become woke, but I think that it can.
That's my point, is the point about possibility.
Only if they ignore the foundational doctrine and they use the hierarchy itself because the hierarchy has power and legitimacy.
So it's like hollowing it out from within.
Yes, but the question is, how many times has this accusation been leveled against other people within a religion?
How so?
Well, I mean, you regularly have people who, let's say within a religion, who think that, you know, another person, another priest, the other priest, the priest of the nearby village has got it wrong.
That's why you need to clear out the institution if they're not adhering to the doctrine in and of itself the institution's meant to stand for.
This is why I will be very happy when Pope Francis is gone.
This upsets some Catholics who will just say, oh, by virtue of him being the Pope, you can't question this.
No, he's an open Marxist.
He violates the tenets of his position.
But don't Catholics owe allegiance to the Pope, ultimately?
Should do, but then if the Pope is illegitimate in his behaviour, then I'm kind of okay with being a bit rebellious there.
I mean, I take practising to mean attempting, so I'm not always the best, but I would say I probably stick to doctrine maybe a bit more than he does sometimes.
And so, look at the graphs, and this is the future of the Church.
How likely do you think it is your Church will still be holding a service every Sunday in 10 years' time?
Only 44% said yes.
So some of the other ones are a lot more pessimistic.
5% of priests said it's very unlikely they'll even be having a service as of next year.
And they said, over the next 10 years, what do you think is most likely to happen?
26% said it's going to fall at a similar rate.
25% said fall, but more slowly.
And only 0.6% said rise quickly.
Well, with attitudes like that, yeah, people aren't going to be flooding backwards because you don't make a spirited defense of the thing you say you're meant to believe in.
And I think there's quite a few people of our age, and we've got about 10 years gap.
Yeah, I'm 33.
I'm actually 33.
Yeah, so about nine years, yeah.
And so for people of my age, and we saw this during lockdown, it's like Gen Z's turning to God under lockdown.
It's because we are bereft of guidance, particularly for people that were brought up across two households.
I was very fortunate to have wonderful for parents, but lots of people don't.
And if they don't have an immediate father in the home, they look to cultural surrogate fathers, like Jordan Peterson, or perhaps a kind of spiritual father to act, to direct them towards something wholesome, to get their life in order, to clean their room before they go about ordering up the world.
And that's what the church could provide, So you're falling down on your duty for people that desperately need help.
I think it's just contemptible.
And so in response to the survey, the Bishop of Leeds, the Right Reverend Nick Baines, and this is a very good statement, this is the kind of energy they should be manifesting, said, on behalf of the church, the church is the church, and as such, not a club.
It has distinct vocation that does not include seeking popularity.
He told The Times that the survey showed that priests were not to dedicate a detached and ivory tower, but really wrestling thoughtfully and prayerfully with the kind of questions our society is also addressing.
But there are waves eroding the shoreline, and so a majority of priests want the church to conduct same-sex weddings for the first time, according to this.
Bishops have, however, said they will allow priests to bless gay couples and are under pressure to go further and permit same-sex weddings.
That pressure's coming from the government, apparently.
They're considering whether to drop the teaching that gay sex is incompatible with Christian teaching, and whether or not to allow gay priests to have civil weddings and will present their recommendations to the church's assembly, the General Synod, this autumn.
The survey found a majority support among priests for a change in the law to allow gay priests to marry couples, with 53.4% in favour versus 36.5% against.
This is a reversal of the proportion of the last time Anglican priests were asked about the broad issue in 2014, when 51% declared same-sex marriage to be wrong, compared to 39% who backed it.
Woodhead, the woman from before, said, it's a very rapid change.
These are interesting findings.
It's fascinating you've got this change in attitude.
Again, may not be sincerely representative, but as a secular man, what do you think about this?
Do you think this is legitimate?
Should it change with the times on this matter?
Well, I don't know if I'm 100% secular.
Well, you're not up with the denomination.
I don't know yet what I am.
I'm trying to figure it out.
I'm not a materialist.
That's what I have figured out.
Well, what exactly do you want me to say about that?
Because you said a lot.
Well, so my objection to this is the similar objection to I had of Matt Walsh's inability to defend marriage to Joe Rogan.
So I don't know if you saw Matt Walsh's Joe Rogan episode, but they sat down and Matt Walsh and Joe Rogan were arguing over whether or not gay marriage is acceptable.
And Matt Walsh kept saying, well, marriage is between a man and a woman, definitionally.
And Joe Rogan said, well, what about if it's just two people that love each other?
And Matt Walsh couldn't argue outside of Rogan's framework of consent and love, because if it's just for two people who love each other, then why shouldn't it be?
And what it isn't saying here, and what the priests aren't understanding, and this is meant to be Christian teaching, is that marriage isn't just for the man and the woman, it's for the children that result of that.
So you can't have a marriage by definition that is fruitless, or at least doesn't have the potential to bear children.
It's meant to be the family structure.
I think that basically, when you have an institution, That does not want to upset people, then that institution tends to become a bit, let's say, morally corrupt.
Yes.
Because the job of people who want to be moral leaders is to actually deliberate about what the common good is.
And try to convince the people to adopt it.
So if, as you say here, and if, as I understand from here, you're talking about an institution that is basically not going to put up a fight for its views, and an institution whose members will not stand their ground for their views, then yeah, I think that's bad news for that institution.
And I really like what you said in the beginning about a church that is trying to pander on this generation will lose the next one.
This is Fulton Sheen's quote, the church that is wedded to the concerns of this age will be widowed in the next.
Yes, I think this applies for everything, basically.
If we have people who want to just pander on the spirit of the times, they very frequently neglect the fact that what becomes the spirit of the times is frequently a very one-sided dilemma that most people have understood.
But it does not exhaust.
The whole debate about how to live well.
So that is why you need to constantly be above your age in order to lead people.
If you're running yourself like a business and you're concerned about reputation management at all times and it's putting you on the defensive rather than the affirmative, the judge is meant to put out an affirmative vision that puts harsh standards out there that people might fall short for, but that's Yes, and this shows the problem that ethics has with diversity and the woke agenda now, because the woke agenda is completely, completely, completely contradictory.
You have regular groups that are trying to assert their rights and put forward their views of what peaceful coexistence consists in.
And they're radically different with similar views of members of other groups.
Like Islam and LGBT?
Yes.
Or you could have, you know, between those who are in favor of women's rights and those who are in favor of trans rights.
You have all sorts of incompatibilities.
So you cannot basically chase a contradiction.
You cannot try to pander a contradiction.
Contradictions don't exist.
You need to take a stand and you need to pick a side.
You cannot not pick a side.
And it's also, I think, very important, and this is the fruitfulness of the relationships point coming to fruition, if you want to pass the values of the church down generations, then as a cultural norm, England can tolerate its eccentrics, its minority positions, And also, there are some Christians that will pray for people to have less hedonistic lifestyles, but they just don't hate them.
It doesn't make them bigoted.
But also, it's not healthy for a civilization, a nation, or a religion, or a community, to put forward self-abnegative lifestyles.
So, don't mainstream being Peter Pan.
Don't mainstream as the ideal, not having children, because within a generation, your civilization will discontinue.
We're seeing that with birth rates now, some of which is driven by economic pressures, and some of which is driven by selfish attitudes.
Yes, and this leads us back to the main question that for people to survive and for institutions to survive, they need to want to survive.
The question is, do they want to survive?
And I'm not getting the sense from this survey, which may not necessarily be representative, all the church leadership, like Justin Welby and various female bishops that bought Calvin Robinson's ordination, that they're filled with conviction, at least about Christianity.
They're filled with ideological fervor, and that's self-destructive, because you've got that Promethean ambition of progressivism at odds with Christianity, and they're picking the former over the latter because they think it would be popular in some way, and it doesn't seem to be, because their pews certainly aren't full.
I'm just going to skip down a little bit, just to, you know, this bit here.
There's also a part about the appointment of female bishops.
Now this is quite a controversial one.
So the appointment of a woman as the Archbishop of Canterbury would be backed by more than 80% of priests.
Two thirds want to enter the system that allows parishes to reject female leaders.
So they're forcing the roles of men and women to be interchangeable.
Now this was something that the Christian right said was probably going to come after gay marriage was passed.
I think that.
That was just the sort of sign on the dotted line part.
I think that's been a cultural and economic shift that's happened for the last couple of hundred years.
But this is again incompatible with Christian teaching because this is St.
Paul's concept of headship, whether it be the husband in the marriage or the priest as wedded to the church.
You shouldn't have men and women's roles as interchangeable and it just creates confusion and it further creates the ratcheting effect all culture is causing a distress particularly men and women that's liquidating us down into de-sexed individual consumer units.
Very materialistic and it's just not healthy.
And so, the cathedral basically becomes a longhouse.
The survey asked priests, would you oppose or support the appointment of a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury?
Among the 1,179 who responded, 80% said they would support it, 13% would oppose it.
A total of 590 parishes, 4.8% of the total, have formally declared they will not accept a woman as their main priest or accept the oversight of a female bishop.
But about 95.2% said yes.
And there's also the decolonization agenda at work here in this particular survey.
15% of priests back the removal of slave trader memorials and statues from church property.
Two thirds want to see information added alongside them to highlight their links to slavery.
Now, I'm taking the Douglas Murray position on this nowadays.
I don't even want a plaque there.
Like, in principle, sure, if you want to provide more information.
But I know that just by providing the information, I'm ceding ground to my enemies that want to destroy my entire civilization.
So I'm actually not that fussed.
Like, no, we spent loads of money.
I think it was like 30% of all GDP at the time in destroying the slave trade.
Thousands of sailors was conscripted into it and died.
We were still paying it if you were a taxpayer until about 2015, I think it was.
We've done enough.
I think it's time we stop the offense archaeology on behalf of people that just despise our civilization and the church is playing into their hands, which isn't even great, but some of the priests actually endorse the ISIS approach.
The survey asked, if there's a statue or memorial on church property dedicated to an individual who owns slaves or profited from the slave trade, what's the best course of action?
1% 13 priests said the morals should be destroyed.
13% should be removed from church property and moved to a museum or display case.
So shame about your own heritage and the inability again to make the case that we've actually made moral improvements since and here's the context for this that I can rattle off.
No instead I'm just gonna play by my enemy's handbook and it's no wonder that people just don't want to show up to church.
But it turns out that loads of them are quitting as well because they just don't think it's progressive enough.
And this is the last part I'm going to mention in this survey.
Almost a third of working-age priests seriously considered quitting in the past five years.
40% feel overworked or overstretched, citing an abject lack of support from bishops.
Attendance at Sunday services fell to 690,000 in 2019, the last year of robust pre-pandemic figures having halved from almost 1.2 million in 1986.
of robust pre-pandemic figures having halving from almost 1.2 million in 1986.
And I think the reason they're falling, not just all these attitudes, Not just siding with the pervading materialistic zeitgeist?
Stuff like this?
What?
If you can't even defend the fact that you are compelled to go and worship at Sunday Mass because suddenly women's football has been declared the most important thing for the nation because they want to desperately say it's equivalent to men's even though they keep missing the goal half the time.
Really?
You can change Sunday worship to your plans to cheer on the Lionesses, say the church.
You're just weak, and just pathetic.
And so, the last one I wanted to mention is just an article by my friend Harrison Pitt, who's recently written about, can the Christian church care about demographics?
And this is the point I made earlier, that parents are the best custodians and communicators of values.
This is what the church used to understand, and now it just doesn't put it up.
This piece is a bit more about the ethnic hostilities that are imported to Britain, um than the kind of role confusion coming from from the top of the church and it also talks a little bit about the impossibility for a value neutral democracy to create this kind of multi-ethnic coalition without as you said that great mediator of christianity to cross those racial tribal divides and and pip writes here the bible does not picture a scattered array of atomized individuals or nomadic anywheres
it's come on to evangelize takes as given the fact that human beings both naturally and justly organize themselves into cohesive peoples go ye go ye for therefore and teach all nations baptizing in the name of the father son and holy spirit matthew 28 so he's making the point here that actually it does accommodate um that universalizing criticism but it still respects people's parochial cultures times places ethnicities but that it provides them this framework of the innate human dignity around which they can structure their societies
And it's much more healthy than the regression back into tribalism, which will happen if the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church stays its course on allowing their congregation to go into managed decline.
One thing here, I think that the answer is yes to this question.
Can a Christian care about demographics?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's yes.
Yeah, you bloody well should, when the birth rate's 1.4, there's about seven below replacement.
That was something that was really encouraging, actually.
I'll finish on a personal note then, that so many young people and Young Christians were showing up to March for Life last weekend.
That's really important, you know, get out from behind your keyboards and actually show up and do things because you might meet like-minded people.
It's a lot more encouraging than just shouting into the void and feeling blackmailed all the time.
And I suppose as well, even if your church service, your local parish, even if you're not fully there yet, even if you don't feel a metaphysical conviction, I mean we have been deracinated As a generation, we're very materialistic just in the waters that we swim, and so it's hard to build that connection that past generations inherited.
Just show up, like it actually means something.
I started taking my Nan to church, I've become part of the local community.
Turns out that my priest actually watches our show, likes you very much.
And so, it's more wholesome than just allowing these institutions to fall into disrepair and be captured by your enemies.
So, if there's one good thing to take from this, England isn't really much of a Christian country, neither are its churches, but it can be again if we do something about it.
With that, onto the video comments, I suppose.
Hello.
I saw Harry and Callum's segment on 2010 reality TV shows, and I think the most egregious one on the US side was called Bridalplasty.
It was where 12 women went on the show and competed not only for prizes, but also for plastic surgery.
The procedures were performed while the show was being filmed, so they would get their breast implants, facelifts, nose jobs, and liposuctions, then show up, uh, back up and compete for something else while they were still healing from whatever procedures they had just gotten.
It was simultaneously hilarious and tragic.
It also only lasted one season because, you know, ethics.
Yeah, there was, what was it, ten years younger where people were promoted to have de-aging surgeries, super-sized versus super-skinny, where they'd get an anorexic girl and a really fat guy and trade diets and just bully them into each other.
The worst one that's still on is Love Island.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever watched Love Island.
I haven't because I couldn't.
I've watched a bit, you know, Lana the Cone.
What was it?
Too Hot to Handle.
Just in the beginning, the first five minutes.
Blimey.
I don't know how Chris Williamson put up with it.
Lovely lad.
So you've watched Love Island?
I've seen bits of it before.
And you're making fun of me for having watched five minutes of the other thing.
No, I feel sorry for you.
You need to be a moral leader and change the channel.
I had a former friend that was going to go on it at one point as well.
Yeah, she was.
My pitch, though, for a reality show, anyone who's buying, and I think we'd make a killing on Rumble Super Chats, political Love Island, where most of the girls are left wing and most of the men are right wing.
And you can watch the girls change their opinions over time as they get boyfriends.
Okay.
See, that'd be fun, right?
Yeah?
Yeah?
Go on, give me a deal.
All right, Craig, go for it.
Okay, since I am a Gold Tier member, I can request this.
Lotus Eater's Cooking Show.
You have to do it, guys.
Put my Gold Tier subscription toward it.
And it has to be hosted by a woman who's dressed like a trad wife and she only makes traditional British dishes.
Traditional English dishes.
Do it!
Okay, so we just got a microwave.
That's where we're at with the facilities.
Also, we don't have a female host yet.
We have frequent female guests.
If you can bear a Greek dish, me cooking souvlaki, showing you how to make pita from scratch with flour, I'm more than happy to do it.
We'll get a turk in to make kebabs.
Yeah, we'll just pour some vinegar here and clean the table so we can spread the dough.
On pancake day, we'll get a little hot plate in and you can make them as the podcast rolls on.
That's it for video comments, John.
Yeah, I can see the thumbs up.
Fantastic.
All right, comments.
Base A, this is a brilliant idea for Lotus Eater's spin-off series.
Send Connor and Callum to Burning Man next year and film their Carl Pilkington reactions.
Call it an autistic board.
There's an even more brilliant thing about it, that I'm not there.
I don't have to be there.
You can commentate.
Yes.
What did I do to you?
What did I do to deserve this?
Thanks, Baysteep.
That'd probably be the most dangerous place that Callum's been to yet.
Andrew Narog, excellent show.
Amazing how it's generated a society.
I could scarcely imagine these things a decade ago.
Also in specific for Burning Man, the Balenciaga model seems scarcely human with that creepy walk around the mud pit, almost skulking.
Yeah, it looks like the vampires in I Am Legend, just walking upright.
Yeah, I don't understand how that emaciated heroin addict look is attractive, but there you go.
Ross Diggle, Steady Office is right with the tools.
Instead of buying well-made tools that can be autoclaved, they're buying throw-away multiple tool packs.
They cost more in the long run, are wasteful, but it looks good that they have reduced the autoclaving used within the hospital.
Yep.
And who sells?
Who profits from this?
Yeah.
Who's the contract procurer?
It's like Matt Hancock giving his sister's firm that he had shares in contracts for PPE disposal during lockdown.
It's like you created the mask mandate and then your sister has a medical waste disposal unit that you then make money off of.
You slimy git.
Baron Von Warhawk.
In case you're wondering why the UK government refuses to fix the schools filled with crumbling concrete and asbestos, it's because the English people are going extinct.
New citizens from the Caribbean and Middle East don't go to your schools, so why bother fixing them?
There's no point in investing something that has no future, whether it be your schools or your children, it's disgusting.
Yeah, I did cover how there's tons of primary schools shutting because they just don't have the kids in them.
Demographic decline already starting.
I want to do my bit to reverse it, so...
I suppose we all better start, eh?
Dirty Belter.
I can't fix the issues, I'm just doing my job.
This is the death knell of our civilization.
Not enough people saying, no, this isn't right, let's get this sorted now, are not in the right places.
Well, because, you know, fixing problems means the gravy train dries up.
Kevin Fox.
The Chinese method of demolishing buildings is something to behold.
They start by hoisting an excavator to the top of the building, it then chiseled Chis?
Chiseled?
Yeah, the building down, dropping as each final wall is dropped at each level.
Once the excavator has done its bit, it's driven thousands of Chinese enter the site and begin sorting through the rubble to recycle all the wiring, piping, and bricks.
They're then cleaned to build the next developments.
Your bedroom wall in your new luxury apartment may have already been in three or four other apartment buildings.
Well, that sounds like a great idea to just constantly repurpose things that have been put together and smashed up about a billion times.
Definitely not just manipulating the economic stats.
Last one on this.
Richard.
On the cheap, by your mates, this is what you get.
What is mind-numbingly bizarre is that they cannot even get to the bottom of it.
Half-arsed as usual, complacent finger-pointing, what a bunch of arseholes.
Misinformation, haha, always someone else's fault, isn't it?
Fall on your swords, wastrels.
That's a fair sentiment.
Baron Von Warhawk.
I should feel sorry for those Justopoil protesters being slummed into the pavement by that native cop.
But after being stuck in an hour-and-a-half traffic jam in a hot car because of these bums, I don't.
The letter M is for muddy puddles.
If you jump in muddy puddles, you must wear your boots.
That's an interesting name.
Bleach Demon.
I cannot praise the Pyramid Lake Reservation Rangers highly enough.
They handled the climate goons in the only way that is reasonable.
Baron Von Warhook again.
When it comes to Burning Man getting rained on, this was probably the first bath he's had.
This hip is had in years.
You can just imagine the smell as well.
Like Glastonbury looked bad enough.
Just, just, just, just the, yeah, the fluids.
No, no thanks.
We're not going.
X, Y, and Z. If there's one thing that could bridge the political divide in the U.S., it is the mutual disdain for Burning Man.
The letter M is for muddy puddles.
Reject modernity.
Return to mud.
They're basically pigs.
They're just pigs.
Do not cast your pearls before swine.
This was a brilliant comment.
AZ Arizona Desert Rat, don't ever go to Burning Man.
I don't want to go.
I want to send Connor.
That sounds like a thing from experience.
Wait, follow up your comment there.
Has she gone before?
I'd be fascinated to hear about your experiences.
Yeah, and someone online, running over justified nonsense is always justified.
Absolute king.
I'm doing my part.
Derek Power.
This is why I can't accept the state being an acceptable guardian of culture and spiritual matters.
Remember how the Church of England started?
Well, yeah, I agree.
Henry VIII setting up his own personal divorce court was where it's all gone downhill.
I think that if you had You're going to have some form of hierarchical leadership no matter what.
It's just talking about scale.
And so you want your hierarchical leadership to be imbued with moral virtues.
One, because if it's setting the parameters for civilizational operation, you want them to be good.
And two, because if you want a cultural safety net for people that aren't thinking all that much, you want the authority figures for them to look to to be embodying those ideals.
So, yes, structures will degenerate and deteriorate over time as people populate them to enrich themselves.
That just means the structures need to be cleared out and the ideas need to be reasserted, not jettison the ideals and trans-valuable values, like just stepped out of the void and know everything.
This isn't much to do with the Church of England, but it's another example of the inevitable march of liberalism.
In the country of Slovenia in 2015, they had a vote on whether or not to legalize gay marriage, and 63.51% of the population voted no, while only 36.49% voted yes.
Gay marriage was legalized anyway.
It just shows that, whether it be a church or government in either the West or the East, liberalism will do anything it can to shape the world regardless of what the population thinks.
There is a liquidation aspect that happens to particular cultures and religions.
Towards that liberal universalism, because it regards any constraint as pathological.
Because if it doesn't have the normative ethics before, like Christianity, then it just makes a crusade out of destroying constraints and makes that its moral good instead.
Yeah, but there's another question though.
When you have societies that focus a lot on civil society, The question is, how do you deal with civil society?
How do you get people to, let's say, go back to the church?
That's, I think, the main challenge.
Because forcing people to sit on a Sunday Mass, for instance, It destroys the element of belief.
It has to be genuine.
It robs them of virtue.
Yeah, it has to be genuine.
It has to come from within.
What you would need is, one, the church to start reasserting its own convictions again.
Because otherwise, if you're just like every other institution, why would they go to you?
If you need to provide differential moral guidance from the thing that's making people unhappy.
And then the state can have some role in, for example, reinstituting Sunday trading laws or giving people Time off in the mornings to be able to go because otherwise it feels like you're caught up in the perpetual rat races.
Excuse me.
This might be something we discuss eventually with Calvin Robinson.
The Protestant work ethic is actually anti-Christian because it defines success by perpetually progressing towards abundance.
And so it doesn't set things aside for mystery and ritual and sacredness, which is what the Sabbath... That's going to be a good discussion.
Yeah, it will be.
It'll be very fruitful, I think.
Lindsay, I've long since gotten round to the point of being able to accept almost anything as having been true against all odds and what used to be unbelievable.
Also got a love when the totally non-legit statism keeps ticking every box for those who follow Satan, whether or not they realize it.
Look, exactly smells, looks like, sounds like, smells like.
We all need to stop denying it because religious or not, it seems to be exactly what one's intuition knows it is.
I noticed this at the March for Life thing.
So there was this diminutive shaved head little dwarf creature standing alongside women who had literally dyed their armpit hair green, screaming, who recognized me and must have pointed to my quite well-tailed suit and assumed it was Hugo Boss and said, "There's a Nazi right there." Now, I don't know if she's actually watched the show, but we're not mid-century Austrian painter enthusiasts around here.
I think it's kind of cringe.
Or German.
No, no.
Well, yeah, yeah.
Well, he described himself as German.
He obviously came from Austria.
Um, so yeah, I think she misidentified me, but I did point out the fact that one, it's very ironic.
The most ugly people are the most concerned about getting pregnant because there's no chance love.
I wouldn't touch you with a barge pole, but also the, the other side screeching at the top of their lungs to kill babies is, is such strong evidence of something akin to demonic possession.
But the value system that predicted this was happening is probably right.
And so I like when our enemies reveal themselves as literal demon worshippers.
It really helps boost my cause.
One last one.
I'd love to see contemplations on the legacy of Christianity on society with Conor and Stelios.
Aha!
Well, you'll be getting something soon with a third chair who is also equally as well informed on this, I believe.
With that, it looks like we're running up against time.
So thanks as always, mate, for your discussion.
We'll be back tomorrow again from one o'clock.
Until then, take care and goodbye.
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