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Oct. 24, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:35:13

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #769

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast, the Lotus Eaters, for Tuesday, which isn't the worst day of Monday's the worst day.
	But today... 24th of October.
	What's wrong with including the date?
	I still, I'm... Lack of standards.
	I'm joined by Carl.
	You're turning this podcast into Zimbabwe when it used to be Rhodesia.
	And Helen over here, Helen Dale.
	What would Ian Smith say, Callum?
	You would say learn the day, you freaking... what's wrong with you?
	Exactly!
	You're just like, oh, I woke it up.
	Do I have work today?
	Better tune in to the Lotus Eaters to find out.
	Some standards, Callum.
	I don't think that's standards.
	I think that's definitely standards.
	I think it's weird.
	Anyway, but no, today we're joined by Helen Dale.
	Want to say hello?
	How are you?
	Good to see you again.
	Good to see you too.
	And today we're going to be talking about Australia saying no.
	Jihad has many meanings, of course.
	That's the book of jokes.
	The nuances of jihad.
	And the Madcap Argentinians on the march.
	Oh yeah, it's really funny.
	It's not going to succeed.
	It's just really funny, though.
	I'm worried there might need to be some censorship for YouTube on those.
	You're going to get censored by Spanish YouTube, are you, for putting up a Spanish-speaking person?
	I just imagine he's going to come out and be like, yes, death to this, death to that, death to these things.
	Yeah, kind of.
	But they're all concepts, so it's okay.
	Anyway, I suppose we shall begin.
	Helen's joined us to come and tell us about Australia saying no.
	Australia on the 14th of October voted no with a great deal of emphasis, I think it's probably fair to say, in Their referendum to add on the idea of adding an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to the constitution.
	Now, this might sound completely left field, so I will have to step back a little bit and do a bit of background, which is what I had to do both for The Spectator last week and also for The Telegraph last week.
	Like the United States, Australia has a written, entrenched constitution.
	Unlike the United States, however, it has no Bill of Rights.
	It also has tended to abrogate or just not sign international human rights conventions.
	It tends to sign the more limited versions of them.
	That's very interesting.
	At all.
	And there is a reason in the 19th century for Australia not having a Bill of Rights.
	It's because the clever British thinker that the Australian framers, they're called framers in Australia rather than founders, Who they were most influenced by was a chap called Jeremy Bentham.
	Oh, really?
	And anyway, Jeremy Bentham's argument is that natural rights don't exist, or one of his arguments.
	He did lots and lots of different things, but he argued that there are no such thing as natural rights.
	And he used an expression that has become quite famous, known as, he said, the idea of natural rights or natural law is nonsense upon stilts.
	You might occasionally hear that and he's the person who originally said it.
	So the Australian framers were persuaded by Bentham that rights don't pre-exist states, rights come from states and because the Australian settlement was very intensely democratic, this is a country that Didn't have the franchise disputes that the UK and the US had, so votes for women very early, votes for unproperty men very early, and unusual political innovations around the ballot itself.
	The form of the secret ballot that is used in every developed country in the world was originally developed in Australia.
	That style of secret ballot with a cubicle that you go into with a curtain or so nobody can see you.
	That's an Australian innovation.
	It used to be called the Australian ballot.
	So when it did came up with this arrangement, it said, if we're going to change and insert rights or anything else in the constitution, we need the consent of the people, not the parliamentarians.
	And so the method for changing the Australian constitution was copied from Switzerland.
	So that means to change the constitution, you have to have a referendum of all the people.
	So they all vote.
	But there's a special double majority rule because Australia is a very intensely federal system.
	You don't just need a majority of the people like we needed for the Brexit vote here.
	You also need a majority of the states.
	So that means four out of six.
	Three out of six states is not enough.
	Four out of six.
	And the two territories, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, their votes only contribute to the overall sum.
	They don't contribute to any of the state-based votes.
	They didn't used to be counted at all.
	We actually had to have a referendum to allow people in the territories for their votes to count.
	That gives you an idea about this referendum system.
	That was copied from Switzerland.
	There have now been 45 referendums since Federation in 1901.
	God, that is a lot.
	Sorry to interrupt, but we've had like three?
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I'm kind of liking what I'm hearing, if I'm honest.
	So Australia's had 45 now since 1901.
	It's like a referendum every other year.
	Every third year.
	And there were also referendums around the issue of Federation before that in Australia.
	Mainly in New South Wales, which was the biggest state in the 1890s.
	So the use of referendums and the use of the idea that democracy and majorities really, really, really matter has been a big part of the Australian settlement since before the country formally existed as a country.
	Just a quick question here.
	I understand that Australia has a compulsory voting system.
	Are the referendums compulsory as well?
	Yes, they are also compulsory as well.
	God, I'm feeling more ANCAP by the moment.
	One of the things that I said, I don't think I said it in the Spectator piece, but I said it in the Telegraph piece, Australians vote a lot.
	And the effect of both the compulsion and the fact that they vote a lot means that you've produced a politically literate electorate.
	Much more literate than the electorates that you get in other democracies.
	I'm sorry, I'm just stuck on the, you don't have rights but you are going to vote.
	Like, just literally, why can't the government just leave me alone for five minutes?
	I'm just trying to kill a snake or something, or find a yaoi in the desert.
	You don't know what a yaoi is, do you?
	I'm just like, a fair argument.
	Bunyips, bunyips, bunyips.
	Oh, well, yeah, bunyips.
	Or a drop dead.
	I mean, imagine being a thousand miles out into the Australian desert, and there's just a little bit of dust on the horizon, and you're like, oh god, here comes the government.
	There must be a referendum.
	Like, Jesus Christ!
	No, but now that you mention all this, I've never thought about it, but if you're going to have a democracy, why wouldn't you do that?
	Because the system we have... Because I'd like some rights?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You'd like some rights.
	I know, I don't have any here!
	All I can recommend to you is that there are distinctive Traditions within liberalism.
	Australia is a liberal democracy.
	Americans might like to call themselves a constitutional republic, but it too is also a liberal democracy.
	The UK is a liberal democracy, but so is France.
	And they have a very different system, and they have an official state policy.
	Laicite, secularity, which is not a great translation of that French word, but anyway, that is very different from the American settlement because the French think, in their tradition of liberalism, that you can have such a thing as perfectionism.
	So that means even though the state is a democracy and the government can change, there are a certain set of overarching ideals Towards which the Republic of France should orient itself, and it has done so far.
	Yeah, terrible ideal, second only to, well no, actually only slightly worse than Bantham, to be honest.
	So it's still a tradition of liberalism, and that's why Macron can sound so emphatic in a way that, say, Rishi Sunak, Never, or Boris Johnson would never sound emphatic or even Keir Starmer because they're coming out of different traditions of liberalism.
	The Australian Benthamite tradition, it has positive effects.
	The voting down of this emerged very much and very intensely out of the Australian settlement, which is intensely egalitarian.
	And to be fair, he has since written about it, but Malcolm Turnbull, who was originally opposed to this in 2016 when I was in Australia, very loudly opposed to it, and the argument he made, he says, Australians will not tolerate putting into the Constitution something Australians will not tolerate putting into the Constitution something for which the qualification is in addition to Australian citizenship.
	The whole point of the Australian Constitution when it was drafted was that citizens get equal rights and equal duties.
	This is the Aussie settlement.
	This is the bedrock 1890s Australian settlement.
	The temper, the bias of the country is intensely democratic and egalitarian.
	Turnbull changed sides and argued for, yes, but he has since written the big Mayor Cooper in The Guardian, where he said, I was trying to defeat, you know, President Malcolm Turnbull was trying to win an argument with past Malcolm Turnbull and past Malcolm Turnbull turned out to be right, basically.
	And he said that, literally, he says that, I lost.
	To himself?
	To himself, in his article, he says that.
	I've had loads of arguments with my past self and won them all.
	He's not here to defend himself, you know?
	Yeah, well, Malcolm Turnbull's past self won.
	Still dominating, yeah.
	Okay, fair enough.
	The big thing with this, and I've put the details in the Telegraph and the Spectator piece, but the core issue that it degenerated, devolved down into this single issue was, yes, we're constantly arguing This doesn't give people extra rights on the basis of race.
	And no, we're constantly arguing was, you are going to have to set up an organisation that the proposed section, which I quote in both of them, there will be an organisation, you know, there will be a body to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
	This was going to go into the constitution.
	You are going to have to select Somehow.
	And you say race doesn't exist because human biologically don't have race.
	We don't have subspecies.
	We're not like chimpanzees.
	Chimpanzees do have subspecies, but Aboriginal ancestry stands out on a DNA test.
	More obviously than any other kind of ancestry.
	There are certainly ethnic groups.
	Yes.
	What it is, there is ancestry or ethnicity.
	So the point was, is the Yes campaign was saying, well, race doesn't exist, so it's not based on race.
	But what they were doing was treating the narrower and more biologically accurate definition, which is ethnicity or ancestry.
	They were then treating that in the same way that people in the 19th century treated race.
	Yeah, I kind of hate these kinds of debates.
	It looked like slight of hand.
	It really did.
	Because, like, when they say, well, race doesn't exist, and then they default to this very narrow scientific, well, there are no subspecies of humans.
	Yeah, but that's not really what was being said when we said races, right?
	Because you could say something like the Norwegian race, and what you're saying is civilization, the sort of continuity of that civilization and culture and ethnicity.
	People would, I mean, to be fair, in the 19th century they didn't know, Darwin didn't know, because he was relying on observation, basically, if there were human races.
	We didn't know how distinct humans were from each other since the human genome has been sequenced.
	We now know that the biggest difference between human groups is about 5% of their genetic material, whereas with chimpanzees you routinely get 25% because populations have been isolated for so long.
	But that's not really what people are talking about.
	But it's not.
	No, it's not.
	It's a slight red herring.
	It is good news that I literally can't be racist though because they're auto-racist.
	I'll be honest.
	Well, this is the thing.
	And people started making this very, very, these kind of very, very obvious and basic points.
	And what made it worse for the Yes case was that during the campaign, because it said there shall be a body to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, and then it construed it as, and it shall be for Parliament to set up how it's
	To be constructed, about the only two things that people knew would definitely happen with this, if Australians had voted yes, was that it was pretty clear that the voting for the voice would be compulsory amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
	You don't have rights either.
	What the hell is wrong with this?
	Sorry, go on.
	Oh, it's liberalism.
	I don't know what you mean.
	I know, yeah, classic liberalism.
	Rights, no.
	Guns, yes.
	So you're pretty clear that that would happen.
	But the thing is, inevitably, that meant that the voting would have to be confined to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
	So how do you work out who they all are?
	You start DNA testing your own citizens.
	And the implications of that just became clearer and clearer and clearer during the course Are the left not concerned that they're going to have the state literally single out and compel minorities to act in certain ways?
	That didn't cross their mind.
	That just didn't seem to click.
	And when one person... I would have thought... It did not seem to occur to them.
	They don't care about that if I'm a leftist.
	What it is, is they all, this has become the classic thing of the modern illiberal left, and it used to be a trait of the illiberal right.
	And I do buy Louise Perry's arguments to a degree that when you fight against this kind of illiberality, and not just on speech grounds, but in various other areas, whether it's Secure cryptography or so on and so forth.
	When you are having these fights, you are fighting from a position of weakness.
	You know who is in authority when you, against them, have to make free speech and privacy arguments, basically.
	I think Louise Perry is correct about this.
	And so what happened was, what I've just said there, this point was made by one of the people on the no side.
	He said, you do realise that in order to delimit the electorate, we're going to have to have DNA tests.
	You can't just identify as Aboriginal or otherwise everyone in Australia will identify as Aboriginal.
	Why not?
	And they've set up over the years, because of this issue, a three-part test.
	You need actual ancestry.
	You need recognition by a community.
	And you need to be willing to be recognised by that community as well.
	I mean, I have a friend.
	I have a friend, Professor Katie Barnett at the University of Melbourne who's part Aboriginal, and she has been invited to join various communities, but she won't because one of the effects of satisfying the tripartite test is you do finish up being treated differently in law and in ways that she finds disagreeable.
	Yeah.
	Like there are different rules for benefits and there are different, and they tend to be based on economic and social disadvantage, of course, which she has done.
	She's a professor of law.
	And so she thinks anybody who claims it on is just working the system and picking the taxpayers' pocket.
	This is the formalisation of literal tribal politics.
	It is!
	Like, this is literally how a tribe works.
	You need to be recognised by the tribe, but you also need to recognise the tribe and have some sort of blood connection to them.
	Connection to them as well.
	What I love about that is like, Stalin wouldn't bother with this.
	You're a Tata?
	There's no asking the person, are you an Aboriginal or not?
	That's amazing to me, that he would bother.
	Sorry, that the Australian system would bother him.
	No, no, no.
	Modern states don't do it, and the thing is, the reason why Karl is right here.
	The reason why you get that tripartite test of Aboriginality is precisely for those tribal reasons.
	It's a two-way street, tribalism.
	People always think it's just one, but it's not.
	They have to claim you, but you have to claim to be one of them as well.
	It's actually really interesting because I actually think that we could learn something from this from the newcomers in Britain who are like, I'm British.
	It's like, no, we need to accept you as British before you can say you're British.
	It's an older tradition that was stronger in Scotland than here.
	It's the whole idea of you can't just bowl up to a clan.
	The clan has to have you as a sect of the clan and all of that kind of thing.
	And so it requires a lot of good faith on both parties.
	I don't know how I feel about this.
	The concept of the group has to accept the person makes perfect sense to me, but the idea that you can be Aboriginal like your professional friend, but then because they don't say so, they're not Aboriginal now, That's not real.
	That's just legal.
	It's legal fiction.
	It's identification.
	And once again, we're dealing even when there is a biological reality in which it is rooted here.
	Well, Katie did a DNA test and there it is.
	It's in her family tree.
	She's done a couple now.
	I think she's done Ancestry and one of the other ones, 23andMe, and it comes up the same or very similar.
	They use different bases, the different genetics companies, but it's there.
	This is the problem of even when there is a biological root, identification is a very, very strange and very modern phenomenon.
	Yes, it's quite weird.
	It is quite weird, even where there is a genuine biological tie.
	It's a weird way of thinking about the world.
	It's the modern liberal state trying to understand tribalism, like pre-modern tribal politics.
	Everywhere in the world before about 1600 would have operated in this way.
	Just without the formality of law.
	This would have been the normal social life.
	Even philosophically, the idea that I am the determinant of if I'm part of an ethnic group or not doesn't even make sense to me.
	It's not an ethnic group, it's a tribe.
	No, no, but even on a tribal level.
	Like, you have a group of the tribes, say, that come to you and say, you're one of us, lads.
	You are, whether you like it or not.
	No, no, you can leave the tribe.
	Well then, they're not... But the thing is, what happened historically When you're dealing with forager civilizations, and even to a degree pastoralist civilizations, but certainly with foragers, is that if someone left, they tended to die.
	That's why ostracism was so dangerous.
	You didn't want to generally leave the tribe.
	People would do so, and that's why you get stories when you get very early stories from different civilizations.
	There's even elements of it because Homer was writing a long time after the events that There are elements of it there in the story of Ulysses, and the reason why people think all his friends and so on and so forth think, oh, he's dead at sea, is because of that thing that as someone who gets isolated, and he is shown all the way through the books as someone who is a bit standoffish and doesn't fit in very well and that kind of thing, but is still liked and respected because he's very capable.
	But this is why Penelope is getting it in her ear all the time.
	Why have you still got a candle in the window for this bloke?
	Yeah, and this is why the story of Genghis Khan is so remarkable, because he got abandoned by his tribe, with his brothers and his mum, and survived, and then came back, and took over, and then took over everything else.
	Yeah.
	You know, this is why that story is so amazing, because literally he was expected to just die on the steps.
	So, and you get like other things, like The exchanging of wives, so the wife leaves one tribe and goes to another tribe to formalize an alliance and things like this, but she becomes a member of the other tribe now.
	I'm not sure how much I can relate to the old tribal systems and the new ones, because the new ones are weird.
	But the new ones, like Carl is saying, they represent an attempt by liberals, and liberals who are not well informed of their tradition, of any of the traditions within liberalism to be fair, trying to develop a system of politics that will work with tribes or with tribal organizations, and they can be very destructive.
	If you, I mean, there's a Labour MP, I think she's still an MP, who can say some completely nonsense stuff, but she's very good on this.
	I'm a shock for a Labour MP.
	Naz Shah, and in Urdu it's bilidri politics, clan politics.
	And it's why you get this weird phenomenon of all these, you know, you get Pakistani background counsellors in certain English towns, and they'll all be related to each other because it's their turn, you know, to go through the bit of deep politics.
	And we think, we find it, we consider that, and we even have a word for it, nepotism.
	And that is actually derived from nepoté, Which means niece or nephew in Italian or in Latin.
	It's one of those ones that's a common form rather than masculine or feminine.
	Because nepotism comes from giving jobs or money or help to your niece or nephew.
	Yeah, because it's just an entirely different way of running a civilization.
	You'd keep opportunity and money within the family in some way.
	But the family is also defined more generously.
	It's a lot broader.
	So you will tend to do things like know who all your cousins are, know who all your first cousins once you're moved are, know who is related to everybody on both sides of the family and exactly what role they play within the family as well.
	This is the difference between the Anglo-speaking world and the Mediterranean world, or anywhere else.
	We've got much more of a strong sense of national identity, actually, when it comes to that sort of thing.
	We say, British jobs for British people.
	We don't think about who the British people are.
	We're not saying, British jobs for my mum.
	You never had to.
	Yeah, you never had to, but now we're in an entirely different era.
	And that's why you get the definition of aboriginality, which is an attempt by a liberal state To adopt bits of that.
	And the thing is, it then became, as a result of a referendum campaign in a country with compulsory voting, so you have to pay attention and vote in it, that thing that had been sort of existing in Australia probably for 30 years, was exposed to the wider Australian public.
	And I think it's probably fair to say they didn't like what they saw.
	And they didn't want it entrenched any further, and they certainly didn't want it in the country's founding document.
	And the one thing I haven't covered in this, these two pieces for The Spectator and for The Torygraph, but I will cover in a piece for Law and Liberty, which is the legal magazine where I'm senior writer.
	is post the vote.
	I wasn't really sure about it because the Torygraph piece came out on Tuesday last week.
	I was just seeing a little bit on Twitter and I thought, no, I'm not going to do the lazy journalist thing and report what I've seen on Twitter.
	I will investigate this.
	But, you know, in the week.
	That's why we have you on, Helen.
	You're a step above the average journalist.
	So in the week since then, it has now become clear, since that was published in the newspaper, it has now become clear that significant parts of the Yes campaign in Australia, and this is very unusual in the context of Australian politics precisely because we do have referendums and they are part of our culture, political culture, has started to do, going to melt down in the same way that Remain did after 2016.
	And, I mean, meltdown in the sense of Russian disinformation must have done it?
	Yes, I know, I didn't want to believe... Vladimir Putin's like, those Indigenous aren't getting a vote!
	Anybody in Britain is currently having PTSD about the period 2016 to 2019, but particularly 2016 and 17, which was when it was at its absolute worst.
	The Russian boot on the Aboriginal neck once again.
	- Again, like what? - So we have, yes, that has been.
	But there's also been, oh, it's not just Russian disinformation.
	It's also, you're all racists.
	Of course.
	You know, not all no voters are racist, but all the racists voted no.
	Where have we heard a version of that before?
	Not all Brexit voters are racist, but everybody who voted for Brexit, all the racists who did vote, voted for Brexit.
	It's exactly the same!
	The yes proposition is predicated on a form of racism.
	Like to say there's a difference between the European Australians and the Indigenous Australians.
	I mean literally their argument hinged on the fact that the Indigenous couldn't succeed in a system where they didn't have a kind of special privilege because of the inequalities in lifestyles and things like that.
	So it's predicated on a form of racism.
	Which was the point.
	They just hammered the point, which is what the egalitarian tradition is tied into.
	But that's also vote no to the voice of division.
	There were two slogans No had.
	Vote no to the voice of division, which is the one you can see there.
	But there was also one was as if you don't know, vote no was the other one they did.
	And that was caused because despite it The text of the proposed change, which everybody read and got sent to them in the post.
	This is the way the Australian system works.
	So I just, I can just picture just some poor guy in a standout with the police.
	And it's like, just come out, Jimmy.
	Come out and vote.
	Say, no, I don't want to.
	We're going to have to shoot you, Jimmy.
	Like, sorry, just leave me alone, bro.
	Sorry.
	You want democracy or not?
	No, I don't.
	All right, that's it.
	We're going in.
	And that was because of the refusal of the Albanese government to fill in any detail of what was going to make up the voice.
	And this was this.
	It really was very bad behaviour from Albanese this part, just in the context of traditional political campaigning, because a number of Indigenous people and other people have put a lot of thought into trying to come up with a system to do this democratically, to do it, to try to come up with a good Voice, if it were voted for that would work and they all just got Oh yeah, we had this report.
	And then they were just trashed.
	And there was one there that was actually paid for by the Commonwealth Parliament, done by an academic, Marsha Langton.
	And it was literally her whole, this like 300-page report with detailed maps and statistics and all of this kind of thing.
	It was all just chucked into the long grass.
	That's excellent.
	It might as well have not happened.
	That's so good.
	I don't want to see detailed 300-page reports.
	If you can't sum it up in one sentence, I'm not voting for it.
	So this is.
	And so this was people got a close up view of stuff that's been happening in patchily across Australia.
	They started to understand what was going to be replicated at a national level and on a much wider scale if they voted for it.
	But the fundamental thing That the vote turned on and all the exit polls agreed and so on and so forth, was what Malcolm Turnbull, historic Malcolm Turnbull back in 2016 said was, you cannot, yes, yeah, old Malcolm, pre-old Malcolm Turnbull as opposed to present Malcolm Turnbull, which was you cannot have a system instituted in a country that is intensely democratic and egalitarian the way Australia is, that
	gives people a civil right for which the qualification is something other than being an Australian citizen.
	You cannot do that.
	And he made the point, he said, because he originally ran the pro the yes to the republic campaign in 1999.
	And he said, this was the argument that I was trying to make on the Republic.
	He says, and I lost that argument because the thing is, the head of state is not an Australian citizen.
	King Charles III is not at the time, nor was the Queen.
	And he said, and I lost that argument.
	And the reason I lost it in large part was because people decided that the Australian political system works well.
	And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
	As I said to the spectator, this was before the vote, I said, part of the thing that's so tragic about the Australian Aboriginal, not so much the Torres Strait Islanders, but certainly the Aborigines, what's so tragic about it, is that unlike with the Republic, where, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, was an absolutely fine response, and that's what the Australian people responded to the proposed change, with Aboriginal Affairs, or in Australia,
	The problem is that the situation is broken, but it was also pretty clear that this wasn't going to fix it.
	It produced other unpleasant side effects in an egalitarian country.
	It was basing a civil right on something other than being an Aussie citizen.
	And it also did look like it was just going to entrench more of this Tribal bureaucracy and corruption, and there has been very bad historic corruption in Australia.
	And they just don't want that.
	But now we're getting the yes meltdown.
	And it's probably better to just recommend Lotus Eaters viewers and listeners, just go on the internet, just change your setting on Twitter X and just look at the Australian trends and Auspol.
	Hashtag Auspol.
	Don't involve yourself in it.
	It's the most vicious cesspit on Twitter in English.
	The Auspol hashtag.
	It's vicious.
	I say that because I worked in Aussie politics for two years for a parliamentarian and was a participant.
	And it's just so you could just have a look at the meltdown.
	And I tweeted a little bit about it as as well and pointed out the extent to which it really is starting to do the whole continuity remain thing.
	They really are going.
	I just seriously hope this doesn't happen.
	But they're giving every sign of being like those Japanese soldiers that were isolated on Pacific Islands.
	Never going to let it go.
	And, you know, 20 years after the war is over, they get captured and they refuse to acknowledge Emperor Hirohito's surrender.
	They are going to be like the mad FBPE continuity remain people.
	And I really, really am disappointed in that because a country that's had 45 referendums plus several before Federation as well, it's only passed eight of those.
	Eight of those 45 have passed at referendum, which means the side That the yes side loses a lot?
	Yeah.
	You know, this is part of Australian political culture.
	You should know and understand this.
	We are all taught this at school.
	Yeah, but this was a vote... You have no reason not to know this if you're an Aussie.
	Yeah, but this was a vote between God and Satan, and the Australian public overwhelmingly voted Satan.
	Of course they're not going to let it go.
	Like, for them, this is a divine mission.
	This is about equality, this is about rights, this is about this poor oppressed minority and they're not going to get any less oppressed by the consequence of this vote.
	It was all the last one, the poor oppressed minority, that's another big part of this.
	But all of these are the same thing to them, this is a religious duty.
	See, whereas a proper liberal understands that there is a difference between liberal rights, whether they come from states or they're natural, it doesn't matter, this is just how you conceive of rights.
	Liberal rights are different things and they belong to individuals, they don't belong to groups.
	This is sort of very basic liberalism.
	And so somehow those have been collapsed into these weird group rights.
	that are based on defining whether you are oppressed in some way and it is just such nonsense and the two traditions are actually contraindicated.
	Well the way that they do it is by temporalizing liberalism because we talk about liberalism as kind of abstract thing that's kind of always existed and exists somewhere in the ether but they say no liberalism is an outgrowth of essentially whiteness and white politics and white people and therefore when you say liberal egalitarian that's one group which are white, and then they've got their tribes, and they're like, yeah, but you're sitting on top of us like that.
	It's part of the intersectional hierarchy, yes.
	Yeah, but it's specifically about temporalising liberalism as a phenomenon of the white Australians.
	That's how they do it.
	Oh, well, yes, that's another thing that's probably, once again, not in these two pieces because I had to write them both very quickly.
	I had to, the Spectators one, which ran on Sunday, was the day after the vote, and then I had to spend Monday writing the one for Tuesday for the Toregraph.
	I haven't mentioned this at all in those two pieces, which are more explanatory.
	Just notice, related topics are racism.
	Like, why?
	Average conservative.
	sorry yeah is the I noticed about and I'm going to talk about what you've just raised in the piece that I'm writing now which is for Law and Liberty because they're monthly long reads I can do a more considered reflection on the vote and fall out from it about
	About 20 years ago, I started to notice the language around Australia and Australia Day from Indigenous activists and from their academic supporters came to resemble, or started to come to resemble, the language that I remembered encountering because I was one of those people who had to do a compulsory post-colonial theory and literature subject as an undergraduate, which I got a high distinction by lying through my teeth.
	That's how everyone passes it.
	That language was very familiar to me because it was the way people like Edward Said or Frantz Fanon conceived of colonial powers and in Said's case specifically of Israel.
	So they started to talk about Australia being occupied.
	They would refer to Australia Day as Invasion Day, you know, which is the closest that they could come to Nakba, which is used by Palestinians.
	It means catastrophe in Arabic.
	And so it's these movements that are contraindicated to liberalism are They come from a different intellectual tradition that is not liberalism, that does not share liberal values at all.
	And when I say liberalism, it doesn't share the Benthamite or the French-style liberal values either.
	It's all completely different and very authoritarian.
	Says the person coming from a country where you can literally die if you don't vote.
	I mean, I just can't get past this.
	Yeah, I didn't want to vote.
	Okay, well, now you've got a fine.
	Well, I don't want to pay the fine.
	Now we're going to shoot you.
	Seems reasonable to me.
	No, you'll finish up in court.
	Yeah, but if, you know, if you put up enough resistance to having to be forced to vote, they'll kill you eventually.
	And so it's just like, right, that's very interesting, isn't it?
	I mean, I didn't realize that Australian democracy was actually so dangerous.
	Like, there's no situation in Britain if I don't vote that I get shot.
	I bet people have died over it as well.
	There are certain things it does very well.
	Back to the point about sort of economists used to say, one of the things that used to be said was you couldn't centrally plan a immigration system.
	And the Australian response was not only to centrally plan an immigration system, but a phenomenally successful one.
	But then you get the state capacity issue.
	Britain or Canada want to copy it.
	Canada was more successful, although it's got problems now with Blackface Trudeau, as I call him, because he's just not very competent.
	I mean, he was a drama teacher, so.
	Why elect a pretty drama teacher?
	As your Prime Minister, I mean honestly, as my mother would say, one suspects that Justin Trudeau got elected Prime Minister of Canada because the heterosexual female population of the country got a dose of hot thighs.
	Now you just need to imagine that said in an Irish accent, that was my mother!
	And it's totally true, but do we have to leave it there?
	I think we will have to, in the interest of time.
	Anyway, we shall move on, because we have another topic that's going to be good fun, which is jihad.
	Because it turns out jihad has many meanings.
	I didn't think it had that many meanings, depending on the context.
	It seemed pretty clear.
	What, a crusade, men?
	Or a jihad?
	It's a nuanced thing.
	The Metropolitan Police Force have been doing some scholarly research, and they have come to tell us that we're all wrong.
	We have all been reading the Quran wrong, and they are the true interpreters of Islam.
	Thank Christ.
	God bless the Metropolitan Police Force for its dedicated work.
	Well, that solves about 1,400 years of confusion then, doesn't it?
	So, before we begin, I'm just going to mention something on thoseis.com, this being the lads hour where we just kind of have fun, which is always good fun.
	This one about your ideal holiday, so do go and enjoy that.
	Yeah, that one had Lord Miles on it, so you can imagine what his ideal holiday was.
	Somalia.
	Holiday in Cambodia!
	Basically, yes.
	Sorry, I'll stop now.
	No, that's great.
	But anyway, the thing that's been continuing to happen, I thought this would have gone on for a week and then would have died, the whole Israel-Gaza protest, which I, like, okay, whatever, why are you in the West?
	Just stop.
	I mean, I like Tim's poll response to all of this, colonisers complaining about colonisers.
	Well, this is the thing.
	Pay attention to European colonialism, this whole post-colonialism and decolonization movement.
	They forget that the people who used to live in the part of the world where they do, alongside or even before the Jews, were not Arabs.
	These people in America are not indigenous either.
	Nor are the ones in London, nor are the ones in Paris, nor are the ones in Germany, nor are the ones in... I could go on.
	But the whole point of this, though, is they treat... We're being liberal critics here, saying, but you don't treat colonizers in the same way.
	And yes, that's a good gag from Tim, all these colonizers screaming about colonizers, for someone who understands that liberalism is about treating like cases alike.
	It's a rule of law thing that goes back to classical... to the Romans.
	It's a Roman law point.
	But the thing is, we think, well, you're all colonizers, we're all colonizers, just get off your bike and get off your high horse and just accept that we're all the same.
	But the point is, these people genuinely think that their kind of colonization, which they wouldn't even call that, they've got another name for it, is fine.
	And our kind of colonization is the bad sort.
	They deliberately want like cases treated differently.
	You are dealing with the anti-rule of law here.
	Yeah, I think they've got a good point.
	Our colonization good, their colonization bad.
	Now what?
	That's the way it used to work, but now we live in the West, in which we have to deal with, well, that liberalism going to its end goal, which is the police now siding with the idea that their colonization good, ours bad.
	And the Metropolitan Police, who decided to give their Twitter account to a member of Hamas, I presume, because I don't know what the hell else they were doing during all this, and they did a various number of tweets, and this one here, the word jihad has a number of meanings.
	But we know the public will most commonly associate it with terrorism.
	Because they're racist!
	We have specialty counter-terrorism officers here in the operations room from Al-Qaeda.
	They're nice guys.
	Anyway, they've got particular knowledge in this area because they've worked with Al-Qaeda.
	They have assessed in this video filmed at the Hizb ut-Tahrir protest in central London today.
	For people wondering what the hell that is, that's this here.
	The guys with the Muslim armies are going to rescue the people of Palestine banner.
	And he was just shouting jihad, jihad, jihad over and over and over again.
	He is indeed.
	His batteria are banned in many Muslim countries because their number one goal is to reform the caliphate by force.
	And yeah, that will get you banned from a number of Muslim countries.
	But Muslim countries such as England do not ban such speech.
	Instead, apparently we have the Metropolitan Police come out and defend them.
	I love how they're equivocating on this.
	If you come out and say something that even comes close to being racist, that's it, you're going to jail.
	But if someone's talking about jihad, they're like, okay, well we need to talk about the kinds of jihad they're calling for.
	I have to say that, and probably because I played a small role in it appearing there, The Metropolitan Police getting community noted is just so John Peel.
	The police are the public and the public are the police.
	That's exactly what it is.
	But yes, I am one of the writers of community notes on Twitter.
	I am one of those people.
	I write them in English and Italian and I rate them in English, Italian, French and Arabic.
	The Arabic one's going to be increasingly useful.
	Well, no, I think they would like me to write in Arabic, but my Arabic's not good enough.
	I can read it, but I make mistakes.
	This is the problem.
	When you live in a place for a few months, you learn to speak it and you learn to read it, but you don't learn to write it.
	That takes longer.
	But the police didn't just decide to tweet that this man screaming jihad at the Hezbollah rally was just a humble Muslim man.
	I don't know what your problem is.
	They decided to go on to defend... Local community activists, I believe is how they're called.
	Of course.
	They made a big old post where they're just like, well, updating everyone on the policing of that protest, and it's like, well, you know, they asked for it, and the man can be seen chanting, jihad, jihad.
	But it has a number of meanings, and we know the public are a bit confused.
	Then they just go on.
	They're also banished saying, Muslim armies.
	That's a number of meanings!
	Who knows what it could mean?
	Exactly.
	And, um, well, they also went on to defend the Al-Qaeda flag for some reason.
	This is the Metropolitan Police here being like, you know, here's some pictures of people saying, you know, they've got ISIS flags.
	And the Metropolitan Police being like, well, this tweet has been deleted.
	It's not the flag of ISIS.
	It's just the Shahada, which is the declaration of faith in Islam.
	But isn't that the flag of Al-Qaeda?
	It is indeed the flag of Al-Qaeda.
	To be fair, it's also the flag of Saudi Arabia.
	Well, not quite.
	Literally, there used to be people who said that the only reason Saudi Arabia was our friend was because they had the Shahada on their flag in nice calligraphy rather than shit calligraphy.
	The evil one.
	Yeah.
	But there is a difference because the Saudi flag is green for one.
	Seems like a mild difference, I'll be honest.
	Yeah.
	But then number two, it has the Saudi swear word on it.
	The black flag has connotations in Islam.
	Not only that, but the specific calligraphy here, some enterprising chap that actually responds somewhere down here and made the point, here's the flag on the Saudi Shahada or whatever else, and then the Al-Qaeda flag specifically.
	They have stylized these letters, and so you can tell it's the Al-Qaeda one that this chap is holding.
	That is true, they do look different.
	Just to be clear, Al-Qaeda are the group responsible for 9-11, aren't they?
	Yes.
	And the British police are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	Calm down.
	Calm down.
	Come on.
	They're good boys.
	They're just humble Muslims.
	I don't know what your problem is.
	Calm down, dear.
	It's local community activists.
	So a lot of people noticed.
	And the 7-7 bombings as well.
	It signed up to bomb their own city in future, presumably, as they defend.
	Totally.
	It's not an ISIS flag, it's a big difference.
	Yeah, they were the ones, the 7-7 bombings were.
	I'm pretty sure they were.
	Were they Al Qaeda?
	I'm pretty sure they were.
	I remember them being.
	Yeah, because that was before ISIS were a thing, yes.
	Just actual terrorist group, that's all.
	And you can see a lot of people are a bit miffed.
	There's quite a lot of comments saying, like, what the hell's wrong with you?
	There's some good footage here we'll get back to in a minute.
	But someone who was funnier, in my view, has to be this.
	Oh, he's hidden his post.
	Oh, my old buddy Adil Ray!
	Did you not screenshot it, you rotter?
	I think it's just because you're viewing this account, it can't be done.
	But Adil Ray made a big post where, like, he said, jihad has many meanings.
	In this context of standing next to a flag of Al-Qaeda at a big banner that says Muslim armies... And death to all Jews.
	It simply means a force for positive good in the world.
	It's a struggle against evil.
	It means social justice!
	So this guy made a pretty good meme, it's just like, Adol Reyes, mind your heart.
	It simply means my struggle against evil and colonialism.
	Someone's got that really good Gothic font.
	Yeah.
	And they decided to whip it out and have fun with it.
	There's a cat here you should follow, trust me.
	He's just a riot.
	He's just funny.
	So there's that.
	But this wasn't just with us, of course.
	You can see here in Amsterdam, there are Taliban and Al-Qaeda flags as well.
	Oh, just Taliban and Al-Qaeda flags on the streets of Amsterdam.
	I mean, one of those groups is bad.
	And you can see that it's all over the West, it seems.
	In fact, in Berlin, they had to corner off the Holocaust Memorial because they just didn't trust the local community to not piss on it.
	Yeah, pretty much.
	Yeah.
	I'm not even sure they would know what that is, to be honest, because of the Holocaust Memorial.
	The one in Berlin is weird.
	Yeah, they haven't done it very well.
	The ones in Poland tend to be I've actually been to this.
	It's actually quite interesting to walk around because it does give you this kind of dead feeling of being in the... because nothing's straight, right?
	Nothing's like well aligned and it tends to start looming over you.
	So it actually conveys a feeling quite well to be honest.
	Right, okay.
	Americans have to go into it to understand why.
	Whole other conversation, but I wouldn't immediately think Holocaust.
	I'm not sure the local community actors would either.
	But if they did, there's a reason that was blocked off.
	But this isn't the funniest thing I saw in relation to all of this.
	ITV decided to update the broadcast ecology by interviewing a local Muslim woman who is so disappointed at how these protests and responses turned out.
	Because now, how could she live as a Muslim in the West without being considered a terrorist?
	Awful that people think such things.
	So let's see it in her own words and then also what she does in her spare time.
	I've been called a terrorist.
	I've been asked to go back home.
	I've had people in their cars making threatening gestures.
	For people like Latifa Abu Chakra, a British-Palestinian living in London, just going about her daily business doesn't feel safe.
	It makes me feel that as a Muslim woman in this country, no matter how Hard I work, no matter how good I can be, it will never be enough because apparently Muslims and Palestinians are inherently terrorists according to the system here, according to the narrative of the media and according to the narrative of the politicians.
	This is what she does in the spare time.
	And of course, Twitter found this in approximately 30 seconds being... Twitter.
	Yeah, people listening, I don't know how loud it is.
	She's literally celebrating the footage of the guys on the paragliders who went and killed all the civilians.
	I love the framing, just armed fighters from the resistance movement.
	Yes, and then the next day she goes on ITV to talk about how they think we're all terrorist-supporting Muslims.
	But me, a terrorist-supporting Muslim, was just going about my business and then people say such things.
	I'm afraid the only response to that is if the cap fits, wear it.
	And ITV put her on for the normies to watch at home.
	Because the media narrative in this country is so against Muslims.
	Irritatingly, you are right that, of course, Twitter found it in 30 seconds, which is like, are you actually retarded?
	It's ITV news here.
	But then you have the normies at home watching that being, oh, isn't it terrible?
	Islamophobia is on the rise.
	They have no idea that the person they've just seen on their TV is actually a terror supporter.
	Honestly, I don't know.
	A lot of normies hate.
	Callum, this is something that I can propound on a bit because I've done the advertising agency thing.
	It is actually incredibly difficult to change people's minds with media.
	It really, really, really, really, really is.
	Which is why they do the same narrative every day for years.
	It's why I'm bombarding Australians with The Voice.
	If anything, it turned them off even more.
	I think it depends on the subject, right?
	Because if it's something about deeply held ingrained beliefs and prejudices, yes.
	But if it's something they don't really care about or know about, probably easily done.
	Every time it's been put to the test, media effects theory is one of those ones that fails to, it really, really fails to show any significance.
	There's even been attempts to do research on the work, the effect of radio in both Nazi Germany, because we've got very good records of which parts of the country had access to the Volksende, the new radio, the cheap radio that Google's made available.
	And also the role of radio in the Rwandan genocide.
	And it does seem that in a totalitarian state where the central authority can exclude all other voices and only have, and it's particularly radio.
	Radio is much worse than television for some reason.
	And so stuff without pictures.
	Sorry, I'm just imagining what the TV is like.
	We should kill all the Tootsies.
	Nah, the radio says it.
	Gotta go.
	Well, what it is, First of all, the findings is that radio does play a role.
	It can change people's minds, but they have to have psychological proclivities in that direction already, and it tends to only work in totalitarian states.
	The other, the reason television is a lousy recruiting sergeant for Genocide is basically because human beings evolved to see each other's faces.
	So when you can see the person's face on television, your face is just far more revealing of you than just your voice.
	And that's why you had that situation when we all only had three TV channels in both the UK and the US.
	We had that incredible political convergence where all the parties all seemed to be exactly the same and countries, the societies were very homogenous.
	Part of that was actually a byproduct of television.
	It drags people to the centre, whereas radio, and just generally text-based media, drive people to the extremes.
	And when you say text-based media, I mean, Niall Ferguson, the historian, has made this point.
	You're not just talking about radio.
	One of the reasons for the walls of religion, wasn't the only reason, but a significant part of the reason, was the fact that everybody could disseminate their shit sheets about everybody else, thanks to the printing press, all the rotten things that the Protestants and Catholics are doing this week.
	Wow, they're suddenly continuing.
	But I just thought the ITV made this attempt here.
	And I'm just going to play a little bit, because I did see on GB News, they decided to respond to this whole question of whether jihad means simply internal struggle.
	And this chap, I think, has it right.
	Well, the greater jihad does.
	Well, if you substitute Adol Ray's speech into where they used jihads, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.
	...made in the first articles about this, about the word has different meanings, like pear and pear, but obviously with far worse consequences. And he says it can mean struggle. So a Muslim spiritual struggle to avoid sin and be a better human. So I thought, let's put that in context, replace the word with that and see if it works.
	So in one clip, taken outside the Egyptian embassy, a speaker says, what is the solution to liberate people from the concentration camps called Palestine?
	The mob says, struggle to avoid sin and be a better human and avoid evil.
	It's good, it's like the constellations of philosophy, you know, or Marcus Aurelius' meditation.
	So I thought that further on there's another clip, let's put it in there, see if it works.
	I think he's quite right.
	Great point.
	How could that possibly be misinterpreted?
	The police are obviously correct, which is why being AI also won't allow you to even look up the word jihad.
	solution is the struggle to avoid sin and be a better human by the armies of the muslim i'm saying i think he's quite right great point how could that possibly be misinterpreted that the police are obviously correct which is why being ai also won't allow you to even look up the word you type it in now you get a content warning your prompt has been blocked because uh maybe a conflict with our content policy The word jihad.
	Can I just say that AI is the most overrated wibble I have ever seen?
	It is now, in the same way that, like, you know, the Sony Walkman or Discman was the most overrated thing, so it kept skipping.
	But in 20 years' time, it's going to be so advanced that you won't even think about it.
	Because at the moment, it's just a joke.
	And at the moment, you're blocked.
	Yay!
	Can't even do... But eventually... But I love this whole situation, because some people start making jokes where it's like, I'm just as English as you.
	I occasionally drink tea and eat shepherd's pie.
	But anyway, let me explain to you why jihad is absolutely fine, you gammon bigots.
	And the thing is... Yes, there's Adil Ray playing the stereotypical Pakistani man.
	No, but that's also the Metropolitan Police standing there, telling you why...
	You have the wrong interpretation of Islam?
	To give them some credit, I mean, there were some British Muslims underneath that ridiculous myth.
	Are those people tweeting at the Met in Arabic?
	and we're doing it in Arabic as well.
	No, no, no, no.
	If it is that organisation, a lot of Muslims really don't like his battalion.
	They might be quite conservative.
	If it is that organisation using it in that way, it means war.
	It means the war version.
	Yes.
	And everyone knows this.
	It's just an excuse.
	Because my partner made the point, are those people tweeting at the Met in Arabic?
	And I'm going, yes, they are.
	And she just says, and they're disagreeing.
	And I'm going, yes, The Met is trying to teach Muslims their own theology.
	It's quite entertaining.
	But that's actually how we live.
	And I don't know if you saw, Rishi Sunak came out and was like, hang on, maybe I should try and stop the police trying to be Islamic scholars.
	And Dominic Cummings just started laughing at this, being like, you know, the government doesn't actually control the government.
	You couldn't do it even if you wanted to.
	So this seems to be the case, though, because I saw an interview and this is the most popular podcast in the UK.
	This is the news agents here, which is trash.
	We've been over there before, but they decided to have some guy on.
	He's the ex Greater Manchester police chief to talk about this.
	And his answers are just kind of horrific when you realize, oh, God, they're serious, aren't they?
	You heard the chant jihad.
	Would you hear that in the context of the march on Saturday as an incitement of hatred or violence?
	Yes.
	Well I think to be fair to the Metropolitan Police, before the protest they tried to give clear direction, not only to their officers, but also to the public and the community about how they'd interpret that.
	And absolutely if you're doing that, for instance around a mosque or a Jewish school, and in that context it appears to be very much incitement to violence, incitement to hatred, then absolutely the law should be enforced.
	But not on a march?
	Well I think in March it's far more complex as to what does that word mean, you know, and there's been a lot of debate amongst academics and scholars and religious leaders even this morning about what that word can mean to different people and that's the difficulty because the officer has to look at the context in that case and then, you know, if they make an arrest we'll have to see what the person who made that chant themselves was actually intending and the context.
	Now, okay, you may be in a giant group of- Can I just say- Hang on, hang on.
	You may be in a giant group of Muslims chanting jihad, but now you're just an individual.
	Emily Matlis is at least willing to put him on the spot quite nicely.
	Brilliant, but like small- A bit of a, what does jihad mean, officer?
	Yeah.
	Well, it's very complex if you ask a scholar.
	It depends what the individual in that mob means.
	I left the camera on her as she was twiddling her hair, which I thought worked quite well.
	You're so right.
	Imagine getting arrested after calling for jihad and then you're like, I meant internal struggle against the IDF.
	I meant some spiritual prayer against the IDF.
	I mean, did you get off?
	Because that guy seems to think that you get off.
	And he used to be the Greater Manchester Police Chief.
	So the people writing those tweets, I'm sorry, but they are sincere.
	They are sincerely this lunatic at this point.
	And to end this off, because we don't have time to go through all of this, I'm just going to end off with GB News reporting that the Met Police decided to come out because they actually have had been asked, what the f*** is wrong with you?
	And their response is that, well, actually...
	We've been ruthless.
	Absolutely ruthless at cracking down on people calling for such things.
	They're quoted in here saying that they've been cracking down on people calling for jihad.
	Trust us, bro.
	But we all saw the footage.
	We all saw your statements.
	And we've seen the effect.
	How many people got arrested?
	Well, he says a number.
	And this is the classic thing.
	When he's asked for a number, he says those laws should be toughened up.
	Okay, I have periodically, I have not just worked for the dark side.
	I have been on the other side where the police are often the enemy.
	This is my legal experience.
	And the very important thing to remember is that woke police are still police.
	They still like more laws to belt people over the head with, and they still like the opportunity to protect their mates.
	Yeah.
	That apparently teaches us all a thing or two.
	I mean, I am a law and auditory, pro-police, pro-policing.
	As soon as you have an organisation of that type, they will have certain institutional traits, one of which is protect And the other one is, as many laws as possible to belt people over the head with.
	That is just the way cops are.
	And you just have to take that as part of policing.
	But you still need the police.
	This is the thing.
	But you just have to accept that that is a real thing that exists.
	So this is also prestidigitation.
	It really is.
	Well, there we are.
	Turns out jihad means many things.
	If you don't believe me, you can go and ask your local Bobby, and he'll recite to you 47 verses, and then you'll fully understand.
	Okay, right, well...
	I don't know anything about Argentinian politics.
	Do you guys know anything about it?
	Not really, no.
	All I know is that Argentina is a South American country, and of course South America is polluted heavily by socialism.
	And it seems that Argentina has been feeling the effect of this.
	Do we consider Argentina to be a Western country?
	It's not a white one.
	That's a very bold statement, considering their census.
	I don't care.
	It pisses them off.
	Well, originally it was a Spanish colony, Spanish speaking.
	It's famous for tango.
	Famous for losing wars over islands.
	Losing wars over islands.
	And it went through the same period that, well, the South Americans always seem to be doing it, but there was a period there where every single South American country had a junta of one sort or another.
	And they were run by these generals who were just covered in scrambled egg, who don't realize that are not self-aware, so they don't realise that they might think they look like big men in their own country, but to every other country they look like drag queens because of all the scramble they had.
	Well, you've got to understand that Argentina in 1955 had their Hitler-loving elected leader overthrown by a military junta.
	So, I mean, who's right or wrong there, right?
	Who knows?
	But I raise the question, is Argentina a part of the West?
	Because Western societies are, of course, struggling to survive.
	And the question that Stelios is answering with Professor Benedict Beckhold and David J. Thunder is whether we're doomed or not.
	And you should go and watch that to find out what the answer is.
	I think it might well be yes, though.
	So this happened a few years ago in which Argentina's Peronists, so the Hitler-loving A socialist light leader of Argentina was called Perón, and so they have a faction called the Peronists.
	They're the left-wingers in Argentina.
	And so Alberto Fernández was sworn in as president four years ago.
	And as the Guardian reports, Mark's return of Argentina's powerful left-leaning Peronists.
	They say left-leaning and left-wing a lot when talking about these guys.
	So you can tell this is their marking.
	These are the goodies.
	These are the good guys.
	So that's very interesting.
	It's a very complex thing that I'm not going to go into.
	And if you're from Argentina, please feel free to... Yeah, I'm not even sure you can call, and I'm sure you will get some people from the country saying this, South American politics does not do left right in quite the same way.
	Except for maybe Chile, but the other countries it's very different.
	Yeah, so they are left-wing because they're kind of old-school left, economically populist left, shall we say.
	And so a lot of Argentinian politics, as we'll get into in a minute, is literally just robbing corporations to redistribute to a bunch of people who don't have jobs.
	Which, I mean, it's not entirely different to ours.
	I did wonder where their inflation rate came from.
	Well, yeah, let's get on to that, in fact.
	So under this president, as you can see, Argentina is coming up to an election, and so the successor candidate is Sergio Massa, and he is the current Argentina's economy minister and presidential candidate.
	And so he's like, right, we're just going to start Buying votes, unofficially that is, because the government was just going to give informal workers two welfare checks totaling about $268 in October and November.
	So they're just going to literally start printing money and handing it out.
	So have they had their election?
	They have, but we'll get to it in a minute.
	All right, okay.
	And so they, this of course, helped devalue the currency.
	Argentinian inflation in August was running 124% and they're like, yeah, so just I was just looking at the numbers.
	Money, printing... It gets worse, right?
	It gets worse, right?
	So this was in the run-up to the August 13th primary vote, and of course they're paying for this, quote-unquote, by just taxing the hell out of corporations.
	So it's like, right, so everyone's wages are going to stagnate, all the things are going to get more expensive, the money is going to be worth less, and you're going to have some of it in your bank account for a very short amount of time.
	Being governed brilliantly.
	So, enter this guy.
	The hero we deserve.
	Helen, what flag is that?
	That's the ANCAP colours.
	That's correct.
	And the symbol is the half, the two half moons, one black and one B, B yellow.
	It's the ANCAP.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	If we go back up, Javier Millet, El General ANCAP.
	I don't need to be able to speak Spanish to know what that means.
	Yep.
	This is Javier Millet.
	This is the savior of Argentina, it looks like.
	Because, I mean, he is, there's something about South American and sort of Spanish world politics I find intrinsically hilarious, right?
	It's not just the accent.
	The accent's funny, especially when they're yelling about stuff, right?
	It's also the kind of Latin exuberance they express when they're doing things.
	Like Donald Trump had his funny hand gestures, right?
	But these guys are just like full body.
	They're Donald Trump multiplied by, you know, Donald Trump to the power of 10.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's like radical politics with the sort of Latin lack of self-awareness.
	Well, that's why they covered their generals with scrambled egg and made them look like drag queens.
	Exactly.
	That's why they look fabulous, right?
	And so General Ancap here has marched in.
	He's like, listen.
	And so, I mean, just before we go on, this guy was a professor of economics.
	Oh, he looks like one.
	And sex cult leader.
	And so he's got some opinions about tax, of course.
	I mean, he's decided that literally taxing people and printing out money, tax is a theft, as you can see there.
	Uh, JVMLA, Economista.
	And he's, you know, it's, it's fairly low level, um, intellectual arguments, really.
	It's just basically like, look, if you tax my money and steal it and take it and give it to other people, that's theft.
	I mean, I'm sympathetic.
	Yeah.
	Don't just do that.
	And so, uh, you know, you've seen this video probably where he's like, look, I actually hate the government more than anything.
	Uh, famous ministry out.
	Yeah.
	Ministry of women and gender diversity out.
	So, and I'm, I'm all in favor of this.
	It's like, great, great.
	Here's a guy who's literally just going to deconstruct the administrative state on day one, pretty much.
	Uh, and so as you can see, he's actually a maniac.
	You're not going to get dinged by YouTube for this massively with all of those swear words!
	Where's the mouse gone, John?
	Can we put the sound on this?
	There we are.
	Leftists, son of a bitch, there you have it!
	I'm going to ask the state for the balls!
	The state, get in the garden, you motherfucking bitch!
	You know what?
	I'll go through the garden, the state!
	Here!
	You know what this is, son of a bitch?
	You know what it is?
	The anarcho-capitalist flag, yes?
	The flag of libertarian liberals!
	You know what?
	The bandera anarcho-capitalist.
	The bandera of libertarians.
	The yellow has to do with the capacity to generate wealth.
	It's to say, the gold.
	And the black has to do with the anarchism.
	Okay, we'll leave him there because I think you get the message.
	I want to hear his points on anarchy.
	Yeah, he's a maniac and I love it.
	And again, like following in the steps of Bolsonaro.
	Sometimes politics should just be funny.
	Well, yeah, like genuinely hilarious and not in any way reserved about what the issues are, right?
	And so when he took the shock lead in the Argentinian August primary.
	Former tantric sex coach, one of those.
	It gets better.
	Yeah, he likes Donald Trump and thinks the climate crisis is a socialist lie.
	That's an interesting perspective that he has.
	He also wants to do away with Argentina's public health and education systems, disband the central bank, dollarize the economy, allow people to sell their organs.
	He won a landslide in the primaries.
	Some people have organs, some people need organs.
	The free market will provide.
	He took 30% of the vote in this, whereas the hard right, he's not even the hard right candidate.
	No, no, this is another example of people not understanding politics.
	And caps are just not anywhere.
	They're just their own little discreet, weird thing.
	Honestly, they're a kind of form of leftist, just one that has a different view on the administrative state.
	But anyway, the hard right candidate was Patricia Bullrich for United for Change, who got 28% in second place.
	And then you've got the Peronis candidate, the status quo candidate, Sergio Meso, who got 27%, despite having every power structure in the country behind him.
	Right?
	All right.
	Now, you can see why the fans of this are having fun with AI generation.
	Yeah.
	Come on, this is great.
	I love meme elections, man.
	I love meme elections.
	He also has some great statements, like he's gone against the Pope because he calls the Pope, quote, a raging communist.
	The quote is an effing communist, the representative of the evil one on the earth for promoting social justice.
	No, he's not wrong.
	Yeah, no, I totally agree with absolutely everything he's saying.
	There's another funny aspect of this, though, which is that Argentina could have been a superpower.
	And there's a period just before it goes all kind of wrong, which if they just had more people, they could have rivaled the United States.
	No, it wasn't even that.
	They made, and the country that it's always timelined with because of the beef, is Australia.
	And basically, the two countries were really similar, both being held up as the wealthiest Highest income per capita in the world and so on and so forth.
	I think it might have been some period in the 20s and basically they diverged and Argentina went down the very, very state controlled, very strong government intervention in the economy and so on and so forth that Australia went free market.
	That's a very generous way of saying what Argentina's done with the economy.
	Well, yes, they were also printing money and completely mad.
	They went completely mad.
	Well, not in that long, but he's not wrong to say it's basically just theft, because it is basically just theft.
	The reason I bring it up is not to say, like, funny history.
	There's a lot of fan fiction about Argentina as a result.
	This is why I think, to be honest, why in Starship Troopers they ended up having him in Buenos Aires.
	Because there's a lot of theories like, oh, maybe Argentina will rise up after a nuclear war and take over the world or something.
	Because they've got so many natural advantages.
	So I love the idea of this lunatic taking over and actually becoming successful.
	Oh yeah, I mean he's pledged to wage a, quote, cultural battle to transform Argentina into a libertarian paradise, which sounds great, and he's repeatedly trolled Pope Francis with repetitive toxic tweets calling him a communist turd, a piece of s, and accusing him of preaching communism to the world, which is exactly what I tweet at the Pope as well.
	Yeah, the thing is, the Pope is Spanish-speaking and this guy is Spanish-speaking, so they can do it to each other in Spanish.
	And the English-speaking world has missed out on this gem, frankly.
	So, you'll notice that I'm using Guardian articles.
	Because these are just the worst images on.
	Yeah, because I want all of our knowledge of this guy to come from the left, because so far they've made him sound absolutely brilliant.
	So far, I want three of him in every country, running every state in enterprise.
	So as the eve of the polls, the eve of the next election, the polls had him in the lead and they were like, well, I mean, look at that, bad and dangerous.
	Look, just try and be a little more subtle with the emotional manipulation.
	Bad and dangerous.
	Look at this angry face.
	I know you don't like him.
	You know, I think he's great.
	Entertaining, if nothing else.
	Yeah.
	But yes, they're just much more...
	Vigorous, Western, you know, like Trump is the most, or Boris Johnson, we're about as demonstrative as you're going to get, you know, in an Anglosphere politician, or Macron in France.
	And he's more, because he's French, he's more demonstrative than our people are, but he's still very restrained compared to anyone in South America.
	So this guy was an economics professor for many years.
	I bet he entertained his students.
	Well, he ended up going on national TV, and he was just really funny on national TV.
	Years of practice on his students.
	And in 2021, he formed this new party, the Insane Libertarian Party.
	Undressed up in a bee suit.
	But in two years, he's become leading in the polls.
	That shows you the extent of the problem in Argentina, right?
	Like, this sort of thing doesn't happen unless there's a fertile ground and a good reason for it to come up.
	Because apparently, I mean, 40% of Argentina's citizens are living in poverty amid triple-digit inflation and things like this.
	And so this mad ANCAP is just like, yeah, okay, we're just gonna abolish the state, abolish taxes, and everyone's gonna have to work for a living.
	Also, you can sell your organs.
	So, what's interesting though is how is the split, right?
	So, the third contender, the Patricia Bulrinch, apparently she's a hard conservative, and she thinks that he's got bad and dangerous ideas as well.
	So, you can see the left are like, eee, and the right are like, eee, and he's just like, yeah!
	They're your organs, why can't you tell?
	Exactly!
	My body, my choice!
	They're worried that many disillusioned young Argentinians consider him a saviour or messiah.
	And why not?
	So anyway, I thought we'd have a look at how elections work in Argentina.
	Now, Argentina does have many parallels to Australia, as in you can be killed if you don't vote in Argentina.
	Which, again, very democratic.
	To win the presidency, the candidate needs 45% of the vote, or 40 plus a 10-point lead over the closest competitor.
	And if you don't get that, you go to runoff elections, similar to something in France.
	And so it was predicted that Malay will face Massa, but of course Massa came third.
	He was doing very badly.
	And so they talk about some of the problems that Argentina is facing.
	The economy, which is presumably an eternal Argentinian problem.
	Oh gosh, yes.
	By the end of 2023, JPMorgan are postulating a 210% inflation rate in Argentina.
	The central bank forecasts only 180%.
	It's going so brilliantly.
	Thank God the finance minister is just churning out the money in order to buy the votes.
	I do love that, though.
	Even when your economy is that bad, you're measuring the inflation in the hundred and something percents, the central bank still has to lie.
	They'll be like, trust me, Brian, it's only 108.
	Yeah.
	Not 200.
	Yeah.
	So there is actually a very strong argument to vote for the absolute lunatic, right?
	There's actually a really good... Occasionally, look, this has happened in more stable democracies than the South American ones.
	Remember when one of the councils, I think it was up in Newcastle, Might have been Sheffield, I'm not sure.
	Elected a penguin instead of the Liberal Democrat.
	You know, an actual penguin.
	There have been instances where Australians have elected a stuffed toy to the local council or done the none of the above thing and voided the election.
	We will send a clown.
	to Congress or to the Parliament.
	He's only renting the seat for five years or two years or three years or however long.
	That's predicated on a well-governed country, right?
	But we're doing this because we're sick of your...
	Yeah.
	People are allowed to do that.
	But this guy actually is a remedy to a genuinely dire problem that they are actually having.
	And it's just really funny how it comes in the general ANCAP costume.
	Yeah, the main one there of just being, what if we just use the US dollar?
	Then you idiots can't inflate it.
	The idiots in Washington will, but no one there as bad as you guys.
	But also I'm just going to basically abolish the government.
	Is that okay?
	I mean, I'm listening.
	You've got my vote.
	Yeah, but he's not very polite.
	It's like, no, I like that about him as well.
	Um, I mean, he's just got some brilliant quotes.
	Uh, we'll, we'll, we'll go on.
	Right.
	So.
	He fails to win the first round of the presidential election.
	Now, far be it from me to imply that a South American country that may have been ruled by dictators for some time might not have the freest and fairest elections in the world.
	But I'm told by YouTube they do.
	Yeah, exactly.
	No, actually, YouTube does say I'm allowed to question that for now, but I'm not questioning that now.
	I'm not questioning that.
	Because what's interesting is the status quo party, who have ruined everything in the country, got 36.6% of the votes.
	Remember they got 27%?
	So it's a nearly 10 point increase on what they got in the primary, which is really weird.
	That's really odd, isn't it?
	It's just weird how suddenly 10% are like, yeah, no, I like inflation and a lack of opportunities, actually.
	I think the governing party is doing a great job.
	He got 29.9% and Patricia Bullwrench got 23.8%.
	And so Javier comes out and says, look, we need to decide whether we're going to make Argentina a power again or turn ourselves into the biggest shantytown on earth.
	It turns out the Argentinians like shantytown, please.
	Although there's presumably an election next month then?
	Yes, well there's going to be a runoff election in November.
	Does he have a chance?
	Well yeah, because it's only two of them and the candidate that got knocked out was the centre-right candidate.
	Are they necessarily going to vote for the Peronists?
	Which way will they break that group of people?
	That's the guts of it.
	That's how runoffs happen in France.
	I don't know what the mood of the electorate in Argentina is.
	I don't know whether this guy is so far out in whichever direction that the Conservatives are like, no, we'll just vote for economic inflation.
	You know, we'll just vote for the liquidation of our economy.
	we're not going to vote for this guy because I mean like the, the masses campaign poster, uh, literally just literally says, are you seriously going to vote for him?
	And 30% of the country are like, yes.
	Don't challenge me.
	I'm somewhat optimistic, though, because as you mentioned, the extremities of South American politics are just kind of weird sometimes.
	I mean, like the lady who was elected... Extremities?
	This guy's mainstream!
	What are you talking about?
	Yeah, but that's what I mean.
	I mean, the lady, I can't remember exactly, I think she was elected to the Chilean Senate.
	She was only elected because she turned up in a Pikachu costume and that became really funny.
	And then she turned up to ratify the new leftist constitution in her Pikachu costume.
	And then the whole electorate were just like, actually, no, you're not funny.
	There's a joke, there's a joke, and then it's not a joke anymore.
	It's not funny.
	But this guy's not a joke, actually.
	He's hilarious, but he actually knows what he's talking about, because he's an economist.
	And he actually commands a very significant proportion of the vote, to the point where the powers that be are bricking it, because they think he's going to win.
	And it may well be that the majority of this 23% that votes Conservative will go with him, because, I mean, what are the options, really?
	Right.
	So who knows?
	Like I said, I have no idea, no predictions or anything like that.
	I just think it's really funny.
	And so he has come out and he gave a speech saying, well, look, because it looked like they were going to win.
	And they didn't.
	It's really weird that, again, 10% up, just, you know, nice F curve you've got going there, bro.
	But I don't know.
	No idea.
	Right.
	And so he just goes out and it's a bit of a sort of We've got to wait and see, basically.
	So his supports were a bit deflated.
	So they expected this stonking win, which they didn't get.
	But he does make a point that, I mean, they've only been doing this for two years.
	This is how far they've got after two years.
	This is the best libertarian campaign in the history of Argentina, which is a good start for Argentina, I would say.
	And it's not over.
	And so who knows?
	So basically, we'll find out what the runoff election in November brings.
	But I just want to say, he's doing surprisingly well, and he's really, really funny.
	And of course he supports Trump, Bolsonaro, all of the other dissident types.
	There's a lot more to say on him, but I think we're running out of time, so I'll leave it there.
	Alright, let's go to the video conference.
	Had all these boxes full of books for Dallas Fan Festival, and now all that's left It doesn't even fill these two suitcases.
	And I've got plenty for Cincinnati Sin City Con next weekend.
	So find me Sin City Con in Cincinnati, Ohio.
	Well, good job, Craig.
	My sponsorship?
	Yeah.
	The next one, I suppose.
	Nope, there isn't one.
	All right, we'll go to the written comments on the site instead.
	George says, so GB News prevented Calvin Robinson from... Ah, there is one more.
	Oh, sorry, okay.
	Okay guys, it's time to show in your general direction.
	Welcome to the many worlds of Saril.
	Tabletop roleplaying where everyone has their turn at the same time.
	This game's had four years of beta testing and refinement.
	Now it's ready to go out and start the fight against Hasbro.
	Definitely gonna need some help.
	If you can afford it, get over to saril.net and back the Kickstarter.
	Thanks.
	Okay, cool.
	Word from our sponsors.
	Yeah!
	It's interesting that they've gone back to his game, going back to the old style, pictures and books, which is my recollection from high school.
	I'm dating myself terribly there.
	Oh yeah.
	Looks cool.
	George says, so GB News prevented Calvin Robinson from using Crusade in the title of his show, but here they are defending Jihad.
	They can't fail fast enough.
	I'm not sure that's necessarily an endorsement by GB News.
	No, that was headliners, but they're making fun of it.
	Right.
	Adrian says, quick question on Australian voting.
	If voting is compulsory, presumably ID is mandatory?
	Sorry?
	Is ID mandatory?
	No, ID is not used in Australia because the system for... Don't feel oppressive.
	Very, very basically the administrative load is borne by the Australian Electoral Commission and the wider Australian and the different state electoral commissions and the wider Australian state at registration because registration is compulsory and a lot of that work is done through the high schools so that everybody gets registered to vote.
	So you don't need to go into the polling station and show ID.
	And very simply, the system is so efficient and well run that this is the state capacity thing again.
	This is just something that Australians do extremely well is run elections.
	I mean, to the point where when the Various people with all the fights were happening over the US election.
	And was it free and fair?
	I mean, if you talk to someone from the Australian Electoral Commission, they would go, oh, this is something that is a conversation that happens after every American election.
	People do not realize how badly run American elections are.
	They're terrible.
	And it doesn't matter who's in the government.
	Both sides do it.
	It is just terrible.
	And it is to do with the fact that of all the Western liberal democracies, the United States copied the least from the Australian system that was developed in the late 19th century, the Aussie secret ballot system.
	The reason you're given a pencil in the UK is because the Australian electoral officials worked out that if you gave people pens, Dipping pens, this is the 19th century and early 20th century, they would put inks blots all over their ballot paper.
	That's the fineness of detail that you're dealing with.
	So basically the compulsion element is at registration, not in the ballot box.
	What happens if I refuse to register at school?
	You can find?
	There would be quite significant repercussions.
	You can, some people do.
	The onus!
	Some people do that.
	My head teacher's just like, Steve, I just don't wanna mate!
	There's had to be a Movis Vivendi worked out in Australia with Jehovah's Witnesses because they don't vote.
	It's part of their religion not to vote because they consider that to be... And to prevent an Australian genocide of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
	And so some of them, some of them, the decision is made, the Jehovah's Witnesses, they register to vote and they just pay the fine each time.
	And it's only $20.
	So they just pay the fine each time.
	What if I don't want to pay my fine?
	That's when you get a court case and they get quite nasty.
	I end up as Steve-O just on the end of his billy-bong going, look mate, I just don't want to vote!
	The full force of the Australian state comes down on me for not being forced into democracy.
	I would love, because not 100% vote, right?
	So I'd love to find out who is avoiding it, and not just like the Jehovah's Witness case, but there must be some people who fall through the cracks.
	It's pretty clear that if people do fall through the cracks, certainly when I was working in the Australian parliamentary system, it tended to be minority religious groups like Jehovah's Witnesses.
	They would dodge the registration element.
	There are also some varieties of Sufi Islam, which is their version of Quaker, the pacifist sort of Islam.
	They don't vote either, but I have to be quite scrupulous about that because some do and some don't.
	It varies from group to group.
	Some of them don't either.
	They plan to martyr themselves against the Australian state.
	So there has been a Movis Vivendi.
	There have been concerns expressed over the election, over the referendum last Saturday, because the last time I looked on the tally room, the Australian Electoral Commission website, They hadn't finished the count.
	There was no formal declaration.
	The writs hadn't been returned and there was no formal statement saying that all the votes had been counted.
	So take this with a pinch of salt, everyone.
	But only 83% It looked like, if you calculated the number of votes counted taken from the total enrolment, that there'd only been 83% turnout, which seems incredibly high to someone from any other... Yeah, not to an Australian.
	But not to an Australian.
	That means a slippage.
	Now, it may be wrong because the count is not complete.
	I know, for example, that when I went to vote up at Australia House in the Strand, Gringotts in the Harry Potter films, the fancy bank, the goblin bank in Harry Potter was filmed in Australia House in the Strand.
	It's a very beautiful historic embassy.
	And I was told by Australian Electoral Commission staff when I was there that these votes are not counted here.
	They are bundled up and they are sent back to Australia to be counted.
	If you even escape Australia, they've still got like an embassy.
	Like the Chinese, they'll come around and compulsorily make you vote.
	It's not compulsory if you live overseas, but it is quite hard to escape their clutches.
	Le French Calamfait says, does Australia have any plans to contain the anger of the Aboriginal gods now that the No vote has won?
	I bet it hasn't got a single plan, has it?
	No, not a single plan.
	I mean, I'm sure yes, we'd like to, you know, rain down the Aboriginal equivalent of fire on the people who ran the No campaign.
	And the reason I say that is because two of the leaders of the No campaign were a woman called Senator Jacinta Najijinpa Price.
	And if you see pictures of her, Najiminpa, that's how you say it, obviously Aboriginal.
	And another chap, Warren Mundine, who is also Aboriginal.
	It's just, and their pictures, the one you put up earlier from the Torygraph just had their slogan, but the how to vote cards that are handed out by booth workers had a picture of the two of them.
	So here were these two Aborigines telling you to vote no.
	You've just found them, haven't you?
	She's just put some feathers in her head!
	Are you kidding me?
	She is totally wild and a brilliant speaker.
	Honestly, if you go and collect her speeches, she is now seriously being spoken of as Australia's first Aboriginal Prime Minister.
	She's a really, really good public speaker.
	If she's not going to wipe her arse with the state, I'm not interested.
	Abe says, Carl, good on you for insisting on holding Callum to the intro standards.
	He's been slipping since this whole project started.
	Resist his natural Zoomer tendency towards degenerating things around him.
	I think he's making a good point there, man.
	I don't think he is.
	Yeah, I know, but this is... What did I complain about?
	Is it you can't wear a jacket or something?
	No, I don't tell people whether or not they need to go to work today by telling them the date.
	The date!
	Because people rely on this podcast to know.
	They wake up in New York.
	And you're disappointing and letting down those people.
	That used to be the role of the front page of the newspaper, to know if you had to catch a flight that day.
	Yes, now today everyone wakes up and checks out the podcast.
	Yes.
	Before they get on the train.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Do we have time or are we doing more?
	I thought we were doing more.
	Okay.
	Sorry, I didn't realize the time.
	No, no, it's all right.
	Okay, we'll go for one more.
	The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws, says Tacitus.
	Yes, that is correct.
	Well, that's not quite the translation.
	The expression of Tacitus is once we suffered from crimes, now we suffer from laws, because he was living in the first great lawyer society and the lawgiver civilization.
	There have only ever been two.
	It's the Romans and the English.
	And so he was starting to see the phenomenon of a powerful state, unusually high state capacity for a pre-industrial civilization, the Romans, doing the thing that high state capacity countries do, which is, oh, we have a problem.
	Let us pass a law to fix it.
	Exactly that kind of thinking.
	Yes.
	Alexander says, I would vote for Malay for US President.
	I'd vote for him for British Prime Minister.
	I just want to be in charge of everything.
	Yeah, I just want people like him in charge of things.
	I'm really tired of the sort of polite, demure, rules-based order of society these days.
	I just want a bit of chaos, a bit of anarchy.
	I completely agree in your way of putting it, like, oh, we just elect a clown.
	Yeah.
	Frankly, yeah, I don't even care what their ideology is, if they're a funny clown.
	Well, this was the logic.
	I mean, I do know people hate British novelty candidates, you know, Lord Buckethead and Count Binhead and the monster-raving loony party and so on and so forth.
	It's got to be a proper lunatic.
	Well, when Screaming Lord Such was alive, that's how the monster raving loony party worked.
	He was a proper nutter and he would, I mean a performative nutter obviously, and he would turn up and he would rain on various electoral parades all over the country and it was very funny and the country got a laugh out of it.
	But that works in more stable times.
	I mean, this guy isn't actually trying to be funny.
	He just is funny.
	He's actually trying to... He's trying to make a point and do something real, yes.
	I'm getting more to it.
	I remember we had a meeting with this guy from the AFD once, and he told us a great story, which is that when they were starting to rise in the polls, they got a meeting because the new ambassador from the United States to Germany had been picked by Donald Trump.
	And this guy was picked not because he knew anything about Germany, but because he was a funny guy, and also was, you know, the kind of guy who liked Trump.
	So obviously, he met with the conservatives in Germany and just went, this is boring.
	And they just want him hung out with the AFD for the next four years?
	Because why wouldn't you?
	Like, they're actually the interesting people in Germany.
	And I don't know, I want more of that.
	But on that note, I think we're out of time, so where would people go and find more of you?
	Yeah, that's www.notonyourteam.co.uk is my substack.
	It's a custom domain, that's why it's got that.
	It's based on my Twitter handle, notonyourteam but always fair, that is me.
	And then on Twitter, at underscore Helen Dale.
	And so I have done that.
	And deliberately too, so people make it easy to find me.
	I don't just write on the sub stack.
	I also publish Lorenzo Warby's stuff.
	We're having our second Zoom chat for paid subscribers only tomorrow.
	At 10am British Standard Time, you will have to take out a paid subscription for that.
	Everything else is free, just subscribe, you will get all the reading and I'm not going to charge you for it.
	The main thing I'm trying to do is build up to 10,000 subscribers, we're about a little bit under 4,000 at the moment, so that I can take it as a fair complete for Lorenzo Warby's book.
	And one of the things we'll be talking about, and I just flagged it up very briefly here, but tomorrow, and I'm going to write a piece on this as well, is this decolonization rhetoric.
	And we've actually got, and I can tell the Lotus Eaters here, Professor Katie Barnett, who I mentioned earlier as a guest of Lorenzo's and mine on the podcast, because she, like me, was forced to do one of those compulsory subjects as an undergraduate.
	And she adopted a different strategy from me.
	I mean, I lied.
	She didn't lie.
	She tried to fight them and has got a really, and this is in the 90s, you have to remember.
	Yeah, it's been going on for a long time.
	It's been going on for a very long time.
	So we can give a bit of an intellectual history.
	And both of us, because Katie's got Jewish ancestry.
	She's not halachically Jewish, but she goes to a synagogue.
	She's Jewish on her father's side.
	She, like me, noticed very early on that The rhetoric that Australia's Indigenous types copied, it was very much copied.
	It was not them.
	They used to speak differently when they were arguing civil rights or even separatism.
	They used to sound more like the Black Panthers, if you go back to the 70s, to be fair, which is a recognisable political group.
	If you disagree with them, you can spot that sort of Black Power type rhetoric.
	And then suddenly it changed.
	It became this decolonisation, occupier, settler.
	Colonial entity, all of these things.
	And Katie and I noticed at about the same time, hang on, they've lifted this off the Palestine conflict.
	And so we're going to talk a bit about that history.
	Chiefly, the big point is that when they say that decolonization means material reality, they mean you as well.
	This is a very violent ideology.
	Anyway, otherwise we will be back tomorrow.

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