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Nov. 10, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:29:03

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #782

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	Good afternoon, folks.
	Welcome to the podcast for Friday, the 10th of November.
	See, I'm still way ahead of Callum here.
	I'm joined by Josh and a lovely guest, Graham.
	How am I pronouncing this?
	Linehan?
	I am getting that right.
	I always pronounce it wrong.
	But thank you so much for coming in.
	This has been really interesting.
	Thank you.
	I'm a big fan of your work, actually.
	Good.
	At least nice to know someone still is.
	Yeah, but your work was never derided on its own terms, was it?
	It's like JK Rowling.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, but I do think it was kind of part of the reason I was cancelled is because it was so beloved.
	Yeah.
	Oh, same with Rowling.
	You know, they come after people whose stuff they, you know, is liked by people.
	You know, I think it's because they view us basically like traitors or something.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's kind of wild.
	Heretics.
	Yeah.
	It's like, no, you've got to sign up to the idea that actually there's no difference between men and women and actually men can become women and vice versa.
	And if you don't, you're a Nazi.
	Yeah.
	What's it like being a Nazi now, father?
	It's on the internet everywhere.
	I've always wanted to say it to a person.
	What is it like being part of the far right?
	Well, you know, it's a nice studio.
	No.
	You know, what's fascinating to me is how Many of the, all the things that I used to associate with the far right, that I used to come at you about online, because I thought that you represented these things.
	Misogyny, antisemitism, all of these things are now being kind of, you know, they're left positions, you know?
	And everything I thought I was fighting, I'm now fighting again, but I appear to be on the other side of it.
	So the way I always pictured myself, so I always thought of myself as a liberal, but then the liberals just went bonkers.
	And so I'm like, okay, I'll just be a conservative.
	It's fine.
	Yeah.
	But I'm not like a radical, you know, like, you know, I don't have like very extreme opinions on much thing and anything really.
	Just sensible opinions, I think.
	Well, you know, my posy as well, like she doesn't strike me as radical.
	It's just sensible opinions.
	And she's like, she's got the kind of right wing Nazi brush as well, you know, and it's, uh, it's just, and again, you know, the same people who were throwing that accusation at her are now kind of, uh, You know, engaging in a form of holocaust denial, you know?
	It's extraordinary what's going on.
	Or worse, sort of holocaust advocacy.
	Yes, yes.
	Which I suppose was, well, we've got an announcement before we get into the first segment, but just a quick thing.
	So because of Armistice Day, usually the weekends we have two shows that go out.
	They're going to be switched around, so Contemplations is normally on the Saturday and Epochs is on the Sunday, but Epochs is our history show and it's going to be about Armistice Day.
	So that's coming out on the Saturday because it's thematically appropriate and Contemplations will be out on the Sunday.
	And if you aren't subscribed, why not?
	You should be.
	Give us your money and you can get 33% off for three months if you use the promo code BIRTHDAY.
	So go and sign up and support us so we can get great guests like Graham in.
	It's also worth mentioning as well that The Contemplations is about the James Webb Space Telescope and all of those amazing images that have come out of that and that's something I really care about and it will be good.
	Hopefully it's worth an extra day's wait.
	I'm totally unimpressed with space.
	I think space is so unimpressive so I'm just...
	I have to work with this.
	I'm very disappointed.
	Joshua Shores means this is good and interesting and exciting, so go and watch it.
	It's one of the best things that humanity's ever done, yes.
	Honestly, I'm just winding you up.
	It's impressive, obviously.
	It's just really funny because you get defensive about it.
	I do.
	You've bashed my scientific passions before.
	I know, I'm a total Luddite.
	You're bashing space.
	Yeah, I'm anti-space.
	Okay, now I have to compose myself.
	So, this Saturday, tomorrow, there's going to be two marches, as far as I'm aware, and I think it could actually all end in tears.
	Before we start, I've not advised anyone to go, but nor have I castigated anyone who wants to go.
	There's a lot of people online saying, don't go.
	It's going to be bad.
	And to be honest with you, it's definitely got the potential to be bad.
	So, of course, on Saturday, the king, the prime minister, and various other notables will be giving their... showing respect to the war dead at the cenotaph by laying wreaths and holding a two-minute silence. and various other notables will be giving their... showing respect And there's going to be protests there in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza.
	Now, I'm not asking anyone to make a comment on whether they support Israel-Gaza or anything like that, but I think the issue isn't really about that here.
	The issue really is about the lack of respect for, well, a venerable British tradition.
	Am I wrong?
	I very much agree.
	I think the choice to make it on, you know, on Saturday is a very deliberate one.
	On Armistice Day?
	Yeah.
	And there have been many different protests that have been on, say, work week.
	So saying, oh, well, it's just a weekend, it's just a coincidence, is perhaps a little bit of a convenient get out.
	I don't necessarily know the ins and outs of it, whether they're deliberately doing it or not, definitively, but I would imagine that there's a certain amount of it.
	Perhaps they're trying to actually get some of the credibility of, you know, the armistice event and try and apply that to their protest in trying to make them out to be comparable things, perhaps?
	There's certainly a lack of... What do you think on this before we go on?
	Well, you know, Irish people have always had a kind of mixed feelings about the poppy, you know, because it represents different things in some ways.
	But, you know, honoring the war dead seems a good thing to do, especially when you're talking about the fight against Nazism.
	I think it was World War One, actually.
	Oh, it was the Kaiser.
	Right, okay.
	But still, the fight against Germans is...
	It's close enough.
	But I don't know, I mean, I've been in Westminster both times while the recent events have been going on.
	And I don't know, I'm seeing a lot of white guys, you know, I'm seeing a lot of middle, you know, young white men.
	I saw an extraordinary thing of a bunch of white hipsters praying to Mecca, which I thought was an extraordinary sight.
	Yeah, they had rugs laid out.
	And i don't know i think what it is is i think there's an opportunistic aspect to this where a lot of.
	You know people are people there kind of what they see is their struggle is being done to buy the same kind of people who have been.
	Um, you know, who spent the last five years not working on a, on a, on a way of, uh, uh, achieving peace in the Middle East, but I've spent that time canceling women, you know?
	Yes, there's definitely a Venn diagram that overlaps a lot.
	I'm seeing a lot of pronouns in people who are denying what happened on October the 7th.
	It is also worth mentioning, I've realized that my poppy is still on my jacket.
	That wasn't a deliberate choice not to wear it, it was just that I had forgotten to transfer it over.
	My poppy is probably going to be on for the next six months because I'll forget it's there.
	But I have mine, so another black mark against Josh.
	Yeah, they're adding up, aren't they?
	So one thing that's really bothering me is the very weak response to this from the establishment.
	As you see, the Met Police here tweeted out a few days ago, we're asking you not to go.
	We'd like you to urgently reconsider because, um, the, uh, the, who's the name of the tracklist?
	Deputy Commissioner Ade Adelekan.
	Okay.
	Says it's not appropriate to hold protests in London on the weekend.
	Okay, that's interesting because actually it is within your power to shut areas of London down.
	So you could make it that they were nowhere near, but instead of taking any kind of affirmative action, they're just saying, please don't.
	It's my understanding that in London you've got to apply to have a protest beforehand, so it has to be approved, which is questionable all on its own, but one has to wonder why they're not perhaps taking a heavier hand considering that there's already something that would conflict with it in the remembrance.
	It could be any protest, but you could easily just say, sorry, no protests allowed on this day because of national sentiment.
	That'd be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
	Protest tomorrow, protest the day before, just not today I'm afraid.
	So who is protesting?
	So the people protesting are the Palestine's Solidarity Campaign.
	They plan, as you can see, to assemble at 12 noon in Hyde Park and then march to the U.S.
	Embassy in Vauxhall.
	Full details of the route will be announced shortly and they're hoping to get a million people.
	Because, of course, they had protests a couple of weeks ago.
	The protest is organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Stop the War Coalition, Muslim Association of Britain, Palestine Forum in Britain and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
	And, as you can see, they're bussing people in from around the country.
	That last one's a little bit left of field, isn't it?
	Yeah, what's it got to do with nuclear disarmament?
	But my knowledge of London isn't that good, because I'm a sort of Devonshire country boy, and so, does that go past the Cenotaph at all?
	It's not supposed to.
	Okay.
	But as you can see, the full details of the march will be released on the day.
	So, who knows?
	Now, you'll get people saying it's not going to go anywhere near the Cenotaph.
	But it has done previously.
	They've had previous marches.
	And one of the interesting things is a former Hamas leader is behind all of this and is going to be leading it.
	He's the founder of the Muslim Association of Britain.
	He's a terrorist.
	Yeah, and terrorist as recognized, or at least a former terrorist, I suppose, as recognized by the British government.
	Yeah, actually formally recognized by the British government.
	He lives in a council house in London now.
	He was involved with their strategy as recently as 2019.
	Is this the gentleman that got £129,000, I think that was the number, of government grant money to buy his property in London as well?
	Oh no, if he's in a council house, of course not.
	No, but I mean, we're paying for Mohammed Kathim Salwala, former leader of Hamas, to live in London.
	It's a bit bonkers, isn't it?
	Yep.
	Why is he here?
	How is he allowed in this country?
	You're no longer leading the terrorist group.
	Right, okay, that's fine.
	There might be a...
	The problem might be that the original reaction to the atrocity on the 7th of October wasn't strong enough.
	In terms of, you know, there should have been a day of mourning, there should have been all sorts of things to mark that occasion.
	And unfortunately, we've moved so far beyond it now that we've had three or four days completely dedicated to, you know, overlooking what happened on that day.
	You know, I still feel like we haven't properly mourned the dead.
	You know, 1,300 is it?
	Yeah.
	I've seen interviews with people in the States that have gone to pro-Palestine marches that weren't even aware of what happened in the first place.
	There were ones in Britain.
	Oh really?
	Yeah.
	I haven't seen those.
	I covered one in Britain.
	Okay.
	Just these people are, oh, I don't know what happened on the 7th.
	I'll have to go look that up.
	Well, I've been kind of talking about this for a while, um, because, you know, my, my hobby horse is the, is the trans issue because of what it's doing to women and children.
	Um, and, uh, I, I think that there's been a kind of collapse in trust in the media because, you know, when Eddie Izzard is, is on and they're using she, her pronouns, they're literally lying into people's faces.
	Um, and I think that it's leading to a kind of, everyone knows about faked footage and propaganda and stuff like this.
	No one knows what's true.
	So I feel like we've had this terrible thing of, there's a similar thing with the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which is that the bodies weren't even cold before people were coming out on the streets in favor of Hamas, you know?
	It's really disturbing the way atrocities don't have the kind of traction.
	You know, I remember from something like Columbine, that devastated us for weeks, you know?
	What I find strange is, why is there a very loud and active constituency that's in favor of the attackers?
	That's a weird thing, isn't it?
	I know, I know.
	I don't know how you can look at the image of women's broken bodies in the back of trucks being spat on and not come away at least thinking, well, maybe I'll leave it a while before I go marching.
	I need to get on Twitter right away and support those people, yeah.
	It's been extraordinary.
	I've never seen such a moral failure.
	It's a weird kind of moral fragmentation because they do have a moral argument on their side and say, well, look what Israel's doing to the Palestinians.
	Okay, that's fair.
	But it's this very impenetrable divide between the two.
	That I don't think can ever really be bridged.
	And then it comes here and we have to deal with it.
	And it's like, God, why do we have to deal with this as well?
	You know?
	Um, so anyway, obviously the veterans like, well, hang on a second.
	You can't just march past the Cenotaph and desecrate it again on Armistice Day.
	And so of course they were warned, well, don't go and stage a counter demonstration.
	It's like, well, how can you ask people not to do that?
	You know you that's a ridiculous ask of course they're going to want to.
	But there is I think you know we've seen I have to say the.
	You know, the Let Women Speak events.
	At the very, very start in London, sorry, of the most recent ones, they were very, you know, the first one was very, first and second were very poorly policed.
	And as soon as they kind of, you know, got exposed how bad it was, they really stepped up their game.
	And suddenly they were keeping the protesters a long way away from the women who were speaking.
	Yeah, they were very, very good.
	But I worried, I just think that, you know, I was, I was looking at them the other day at another Let Women Speak event, and I just thought, gosh, they're stretched at the moment, you know?
	And it's all because of people who, you know, who want to come out and they really physically want to attack these women, you know?
	I have physically been attacked by them myself.
	Have you?
	Oh yeah.
	Oh yeah.
	Um, in London and in King's College London, I was physically attacked by a bunch of men, but it's okay because I took their flag.
	So I have an anti-far flag at home that I captured from.
	Oh good.
	Yes.
	Such a symbolic victory as well.
	Yes, it's pretty good.
	But you are right, they are actually violent people.
	One thing I can't help but notice on what I'm just going to call the other side of the argument, the non-left wing crazy side of the argument, none of these people have been violent.
	Even though they don't all agree, none of these people would go out and just beat them.
	Sorry, who are you talking about?
	Just anyone else who's not the sort of radical left.
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	Like, you know, the Let Women Speak events are literally ordinary women who put their hand up and have like five minutes to say something.
	And you would think that they were, um, you know, you.
	But that's the point, isn't it?
	Because like, whenever it's been on our side of the thing, none of our guys have been going out to try and start fighting.
	It's always been them on their side with their masks and whatever else to come and fight with us.
	It's like, look, we don't want to fight.
	We want to be able to say what we want to say, you know, to protest as we want to protest.
	Just like the, let me speak, just like any of these other events.
	The very act of not letting people speak is basically a smokescreen.
	It's trying to create enough chaos that it feels like what the people are trying to say is somehow evil.
	So yeah, that's why as a phrase, let women speak, is so powerful.
	Because what is wrong with that?
	Well, I'm married, so I can't really comment.
	It also doesn't help that the media coverage will quite often cover these sorts of things, where people are minding their own business, they get attacked, and then the media will quite often paint it as if, well, they were instigating it in some way, even though it was just them speaking their mind, saying what they wanted to, and then people turn up who aren't involved and then attack them or assault them, milkshake them, throw soup, those sorts of things.
	Yeah, there's a, there's a, and the media, the same media who are kind of allowing this to happen, because they don't, they won't interview Kelly J, they won't interview Stella O'Malley, they won't interview, you know, Helen Joyce.
	They don't let any of these people on.
	And the reason I think they won't let them on is because they are all entirely sensible, gentle, compassionate people, you know?
	Maybe Kelly's a bit pugnacious.
	Yeah, but that's what I like about them.
	Yeah, me too.
	But what they're most frightened of seeing is the compassion that they feel for many of the people that they've been told I mean, people have been told these people hate a certain group of people.
	And yeah, all you hear is compassion and understanding and a desire to help them.
	But also the arguments are persuasive.
	I think that really is it.
	Yes.
	You know, if you get someone who stands up and says, well, look, I think X is this for whatever reasons, they know that people are going to be like, yeah, well, I agree with that because that's a common sense position.
	And honestly, it's almost with everyone who the media demonizes.
	In some way, that's basically what it boils down to, I think.
	That's why, you know, like I did an interview recently and like all the interviews I do, I'm pointing at things and people just keep looking at my finger, you know.
	Yeah, I know that feeling.
	But the very first thing I said in the interview was, you know, children are being mutilated and sterilized, you know.
	And like, the next thing it's about me, you know, using naughty words on Twitter.
	And it's like, why did we just skip over the mutilation and sterilization of children?
	Surely that's like a significant issue with high stakes that should be explored.
	But they're terrified of exploring it for, not just because none of them are briefed, none of them understand the issue.
	But the second thing is they know that they have been merrily reporting on everything under the sun except this issue for the last five years.
	So a huge medical scandal is underway and has been underway.
	It's probably destroyed a whole generation of gay kids.
	And they just, you know, pretended it wasn't happening.
	Yeah, we've spoken to many detransitioners, we've had a bunch in to interview, and it's just, it's just harrowing.
	It's just genuinely harrowing.
	It's one of those things that history's not going to look very kindly on, and particularly the fact that, you know, when I was at university, and around, say, 10 years ago, these sorts of things would have been very abnormal.
	You know, when I was studying psychology, it was taught as gender dysphoria, which is a mental health condition, like other dysphoric conditions.
	Yeah.
	And it was just, it wasn't even questioned.
	Sorry to have to drag us back onto the topic, but Nigel Farage is of course quite strident on this, calling the police gutless for not banning the pro-Palestinian march.
	And of course, what happens when the authorities fail in their duty to uphold the sacred days that the British have in their hearts?
	Well, you get people like Tom Robinson coming out and saying, well, okay, we're going to have our own counter-protest.
	Um, again, Tommy is one of those people who I think is just mostly just smeared.
	Um, I mean, he's got, yeah, he's got his downsides, but generally I think that he's not nearly as bad as people think he is.
	Um, and.
	So then him and his supporters are going to go out and counter-protest around the cenotaph.
	So, of course, GB News.
	That's weird framing from GB News.
	Fears grow of far-right yobs clashing with innocent pro-Palestine march.
	Like, sorry, the pro-Palestine march is led by an actual Hamas terrorist?
	You can say whatever you want about Tom Robinson, but he's never been convicted of terrorism.
	He's never been part of a prescribed group.
	Actually, I think he was.
	No, no, he was a member of the BNP when he was, like, 18.
	But they're not prescribed, are they?
	I'm not entirely sure.
	I don't know very much about... I think they actually stand in elections.
	But the point being an actual terrorist is not...
	In some way denigrated by apparently the common sense outlet, GB News.
	You can see the replies to this have not been very kind to GB News, because that is disgusting framing, frankly.
	I saw this as advertiser courtship, really.
	I know that they have been having troubles with advertisers in the past, and perhaps this would be the kind of thing that they'd say, see, we're not all bad.
	I mean, at the first pro-Palestine demonstration, they were literally chanting death to Jews.
	It's just actually staggering.
	The one in Swindon, which I heard, even though I didn't necessarily want to, was the from the rivers to the sea chant.
	So that's been prescribed as anti-Semitic by some.
	But the problem is the far-right yobs who just want the Senate to have to not be desecrated.
	I don't think it's going to be a good weekend.
	No, I don't.
	Like I said, I'm not advising anyone to go or anything like that.
	But if you do go, I'm absolutely not going to tell you off for doing so.
	Sinek and Braverman have both come out saying, well, they shouldn't do this.
	This is wrong and disrespectful.
	It's really interesting because actually it's Braverman who holds the keys here.
	She's the person who could say you can't have that protest.
	And for some reason she just won't use her executive authority as the Home Secretary to just prevent it.
	I don't know why.
	From my understanding to conversations with many police officers, the police have never been under more political control than now.
	And so the sort of argument that the Prime Minister couldn't do something is a rather weak one.
	No, it just means nothing.
	Like, the Prime Minister appoints the Home Secretary, the Home Secretary controls whether the police are going to allow a protest to happen or not.
	So it's totally within the power of the Conservative Party right now to just say, OK, we're just not going to allow the pro-Hamas thing, and therefore Tommy doesn't need to go down to London, and therefore it can just be a peaceful day of remembrance that everyone actually wants.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	And they can just have the protest tomorrow, the day after.
	But for some reason there's not.
	And I think it is just that people are concerned because other cenotaphs in the country have been defaced with free Palestine graffiti.
	So it seems that there is a kind of animus here.
	And so I'm just genuinely quite concerned about tomorrow.
	Basically, if you're going, just be good.
	Act as if you're going to church.
	Don't do anything stupid, because no one's going to be on your side afterwards if you do.
	So just be sensible.
	We'll leave that there.
	OK, now for something perhaps even more controversial.
	We can't put this on YouTube, can we?
	We can't, no.
	So I can at least avoid the YouTube terms and conditions language that I have to use.
	Just as a quick thing, Graham, we don't normally have to not put segments on YouTube.
	Normally, everything we put up, we can put on YouTube.
	Really?
	You come in.
	OK, we can't put this on YouTube.
	I'm not joking.
	I'm not joking.
	I've done this especially for you as well.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Wow.
	That's how controversial you are compared to me.
	So, when it comes to elephants in the room, I think there are many.
	And one that I've always said for a very long time is that the biggest elephant in the room is missing transgender news coverage in Jordan.
	I find that this is something that... You don't find this?
	This keeps me awake at night.
	Well, the fact that Jordan, the country, doesn't have transgender news coverage.
	Yes.
	It's not so much an elephant in the room as an elephant not in the room.
	It very much is, isn't it?
	The reason I draw attention to this in particular is the people who are associated with this article, and it is the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford.
	Both of these are very, very important institutions.
	So the Reuters Institute, as well as having journalistic schools and generally setting the tone for journalism more generally, because if you don't know, Reuters tend to be the ones who report on lots of news stories first and then other news outlets will see their reporting and then cover it themselves.
	That's why quite often you'll see commonalities in word choices that are very sort of idiosyncratic in lots of articles across the UK.
	It's because quite often Reuters will use a word and then other journalists will then use that because they lack imagination because they're in journalism.
	Because they're stupid and lazy?
	Yes.
	Am I wrong?
	But I wanted to read a short extract from this because it's fraught with nonsense, as you can probably imagine.
	So it is as follows.
	In Jordan, trans issues remain largely absent from the news agenda.
	It's worth mentioning as well that Jordan is 97% Muslim.
	Often deemed a Western concern, it's brushed aside with statements like, it has no place in our culture, society or religion.
	I mean, I say that about Britain as well, but even more so, I think, in the Islamic world.
	And she goes on to say, my journalism fellow project seeks to shatter this misconception, revealing that transgender issues transcend geographical boundaries.
	Well, that's news to me and the data.
	Yes, they are paid, probably quite handsomely considering who they're associated with.
	Statistics, according to her, from a 2023 Ipsos report spanning 30 countries including Turkey, Singapore, Thailand and Japan indicate that 3% of the global population identifies as transgender, non-binary or other than male or female.
	Translated to Jordan's context, this represents a staggering 345,000 individuals among its 11.5 million populace.
	Do you believe that, Graham?
	Do you think there are nearly 350,000 transgenders in Jordan?
	There's quite an extrapolation error here.
	In a global population that the variance is going to be consistent and universal amongst all countries.
	I know it's sort of an estimate, but even so, one would assume it'd be much lower in Muslim countries.
	I can't help but think, I mean, you know, call me a racist for this, but is Thailand skewing the statistics there slightly?
	It may well be.
	Are there more transgender people in Thailand?
	Oh, I see what you're saying.
	Yeah, yeah.
	As with many polls, I find that people who go into political polling more generally are people who weren't capable enough to go into academic statistics, and so they're fraught with methodological errors.
	This is a thing that is one of my passions because I did research methodology at university and on a regular... Wasn't this what your master's dissertation was in?
	Well, I did my dissertation in decision making, but I did come up with a new form of data analysis for binary data.
	So, I know my stuff hopefully.
	Just let you peak off a little bit there.
	Yeah, thank you.
	Thanks for the setup there.
	But yes, there's likely just errors in how they've asked the questions, worded things, analysed the statistics to inflate that figure.
	So you're a trans denier?
	It seems like it, yes.
	And the final paragraph I'm going to read from this is, this invisible community grapples with marginalisation, familial isolation, societal discrimination and legal hurdles in Jordan.
	Access to medical treatment and accurate identification is a privilege denied, resulting in limited educational employment opportunities and a rough path to a peaceful life.
	And I think that this is trying to invent problems in which They do not exist, and this is a sort of Cass's belly, in my mind, to start interfering in other countries in a sort of colonial-style way, where we're imposing ideas that have only really taken root in the Anglosphere to countries that will not welcome them and will be very hostile to us.
	I think – not to sound a little bit too sensationalist, so please stop me if you think so – but One of the reasons for the rise of radical Islam since the 1970s, one was King Faisal of Saudi Arabia spreading Wahhabist schools in the Middle East.
	Another is they recognised subversive ideology infiltrating the Islamic world from the West.
	That's what Wahhabism is?
	Yes it is.
	It becomes a resistance to liberalism.
	But it wouldn't necessarily be fair to say it's the same thing.
	They're sort of two sides of the same coin though.
	I can see pushing this sort of thing as causing a massive reaction to the people who are doing so, and it's my belief that if we start pushing this sort of thing on the Islamic world, people will die because of this.
	So I don't want to be hyperbolic and over-egg it, but I do think that there is an element of life or death because, of course, People in Islamic countries won't necessarily recognize that it's not all of British society and so will attack us in retaliation.
	Well, you know, what's interesting about Thailand is I believe in Thailand, like there was a funny story.
	You may remember a trans activist called Tara Wolf, who became famous because he punched a grandmother at a speaker's corner.
	Sorry, I didn't hear about this.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I've heard about this.
	This is one of the things, this piqued a lot of people.
	Man punches grandma.
	Man in dress punches grandma.
	Yeah.
	That's how you know they're the good guys.
	He punched her and then he was charged.
	But Maria McLachlan, who was the woman who was punched because she refused to use female pronouns for him, Uh, he didn't get, uh, much in the way of, uh, of, uh, punishment.
	He is now in Thailand, uh, kickboxing against men.
	And the reason he's kickboxing against men in Thailand, it's illegal for men to fight against women.
	And he actually said in an interview, I hope to be able to fight women again someday.
	That's truly ridiculous.
	Well done, Thailand.
	Yeah, but my point is that when you think about Thailand, you think of it as a place where that kind of gender nonconformity is like really part of the culture.
	But they know the difference between men and women, you know, and they don't pretend otherwise.
	They understand this is a bit of a fetish, really.
	Yeah, well there's another interesting thing I saw, there was a BBC show by Sue Perkins, and I think she was somewhere like, I think it was Calcutta, could be wrong, and she was kind of, in that BBC way, waxing lyrical about the thriving trans scene, you know?
	Just out of curiosity, I looked up when homosexuality was legalized in the country and it was like a year before the show was filmed.
	So of course there's a thriving trans scene because they drive gay people into the only acceptable expression of their gender non-conformity, which is pretending to be women.
	Is that similar to the Iranians then?
	Exactly, like that's another thing.
	Really interesting.
	Pink News used to praise Iran for... For suddenly transitioning gays?
	For their trans, their kind of progressive attitude to trans people.
	I didn't know that.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's worth looking up Pink News and Iran for their coverage.
	That's just bonkers!
	I would say if there's any truth to the figure, I would say a lot of the people have very good internet connections and are all speaking English.
	Because this is an American phenomenon that's spread basically through the internet.
	Uh, what's the word?
	A mass delusion that's spread through the internet and it's, and it's really, it really takes most hold in countries that are a little bit obsessed with America.
	I think that's why Japan is currently, uh, yeah, I believe there's a rape crisis center that's, that's been closed down or something.
	Cause it won't admit men in Japan.
	So, um, yeah, it's, it's interesting.
	I'd love to know more about that 345, a hundred thousand figure.
	Hmm.
	So the funny thing is that The Guardian has unintentionally refuted this and I really enjoy, you know, using left-wing outlets to refute their own narratives.
	It's a good sport and one I try and engage in very often and that is talking about the census records and the title of the article is Census Records Trans Population in England and Wales but Accuracy is Doubted.
	I'm going to read just a short part from this.
	It says, the proportion of people who had a different main language than English who said they were trans was four times higher than the 0.4% of the population with English as their main language, or English or Welsh in Wales.
	Overall, 13% of people identifying as trans did not speak English well, and the London boroughs of Newham and Brent recorded more than double the average proportion of respondents identifying as trans, more than places such as Brighton and Cambridge.
	I can't believe they wrote this!
	So hang on a second, are they saying that loads of foreign transgenders have moved to England?
	No, it's that they didn't understand the question and because of the language barrier they didn't even understand that transgenderism is a thing in the first place and so were thrown off by the question and answered it wrong.
	So do we know that or could it be that it's trans refugees?
	Even the Guardian's not taking that line, Carl.
	You're trying to outflank them on the left, are you?
	And none of these words have any stable definition.
	Trans doesn't really mean anything because it can mean a person who's a transsexual or Eddie Izzard, who's just a transvestite.
	It means children who are going through a rough puberty and feel that something's wrong, which most people going through puberty feel.
	So, you know, the idea of putting any of these questions on the census has always been absurd.
	Of course, it's going to fail.
	Of course, it's going to be a mess, you know.
	But unfortunately, we've had so many organizations, including government organizations, infiltrated by ideologues that, you know, we get a mess like this.
	Absolutely.
	And I want to have a look at some UK-based news just to make the point that I think that a lot of the trans advocates think that now the sort of Anglosphere is a sort of safe base of operations to then go about to other places.
	And I don't think they're necessarily misguided in that.
	And I think the sort of Icing on the cake is this article, sorry for having to use the express but I thought that the headline was the most appealing.
	Tory MPs break out in open warfare in major rout ahead of King's speech and this is of course to do with the ban on conversion therapy and the schism in the Conservative Party is that The inclusion of transgenderism, and that people are saying, well, you're not going to be able to question it then.
	You can only legally advocate for people doing so, which is not backed up by the data, in my view, in my reading of the research, which I have read relatively extensively.
	Major Australian study on Keira Bell came out today.
	Oh, really?
	I haven't heard about that yet.
	Yeah, it says it's just, you know, basically the claims about stopping suicide are completely false.
	Keira's story is basically used as a basis to expand outwards.
	And what it kind of proves is that, is that like, uh, early affirmation, which is the, which is what they're talking about here.
	They're saying that early effort, they think that anything other than nearly an instant affirmation is conversion therapy.
	It's a cult, isn't it?
	It's dragging people into the cults.
	Yeah.
	It's recruiting.
	Yeah.
	It's recruitment.
	In my view, there's no reason for that view if you have an objective reading of the literature.
	Even if you are completely devoid of any knowledge of the politics around it, particularly some of the things published in the late 90s, it's not fraught with lots of this ideology.
	You get much better quality research going on there, and actually they were coming up with much better suggestions for how to help these people.
	It's part of the reason why I'm quite an advocate for fighting against this sort of stuff.
	The Welsh have also decided to redefine women to include transgender females.
	What's their definition?
	It's not just in Westminster.
	The definition of woman is one of my personal canards because I'm very hot on linguistics.
	What's the definition then?
	Well, can I also point out transgender females?
	That's an insane thing.
	Yeah, a transgender female is a trans man.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, even the Telegraph, which is fairly doubtful about this ideology, uses language that is confusing and people don't even know.
	I think there was some study recently and it was found that people thought that trans women Referred to women who are trans, so trans men.
	It is a counterintuitive label isn't it really?
	That's the whole ideology is deliberately confusing and deliberately counterintuitive because it does not want people to be able to talk about it, you know?
	So I'm a bit disappointed with that headline from the Telegraph, it's a bit weird.
	It's going to be more where that came from as well.
	This is also amazing as well.
	They haven't given us the verbatim definition, but the purpose of the proposed legislation includes transgender women, so it's just going to include men who are saying that they're going to become women or pretending or whatever.
	The definition further stated that transgender meant a person who is proposing to undergo or is undergoing or has undergone the process.
	So, this will be another Nicola Sturgeon situation.
	Ah, look at this rapist.
	Ah, suddenly I'm transgender.
	I'm proposing to undergo the surgery.
	Put me in the women's prison, please, boss.
	Yeah.
	Unbelievable.
	It really is.
	You could be proposing to undergo for your whole life.
	Exactly.
	You know, there's not gonna be a time limit on it, is there?
	Yeah.
	And that's why transgender is such a useless word compared to transsexual, which actually means something.
	Transsexual means someone who has actually gone through a really, you know, violent process to settle some issue that they have in their mind.
	But transgender, that can be someone who's wearing black fingernail polish.
	Exactly.
	By their own standards, gender ideology, gender as a social construct.
	And so a transgender person could literally just be from second to second flipping.
	And so what have you actually defined?
	What are you actually describing there?
	You know, absolutely nothing by their own standards.
	And that's why it's recruiting, you know, because as long as you want to, it's just basically, do you want to be on this team?
	Yeah.
	This team of people who say they're special, say there's something, uh, that they need to be treated differently from everyone else that they're, uh, you know, and also like these, these, a lot of, you know, incredibly guilty liberal kids want to feel like they're part of a, uh, kind of a neglected, uh, minority because they feel terrible about it.
	I have quite a cynical view that is probably quite controversial that I think that there are people that are aware of the limitations and advocate for it anyway because they believe that if People go through the operations, then there's going to be a certain element of sunk cost fallacy of where I've gone this far and therefore they have a political advocate for life.
	They can't change their mind.
	And that is why you see so-called trans influencers who are fully intact Encouraging children to get these operations, to take these drugs.
	That's the most disgusting aspect of this to me.
	And they're doing it to bolster their place as a sacred class in society.
	And they're making a decent amount of money from it as well.
	There's a lot of self-interest involved in it, unfortunately.
	So it's going to get worse as well as the stories go on.
	Transgender activist who said it would not matter if the number of female murders increased if men were allowed to self-identify as women is devising ethics rules for therapists.
	And they call me a misogynist!
	I'm the misogynist!
	One thing I find very frightening about these kinds of headlines and these kinds of people is these are These are like that.
	That's kind of almost a description of a Thomas Harris novel.
	You know, Hannibal Lecter was a psychologist.
	You know, he was a therapist.
	I think, you know, he worked.
	And now this person who says it doesn't matter if the number of female murders increased is devising ethics rules.
	I mean, it's it's it's really frightening how twisted some of this stuff is.
	Well, I'm going to come out and be very far right about this and say that I actually do think it matters if the number of women murdered increases.
	Study on, Carl.
	I know, I know.
	I expect the Guardian to come and give me a hit piece now.
	But no, I think that that person probably shouldn't be devising ethics rules.
	The annoying thing is, as well, I've had run-ins with ethics committees.
	Not bad ones, I might add.
	I dread to think, Josh.
	I do have a tendency to design experiments using electrodes and things like that, but that wasn't it.
	I had a back and forth with a very tepid experiment which was computer based, asking people about decision making, basically asking them how did they come to their university decisions because there's a population of university students, and I had a back and forth three different times before they actually accepted my research proposal.
	Your research proposal probably wasn't going to get women killed, was it?
	No it wasn't.
	Clearly I should have gone for something similar to this and they would have been all over it apparently.
	But it's really quite a testament to how bad my discipline is being subverted because I think organisations like the APA, the British Psychological Society, please don't take away my accreditation, they've all been subverted and they have now buckled to political pressure because there wasn't the evidence in my view to warrant these sorts of things?
	Well it's the word transgender might as well might as well say catholic or any religion you want to choose you know basically the word transgender is it it represents a religion you know and and this is the new sacred class and they they just can't be questioned But we can go further on that as well, because it actually contains a metaphysic of its own, because they always say, born in the wrong body.
	Yes.
	It's like, okay, well, where does the soul originate from before it arrives in the body then?
	But you're already committed to the soul.
	Because, I mean, like a normal person will say, well, the brain constructs the consciousness, and so it's a material phenomenon.
	You know, an atheist or a non-religious reading of that would be, no, your consciousness is a product of your brain, and therefore you don't have a second body or something prior to your body.
	That can't possibly be the case, and so they are in the realms of religion when they start saying things like that.
	I've actually had Christians correct me because I said that they believed in a sort of mind-body dualism, and they said actually there's a reading of Christianity whereby the soul is sort of the brain, if you will, and that kind of took me by surprise.
	I haven't read that much.
	I'm not a Christian scholar or anything, but this is definitely arriving in the realms of religion.
	And the final thing I wanted to mention is, do you notice anything unusual about this headline?
	Transgender paedophile Hannah Tove.
	This is America, by the way.
	Right, so we're not misgendering or deadnaming the paedophile.
	Yes, and this is supposedly the Daily Mail, who are called things like fascist by some people who don't know what fascism is, and things like that.
	This is supposedly our right-wing news outlet just bending over backwards to use the language of the left, which is very strange to me because There is an explanation.
	It just kind of shows how deeply the ideology has kind of got into not just the press, but everywhere.
	Apparently, if the equal treatment benchmark in courts It says that you should use someone's preferred pronouns, if possible, I think.
	Things like, unless it confuses the issue or upsets the victim, something like that.
	And the press is forced to report that, you know what I mean?
	So they have to say she, or they, I think they'll be breaking the law.
	So even though Mail Online or Mail and Telegraph have been very good on this, Even they are kind of hobbled by some of these rules.
	I had suspected that that might have been the case, but I wasn't able to actually find anything definitive, so thank you.
	Yeah.
	So, to kind of reinforce my point that this stuff is being spread outside of the Anglosphere now, I saw a couple of articles which kind of took me aback a little bit, such as this one, Inside India's First Hospital Clinic Exclusively for Trans People.
	And yes, these are things that are now being set up in places like India.
	I suppose India is going to be one of the earlier places to adopt this sort of thing, simply because of the commonality of English.
	Who was it that was giving 50 million for gender studies in Pakistan?
	That was America.
	I think that was in the COVID relief bill wasn't it?
	Yeah, that was right.
	In the COVID relief bill there was 50 million dollars earmarked for gender studies which is going to be this nonsense.
	In the COVID relief bill?
	Yeah.
	Oh, they love their pork barreling in America.
	They stuff all sorts of stuff in.
	But that's a great example of how this is, you know, explicitly American ideology that is being paid to be exported to countries that have got no interest in it whatsoever.
	to be charitable to americans as well it's only a fringe of america yeah it's not the average american like the average american probably doesn't want anybody says pakistan for any reason at all but and they'd be right but why gender studies because radical leftists are in control unintentionally subversive as well which is kind of amusing and And also this as well, interesting sort of puff piece from Al Jazeera of all outlets.
	In India, transgender beggars use digital apps to avoid discrimination.
	This is the kind of news story that everyone in the West wants to know about.
	Technology facilitating, begging in India for transgender people.
	Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar and you can imagine the kind of news they publish in Qatar is very different to the kind of news they publish in the West.
	The West is all subversive leftism.
	The Qatari attitudes need only look at the controversy around the World Cup being held there to know how they really feel.
	And this is very strange.
	It's not strange.
	It certainly is.
	Yeah.
	This is a form of attack on our societies.
	That's what this is.
	Yeah.
	And isn't it interesting that it is ideological colonialism, you know, which is supposed to be the big bugbear, the thing we all object to.
	But they're basically just kind of at using tracing paper and putting down their own concepts onto these different societies.
	And I don't think I've quite outlined just how insidious it is.
	Obviously, I've said that people may die because of this, but also you look at somewhere like Uganda, I covered the anti-homosexuality bill, and I listened to lots of their parliamentary discussions.
	And the rationale for lots of the people in favour of the bill was that, well, we were okay to tolerate this sort of thing, but then Western politicians and NGOs came in and tried to push it further and further, and this is just too much for us, we've got to push back against it because we've seceded too much ground. we've got to push back against it because we've seceded And the thing is that people who are advocating against...
	against these sorts of bills, the best thing they can do is not push too hard because you'll get a reaction against it and now they're more hardline than they ever were before.
	That same thing is going to go on here and the activists are actually going to shoot themselves in the foot.
	Because of their naivety or malevolence, I suppose.
	Do you remember the protests at the school in Birmingham, I think it was?
	I think so, yeah.
	The way that was covered was Muslim savages don't like gay people, you know?
	But I guarantee you the reason that they were there and the reason that there were protests is not because of gay people or gay rights.
	It was because of, you know, telling kids they might be born into the wrong body, telling kids that, you know, making toilets unisex.
	You know, these are things that go against Muslim, observant Muslim beliefs.
	To be fair, the gay thing may have been a part of that as well.
	Sure, but like, I don't think it would have hit a flashpoint if they were just saying to kids, some people are gay, get over it.
	But the fact that they're actually saying, some people are born into the wrong body, you might actually be a boy, you know, all this stuff is like, you know, toxic to observant Muslims, you know?
	It's toxic to anyone.
	I've got four kids, man.
	But my point is, the left has been has been ignoring this clash because it just doesn't fit with with their like we've seen the recent queers for palestine uh debacle you know i saw yesterday i haven't shared it because it was something my my new rule is if something is extremely shocking don't share it until it's backed up by a load of people But it seemed to show a gay person being thrown from a roof and then stoned.
	There's actually a fair amount of footage of that because the Muslims have been doing this for a while.
	Yes.
	But that doesn't even register.
	People can easily talk about it as if it just doesn't.
	And then switch to LGBT plus stuff as if there's no conflict.
	You get defences from Owen Jones being like, well, the anti-gay laws in Palestine are a result of British colonisation.
	Oh, that was amazing.
	Shut up, Owen.
	Just shut up, you idiot.
	It's like, maybe they could have been changed.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I've had something in power for like 20 years.
	I don't have much time to go through these last two things, so I think I'll probably end it here.
	I just wanted to say that this sort of thing has lots of far-reaching consequences, and we need to be very aware of how these sorts of ideologies are being communicated abroad, because The retribution isn't necessarily going to discriminate against who's been saying this sort of thing.
	We're all going to be tarred by the same brush, and so there may well be bad things happening in the Anglosphere because of this monstrosity, I'll call it.
	Yeah, I mean, when they're like, you've been transing my kids, I'm like, well, yeah, that's kind of true.
	You know, it's my taxes.
	It's my government.
	You know, they're doing it to my kids too, if that helps.
	Anyway, let's move on to something a little more entertaining.
	Right.
	Because I love Scientific American.
	It's my favorite publication.
	I hate it to bits.
	It's not in any way corrupted by far-left ideology, and everything they say is true.
	And so when they put an article like this, the theory that men evolved to hunt and women to gather is wrong, you know that you're in for truth.
	Raw, unfiltered, scientific truth.
	I'm already very angry.
	If I was American, I would be so embarrassed.
	Can you imagine a magazine called Scientific Irishman that had stories like this?
	We'd never live it down.
	So they begin by just saying, well, look, the theory that men go and hunt in hunter-gatherer societies is obviously nonsense because women have clearly superior hunting and gathering skills.
	In fact, nature's optimized them as such.
	This entire theory just has to be abolished at this point.
	Man, the hunter, they say, has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century.
	But the thing is, it's wrong.
	What did men do?
	We just sat around, didn't we?
	We just put our feet up.
	We're like the lions in a lion pride.
	It's like, right, the women have to go out and hunt and then we just eat the... I'm sure this article is going to be based on all of the paleoanthropological evidence, which I've spent a considerable amount of time reading.
	Well, mounting evidence from science, Josh.
	Ah, just science generally.
	Just science.
	No, it says exercise science.
	Yeah, it's exercise science.
	What's exercise science?
	Science of exercising.
	So people who studied physical education are now telling me about paleoanthropology.
	That's fantastic.
	Yes.
	Those are the people I want to disentangle.
	Women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts, such as running marathons, and therefore women did the hunting.
	It's that simple, Josh.
	Who's won the London Marathon every year since time immemorial?
	Listen, you and your facts.
	We're going to get to those in a minute, right?
	But we're trying to create a BS narrative about how women are exactly the same as men in every way and always have been.
	And so there's lots of evidence to suggest there's no difference.
	Going on a little bit more further, they actually do tell us about the difference.
	Let's see if I can find it.
	It's quite a long article, this.
	So, as you can see, the power of estrogen would imply there's a physical difference between men and women.
	They say the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males.
	Females have more type 1 or slow-twitch muscle fibers than men do.
	These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat.
	They are not all that powerful, but they do take a long time to become fatigued.
	They are the endurance muscle fibers.
	Males, in contrast, typically have more type 2, which is fast-twitch muscle fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and provide a great deal of power but tire rapidly.
	It's literally the next paragraph.
	The iniquity between male and female athletes is a result, not of inherent biological differences between sexes, but of how biases are in how they are treated in sports.
	Um, what?
	What is, what is wrong with you people?
	You literally have the biological and anatomy out to show people there are physical differences between men and women.
	And they're like, yeah, but the differences are not the result of inherent biological differences.
	This, this is like, uh, however many words devoted to getting, uh, men into female spaces.
	That's, that's what it is.
	Scientific American has been completely captured.
	That's precisely what it is.
	Cause what they want to establish in your mind, obviously not in reality, that there is just no physical difference between men and women.
	That's what they, that's, they're trying to achieve it.
	And so if they can arrive at the point where there's no difference in men and women, Why women run marathons better than men apparently, uh, then women can have been in every male space and therefore every man can be in every female space.
	Why wouldn't they?
	I like, you know, it's so infuriating.
	I just recently, I went to the battle of ideas, you know, that was good.
	Yeah.
	And I met, um, I met this woman whose daughter was a silver medalist in, uh, I think it was jujitsu.
	Why was she a silver medalist?
	I don't know.
	Oh, it wasn't?
	I thought you were going to say it was gold or something.
	No, she didn't get beaten by men, but she has now left the sport because she said it was impossible to deal with the men involved.
	Another young girl has quit her football team, someone I met.
	You know, and it's because of boys who are just kind of, who've realized that this is a fast track to getting a lot of goals in a game and looking like a kind of star, you know?
	Yeah.
	So it's, um, it's outrageous.
	I just don't understand why it's happening.
	I, I sometimes feel like I've fallen through some portal.
	That's because we literally have fallen through some portal.
	Bizarro world.
	So just, I mean, just we've, we've got the, the, the, the, the statistics.
	If we need to, if they were helpful in any way, shape or form, you can look it up that for the 10 fastest men ever, uh, men were faster than women in 50 mile, 100 mile and a thousand mile events.
	It's not really, I'm going to chase my dinner for a thousand miles.
	Am I, you know, obviously, and, oh, sorry.
	And the 3,100 mile event.
	Imagine running for 3,100 miles.
	But it's like, like all this, all this effort they're putting into trying to disprove all this stuff.
	It's just extraordinary.
	Yeah.
	I mean, men, they say to summarize the fastest men were 17 to 20% faster than the fastest women for all distances.
	It's like, okay, that's fine.
	That's not a, that's not a dunk on women.
	You know, that's not saying women suck because they can't run 3000 miles quite as fast as a man could run 3000.
	That's just the fact of human biological difference between the sex, right?
	Men and women have complementary niches, don't they?
	Yeah, and the thing is, as you can see in here, they say, look, the difference in the time that each one took narrows as the distance they run becomes longer, right?
	So men, the gap is a lot faster for men in short distances because of all the I saw this young girl the other day carrying her brother, you know, um, who was like a toddler, quite a heavy looking toddler.
	than the women.
	It's like, okay.
	That's interesting.
	I saw this young girl the other day carrying her brother, you know, who was like a toddler, quite a heavy looking toddler.
	And she had her kind of propped on her hip and was obviously walking for ages with this kid, you know.
	So maybe the endurance comes from having to lift children up a lot and carry them.
	That's a really good hypothesis.
	I think you're absolutely right on this, right?
	Because my wife can carry my kids longer than I can.
	And I mean it, it's because of the hips, right?
	I can't just put them on my hips.
	So I've got to like hold them up properly.
	Yeah, that's another thing.
	Which is tiring, right?
	But she can actually leverage them on her.
	And I always see her carrying around thinking, aren't you tired?
	But it's like those kinds of differences are seen as somehow bad, you know?
	Morally matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	Like you're locking a woman into motherhood.
	Well, no, you can do whatever you want, you know, but this is how we've evolved.
	So let's go back to this, because there's another part in this.
	Like I said, it's really long, but I'm going to try and find it.
	But I want you to pay attention to this framing, right?
	The modern psychological evidence, along with historical examples, exposes deep flaws in the idea that physical inferiority prevented females from partaking in hunting during our evolutionary past.
	Why would you use the term physical inferiority?
	Yes, interesting.
	That's a prejudicial term.
	Yes.
	That has moral connotation.
	It's not very scientific either.
	We were very strongly advised against using a native language like that in our scientific writing.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Why would you do this?
	And so they say the evidence from prehistory further undermines this notion.
	Males living in the Upper Paleolithic, 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe, do show higher rates of sets of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than women and females to throw spears.
	Right, so the male skeletons have got injuries on their elbows because they're throwing spears.
	The women don't.
	But, but, quote, it does not mean women were not hunting because the period, this period, is also when people invented the bow and arrow.
	Why didn't the men use the bow and arrow, Scientific American?
	The women invented bows and arrows going, listen you stupid men, we could use them.
	No!
	Man, you spear!
	What are you doing?
	Also, famously, didn't Amazon cut off their breasts to fire arrows?
	I think there might have been a tribe that did that somewhere.
	I think it might have been a myth.
	I'd have to look it up.
	But, uh, but they say the idea that, uh, in the past men were hunters and women were not, is not absolutely unsupported by the limited evidence that we have.
	Right.
	It's not absolutely unsupported.
	Right.
	That's very, very concrete.
	Um, because basically, you know, there will be examples in the, in the past, there was an example in Peru where they found a female skeleton who had clearly been hunting.
	So yeah.
	But that's not what they normally did, because that's through, you know, people have to cope with suboptimal conditions.
	It's also worth mentioning as well, part of the reason that we know human beings had a pretty stark division of labour, that men tended to do the hunting and women did the gathering, is that it wasn't true of all hominins, and so you have
	Species like Neanderthals, for example, you can see from their skeletons as well as their injuries that you find in the paleoanthropological record that it's more common to have hunting-related injuries in Neanderthal women than it is for Homo sapien women because they were less sexually dimorphic.
	It indicates that there's more similarity between them than there are with human beings, and one of the hypothesized reasons why Homo Sapiens succeeded and Neanderthals died out... Is because we didn't send our women off to hunt!
	Yeah, well, if you want to reproduce effectively, putting women out of danger and allowing them to be safe and risking just the men who, from a biological point of view, are more disposable, makes sense.
	Again, I would ask you to imagine if this was called Scientific Irishman.
	Scientific Englishman?
	I'd be deeply embarrassed.
	Yeah, Irish people wouldn't put up with something this stupid being put out under their own name.
	It's so unbelievably thick.
	But the interesting thing about Scientific American is it's very kind of authority, kind of allows it to be to degenerate in this way, you know?
	Like even the font, it just looks scientific American.
	It just looks impressive.
	It's obviously got a great history behind it, but they've made themselves a complete laughingstock.
	The quality of lots of scientific publications has steeply declined.
	I covered... The Lancet?
	Yes, I covered... Oh, the Lancet, yes.
	I covered the decline in the journal Nature, which is the sort of premier scientific journal.
	I once had a professor say that most academics would kill their own grandmother to get a publication in Nature, and they were talking about how it was right for them to talk about how Donald Trump is a bad president as a journal.
	They were weighing into politics.
	Anyway, let me carry on.
	So they finished this by just saying this.
	Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kind of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food.
	At the end of a hunt, there is something that happens.
	You have to physically subdue the giant beast that you're trying to eat.
	So, okay, you've chased it for a thousand miles.
	Fair enough.
	Why would the people with the lower amount of upper body strength be the ones tasked with subduing a giant wild animal?
	Just a question.
	Can you flip to the end as well?
	There's something there that... Now, it's not so clear what they're up to.
	The last paragraph, now when you think of cave people, we hope you will imagine a mixed sex group of hunters.
	Yes.
	Do you know what I mean?
	That's what they're up to, you know?
	Yeah, that's precisely it.
	None of this is descriptive.
	This is normative.
	We want you to be in a certain way.
	And the thing is, the weird thing is, I just don't know why they didn't explain it to the actual hunter-gatherers that are still living.
	Yes.
	Because there are people in the world who, and this is a group of people called the Hazda people, right?
	There are only 1,300 of them left, but they have, in Tanzania, been there for... Tanzania, yeah.
	Got you back.
	Okay, fair enough.
	Foreign words, I'm not.
	But they've been there for a hundred thousand years living this same lifestyle.
	And it's the men who go out hunting.
	The women stay home and gather roots and berries while the men favor handmade bows and arrows.
	And really, I just want one of the experts to come down and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	Look at the women, look how they evolved.
	Obviously, they're the hunters.
	You're just a bunch of bigots, cavemen, misogynists.
	Get out and go and hunt.
	And there are people who have been to this tribe and gone on hunts with them and stuff like this.
	Obviously, it's the men.
	They go out, they hunt some big beast, and then they carry it home.
	It's not very controversial for me to say that the experts are liars, I think, in this regard.
	The funny thing is, when I studied social psychology and group dynamics and things like that at university, we were talking about the sociologists in the 20th century that went out to all these tribes, and it was notable that there was only one matriarchal hunting society, and it was just like, isn't that weird?
	Isn't that a strange sort of quirk?
	Rather than, oh yes, this is true of everything.
	Yeah.
	So we'll leave that there and we'll go to some comments.
	We have lots of comments about you, Graham.
	Okay.
	All terrible, I'm afraid.
	I'm joking, I'm great.
	Sophie says, Graham Linehan, no freaking way.
	I'm a huge fan.
	Father Ted, Black Books, The It Crowd.
	I've enjoyed, all I've enjoyed hugely and love re-watching from time to time, especially Father Ted.
	RussianGarbageEven says, Graham, pleasure to see you here.
	ItTown and Father Ted, IT Crowd and Father Ted.
	IT Crowd.
	Is it IT Crowd?
	It's either.
	Ah, you got got.
	Some of the best series I've ever watched.
	You know, all of these are still being memed to this day.
	Timeless classics.
	Ron says, thanks Graham for all the laughs.
	JJCW says, this episode should be titled, That's a Turnip for the Books.
	The Shadow Band has sent us $100 on Rumble saying happy third birthday.
	It was our third birthday yesterday.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	Right, so let's go to the comments about the actual segments we've just done.
	Mike says, I went to Oxford last Saturday and saw a poster advertising trade union subsidized coaches to London for the pro-Palestine march.
	If any good can come of this, the university students coming face-to-face with arch-Islamists.
	It's a weird constituency, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	That's very odd.
	Kevin says, so the organizers of the protest march have said they will not be going near the Cenotaph.
	That won't be easy as they plan to walk from Hyde Park to Downing Street.
	The only way to get to Downing Street from Hyde Park means they must pass by or near the Cenotaph.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I can't remember the name of the road now.
	You have to go past the Cenotaph.
	Don't look at me.
	I've been to London a handful of times.
	I've been to protests there.
	You have to go through there.
	Oh, it's Whitehall.
	They have to use Whitehall to get there.
	I suspect the police will be patrolling the veterans and those parading with the cenotaph rather than the protesters, as we all know how this goes.
	Yeah, totally true.
	General Hai Ping says, surely, if anything, former Hamas leader should get you turned away at the airport.
	No, get you a council house.
	You can't get a council house in London.
	I couldn't get a council house.
	Even I got hassled at airport security.
	I went on a holiday this summer, although I had been to the Czech Republic shooting and they found gunpowder on my fingers, so that might not help.
	That sounds like fun.
	It was great.
	Matt says, as a Norman Irish person, I find the hyperbolic rhetoric around Tommy quite humorous.
	We have literal paramilitary leaders in government, and yet the leader of an ineffectual protest movement is seen as a super villain.
	Yeah, that is weird, isn't it?
	What have they even really done?
	EDL and all that.
	I don't know.
	This is like an area of cancellation I don't want to explore.
	I think they've just been really badly maligned.
	Well, I will say, I will say one thing, though.
	I believe that Robinson was one of the first people who was talking about what was happening in Rochdale to those girls.
	And I think Farage was as well.
	Yeah, Farage was a few years afterwards when it became evident that Tommy wasn't just some upstart bigot.
	And he was actually like pointing out, actually, there is a real issue for girls in these towns.
	So that's an interesting aspect, especially when you consider that those scandals went on for 30 years.
	Unbelievable.
	And the fact that the Labour Party and the councillors covered it up, the police covered it up, it's unbelievable.
	Pericles says, Tommy Robinson isn't allowed a bank account but Hamas leader is given government housing.
	It's ridiculous.
	Yeah, it's just preposterous.
	I don't like having to bang the drum, but the scales are so weighted in favor of one and so against the other, it just seems unfair to me, if nothing else.
	Tim says, I shall be going to the event in London with a couple of friends, dressed well, acting distinguished, dignified and unmoving.
	One might say I'm going to church.
	I should take a video or two for you while I'm there.
	Please do, but also stay safe.
	Like I said, I'm not advising or disincentivizing anyone to go.
	I think it would be safer to go there in a headscarf.
	To be honest, you know, one of the Palestinian ones.
	At least you know you'd be okay.
	Probably will.
	AK says, I've noticed several other Palestine marches scheduled this Saturday in market towns.
	Worth keeping an eye out for them.
	George says, feminists use the trans phenomenon to attack masculinity for decades, but now that faction is getting more protections than biological women for playing the gynocentrism game better.
	My only reaction to that civil war is laughter.
	Well, you know, that's the kind of like a very wide umbrella to say feminists.
	You know, there's different there's different kind of groups within feminism, you know, and there's there have been women fighting against this stuff since the 80s.
	I know I have a lesbian friend who says that, you know, she used to have lesbian discos and stuff like that.
	And they were regularly invaded in the 80s.
	by the odd, you know, cross-dressing man, you know?
	So, you know.
	I don't know how they can't just, I would just, even if I was like, I'd still be like, Oh, I feel like I probably shouldn't be here.
	Well, it's, I always think of about, about it with the, the, the sports cheats.
	I, I cannot put my, myself in their shoes.
	Uh, like it's quite close to having a criminal mindset.
	I'm going to go and play the sport and I'm going to win because I'm a man.
	It's, I just don't, I don't get how anyone can be so shameless.
	Yeah, shameless is the right word.
	It's genuinely shameless.
	There used to be a sense of fair play in the past as well.
	Some people still have of course, but it seems to be in rare supply these days.
	I guess cash prizes and things like that incentivize these people.
	I had this really interesting story once.
	Apparently when cops are looking for someone, let's say they know that they're somewhere in a shopping center, And they drove there.
	The first thing they'll do is they'll look at all the handicapped parking spots.
	Because criminals love using handicapped parking spots.
	Because their attitude to life is, well, that's for suckers.
	I'm not a sucker, I'm going to park there.
	So the first thing they'll do is they'll go to those spots and they'll see if they can find the car.
	For a split second there, I thought you were going to say disabled people commit more crime.
	It's just like, where is this going?
	But it seems to me that there's more people than we realized who have that criminal outlook on life.
	You know, everyone else is a sucker.
	I'm going to win a thousand pounds by coming first in a women's marathon.
	You know what I mean?
	So I wonder how much of this is a case of the internet allowing them to find one another.
	Oh, I think it's all about coordination.
	Yeah.
	I think the number probably isn't terribly different.
	It's just that now they can actually get in contact.
	Otherwise you would have been in some village in Barnsley or something.
	There's a bit in my book where I talk about it where I said, you know, Imagine if Jimmy Savile had the ability to communicate with every other Jimmy Savile in the world.
	Then he wouldn't have needed to become a famous DJ.
	You don't need the keys to the hospital if the whole of society has agreed that you're one of the loveliest groups of people in the world.
	God, that's awful.
	Sorry, I'll carry on.
	Omar says, until Elon took over Twitter, social media wouldn't even crack down on child exploitation and abuse.
	With that frame of reference, it's no surprise they don't care about mutilation, children or otherwise.
	And the media tried to lie about it and say that it went tough as well.
	Yes, which is a very peculiar thing to play defense for, isn't it?
	It's very interesting that since Elon came back, or since Elon took over, two child castration charities, I would call them, have left Twitter.
	Oh no, really?
	The Trevor Project and Mermaids have both closed their Twitter.
	Oh no, how terrible.
	They've all gone to TikTok and Snapchat.
	Where that's allowed.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, people have got their complaints about Elon, but I'm just like, look man, look how much good he's done already.
	Well, community notes in itself is a brilliant thing.
	It's so good.
	But I think just allowing the plurality of voices, even if you don't agree with them, even if you don't like them, I think it's necessary that they exist.
	Yeah, I'm still Shadowbanned though.
	Well, I mean, who isn't?
	I got my account back, which I was like, yes!
	So I was thrilled about that.
	Being Shadowbanned is a badge of honour these days.
	Yeah, all the best people.
	Yeah, exactly.
	All the best people in Seattle.
	A man who thinks about the Roman Empire says... Oh no, wrong section, sorry.
	We've got a lot of comments, but we haven't got that much time, so I can't go through all of them.
	Matt says, the trans issue could be discussed for hours.
	It provides such insight into the worldview of the left, bizarre, unintelligible, and insidious in equal parts.
	Everything from the callous disregard for facts, regardless of the damage done to both women and confused children, to the disdain for the existence of any category, One cannot simply will themselves into, but act as a barrier to the unlimited, quote, authenticity, in Sartre's sense of the word, despite how fringe the issue it seems.
	For a lack of a better term, it intersects with so many other aspects of left-wing thought.
	As you can tell, the quality of our commentators is so much higher than anywhere else.
	I keep saying this, but it's very well said.
	And, but that, but that I think is the key thing, isn't it?
	It's the idea of a category that is impermeable.
	That's really what they're against, isn't it?
	And also I would say this is, uh, I don't, have you ever read the Eric Hoffers, the true believer?
	It's, uh, he was this very interesting guy, self-taught intellectual.
	Uh, he wrote it in 1953 and it's about the, um, it's about what mass popular movements have in common.
	And he goes from Christianity to communism to Nazism.
	And it could have been written yesterday about the trans movement.
	He says things like it's usually a movement of middle class people.
	This is a middle class movement.
	It attacks the family first of all.
	This really attacks the family.
	It separates children from their parents.
	And there's so many other things as you're reading it.
	He's applying them to, you know, how Christianity took over in the Roman Empire and all this sort of thing, but everything you see could be true of the trans movement.
	It's a brilliant... I really recommend anyone who's interested in... Sorry, what was it called again?
	The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.
	Right, okay, I'm gonna get that because I'm a big fan of these sorts of books.
	I've never heard of that.
	Yeah, you'll love it.
	But the thing, and it's not just because I'm the dad, but The thing I'm most wary of is anything that gives children moral authority of their parents.
	And you see this all the time, especially in America, where the kids yelling at the parents that they're transphobes or they're racists or whatever it is.
	And so they don't respect the authority of their parents in any way, shape or form.
	It's like, no, that's just wrong.
	Well, it's a kind of year zero, isn't it?
	It's kind of a Cambodian Khmer Rouge type of attitude to people.
	Yeah.
	But anything that disrupts the sort of natural hierarchy of parents and children in that way I think is deeply suspicious.
	Yes, yes.
	As Desert Rat says, so this journalist is projecting her views of society onto another country, this is the India thing, Society, culture, and religion.
	Transgender ideology is almost exclusive to North America, Europe, and Australia, and a few select Asian countries.
	It is not a worldwide concern.
	People from other countries are far more concerned with just making it through the day.
	To be honest with you, I think most people in Western countries are just far more concerned about making it through the day.
	Yeah.
	But it is true that it's, I mean, you see it all the time and I've seen, you know, I saw an Irish trans activist the other day talking about saying something like, um, y'all, he said, y'all, y'all think this and that.
	And they're just completely American.
	Irish trans activists saying y'all.
	Yeah.
	They're just completely Americanized and they haven't, they, they don't notice it about themselves because it's the water they're swimming in.
	Yeah.
	You know, but it's all y'all and folks, folks.
	It's always trans folks.
	Have you noticed?
	Oh yeah, I have noticed that.
	Folks is the word and it's like, you know, I actually quite like folks as a word because I think it's homely.
	Well, it's, and also it was a bit of a brilliant, um, a brilliant, uh, rhetorical thing by Obama.
	I think, I think he really brought it in and, and I thought, yeah, that's a great, great unifying thing to say, but like all good things, it's just being misapplied now, you know?
	Like some of the folks that you're talking about are not folks.
	They're dangerous people.
	You know, Andrew Miller in Scotland, Adam Graham in Scotland.
	These aren't folks.
	These are, you know, this is a new type of problem that has to be talked about genuinely.
	No, so it's totally true.
	And linguistic subversion is something I'm very hot on because it's 90% of what they do to get to where they want to go.
	Exactly.
	And also what it does is it destabilizes everyone else.
	Yeah.
	Because when words can mean anything, then you can win any argument, you know, and, and, and in the same way that trans means nothing, really.
	I mean, it's a meaningless term that kind of, uh, covers too many different experiences to be useful.
	Uh, transphobic is a, is a kind of really powerful weapon.
	because you can apply it to anyone.
	Yeah, I mean, what isn't transphobic in some way?
	Well, apparently male hunters are transphobic.
	Well, apparently hunter-gatherers.
	But other thing going on to hunter-gatherers, in fact, Omar's got a great point.
	Notice they always use superiority and never suitability.
	That's a great...
	Yeah.
	Great point.
	Early humans didn't have the luxury to rely on less effective people in the desperate scramble for survival.
	That's a totally great point, but that's exactly it.
	It's all linguistic games in the characterization, in the framing, because if you say suitability, suddenly it becomes evident that yes, the men are more suitable to go and scramble in the bushes and try and bring down a lion or whatever they're going to eat that day.
	You know, obviously it's just suitable for the men to do that.
	And that's why they're developed to be stronger.
	And that's why they live less long, you know, What was the word they used?
	Inferiority?
	Yeah, they used inferiority and superiority.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's just like they're loaded judgmental words.
	Yes.
	That they, like you said, they should not be using because you're trying to be neutral on these things.
	Grant says, I just looked up the 3,100 mile race because I couldn't believe it's a thing.
	And they say that that's the men, that the men's time is faster and the record for men is 40 days, nine hours and six minutes.
	And the women's record is 45 days, 12 hours and 28 minutes.
	Running 45 days, man!
	Yeah, that's impressive no matter who you are, isn't it?
	I can't run for 45 minutes!
	But he does point out that's a 10% difference, which is actually quite significant.
	That would be a statistically significant difference.
	Absolutely.
	And again, it's not about inferiority or superiority.
	You know, if anyone can run 3,100 miles, that's incredible.
	As Desert Route says, and this is, again, one of those things that is just true, Men have a superior sense of direction, distance, and I'm going to expand on your, um, point a little bit, uh, spatial awareness as well.
	And, uh, men have got like weird eyes compared to women track.
	No, they do.
	They, they, they track motion a lot better.
	Whereas women are much, um, more responsive to color tone differences, things like that.
	The sort of cognitive perceptual literature seems to suggest that men are much better at spatial navigation, whereas women navigate based on landmarks.
	So it's a different style of navigation.
	And all of these things would be important if you were hunting.
	Yes, and also if you if you're traveling as well, say you are migrating, these two skills would actually complement one another because, you know, both are useful.
	Yes.
	Suitability, not superiority.
	Yes, exactly.
	The Baron of Warhawk says men involved to hunt while women involved to gather is nonsense.
	Meanwhile, I look at my personal life and notice both my uncle and grandpa love deer hunting while my mother couldn't stand the sight of blood or deer being gutted.
	I'm noticing a pattern guys, but I can't put my finger on it.
	Yeah, it's just...
	I mean, it's just true and everyone can tell it's true.
	And so all of this nonsense.
	George, we'll end on this one.
	George has got a question for Mr Linehan.
	What were the reactions to the speech episode of the IT Crowd at the time?
	It had a pretty big joke involving a trans person.
	I can't imagine the BBC executives of today would allow something like that.
	Well, it was channel four, but like they, they, yeah, they, um, they banned it subsequently.
	So it's no longer available on channel four.
	Um, and at the time, yeah, I noticed there was pushback, but it was very early days.
	Right.
	And I thought.
	Oh, this is weird.
	It was a weird new kind of, um, annoyance from viewers and no one else that, you know, I'd never got complaints from, you know, people, countdown viewers or anything like that.
	But for some reason, you're not allowed to talk about, uh, trans people.
	Um, that was the first time I realized, oh, this is much more of a hot button than I thought.
	Okay.
	And how, what, what year was that?
	2007 or 8?
	Really?
	So that far back?
	Yeah.
	2010 maybe?
	I'm not sure.
	I was watching it around the time it came out and it didn't strike me as controversial at all.
	It's not.
	That's because you're normal Josh.
	When they banned it, Channel 4 sent me a letter that was just full of Stonewall talking points that none of which are true.
	Stuff like, you know, trans people are uniquely subject to violence.
	Trans women are the safest demographic in the UK.
	You know, like there was one, like I think there's been two trans people killed in the UK.
	Yeah, I've just never heard of it.
	Yeah.
	I've heard of them getting put in women's prisons after they've been raping women.
	Yeah.
	But like, it's like, you know, they just kind of accept these talking points from these heavily ideological organizations, you know?
	So it was a bit It was a bit annoying when they banned that episode.
	I've not let it go.
	I wouldn't.
	I always say that if you're going to essentially be an activist, what you've got to do is have a win condition.
	So getting your episode reinstated should be part of your win condition.
	That's a good idea.
	Yeah, definitely.
	So whenever you have to talk to any of these people, no, put my episode back.
	Yeah.
	Demand it.
	Because you've got to make the demands for them to concede to them.
	Absolutely.
	Anyway, Graham, Thank you so much coming.
	This has been really great.
	Um, and totally unexpected as well.
	Like five years ago, I would never have guessed I'd be sat here.
	I used to be a, an enthusiastic counselor of yourself.
	I know.
	So where can people find you if they want more from you?
	Where can people find what?
	Where can people find you online if they want?
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm on Twitter at Glinner, although you won't be able to find me if you search.
	You're going to have to just write Glinner and send it and then click the word to find me.
	The Glinner update is my sub stack, which where we we just kind of do a regular kind of catalog of things that have been happening to women, but also kind of reports from whistleblowers and People in the NHS and things like that.
	Um, yeah, those two things.
	And my book is on Amazon, so please, please pick it up.
	You know, it's, uh, it's not all about this stuff.
	It's like 70% about writing comedy.
	I was going to say, I haven't read it obviously, but, uh, yeah, but I assume it's, uh, quite autobiographical given the title.
	Yeah, it's a memoir and it's like, but it's like, like for 70% of my life, uh, I wasn't fighting lunatics, you know?
	And, uh, it's only the last 30% of the book that really goes into it.
	The rest of it is about, you know, writing Father Ted, casting it, the various problems that came up with each different series.
	So it's funny, but like every time we thought everyone would want to talk about Ted, but no one does.
	People just want to talk about the trans stuff.
	That must be really annoying, actually.
	I don't know.
	I suppose it's a passion of yours.
	Well, it is very good to be able to actually make the arguments.
	Because one of the things that the other side doesn't want you to do, they don't want these arguments to be heard.
	So now I have a little bit of a platform where I can make the arguments and show people that it's not based on bigotry, it's based on respect for women, you know?
	Graham, that's only because the arguments are devastating to their case.
	I know.
	You've got to cut it out.
	Anyway, thank you so much for joining us, folks.
	Go follow Graham, and we will be back on Monday, so have a great weekend.

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