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Dec. 22, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:14
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #812
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Seaters episode 812 for today, Friday the 22nd, December 2023.
I am your host Connor, joined by Bo and by Callum.
Less sick, getting there.
Though I have to commend you for even coming in, so well done.
Off over here again.
Yeah, there's just a big green pile in the corner that's slowly gaining sentience.
Anyway, point being, today we're discussing CGP Grey must pay.
I have zero context for that, so Callum will be able to fill us in on that.
How this was always the plan, and then we're just going to sit around and chat a bit of bollocks about what's going to happen next year, because we don't really have much of an idea, and it's fun to speculate, I suppose.
A couple of announcements.
As of today, this is the last live podcast for a few days because we're going to be running limited operations getting things prepared for a few exciting new things you'll be seeing in the new year so we're going to have a lot of pre-recorded stuff drip fed out over the course of christmas period to keep you company but we won't be able to play any video comments so any video comments you do send in we will review them and possibly play them in the new year depending how many stack up But don't be discouraged, we're not ignoring you.
Also, today, 3 o'clock, this is the last Gold Tier Zoom call of the year, so if you're not a Gold Tier subscriber, you can still sign up and get there before 3 o'clock.
It'll be myself and Callum, who will still be alive, and we'll be able to take your questions and probably just sit around, have a drink, and chat a load of rubbish.
So, please do feel free to join us in about two hours.
But, without further ado, let's jump into today's stories.
CGP Grey has sinned and needs to pay.
And for people who haven't enjoyed good YouTube, CGP Grey is a legendary YouTuber, I think, is correct?
Like, his channel, I think, is well-liked by pretty much everyone who used to interact with it, and still does.
What does he do?
He makes videos.
Well, I guess because it's on YouTube.
CTP Grey, 6 million subs, and he makes little animated videos.
The style's nice, the explanation is masterless.
He's a really good storyteller, and a fantastic YouTuber.
Couldn't bring enough praise.
This isn't a full drama episode.
But the man's gotta pay for his crimes, because the man has done some serious crimes, in my view.
Which is that he's joined the flag people.
The Vexologists.
What, the LGBT community?
No, no, people who just love flags and talk about flags and about rules for flags.
I'm fine with flags.
Yeah, and I used to think, oh, that's pretty neat, and I liked it, and I'm willing to accept when I'm wrong about someone, and this is it, which is the no.
As gay.
Care about flags as much as wrong.
And it makes people do silly things.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, here we have probably a really good video in which he rates all of the US state flags.
And one of the rules here being that, I mean, look at them.
They're kind of crap compared to European nation flags, or African nation flags, or Asian nation flags.
I mean, nation flags in general are pretty solid.
But then you get to, like, states.
And it's not just the United States.
I mean, states in most of the world have pretty crap flags.
Yeah, okay.
The American ones are a bit weird.
They're very uniquely American.
What are we going to do?
Shove the date on it, and also the name, and maybe a crescent.
Kind of strange.
They're like family crests.
Kind of, but not really.
because like for example there's uh the the decent state flags that are family crests like merland which god damn it there we are we get right i'm gonna ruin the time stamp but that looks like a call of duty there we are uh well not that one i mean that one's just that's my merland state flag it's like heraldic almost yeah poison but the other one looked like some sort of prestige emblem but that's the thing american state flags are all a bit strange uh And then he did, like, this tier list of all of them where he showed them off.
And Maryland is good, in my opinion.
It's one of those weird ones that's so bad it's good.
Because it's an old crest from, like, two guys from Belgium and the Netherlands.
I forget.
It's a really stupid story.
But when you read it, it's awesome.
And then there's everything else, which is just, ah, blue with the name on it.
I thought, okay, you know, I kind of agree.
That's pretty dumb.
And then, you know, rang on Minnesota, because Minnesota have decided to come out and change their flag.
And I don't know how much influence CGP Grey has had in this world, but he is a massively viewed guy, and I'm just gonna pin it all on him, because why not?
So these are the three new designs for Minnesota there.
We have the star, the wavy one, and then the tricolour one, which...
I hate.
They're all bad.
on the second Aquaman costume from the 80s that got ditched because it was too hard to draw.
So, I don't know why they've come up with that.
They're all bad.
I don't think any of them are good.
And the thing is, this is the thing that annoys me because like Vexologists have their own rules about flags And I was arguing with Michael earlier, because it's like, well, there are the rules of vexology to make your flag look good, easy to draw, so even a child could do it, you know, some symmetry would be nice, maybe don't have words on it, because what are you doing?
Like, on paper, that's brilliant, and I always agreed with it.
And then I see this coming out of Minnesota, and I think, No.
Something has gone wrong.
But before we move on, Sean, can you get up Captain Marvel's costume for a minute?
Because the bloody blue and green Kree one that she wears in that awful first film, that is the first flag design.
It's kind of uncanny, and that was an eyesore as well.
Alright.
Wait, where's the green one?
Go to images.
I don't know anything about this.
Scroll down, scroll down, scroll up.
That's a Minnesota flag, it's even got the emblem.
On the chest.
What the hell?
I mean, maybe.
Maybe someone who liked Marvel is just obsessed and ended up being an exologist for one of them.
But look at all the designs, real quick.
Because it wasn't just that one, there's a whole bunch that they brought out.
And Cody from Alternative History Hub did a bunch of posting about this.
I don't really know why, maybe he lives in Minnesota, I don't know.
But I watched this coming from my timeline and I just thought, this pisses me off, I want to talk about it.
What's your main objection?
They're soulless, or what?
Well, the thing about those American state flags, as CBG Grey correctly pointed out, they're kind of silly, right?
Especially the ones that are just some words, and look wrong, almost.
These ones.
But at the same time, there's something uniquely American about them, that at this point I'm actually like, no, return to tradition.
Like, the Americans have some crap state flags, but that's kind of their thing.
Whereas these, like, toothpaste-flavoured flags, I just don't want anything to do with anything awful.
And now it's history.
Because, of course, this went to a vote.
And the state didn't vote on it, because why would they?
It was the council that voted on it.
So just some guys were like, hey, let's just change the state flag to one of these pieces of crap.
And they actually did it, as well.
Because then they went on to vote.
The men liked the tricolour, the women liked wavy flags.
Okay, some sex differences.
I think that might be something that they'd put to the people, like a referendum, a plebiscite, a referendum for all people from there.
I guess not, obviously not.
Well they'd probably choose wrong, they'd probably be like, I don't know, but I would probably put money on it, that if you did do it to a vote, most Americans in Wisconsin would just pick their crappy American state flag they've already got, with the words on it, which would upset people, at least the people who love this, because apparently they had a vote, the tricolour won, and then this dude just turns up and is like, but which tricolour?
And they're all crap.
I don't know why Vexology people think that this is acceptable.
You need to pay for what you've done.
Because this is what ended up happening.
This is now the flag.
This is going to be the flag of the state.
And it just looks like toothpaste.
Like, sincerely, if Colgate decided to come out and declare a nation-state, that's the kind of thing I expect to see.
And the thing is, Cody's not like some guy who is obsessed with Yankee flags.
Because, like, dude did a whole video about city flags, which I don't know if you've ever looked into.
It's madness.
Like, for example, that's a city.
That's a city in America.
That's their flag.
That's a beer label.
It's as corporate as you can get.
It even has the word copyright on the flag.
And a little trademark symbol on the bloody flag.
I mean, it is awful on every front.
Breaks every rule of vexology.
But...
Which one would you rather have?
I'll be honest.
Because part of me looks at this and is like, this is so materialistic.
And that's much, much worse, even.
Yeah.
On every point of like, if you wanted to make a little checklist of reasons why you wouldn't do this, it is absolutely correct that everything about this is awful.
But part of me now loves it, looking at what Americans will come up with, or at least modern Americans, the Vixology crowd.
In response.
I'd rather that than the last one we just saw.
Really?
The trademark.
I kind of like the stupidness of the trademark.
Oh really?
Well I didn't know he was going to be talking in this much depth about flags, but one thing I can add is that it's born out of originally medieval heraldry and things.
On a battlefield you'd have a standard of some colours, so you at a glance could see, hopefully, who's who and where they are, and rally to a standard.
That's what a lot of these things come from originally.
So nowadays, it doesn't matter really, does it, if a state or an individual city has a flag or not.
There's no practical purpose for it.
It's all symbolic.
It's more of a pride thing now.
But I see that that is soulless.
And the other one was absurdly commercial.
One of the purposes of it is it's a way to engender high trust.
So obviously the reason that we have the whites variety is so that we can see what we're oriented towards.
And so if we're all focusing on one thing together, It shows that we're not all staring around wondering who's going to stab us in the back.
It's the same principle of why church pews can be ordered in one direction.
You can have rows and rows of people staring at each other's backs, but you're never actually worried about being attacked.
I mean, well, this day and age, if you're in the middle of London, I suppose.
But point being, if you're all staring up at the same thing, you're all oriented in the same direction.
And so if you're all oriented towards ugliness or apathy, it does communicate a level of disbelief in your civilization.
I don't think it's that deep.
Thanks Callum, appreciate it.
I'm just trying to add to your segment.
The guys coming up with this weren't thinking about beauty or ugliness.
Literally like four boomers.
That's what I'm saying.
When you have flags like this, it does show a fundamental unseriousness towards the civilizational project you're engaged in.
I don't know.
There's something about Americans that is unique in this aspect that I used to think was wrong.
Because you look at the vexology rules and you're like, damn, what have you done?
But recently, after seeing that, some part of me thinks that that stupid boomerism of, let's just have the word copyright on the flag, I kind of like.
Just no F's given, because it's the city flag, so who really cares?
As long as it's been there for long enough.
Which for Americans could be 50 years, who gives a toss?
Just out of interest, do you know where that is?
Where that city is in America?
It's Portokello.
Which, I don't know which state that's in.
But the point being, there's loads more in here as well.
It seems like the very concept of flags has been perverted out of all recognition by this point.
By the time you get to that.
Like they're not even bothering, they're just like, you know, whatever, just some stuff, I don't care.
But, I don't know, there's something I like about that, that visually makes me sick looking at this.
Which I don't really know how to put into words, so I'd like people's feedback on it, maybe this will start a war, maybe it won't.
But, either way.
And this isn't new either, of course, you may remember the New Zealand redesign, that competition.
I agree, I agree.
What happened?
So of course, the flag of New Zealand is disgusting because, you know, colonialism or something.
So we've got to redesign it.
So there was this big redesign project where they asked people to submit.
And as you can see, I mean, the Guardian here taking the funniest ones.
These were real designs that were sent in for the government to consider, to put to a vote to everyone, to decide if they wanted the laser Kiwi flag as the new flag.
And then they ended up putting it down to these.
And again, There's something so vexillogy about this.
Did they change it?
Did New Zealand change their flag?
No.
Because they looked at that and just went, that's crap.
There's no real meaning behind it at that point.
Because you're right, of course flags started as a battle standard or something useful.
But these days it's literally just about pride.
And in which case... Identity.
Yeah.
What that means.
You get it out of that symbol and instead it's just like...
No, there's something about this is grim.
CGPCray is wrong.
I'm just saying it.
And you can see it in the examples people give.
So, I mean, this is the response from some people having fun.
The Minnesota flag just also happens to look like cigarette packets.
Just saying.
Mental flavored state.
And it goes on, which you've got now.
Oh man, but at least it stands out.
I don't know, like all of these scream Americanisms, which if you are American, Seems good to me.
But instead they got Mr. Toothpaste over here.
And it goes on.
I mean, this was kind of funny.
They decided to redesign the seal to stay as well.
And actually did a good job.
But then a lot of people saw this and were just like, why not just make that the flag?
That looks way better.
It's not the only thing.
There was a lot of conspiracy theories as well that came out of all this.
Minnesota's just right up in the north, right?
Near Canada.
Yeah.
That's right, isn't it?
It's really cold up there, right?
So, like, some of the ideas for the colours is it represents, like, the land and snow and the sky and stuff like that.
I mean, here's someone making cookies out of that thing, which... Yeah, okay.
I have my opinions, is all I'm saying.
But then, of course, there were a lot of conspiracy theories.
Because who knows?
Well, sorry.
Someone did actually pick it out.
It is a superhero actor's outfit there.
A lot of people started deciding whether or not it was a Somali thing.
Oh, yeah.
I saw that tweet, actually.
Yeah.
So this is NwokeNotes being like, bros, it's from Somalia because here's the old flag.
Here's the new flag.
And then did you know that there's a huge amount of Somalis living in Minnesota?
And then here's one province of Somalia, which just happens to have also the same tri-color.
I'm here to tell you the bollocks, obviously.
Weirdly enough, the vexology community is not very Somali.
For some reason, Somalis aren't interested in flag designs.
Isn't Somalia, couldn't you say, sort of the classic example of a failed state?
That's what some people call it.
You know, there's a handful of countries that sort of fall into the, can fall into the category of a failed state.
I think Somalia is one of them.
It's not really a proper nation state in a couple of different ways.
So it's flag, it's not like our flag or France's flag.
Literally means nothing.
The stars and stripes, yeah.
Like Puntland, that's only one little bit of Somalia, isn't it?
I don't know, I don't think you're that right.
I mean, Somalia's not even really a state, is it?
I mean, it's still not fixed.
I mean, you've got Somali language declared independence and then the rest of it's just run by either Islamists or tribesmen, so whatever.
But anyway, a lot of theories came out of this.
Some other guy, well, the same guy was just like, what about this other state, Jubilant, which happens to have the same series of tricolour there.
Funnily enough, no, it's not the Smarlies.
It's the kind of people you'd expect.
The people who are obsessed with masks and vaccines and are voting Biden.
It's just like, okay, okay.
Well, they're the people that were pushing for the new flag.
Yeah, so this is the guy who designed the flag.
I don't know why, but a load of right-wing accounts got this obsession that maybe it was the Somalis who were infiltrating America through the vexology community.
And it just wasn't that.
No, not even slightly.
I mean, it's almost cute, where it's like, you know the Somalis, of all the different unique cultural aspects they have, one of them's loving flag designs.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone like that?
I don't believe that.
But anyway, getting back, I just, I hate this.
I think this is terrible.
I think it's... fight me.
And my opinion on that is now that I kind of hate the vexology.
I think CGP Grey's rules about flags are wrong and demonstrated by whatever the hell this is.
I just feel toothpaste brand here.
Which, again, if you like toothpaste, go for it.
But I don't.
That puts me in the mind.
Is it the Seahawks?
The Seattle Seahawks?
Their colour scheme and pattern and thing is similar to that.
It put me in mind of the Seahawks.
Neither of you are really into American football.
I know of the team.
I know that they won the Super Bowl how many years ago now but I wouldn't be able to recall their jersey off the top of my head.
I lost a lot of money on the Seahawks one time.
What did you do?
I bet on them to win the Superbowl the year after they won the Superbowl because they were still brilliant and they got to the Superbowl and lost in the last few seconds.
How much did you lose?
It's embarrassing.
Well it was a spread bet and it was the last bet so I didn't actually, I hadn't actually put down a fantastic amount, a few hundred quid.
I stood to win about 1,500 quid or something and I lost it in like the last, what was it, if anyone out there remembers, it was like the last five seconds or something, the last play of the game.
They're still haunting you, I can see it on your faces.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alright, anyway.
But here's the last thing, which is just a bunch of people like, oh no, but it's great because I can redesign it for all kinds of purposes, such as...
I don't know what this is.
I assume this is different teams or something, or some kind of sport.
I don't really care.
But again, I mean, I think this just more demonstrates how crap this is.
Completely irreplaceable.
Like, did you used to play Modern Warfare?
And people would redesign their, um... Call sign, wasn't it?
Was it a call sign?
Is that what it was called?
The little lower third banner that would go alongside your name.
And then in Black Ops, they made it so you could add, like, little triangles and squares, and then people just started making, like, racist messages out of it.
There were a lot of dicks.
Yeah.
Well, that's all this reminds me of again, where it's just like, I really find this way harder to take seriously than just, I've written the word of my state on the flag, that's good enough.
But anyway, fight me CGP Grey, you are wrong, and your crimes will now be, well, in flag for the next, I don't know, hundred odd years until Minnesota collapses from nothing in particular.
Well, was he arguing that it's good and he likes it?
Yeah, well in his video specifically about it, he was talking about, well, you know, he rated them and he rated this one the best.
Which again, just kind of makes me think of Austria or something, with all the colours messed up, like tricolour.
Didn't even know they were going for, they went for the toothpaste design.
But, just that, this whole argument of like, flags should have rules and trust me, I can rank them and then we can figure out what the best flag is.
It is not good enough, because this is how you end up with this.
This is how you end up with Toothpaste Country.
I do agree with you that the old, like the Field of Azure, with some sort of date on it, that was obviously of its time, like mid-19th century, second half of the 19th century, Americana thing, that was what was done at the time.
It might be a bit weird compared to European flags.
You're not Europeans?
Yeah.
Why would you try to be?
It's fine.
There's no reason to change it.
But that is sort of what progressivism is about, isn't it?
It's changing things for the sake of it, almost.
It's that you despise things that are traditional.
For their own sake.
There's also this aspect to that side of American culture, the progressive side, which think that they must endlessly compare themselves to Europeans, or their flags, in this case, because we're talking about vexology.
I just don't get it.
Like, weird inferiority complex for something you don't need to feel inferior about.
Yeah.
I mean, I knew his resolution.
I need to stop being so anti-American, I think, when I think about some of their faults.
Because a lot of it is just, you find it a lot.
It's like, oh, it's different.
It's like, Yeah.
They're the global superpower.
They can literally do whatever they want.
They can have a city flag that looks like this.
Guess what?
There's some kind of charm to it, no matter how horrific.
anyway let's leave that there right wonderful oh it's a ghost of the mouse wonderful I'm just going to scroll down there we go right so there has been a running joke that infinite immigrants is always a solution to everything And I wish it were a joke, but it's actually Conservative Party policy at the moment.
I mean, Kamidrakpa, one of the best accounts on Twitter, makes these Delightfully eye-poisonous infographics.
This one just titled, and this was quite a few years ago now, should we build massive tent cities in parks in our cities to house infinity immigrants?
And they're just a typical YouTube normie thumbnail of big red arrows just saying where they should go.
I wish that was just a piss take, but it turns out that's been the plan for quite some time, as we'll go back and see.
Now, there are demographic and economic reasons that the government feels pressured to keep increasing immigration.
I mean, just for a little roundup, I did an article on this a little while ago.
We've had more immigration in the last 25 years than between the Norman Conquest and the Second World War.
Part of the reason for that is that the Treasury Green Book says we need at least 200,000 people every single year to keep the economic growth afloat.
That's GDP, not GDP per capita.
It's why we're all getting poorer, but the graph seems to continually go up forever.
And we've got sub-replacement birth rate, it's slipping below 1.5 now, so in order to pay the pensions and make sure that all the boomers are looked after in their old age homes, they think that they need all of those African care workers.
One in three have told the WHO that they abused their patients, and obviously some woman died falling off a stairlift, and the person that was looking after didn't know the difference between bleed and breathe, but neither here nor there.
That's apparently the government's plan.
But it also turns out that there is a Perverse incentive to import a clientele class over who seem to vote for one or the other party in perpetuity.
And the Conservative Party are very aware of this, particularly Rishi Sunak, and he's been aware of this for quite some time.
Now, the reason I'm talking about this isn't just because we all are frustrated by the endless amounts of migration, but it's because recently we had the whole kerfuffle with the Rwanda scam.
Now I call it a scam because we sent them 140 million and have pledged to send millions more and not a single person's been sent over there yet and it turns out that we've got to pay for their bed and board for five years and Rwanda concerned a bunch of their criminals here and it's basically a refugee...
refugee exchange program because Rwanda can send one over for everyone we send to them.
But don't worry, it's a deterrent, I'm sure.
There was a vote on it about last week or so.
And the MPs in the Commons voted 313 votes to 269, so a majority of 44, to pass the safety of Rwanda bill.
Basically saying that despite the ECHR complaining, I know, they haven't listened to the...
It's just a name for a British bill, the safety of Rwanda, yeah, of course.
I mean, they might need to reaffirm that given the radio in the 90s, But, oh, well.
But we're there.
I find it hilarious whenever we're just like, we're responsible for foreign country now.
I mean, literally pick one out of a board.
Belgian colony.
Yeah, that's our problem now.
There you go.
But anyway, point being, the bill passed despite 29 Tory rebels who, if they would have not abstained and rather voted against, the bill would have been shut down because obviously every single opposition member voted against the bill because it was going to At least pretend to promise to do something about the mass importing of fighting-age men over the channel every single day, but oh well.
One funny little tidbit in here, so the climate minister, why we have one of those?
God knows.
Graham Stewart, he did a 7000 mile round trip from COP28 in Dubai to then vote, to then go back because the government were browning their trousers so much at having not enough votes to pass the legislation that they had to do that particular Climate emissions faux pas.
So a rebel source among the 29 voters said, the bill has been allowed to live another day, but without amendments it will be killed next month.
It's now up to the government to decide what it wants to do.
According to the Telegraph, and this is in the mail, those who abstained in the vote did not gain permission from party managers, prompting concerns there would be enough Tory rebels in future debates to kill future legislation.
This is why on the morning of the vote, Sunak had a very hurried bacon sandwich and coffee Breakfast in number 10, trying to corral all the rebels together and convince them to not shoot down his legislation.
Because he knows that if he would have lost this, there probably would have been an immediate leadership challenge or a general election.
They're just playing for time at this point.
So, why the discontent?
Well, Labour's claiming the UK is now set to hand the African nation 400 million after Home Secretary James cleverly confirmed another 50 million is due in 2024.
James cleverly mounted a robust defense in the house, this is the males editorializing, saying the government is determined to stop the boats and that's what voting for this legislation means.
The Home Office confirmed 240 million has been paid to Rwanda so far, brilliant, another payment of 50 million anticipated by 2025.
No asylum seeker has been sent to Rwanda and the National Audit Office will publish a report next year on the costs of the scheme and estimated spending in future.
So we're just going to get more numbers on how all of our money is being spaffed away on something that isn't working.
Almost like it's designed not to work.
Isn't that interesting?
Also, if it does get passed, it'll obviously be enacted with some opposition.
You don't look too happy about this.
Yeah, well, a couple of things.
One, you mentioned, it's really an exchange program.
So for every person, if ever, we fly over there, they send us one of their refugees or criminals or something.
So it won't actually Which is not what it was sold as.
Right.
Yeah.
You have to look in the fine print.
You have to look in the fine print for that.
So it's an exchange program.
Secondly, as far as I can tell, we don't just send them to Rwanda and that's it.
It's rather they're sent to Rwanda to be processed.
Their asylum claim to be processed.
Now, I believe that Rwanda are likely to decline nearly all of them.
That's the point.
Okay.
All right.
But if we just had a home office that worked properly, Was it completely being cucked inside out?
I mean, there'd be no need for any of this whatsoever.
Well, we do have one.
Rwandan Home Office.
We pay for a second home office now, and second home office actually does the home office job.
Yeah.
So if I was in charge of something, I would just scrap the entire Rwanda thing and make a new department here.
Why get Rwanda involved?
What on earth?
What a completely bizarre, absurd thing.
Because they're brown.
They're allowed to deny applications.
They have too much white guilt.
Either make the Home Office do its job properly, or if that's just impossible, they're just not fit for purpose.
I don't disagree.
and staff it with true believers or people that don't hate this country or whatever you want to say.
Get them to do it.
You don't need Rwanda involved in this process at any point.
It's completely ridiculous.
It's not that I don't disagree.
It's also what are you going to do with people that you suddenly put out of a job at the Home Office that are then motivated to work against you at all levels of government and civil society?
I mean, I would personally just propose legislation to turn all of the boats away and deport everyone.
And if you don't comply with that in your workplace, then you will face prosecution, not just job loss.
Because you actually need to threaten these people with prison if they act against the law.
I mean, shock, far-right opinion, I suppose, you know.
Treason or sedition.
Well, yeah.
But it turns out they've already declared their intent to be seditious.
Because the Home Office issued a report on the Rwanda policy, and get this right, they published on the same day that it went through its summary of its official legal position on the Rwanda plan.
It was a five-page summary and it, and this is according to the mail, attempted to knock down the case for tougher measures advocated by MPs including Suella Braveman.
The document warns that blocking the ability of migrants to bring legal action would be a breach of international law and alien to the UK's constitutional tradition of liberty and justice.
Right, so the post-war international order that's set up to define refugees as, per that place and time, anyone who was fleeing post-war Germany, is now applied to every North African, and so we have to abide by that definition, which is totally obsolete, otherwise we're evil.
That's genuinely their opinion, so they won't enforce the law even if the Rwanda bill gets passed.
Even if the strongest bill gets passed, and there are no legal penalties for not going against it, the Home Office will just continue to rubber-stamp yes on over 3,000 visas a day.
But Carl said this at a university event we did a little while ago.
It's not that the Home Office are unwilling to rubber stamp every single visa.
At this point, we just think that the ability to stamp visas is probably limited by the size of the physical building of the Home Office.
Like, if they could fit more desks in there to stamp yes on more visas every single day, they would.
They just can't get enough people in the office to stamp yes.
They just want to flood the country with unlimited people.
Great.
So, normally, the One Nation Tories, who are the sort of front-bencher types, the very Tory-wet types, the ones that say they'll do something about immigration and don't, you know, Michael Gove, David Cameron, a hundred of them actually backed the Rwanda plan.
Chairman Damien Green said, The most important thing at this stage is to support the bill despite our real concerns.
Their real concerns were that it wasn't upholding our international obligations.
The ECHR and the UN Refugee Convention of 1952 that defines a refugee as anyone unable or unwilling to return to their country of Oregon.
Just don't want to, mate.
Too lucrative over here.
Can't be arsed.
You know, keep me in the country.
So, of the 29 people that abstained, there were a few different constituencies.
I mentioned this yesterday, but this is the New Conservatives like Miriam Cates, Tom Hahn, Jonathan Gullis, Danny Kruger.
A mix of people that are actually trying to do some things but have little to no power, particularly since Cates has had a gag order placed on her.
Mark Francois and the European Research Group, the Northern Research Group, led by Jake Berry, Sweller Braverman and Liz Truss, and that sort of lot.
The wets, like Tobias Elwood, who's just become obsessed with assisted dying as well, because it turns out that there isn't a war on where we can go send a bunch of British boys to die, so we need to get our death quota up, apparently.
And also Robert Jenrick, and the reason I mention Robert Jenrick is because he was the former Immigration Minister, and right before this happened, He came out, did an interview with the BBC, with Laura Kunzberg, and he said, a political choice has been made to bring forward a bill which doesn't do the job.
So, former immigration minister, who resigned over the fact that nothing was getting done about immigration, in the Home Office, has turned around and said, yeah, the government knows the Rwanda bill won't do anything, they're just pushing it forward as a dead cat distraction strategy.
Because they actually just wanted migration to go on infinitely, because m'GDP, because m'international commitments.
So they're just lying to us.
Great.
That's fantastic.
I did do a bit of digging and wondered, OK, sure, it might just be economic reasons.
It might be that they want to do what the Tony Blair speechwriter said and rub the right's nose in diversity and render our arguments out of date.
But could there be another perverse incentive to bring over certain ethnic and cultural constituencies that might favour the Conservative Party?
I had a bit to think and I thought, well, we had 250,000 Indians last year.
As far as I know, they're not at all at war.
Why would Rishi Sunak be motivated to bring over 250,000 Indians?
Maybe it's something to do with this policy exchange report he wrote in 2014, A Portrait of Modern Britain, where he observed that Indians reliably vote 10 percentage points higher than any other ethnic minority or the Conservative Party.
Isn't that fascinating?
Now, again, I'll read through some of the data and you're welcome to accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist if you like.
There's a chart on page 7 of the PDF, right?
I'm just going to scroll down quick.
Here we go.
So, these are the five largest ethnic minority groups.
This was at the time, Indian was the largest, 1,412,000, nearly 413,000.
That's only gone up since, particularly in record migration in the last year.
So, one thing I find interesting as well, maybe it might just be the bias of the authors here, both of whom are from Indian heritage, but Indian Pakistani and Bangladesh are separated out as different ethnicities in the Asian diaspora, and then Black African and Black Caribbean.
That's just immediately demarking those ethnicities as maybe having slightly different interests, whereas the Black Africans and Black Caribbeans don't.
Almost like it's a target immigration strategy to try and raise the populations among those.
But no, no, no, okay.
Interesting omissions in the report.
Over the past decade, the UK's white population has remained roughly the same size, while the ethnic minority population has almost doubled.
BME groups accounted for almost 80% of the UK's population growth.
Just three cities, London, Greater Birmingham and Greater Manchester, account for over 50% of the entire UK's BME population.
Of course, that's been growing in the last few years because it's nearly 10 years old now.
So, accelerated on Soonak's watch.
Interesting data on the sources of stresses in the job and housing market here.
10 years ago as well.
Almost all minority groups have unemployment rates that are almost double the national average, 6.6%.
Black Africans have the highest unemployment rate at 14.8%.
Indians the lowest at 8.1%.
Oh, those industrious Indians.
Bring them over quickly.
40% of black residents live in social housing.
It's 48% now in London.
Whereas 65% of Indians and Pakistanis live in owned accommodation.
Now, There's a difference between they live in owned accommodation and they also own accommodation.
I think that might help to explain why, especially in Swindon, all the landlords seem to be Indian, as you well know, Callum.
What's the quality of that housing like?
It's a brothel.
The building is a brothel.
Well, at least they're in employment, I suppose.
I mean, it's industrious, right?
According to Rishi Sunak.
Yeah.
How are you enjoying the excrement?
I love the idea that, like, my immigration policy is we need more sex workers.
I'm going to illegally import sex workers from now on.
I mean, I know the Ali G meme comparison to the feminist immigration policy was a thing, but... I mean, sincerely.
That's actually your position now.
Slave sex workers that serve the immigrant population.
I mean, that was basically the thing in Leicester, wasn't it?
Yeah.
They had loads of slave labour.
It used to be a joke that they were like, we need slaves, but then they just want slaves.
my gdp remember funny when you do point out that you know the vast majority of it's a targeted type of immigration because it's you know it's uh people from the subcontinent or africa or the caribbean you know we're not flooded by kazakhs no you know we're not flooded by like maoris right it's not we haven't got a too many peruvians in britain right it's
Yeah, it's curious how it's almost always large sections of former colonial demographics that happen to share the same culture and ethnicity of the politician who's currently in power.
It's kind of curious that, isn't it?
The thing also to say about GDP is interesting.
I saw, I can't remember who it was, but someone on Twitter tweeted, you know, I would rather our economy and our whole standard of living be lower than just be flooded with foreign people whose values are antithetical to ours.
I'd rather be sort of a second world country.
I'd rather Britain be as rich as sort of Portugal or something.
If it meant we could keep our heritage and identity and all that sort of thing.
Well look at the Japanese, imagine putting that to a reference.
I completely agree with that.
I'd rather be a bit poorer.
Right, yeah.
I just did an interview with Philip Moorland, sorry, Paul Moorland and Philip Pilkington and they compared Israel, Japan and the UK on their productivity, birth rates and immigration policies.
And Israel is the only one that has ethnically and religiously selected low immigration, high birth rates and high productivity and a decent GDP per capita.
So I would like that very much, please.
But even if I couldn't pick that, I'd pick Japan, who, yes, have really high debt to GDP ratio.
And that's going to be a problem at some point.
But for every single American Basel state, it's going to be a problem because the Americans can't pay back their debt.
Yes, they've got low birth rates, but their GDP per capita is much higher than us because they're a very productive Culturally and ethnically homogenous and industrious country.
And so, I'd rather be in Japan than here right now.
Because they seem to be just running it better, because they understand that to keep a country, you can't just flood it with foreigners who are only here because they're on the take.
Well it's just simply true that homogeneity is a strength, not diversity.
Well diversity is their strength if they want to divide and conquer us.
Right, well yeah.
Yeah, the hour in there is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
And the reason it's Our strength for the political elite is because of this chart on the paper.
It's quite interesting.
All of the ethnic minorities vote overwhelmingly Labour, but Indian is 10 percentage points higher for Conservatives than most other groups.
Indians are four times more likely to vote Conservatives than Black Africans, 24% to 6%.
So, Put it this way.
If they're seeing, since the Windrush generation, you know, the second settlement of the UK, it's basically our Mayflower, right?
That we had a massive Caribbean and African diaspora come over in that time.
If the elite are wedded to this high level of immigration, we're just negotiating which ethnicities make up the composition.
And there might be some kind of electoral interest for the Conservative Party to say, well, why don't we make that overwhelmingly Indian?
Because, oh, they're very industrious, they buy up all the housing stock, they're entrepreneurial, and they just happen to vote for our party, which is now spearheaded by the guy that observed that they vote for the party and who is also Indian.
Now, again, could all be a conspiracy theory.
It's not like we have any video evidence for it.
Oh, dear.
Right.
So this was when the report came out.
Al Jazeera, of all places, did an honest report on it and I think it's just worth a quick listen.
If you look beneath the slightly alarmist headlines here you can see what they're trying to do.
Indians, it decides, are hard-working and much more likely to vote Tory or Conservative.
Africans, however, it concludes, are much more likely to vote for the Labour Party but are also much more likely to be unemployed.
The report author says the intention wasn't to raise an alarm about mass migration, but to help politicians better understand a changing electorate.
We examined socioeconomic status, life experiences, attitudes and aspirations, and what we found is on almost any metric you look at, there are striking differences between communities, and it would be good for politicians and policy makers to appreciate those.
Appreciate those in what way, Rishi?
Almost found the entire immigration policy based around importing that specific population.
Curious that, isn't it?
It's almost like it came straight out of your mouth about 10 years ago.
And this is why, as soon as the Rwanda bill has been passed, as soon as they've pledged to stop the boats, as soon as they've pledged to bring that net migration number down, oh, they've reversed the plans to raise the minimum salary threshold for bringing family members over and doing chain migration.
Isn't that interesting?
So they've rowed back plans on increasing the threshold that Britons need to bring foreign family members to live in the UK from £38,700 down to £29,000.
Now, if you look at pre-pandemic inflation levels, which Rishi Sunak caused by his money printing for the Eat Out Help Out and furlough scheme, as Callum reported on a couple of weeks ago, actually £38,000 was roughly the equivalent to about 29-ish grand anyway, before the pandemic, before Rishi wrecked the economy and conducted mass immigration and mass inflation.
So even the 38 grand is not particularly high skilled salary compared to the average salary of about 26 or 27 now.
So it's barely above your average salary, highly Not exactly high-skilled labour that was being imported.
And so, James Cleverley still insisting that this is going to reduce the number of net migrants every year down by 300,000.
Brilliant!
So we still have a net 900,000 coming into the country using scant public services, bringing crime with them to make us the number one place in Europe for committing crimes from people by foreign nations, and just destroying the cultural cohesiveness of communities.
Isn't that fun?
Yeah, I don't know how anyone could still be a paying member of the Tory party at this point.
If you try and infiltrate it, then that's about it.
Yeah, right.
This is why I hate Westminster politics so much, because it really is Groundhog Day.
Just whenever anything happens, you might as well just be like, nothing will happen and you will be right every time.
I decided to just look up an inflation calculator for what is 29 grand now.
So before the pandemic, it was 23 grand.
So before the pandemic, if you think about Joel to pay 23 grand, that's now the minimum threshold to get a visa here to then bring your family.
That's barely a graduate salary.
But trust me, that's high skilled work visas.
What's that per hour?
What's £29,000 an hour?
Because the minimum wage they're raising to about £11 because of inflation.
Let me just check real quick.
I do feel like what the Tory party have done since they've been in power this last stint, of course the Blair and Brownies as well, they by rights deserve to be Punished to be wiped out electorally.
It's one of the most egregious crimes.
It's one of the worst crimes that's ever been perpetrated upon this island.
I've said that before.
It's staggering what they've done and what they're still doing.
Staggering to me.
You can't quite believe your eyes.
Again, where I'm sort of old enough and my memory's kicked in in the 80s and remember the 90s clearly.
Remember sort of the pre 9-11 years.
It's unbelievable, it's hard to describe.
I said about 9-11, it's hard to describe to people who don't really remember what the world was like before 9-11, how different it was.
It's the same with immigration, mass immigration.
It just wasn't like this.
It just was not like this.
It's mainly happened, well, since Blair got in in 97, but since the Tories really, where the very nature of the world around you, every high street in the country, You know, the very demographics completely changed that nobody wanted.
In fact, we've actively been saying we didn't want since the 60s.
Well, my high street's been destroyed since lockdown.
Bunch of businesses gone.
Now we've got actual money laundering fronts.
I mean, there's a Turkish Barber's on my high street that I've seen a drug deal happen late at night out of.
There is a brand new neon lit Pakistani vape shop right next to the bus stop where all the school kids get off.
Nobody's going to be shopping in there to justify the rent and the operations costs.
So clearly you're turning over cash inside there that is somewhat illicit.
There's another one right up the road.
There's now a mosque just up the road down the hill from the high street.
There's a Polish shop as well.
It feels like multicultural vomit on my doorstep and I didn't move but we were one of the last safe haven refuges on the borders of Kent.
It was nice, it was peaceful, there was no transient population, there was no bloody tube and now it's even come for there.
Both the big parties and of course the Lib Dems and the Greens that are more insane if anything.
They can't be allowed to just continue forever.
I don't think it can be.
This idea that you would try and change them from within, I mean that would take a generation or whatever, if ever possible.
They don't deserve to be sort of reformed in that way.
It needs to be swept away in some sense, I don't know.
Yeah, but the party's comprised of people.
I mean, if you rooted out the people from the party, it's not the fault of... The institution itself does not make people mad.
It's the fact that the people that are in the institution, that are sabotaging it, that are mad.
If you cleared out the people from said institution... It's like you said about the creation of the new Home Office Department.
Okay?
The only reason it would work is if you staffed it with true believers.
It's not just the creation of a new department which makes people comply with it, right?
You have to empty the bloody thing, like 90-95%.
I mean, what did Elon get rid of?
80% of Twitter staff.
I mean, the actual level of decimation you have to go through at these institutions just to make them not insane is really hard to comprehend.
Yeah, and when it's not something like Twitter, it's something like a political party, it's not as easy.
You can't have that situation that Elon did.
You can't just turn up and get rid of 80 percent.
Yeah, it's not really possible.
I think that maybe in the future, hopefully, there'll be newer parties.
Some will be sort of uh nationalist or um you know at least patriotic in some way and some will be sort of islamist party the can be other in some will be sort of ultra green or something or just overtly socialist or something uh because at some point surely at some point the stranglehold of the two big parties or the three traditional parties It can't last anymore.
I wonder at what point the huge Muslim vote that Labour get, they'll just form their own party.
At what point will the sort of middle class globalists abandon the Tories and form something of their own?
It's theirs.
Well, yeah, they don't need to.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the spell of neoliberalism is waning, particularly with my generation.
I mean, there was an Onward paper recently where they were tearing their hair out over how Zoomers have been polarised into two very anti-democratic camps because the Boomers overwhelmingly believe in end-of-history democracy theory.
I think it's about 55% wanted governance by experts, 18 to 25, which means that they're the sort of technocratic Green Party level, the climate's going to destroy us all types.
And then another sort of composite group of roughly the same size said they wanted a strongman who can ignore the whims of Parliament because they're not doing anything, or military dictatorship.
It was actually an option on the ballot and they said, yeah, we prefer that at this point.
And then obviously when they're thinking that, they're not thinking the woke RAF, they're thinking, you know, the kind of horse guards that we saw at the Queen's funeral, riding down and stopping at Albania Day from draping a flag around Winston Churchill's statue, you know.
So, the polarisation is coming, it's just it will take an electoral wipe out of this magnitude.
The problem is, as you've alluded to, the option that we're going to get, inevitably, same policies, different colour on the car?
Labour Party are indistinguishable?
So yeah, not looking good going into 2024, boys.
I wish I had a bit more hope, but at least you can understand the reasons that we've been sold out by Rishi Sunak and vote accordingly, I suppose.
All right.
I'm being told by the team, by the way, if you hit the desk, it goes through the mic.
Oh, right.
Apologies.
Don't do that.
But anyway, Beau.
Right, yeah.
Has someone got a mouse?
Can you just scroll down to my bit?
Yeah, that's fine, of course.
I just thought we'd, you know, sort of a classic end of the year thing to just have a bit of a discussion about, you know, what 2024 might hold for us and any predictions we might have.
It's that classic thing, if you get one right, it's then a great clip.
It's quite a big window to be terribly wrong.
I was going to say, is your track record for bets that we've learned of?
I don't know.
I was very close, I was within seconds of winning a spread bet of about 12 bets.
What's happening next year?
We've got the big Donald Trump election.
Is the UK having an election?
Yeah, it's got to be called before January 2025.
But does it happen in 2024?
Yes.
Okay.
Almost certainly, yeah.
I thought it was more like November.
I thought that was the latest.
The date I'd prospectively heard was actually the 31st of October.
Oh, okay.
Oh, right.
Oh, right.
So we may end up getting a shift in both Anglosphere nations here.
I think it's 99% sure we will have a general election next year, sort of a thing.
That's the reason they're delaying the ARC conference until 2025.
They're not going to have one next year in November because they're waiting to see what the political landscape is, depending who wins in the UK and US.
Right.
So I thought maybe first we could just have a think about Trump.
Well, sorry, the 2024 presidential election.
Biden's locked in, right?
He's definitely... No, not technically.
Is he not?
He's not technically locked in.
I mean, he's said he's running, but it's assumed he's going to be the candidate.
But also, nobody really believes he's running the show.
And everyone seems to think that the Democrats are at least lining up surrogate candidates.
There's a reason... Of Gavin Newsom.
Yeah, that's the reason that Newsom and DeSantis did a debate recently.
DeSantis is actively running for the Republican nomination.
He won't get it, obviously, but... Newsom hasn't thrown his hat in the ring for... I mean, he's not like he's gonna displace Kamala Harris officially, because that'll upset all the black women that overwhelmingly vote for them.
So, the idea is that, I don't know, Joe Biden might slip on a banana peel and he might just have to step in.
I mean, short of him dying, I don't think they are going to pull him out.
Retirement for health reasons.
I mean, it's possible, but yeah, usually the incumbent president... I don't know if there's any... whether that's ever happened, whether an incumbent president has lost the nomination to get re-elected.
Has that ever happened?
I don't think... It's not even lost the nomination, it would be that you don't run again.
Right.
I mean, yeah, they could decide it's just there's actual health issues.
OK, but short of that, I mean, just look at it.
And Trump has got.
The polls show that he's got a lockdown.
Assuming legal challenges don't actually prevent him, he will win that nomination, right, for the Republicans?
Yes.
317 electoral college votes, if you believe the polls in each state, then add it up.
In the actual election?
Yeah.
In terms of the primary, he's going to be the Republican candidate, unless they somehow take him out.
The way we're sitting right now, I mean, unless he tomorrow comes out and be like, you know what?
Mein Kampf, not a bad book.
Like, he's going to win.
And in which case?
That's so going to be a clip.
You know, he did say something similar the other day.
Did you see it?
No, I don't know.
He just says the migrants, they're coming in, they're perverting the blood of our country.
And some people say, you know, Hitler said something like that, which is very differently, very differently.
Did he actually say that?
And then he just said, and I'd never read Mein Kampf.
Why did you bring it up?
Why did you have to bring it up?
I haven't seen that.
It's a real clip.
It's him talking about the invasion of the southern border.
And he's just like bringing up the fact that he's never read Mein Kampf.
But I believe him.
Right.
John, if you can find that on Twitter, that would be amazing.
I've seen a couple of clips of Trump recently, or in the last week or two, where he's saying fairly strong words, you know, saying he's going to dismantle various portions of their deep state or their intelligence services.
Well, you know about Schedule F, I assume?
What limits?
What was that?
The day one plan that he's drawn up to fire 50,000 federal agents.
Oh yeah, yeah.
That was it.
That was one of the things.
I didn't know it was called Plan F. Is that what you said it was?
Schedule F. Schedule F. Okay, I didn't know it was called that, but... There was an Axios article detailing all of it where, of course, they were crying about how could you destroy our democracy in this way by firing a bunch of useless... Mind Swamp.
You gotta type in Mein Kampf, otherwise.
Oh, this is gonna be so clipped out of context.
Well, he said it, so.
But unless he actually comes out and endorses the book.
They come from Africa.
They come from Asia.
They come from South America.
But not just South America, they're all over the world.
They dump them on the border and they pour into our country, and nobody's there to check them.
And the Border Patrol's incredible, by the way.
They want to do it, but they're told not to do their job.
It's crazy what's going on.
They're ruining our country.
And it's true.
They're destroying the blood of our country.
That's what they're doing.
They're destroying our country.
They don't like it when I said that.
And I never read Mein Kampf.
They said, oh, Hitler said that in a much different way.
No, they're coming from all over the world.
People all over the world.
We have no idea.
They could be healthy.
They could be very unhealthy.
They could bring in disease that's gonna catch on in our country.
But they do bring in crime.
But they have them coming from all over the world.
And they're destroying the blood of our country.
They're destroying the fabric of our country.
He said it.
He said it again.
Yeah.
He said it again.
That was unwise.
No, I think this is classic Trump where he'll say some stuff that's on the line in the sense that you can see the Democrats being like, he said blood!
But obviously any normal person reading the news would actually come out of that eventually just being like, nah, Trump's our guy.
Yeah.
Because you remember back to the first election where he won, he would say random stuff that was clearly just bait.
So I don't know if he's baiting.
I think he's baiting.
Most normal people, I think, wouldn't necessarily know how incendiary just the mere mention of the word blood is.
It's like the blood and soil thing.
Most people wouldn't even realise the perhaps incendiary connotations.
Yeah, exactly.
Most people wouldn't realise that, which is why you shouldn't immediately reference Mein Kampf and Adolf Hitler in the same sentence.
You're then making the comparison.
That was dumb.
It's like, by the way, I've never read Mein Kampf.
Yeah, that's like someone farting and then the first person going, wasn't me!
Then everyone turns around and looks at you.
But the irony is, he's still going to win the nomination.
But that's my point, unless he buggers that up, he in a free and fair election has won.
It must be over unless something major happens.
So in which case the real question is, so are they going to rig it?
Because they literally, I think we can actually say this, because in Colorado they tried to get him kicked off the ballot and that is rigging the election, not having the ability to vote for the opposition candidate.
So what do you guys think?
I saw Tucker Carlson saying Recently, maybe it was an older, slightly older clip, but I saw it recently.
Someone said, you're quite fearless as a reporter.
There seem to be many things you're not prepared to talk about, like even 9-11 or the JFK murder or something.
Is there anything you're sort of afraid to talk about?
And he said, yeah, the 2020 election.
Well, he's technically got a gag order on him because of the Fox lawsuit, hasn't he?
Oh, has he?
Yeah.
The Dominion case has probably put... Oh, right.
The Dominion case.
He was talking, I think, in general terms.
Just in general terms, he doesn't want to...
It's like a hot subject for him.
Sure, but if the lawsuit itself was that what Fox broadcasted caused reputational damage to Dominion and Tucker was implicated in that, he doesn't want to talk about the topic in case they just go after him with more fair again.
Fair enough, yeah.
It's not that he doesn't have the balls to do so.
I mean, he said some pretty controversial stuff and fair play to it.
But I think the interesting thing that will happen is that I don't think they can pull off the same scale of weighing the votes in their favour as they did with Covid, because not everywhere is doing mail-in ballots this time around.
I think some of the swing states are, because it's technically in the Pennsylvania Constitution now, and I don't think they're going to get away with challenges with that, but there are Republican states which are aware to this.
You've got folks like Scott Pressler and that that are going to do registrations and do ballot harvesting where legal for the Republicans, and I think most of the effery is going to be in the deep blue Democrat states where Trump's not going to be able to swing them anyway.
It's not like you're going to get a second Reagan election where he wins 49 out of 50.
And where it's always, sort of always been the case, certain places in Illinois or whatever.
Yeah.
The ones you've got to look out for are the slowly turning purple ones, like Texas.
Right, yeah.
And Arizona, because Arizona always seems to have problems.
You know, there's Maricopa County machines that just magically switch off midway through the day.
Oh, I guess you can't vote, guys.
That's okay.
Yeah.
I'd like to see the whole Dominion case.
Is it still not finished then?
It's still ongoing?
That's settled.
I mean, the thing with the Dominion one is the Trump team hired such Non-credible lawyers that made outlandish claims that it just made the whole thing look stupid.
I mean, if you want to say the Democrats fudged the numbers in not doing signature verification for the ballots in that some people were on the voter registry after they died so we don't know if they voted or not or if someone voted in their name or not, if you want to say obviously mail-in ballots are going to be liable to fraud because Jimmy Carter's foundation found out about this years ago, Elizabeth Warren and who's the other one from Minnesota, the woman that ran in 2020.
No, no, no.
Amy Klobuchar, they did a documentary on Amazon Prime saying that mail-in voting and proprietary code digital counting machines are liable to fraud.
We had narratives for years that George Bush stole the 2004 election, Donald Trump stole the 2016 election, and suddenly 2020 is the most safe and secure sweeping election ever?
Really?
Okay.
Right.
That's what makes us suspicious forever.
It's like, if everyone was whining about how rigged this was but no one in power cares because they think that's ridiculous, like you know it's probably ridiculous, there's no real threat, but even mentioning that something went wrong or suggesting something went wrong gets you in jail.
Or removed from your job or whatever else.
You know, getting kicked off YouTube, etc.
I mean, of course people are going to be suspicious.
But I mean, last time around, what was it?
It was 40-something percent of all votes in the election were mail-in, which was unheard of.
Like, the highest it had been before was 20.
It's a massive jump, so I'd love to see what it comes out this time.
Unless you implement martial law and stop people from going to the polls for some confected emergency, you're not going to get the same share.
And also the electoral college is more on Trump's side this time because of the population bleed that's happened from California into red states.
I think it's deducted a seat from California, redistributed it to one of the Republican strongholds.
Right.
Well, we'll see.
I do think that, sort of, obviously, the 2024 presidential election will be, there'll be fire, all sorts of fireworks, kind of, you know, whatever happens.
Literally leading up to it, there'll be riots.
And laughter.
But no one's going to accept it.
Even if it is the most safe and secure thing in the world.
The time for both sides accepting the results of an election in America was over long ago.
I think 2012 was probably the last one.
From a British point of view, or from anyone that's not in the US, the whole world will be watching.
It's like a show, isn't it?
You sit back, you obviously have no input into it whatsoever.
The whole rest of the world just has to sit back and watch it play out, whatever's going to happen.
We're going to have to do a drinking livestream of it.
I have stayed up for presidential elections and UK general elections since I was about 18.
So I always do it.
I don't think I've missed one.
I always, always do it.
So yeah, maybe we could get Carl to, one of the producer boys, to set everything up and we could do a late night, all night.
We'll just have to rotate the cast out.
Yeah, we could maybe do that.
I'd be up for that anyway.
Yeah.
So, moving on then, maybe talk about our possible general election briefly.
Looks like all the polls suggest Labour's going to win that, unfortunately.
The Tory party know Labour's going to win it.
I mean, having spoken to them, they know.
The tone at each successive conference is fascinating.
So, the one in 2021 was the first one after lockdown, it was jubilant, Boris was very arrogant, and It left me feeling quite bitter because I was like, you just locked us in our home for nearly two years and now you're celebrating these wins, really?
Then the trust one was the party trying to say we've got back on our feet, we're going to win the next election and none of the membership believed it.
And then this year it was the membership and the MPs know they're going to lose.
So it really was like pissing up and fiddling as Roanburns.
Was it the one that Theresa May called where Corbyn got a fair few seats?
2017.
Yeah, Labour increased the vote share.
And then the one after that, that's when Boris gets in, right?
That's when Corbyn, everything collapsed for Corbyn.
Utterly obliterated.
Right, yeah, yeah, okay.
So I think we'll just have to see what the sort of turnout is.
Whether people's anger translates into Labour votes, or just staying home, or any sort of protest vote, hopefully.
I think it's going to be stay home.
So Goodwin's numbers on this look about 6 out of 10 people that voted Boris, particularly the first time Conservative voters are not voting at all because they thought the Conservative Party betrayed them and Labour are the same.
The problem is that's not necessarily translating to any vote.
If you look at, and this is pertinent to reform, There was a Bexiby election about two years ago in a Tory safe seat because James Brokenshire died and the Tories put up a candidate.
I met him.
He was nice enough.
He was an anti-Brexiteer though, so he was wet.
He used to be my MP in Hull Church, was he?
Anyway, sorry, go on.
No, no, it's alright.
Richard Tice ran in Bexley, that's where his local constituency is, and his vote share increased, I think he got about 5 or 6% of the total overall vote.
Labour's vote share increased, but their overall votes didn't really increase, it was just a proportion of the vote.
There's a Tory share and a Tory safe seat, just collapsed because barely anyone showed up.
So apathy is going to claim more Tory seats than vengeance.
Yeah.
No, you're probably right.
If Hacks put money on that, I probably would.
It depends on Nigel Farage.
Literally, the man can still command so much swinging of the polls in his own actions.
So, I mean, if he wants to go out and actually do a fantastic job, potential's there for him.
I don't know what he'd end up doing with that.
Like, how many seats you end up with, exactly.
Because, of course, being an England-only party, you're only really going there, and you've got to become the biggest in that constituency.
To be honest, I mean, I don't know why he doesn't just do himself.
Like, go back to that constituency, he's running nine times above them.
Self-annot?
Yeah, just take it.
Just finally take it.
He believes they were stolen from him last time, and a lot of people believe that.
Okay, just go back, take it, take the victory.
Because there's no way that people there are going to be like, you know what?
One of the old parties.
Everyone in this country with any kind of sympathies for UKIP or Brexit or anything else, they all seem to believe in some kind of redemption arc for Nigel Farage, like he deserves something for what he's done.
And if we're not going to get him in the House of Lords, I mean, he's become an MP for four years.
Problem is, though, I think he's going to go and won the old parties.
Specifically.
Right?
But he'd be a fool to do so.
Really?
Because what a waste of a story.
Like, master Brexit, the Brexit man, who could finally destroy politics as it was and reforge it into something new and interesting, just becomes part of the apparatus.
I mean, he's honorary president of reform.
It would be Quite a U-turn to just suddenly run for the Tories, but who knows?
I think he, let's be fair, it's not impossible that he's foreseeing after the next election the total desolation of the Conservative Party, which will happen, that if they're bereft of candidates to select and their current candidate selection process didn't generate an election win, that he could say, let's just fold all of the successful reform candidates into the Tories.
I wouldn't be shocked if he did that.
But the reason, he's obviously not going to say that now, because, I mean, ahead of an election, nobody wants all the reform donors to go, well, what's the point of reforming?
Because reform clearly has principles.
They've got a full manifesto pledge.
They're the only ones saying net zero migration.
Good on them.
I think they need to say a lot more and be a lot more full-throated.
But, yeah, I mean, I don't mean to be too rude, but I feel like that's just Tory wishful thinking, that that's the way Farage would go, and that's what he's thinking.
That's not what he said at the last conference.
It's just like there seems to be a gaping hole for reform to fill.
That's it.
Simple as that.
He did also say, I would be surprised if I wasn't Tory leader by 2026.
When did he say that?
It was about four weeks ago.
I didn't see that.
You can get it up, John, if he's there.
It was on Guido Fawkes.
He did it in an interview, actually.
Either way, my interest in this isn't so much of the person, it's the story and the effects of it.
Because That I saw, I think it was Richard Tice said that the Tories should stand down and let reform take the seats.
And obviously the immediate response was a bit of laughter because it's like, well, you're lowering the cost.
One man?
Yeah, that was.
But there's some truth in that in the sense of like, now you guys have been messing up everything and you probably will continue to mess everything up.
So if you actually wanted a story which was glorious and actually led to this country being better off, It would be one where the underdogs basically overtake the state and therefore enforce what, well, they will actually do instead of the people who have promised it for 14 years and done nothing.
Like them having any kind of victory would just be so demoralizing.
But the idea of Nigel Farage joining them or folding anything into them, I kind of feel like most of the people who would stand for reform would turn around and be like, this is cringe, I'm leaving.
It would be an arch betrayal.
So, that's why I don't think, if anyone's recommending that he does that, they don't seem to realise the level of betrayal that would be.
Yeah, I'd like to see what his actual words were, because he expressly said the opposite of that.
I don't know if that's a... He did say that and then he also said the, but currently that's not viable and also I'm currently with reform.
Yeah, but as I just said, he's obviously not going to say, I'm going to bail on reform, because otherwise everyone that's throwing their weight behind reform wouldn't go for reform.
But I'll put it this way, as a political realist, if Farage saw fertile ground to take over the Conservative Party and fold reform in, I wouldn't be surprised if he took it.
I just flatly disagree with that view, that take.
It would be an arch betrayal of all the You kick Brexit party and reform stuff.
I mean, it might happen.
I'm not saying it definitely won't happen.
But that's what I'm saying.
You're saying you flatly disagree with my take.
I'm giving an observation that it could happen.
I don't care.
I'm a results-based man.
If reform took over, cool.
I'm not saying I want that, as in, like, that's my only goal.
I'm saying I would not be shocked if this is the trajectory of travel, because he sees it as a path of power.
I would be shocked.
Also, in the jungle, he kept saying, I just don't know, didn't he?
When asked a few times, I see him say, who knows?
Who knows what the future holds?
Anyway, anyway, I'm not sure if he's, he's obviously a really, really important person and voice in UK politics, but it's not the be all and end all.
If he's your leader, it doesn't mean you definitely win a general election.
I mean, but anyway.
If we're back in a horse, Who else is the Caesar figure?
I mean, and I say this with criticism of Farage, I think he's been too tepid on plenty of things, you know?
He criticised our friend Calvin Robinson fairly recently, and he didn't need to.
So, but I am saying, who else is as prominent a personality to lead a party to victory right now?
Yeah, no, fair point, yeah.
Starmer does look like a rabbit in the headlights a lot, doesn't he?
Like, literally.
He's winning by default.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Prime Minister Starmer.
Can you imagine?
It's not going to be that different.
It's going to be from the current Conservative Party.
It's going to be awful.
You're just going to get a bit more gender madness than usual because there's going to be no backbenchers pushing back on it.
Make misogyny a true crime.
Can you go back to the document where I had a few of my notes?
Maybe a few last little things we could have a quick Talk on where you think maybe the Ukraine and Gaza wars are going.
I think Russia's just going to simply, well they've already won essentially, I think they're just going to, Ukraine's going to sort of formally, formally lose that.
Well the appetite to continue funding it.
What does that mean?
Well that the Ukraine army stops trying to fight the Russian army, I suppose.
And just all of the Ukrainian land becomes... No, no, all the Donbass, everything to the east of that.
Oh, so like a sea fire?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
And Ukraine stopped pretending they might win one day.
Well it's not even that, I just think it'll get to the point where it's just untenable to fund it.
So, then by default Ukraine can't take back whatever territories they've already ceded.
I saw today or yesterday that Ukraine was saying, Zelensky was saying, you might try and conscript half a million more men.
Wow.
You can sort of get into the bottom of the barrel of your manpower at that point if he does another few offensives with them and they fail.
There's literally not that many men fighting men left.
I don't know.
Anyway, we'll see what happens.
The Gaza War, I guess that will... Can I make a prediction on the same one?
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's going to go on for another 10 years.
You reckon?
I think it'll be unbelievably boring.
Just a low burn.
Be something in the background.
Right.
Whereas the Gaza War... I mean, that's already kind of over.
I mean, they've lost.
They've lost the lands, they've lost their tunnels, they're all getting killed.
I don't know what the Israelis want to do with the West Bank.
Sorry, not with the West Bank, with the Gaza Strip, but who really cares?
Are they going to do what they want?
Expand into it, redevelop it.
There have been suggestions they want to make it a sort of parallel shipping lane from the Suez Canal so that they have more influence over trade in the region.
What does that mean?
Because they used to own the damn thing, tried to do that before and ended up having to leave because of all the terrorism.
It's just like, is this really a population you can integrate?
Yeah, but they don't want to integrate them.
So where do you put them?
Because killing them all is not what they're being successful at.
For all the cause of genocide, it's not.
Yeah, I'm not calling it genocide, but either... I mean, so there has been recent suggestions by the Israeli finance minister and a couple of members of the Knesset that Europe needs to take refugees from Palestine.
So I think they're just betting on either bombing them or shipping them elsewhere.
I'm not even making a comment on the conflict.
I'm not picking a side.
Yeah, I know, it's what the Israelis would like.
I'm just declaring to the audience that's it.
We're just trying to make predictions of what we think will happen.
I think it seems to be a fair observation that Israel would rather they didn't have the Gaza Strip and Palestine populated by people that support Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
So if they can remove those people and turn it into a wider stretch of land for Israel, that's, of course, a strategic goal on their part.
Condemnation of that side.
It does look like a lot of Gaza City has been reduced to rubble.
Like a lot of it.
Like a massive percentage of it.
So maybe they just will move the majority of Gazans either into the West Bank or Egypt or anywhere else in the world and... Then just occupy what's left.
And keep the Gaza Strip, the depopulated Gaza Strip occupied in perpetuity.
I don't know.
Maybe something like that.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm thinking more, it'll become kind of like, uh, they won't be able to get rid of the population they want to get rid of.
And it'll become more of like a police state zone that you can go on tourist holidays or something.
I can't imagine the Israeli government being like, yes, no, we need to make this look normal.
Start advertising, come to Tel Aviv and Israel.
Like their version of Dubai.
Yeah.
But it's, it's like, look how wonderful we're treating people and how we're building the place up.
Like I can see the first year of occupation being that.
I'll go and have a look, why not?
And there's constant soldiers and tanks on the streets of Gaza.
Yeah, checkpoints.
To keep it under strict, strict military occupation.
Every single road of it, at all times.
I'm going with that.
Again though, I'm not making a moral judgement on either side.
You can see, given the cultural, ethnic and religious conflicts in the region, how the Israelis would think that would be necessary.
Were they to take over that portion, because bond and military incursion people out of the area, if they wanted to resettle it, yeah, they basically have to turn it into a police state because their occupation would be constantly under threat of Islamist retaliation as well.
So there's never going to be peace in the region.
But that's actually the prediction.
This will never stop.
No matter how large scale it continues to go on for, there will always be conflict around that.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, you're right.
Both peoples claim a divine ownership of the same bit of land.
So yeah, it's a very difficult thing to ever resolve.
What about a couple of other things then before we round up?
One of the things when I was Googling around looking at sort of predictions, because all sorts of websites and news outlets and all sorts of people, broadcasters, do a what's coming in the following year.
A lot of it seemed to revolve around AI.
Everyone seems to have a take on AI or 2024 seems to be, looks like it's probably going to be a big year for AI.
And now I'm no AI expert, but a lot of people were saying stuff like AI is going to explode and it's going to be just everything starts getting dominated by AI next year.
Or in the near future.
You're going to get, I think, a few deepfake scandals ahead of the American 2024 election.
Deepfake stuff, yeah.
It's getting scarily good.
You're going to get a bunch of creepy AI influencer and porn stories.
That's absolutely going to happen.
Right.
As in, you're gonna get- so the BBC did a documentary, I think it was last year now, of- there's a whole enterprise of people, like, putting the faces of people they know on explicit materials using deepfakes.
Alright.
And so that'll be- there'll be legislation that comes around that, and then people are gonna end up debating because- And then that'll drive the technology that gives us, like, self-created movies and totally novel experiences.
So, anyway, I'll just make exponential jumps and there'll be political implications for it.
Yeah, it does seem worrying.
Two things I've seen this year, or late this year, which seemed very worrying to me.
One was a deepfake of a fake military thing, I can't remember if it was supposed to be in Ukraine or Gaza, but it was just a deepfake, it was supposed to look like a road crossing that had been blown up or something.
And the whole thing was AI generated.
And it looked just perfectly real.
That, for obvious reasons, is worrying.
No one's got the power to generate that sort of thing.
Second thing I saw were drones.
Super fast drones.
They, like, whiz around the sky.
Super fast.
And only small ones, like this big.
But you know, you only need like a small bit of... small charge.
Like a little bit of plastic explosives the size of a 50p or something.
And it's a... it's a... a suicide drone.
It's a swarm attack.
It just flies into you and blows you up.
But it's so fast that it'd be... it'd be very, very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sort of shoot you out of the sky with a rifle or something.
If it was coming at you.
You can't really get away from it on a quad bike or a motorbike or something.
It's so fast.
Um, that seems extremely worrying to me that the future of all war, or even police enforcement, is just that.
Just like a drone conflict.
The proper dreadnought effect.
Super fast.
Like whoever's got the most drones now just wins.
Yeah.
And we need to figure out anti-drone technology and build more drones.
Yeah, there needs to be an arms race which is anti-drone technology, right.
Yeah.
We need more anti-drone weapons.
Well essentially to prevent terror attacks you're gonna have to start putting like micro iron domes on the top of every building in London.
That's a great place to live in.
Like, you thought the concrete bollards to stop the trucks at peace weren't bad enough.
Can you ban super fast suicide drones?
Not if they're coming in from Iran or... No, right, I'm joking.
Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like banning dum-dum bullets or banning a flamethrower or banning increasingly large battleships or something.
You can't really do it.
Right?
You can't once the genie's out of the bottle.
You've built the Dreadnought.
Yeah.
You can't unbuild it and hope that no one builds one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The genie's out of the bottle sort of thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So AI and sort of drone technology seems to be a bit of a worry in the near future.
Well, there's lots of other things we could talk about, I suppose, but maybe it's time for comments and video comments.
But one last thing.
Do you think they'll draw up a new fake pandemic?
Next year.
A few people were saying that that's sort of on the horizon, that people in the know seem to say that the super elites, whoever they are, are planning another pandemic for us.
Well, I haven't.
So I haven't been through the testimony that happened the other day yet.
In there was Commons debate on whether or not the UK is going to sign up to a WHO treaty that allows them to unilaterally impose measures like lockdowns and vaccine passports on us and I think that got shot down actually thanks to Danny Kruger and Andrew Bridgen and the like so well done but I wouldn't be surprised if there were Something.
I don't think you necessarily get away with it to the scale of Covid again.
Perhaps that's my naivety, but a certain contingent of people, you know, now watch shows like ours.
There's a critical consciousness that was raised out of that and I think there will be some non-compliance.
But are they going to try and introduce international vaccine passports and stuff like that?
Yeah, of course they'll.
Yeah.
So, I guess I'm going to have to strike places off my travel list.
Fun.
Yeah.
Yeah, I shan't take a vaccine or wear a mask or queue up outside Tesco's or anything again.
I just won't.
It's as simple as that.
Okay, well, there you go.
With that, onto the video comments.
So as a fellow person of size who eats dinosaur ribeyes and pterodactyl wings, I have to say I fully support the fat struggle against the airlines.
This is a terrible industry.
They overbook all their flights.
They actively hate their customers.
You wouldn't treat your customers the way they treat you if they do.
I fly frequently.
This is a problem.
I think this is an American phenomenon as well, because you guys fly a lot more for a lot cheaper.
We don't fly internally in our country.
Maybe occasionally you might go from the south of England to Scotland.
Yeah, I once flew to Edinburgh, but you just usually don't do that.
You can fly around Europe way cheaper than you can in the US.
I'm saying the UK.
As in, like, we don't fly as frequently as the Americans.
No, but we fly around Europe.
Like, we go on holidays.
Okay, let's put it this way.
Most people have fewer foreign holidays to Europe a year than an American will fly to visit people out of state.
So the problems with their airlines being basically buses in the sky compounds.
I kind of find the bit that Carl did the other day was it he responded that was with Esther yeah about the fat airline seats.
So they're getting double for being fat which I never got the whole overbooking airline seats thing.
I've never had that experience and it's my number one fear whenever I get on a plane.
I'm not even sure if it's legal in the rest of the world.
I know the Americans do it and then you can get on and they'll be like, oh we'll give you 300 bucks and not get on the flight.
I did book it for a reason.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then I've got to drag someone off.
I do wonder if it is genuinely a weight limit though, as well as just fitting in the seat and not smothering someone to death, but I don't know what... Fat people have got to be on the top then, surely.
Like, we've overbooked the flight, the lady taking up to your seat, she's going first.
Yep.
Otherwise we've got a riot.
I saw something, maybe it was Viva Fryer, anyway, one of the YouTube legal.
If you kick up enough stink, they have to give you a decent amount of money, not fob you off with a few hundred dollars.
But most people don't know that, or haven't got the nows to kick up a big enough stink, but I think you are entitled to a bunch of money, if they ever do that to you.
But yeah, I see both sides of it.
Obviously the airlines are complete dicks for making their seats really tiny.
But then, don't be as wired as a normal human being, though, also.
A wider than a normal human being.
Yeah, much wider than a normal human being.
Don't be like this wide.
It's not good for you.
Don't do it.
Yeah, you've got a problem.
It's not very flat-affirming of you, though.
Right, next one then.
Good afternoon, Lotus Eaters!
Not going to make it to the Gold Tier Zoom this week, because we're heading to pasture for our annual steak Christmas dinner.
So, wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and looking forward to seeing you all in the new year!
Wonderful, thank you very much.
That was very wholesome.
Enjoy your steak.
I've got a bit of beef for Christmas this year as well, so that's good.
Here's a bit of trivia for everyone watching that I learned at ARC.
Jordan Peterson and his wife, every time they go to a new hotel, because they only eat beef and salt, they buy a new air fryer, make steak in the hotel room, and leave the air fryer there.
Yeah, when you make that much.
Yeah, right, yeah.
I just think it's mad, but... There you go, here's an air fryer for every woman who's cleaning up, though.
Good one.
It's a bit weird, but you've got to do what you've got to do.
Yep.
That's what he feels like he's got to do.
It's nice to know we've got a few Welsh fans.
I'm sort of a call to Welsh myself, so that's a soft spot for the Welsh.
Right, on to the next one.
I have to say, I am very disappointed in the AI girlfriend market.
What strikes me is the sheer lack of quality they have in their models.
Honestly, if you're going to be losing your sanity to something, at least have it look presentable.
Let's take a look at my personal work here.
We have the office lady.
The office lady up to hours.
The furry.
And of course, for the more traditionally minded of you, the battle nut.
Because he doesn't love that.
Who let this video come in through?
He's right, though.
And he's actually preempted something that does already exist.
So the AI girlfriend thing, there is just that one that looks like Pixar.
But there are loads that already are just basically just like porn AI GFs.
But yeah, no, I still don't support the idea.
I still think it's cringe and something that should be bullied.
It's a demon, don't talk to it.
It's my advice.
Super sad.
Mixed with real people.
It's literally a siphon for male potential.
A joke stealing your soul.
Hopefully that was completely ironic.
I just want to wish everybody a very Merry Christmas.
I don't think anyone here is under any illusion that the next year is going to be easy for anybody.
But that also means Anybody!
So this really is the time to just reach out to those around you and be there because whether we like it or not, we're all in this together as human on this planet.
It's going to be hard for everyone to just be there for each other and remember to laugh.
At least next year is going to be ridiculous and they want us to be depressed and not laugh.
But keep laughing, keep having a good time.
A very Merry Christmas and I hope Everybody in the chat finds a real-life girlfriend in the new year.
That was a wholesome message, at least.
Thank you, Sophie.
Much appreciated.
Huh?
Hug.
It just means thank you.
Oh, right.
Okay, I thought you were swearing at me.
Right, wonderful.
Wouldn't blame you.
All right, on to the written comments.
We also have a super chat from The Shadow Band.
Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night for $150.
So, thank you very much for that.
Texas Gal, $150.
Yeah, not bad.
Yeah, not bad at all.
I expect that in my Christmas card.
Just got on the road for a six hour drive from southwest Texas to far west Texas, so I'm glad for the company for a bit.
Merry Christmas and a blessed new year to y'all.
Americans drive for a really strange distance.
Your country is a continent.
What are you doing?
Like you said, where they have to actually fly places.
We're just not used to vast distances.
I drove across America once.
Well, not all the way across, but from Kansas out to the West Coast.
Yeah, it's just sort of, it seems endless.
You're in an ocean of land.
We're just not used to it, are we?
No.
I hate half-hour train journeys.
Someone's asking, did we fix the last Lads Hour?
Yes, we have, so you can go and watch that if you've missed it.
Yesterday there was an issue with the video player, apparently.
Jerome Doohan, Merry Christmas, Lotuses.
Thank you very much, appreciate the all-caps.
And Le French, Merry Christmas to you all, and especially to Callum's beard.
Half of it has been gone, but I'm sure he'll regrow it in the new year.
Yeah, it turns out those Muslim guys, that Mohammed guy was way worse than they said.
So I thought, okay, I gotta leave Islamism.
This isn't working.
It's like a non-McDonald bit.
Don't forget to take time off and hang out with the family.
I'll see you next year.
Cheers.
Yeah, I do need quite a break.
Do you want to do your comments?
Sure, so on the CGB Grey problem.
Good question.
Theodore says, Vexologists come up with a bunch of rules for flag design, which sound good in principle, but then you see them apply to actually good iconic flags and realize they're a load of bollocks.
But Vexologists go around acting like these rules have been made up, officially dictated by learned scholars, and objectively prove these iconic flags are actually terrible.
Look up the flag of Venice, for example.
It breaks every single one of the damn rules, but is an awesome flag.
And he's posted a picture there.
Pete has, which proves it, which is, um, yeah, the flag of Venice is epic and timeless.
Theodore says the Florida state flag is the best of America's flags.
It's kind of true.
You ever looked at it?
It's you being born in Florida.
Cause you got the, you got the cross on the circle and in the circle it's you coming through.
Bit weird, but it's good.
Arizona Desert Rat says the U.S.
may have city flags, but Europe has coats of arms.
I don't see much difference.
Yeah, and there are some terrible coats of arms as well.
Don't get me wrong.
So, what's it?
It was Burko's, which is the funniest.
He put the rainbow flag in his coat of arms and then wrote a quality for all on it.
It was just like... He did?
He did that?
John Burko for the speaker.
It was just so boring.
It was like, bro, you went for your family coat of arms and went for progressive politics of all the missed opportunities you could spend with your life.
My family coat of arms.
Now, here's a flag indicating I'm a genetic dead end that won't reproduce.
It's less than that.
It's like you don't get to do that for no reason.
Of course, you can go home and do your own.
He got that special privilege that will timelessly be put in the House of Parliament because he was a speaker and just wastes it on a pointless political message.
I once did an article called What Berko Did.
I think that's what I titled it.
So there's an article on the website, I'm pretty sure it's not a premium, where I list why he's disgraced.
Because we can now call him a disgraced ex-speaker.
Like a formal inquiry called him a bully and stuff.
So yeah, he's a total scumbag.
Deranged diminutive.
Yeah, it's out of his mind.
Cameron says he loves CGP Grace.
Be careful.
Me too, but the man must pay.
Omar Awad says, given the number of autists turned trans, I wouldn't rule out the Vixology community being taken over.
Oh, that's a little bit spicy.
I would avoid reading that one.
I'm not going to say that, but that's funny, Omar.
Don't get me wrong.
I also despise the corporate inclination to every logo.
Smooth and simple.
Anything designed by committee is cancer.
There's a lot of people making fun of Vexologists by applying their rules to company logos, and they just become worse every time.
Andrew Narok says, Oh hey, it's Minnesota in the international news again.
At least this time, it's also needless stupid drama over changing the flag rather than the continuing spike in crime.
That said, Merry Christmas to everyone, and to the Lotus Seeders, praying for all to have a wonderful holiday season.
There we are.
Andrew Narok says, in regards to the Somali conspiracy, I'd imagine it's less that they think the Somalis designed the flag and more of their virtue signaling to the Somali population.
That doesn't seem to be true though.
The dude in question seems like a vexologist leftist.
They're plenty able to be retarded without having to need to virtue signal to the Somalis that we love.
Okay, so Callum didn't get time to do the calculation, so, and he's done it here, UK minimum wage from April 2024 will be £11.44.
Takes someone working full time, 37 and a half hours a week, and they are making £429 a week.
That's £22,308 for 52 weeks of full salaried employment for a year.
So the 29K threshold for importing someone from abroad is £6,692 more than minimum wage.
a week.
That's £22,308 for 52 weeks of full salaried employment for a year.
So the 29k threshold for importing someone from abroad is £6,692 more than minimum wage.
Clearly not a high-skilled position.
Thank you, Rishi Sunak.
Kevin Fox, Labour voted against the Rwanda plan because Rwanda is not safe.
Why, then, is a Labour Party member organising school trips for kids to Rwanda?
Sam Rushworth is standing for the post MP of Bishop Auckland.
Oh, that's Hannah Davidson's position that she just stood down from as well, so they're definitely going to get that.
While running a company offering 2k paradise trips for kids to a place that's unsafe for illegal migrants.
Never ask questions.
It's just about hypocrisy.
Not about hypocrisy.
It's about hierarchy.
Sophie, I said it in the comments section of Conor's Life series interview.
We're selling the soul of our nation in exchange for stuff.
It's horrible and will always be a mistake.
The soul is eternal as long as you take care of it.
Stuff runs out.
Never trade the soul for stuff.
What makes it even worse is that the English people didn't choose it.
This is just evil that's forced upon them.
Very much so.
Do you want to do a couple from yours?
Okay, focus on the idea, said, I'd love to watch the Lotus Eaters following the election results of either the UK or US elections.
It would be far more interesting commentary than any other news outlet.
I think we could probably arrange that and we've got large enough of a guest book that we could, if we're doing a long live stream, bring people on.
We're already going to.
So last election we just didn't build the studio fast enough in time for it, so we ended up doing it over the internet.
So yeah, this has been in the waiting for four years.
Like I say, we just need to get one of the production people to give up their whole night.
Yeah, you know, you pay John to do anything.
But I would be doing it anyway.
Yeah, John fancy building us a new railroad?
I mean, if you pay him!
Actually, we can only get a maximum of five seats.
I think Josh, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it in passing at least to Josh, and Josh said he'd be up for it, or he quite often stays up all night anyway.
Yeah, I'm not sure if the big man himself, if Mr. Benjamin... Cole would absolutely do it.
I mean, he usually does it, doesn't he?
Yeah, I mean, it'd be nice if you would.
We could just rotate people out.
Sign off on it or whatever.
Yeah, or actually do that.
That's actually better, yeah.
I'm not being funny.
I live about three hours from here and I'm not going to do a full eight hours and then come into work the next day.
Right.
Fair enough.
The last couple and then, uh... OK.
JJ HW said, my predictions for 2024 is that comedians will become extinct as Western governments become the source of all comedy on Earth.
GPT-5 will replace all HR departments and most middle managers, making everyone happy until the economic collapse.
Merry Christmas and a wonderful new year.
That's probably the best one to finish on then, actually.
All right, well, thank you very much.
We've got a Gold Tier Zoom call in just under half an hour, so if you're not a Gold Tier member already, do quickly subscribe and get in the queue, I suppose.
Link's going to be on the website.
If you're listening to this in the future, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, both from Beau, Callum, and myself.
We will be back on Monday on Christmas Day at one o'clock with a pre-recorded podcast to keep you company, so if your family are boring, you know.
Listen to us instead!
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