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Feb. 2, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:30
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #842
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Hello, and welcome to the...
I don't know why I'm doing an accent.
Hello, I'm joined by Bo and Harry.
Ayup.
Ayup, kumbay.
Ayup, lad.
Do they actually... Yeah, they do talk like that.
I don't know why I'm asking, I've been there.
That's where I... That's what I always say.
Yeah.
I modify my language for you lads, but when I'm back home it's, ayup, jup.
What about, do you go home and do a Cockney accent in the mirror?
Yeah, call Blimey, governor.
Anyway, welcome to this shambles.
Today we'll be talking about the fact that they have No Shame, Suicide Squad, Kill Your Franchise, small move, and The Farmer's Revolt.
So, it's going to be fun, I think, and informative.
But before that, I have an announcement to make, which is lads hours tomorrow, because it's now... It's today.
It's Friday today, Callum.
I was coming in tomorrow.
You were going to come into the office tomorrow again, weren't you?
It wouldn't be the first time, folks.
It wouldn't.
So today, after this podcast, there'll be lads out, and this episode is about total twink death.
So if you are a closeted homosexual man, do come and join, and I'm sure you'll have good fun.
Hosted by Connor.
There we are.
Callum, this is the problem, I have to say, with orientating your understanding of which day of the week it is by the schedule, as you have admitted to doing many times before, is that when the schedule is changed, all of a sudden your entire life is flipped upside down.
I'm buggered.
And there's not much more to say about that.
No, no, I did genuinely bad timekeeping on my life.
Anyway!
We have a podcast today, which I think you'll like.
So, let's talk about the fact that they have no shame, shall we?
So, a new graph just dropped, boys, on new statistics, which is the Office for National Statistics.
Which, I will be honest, hand on heart, I am actually quite proud of British statistics.
Like, the ONS is very good at keeping statistics and gathering them and being able to use them.
But they also make predictions.
And these predictions are based on reality, regardless of political promises.
Which is quite revealing because, of course, we're talking about immigration.
Are the ONS the only part of the British government that still does the job it's supposed to?
Functions, yes.
Yeah, I think that's telling.
We do know that it is nowadays politically problematic to notice things and make predictions based on reality, isn't it?
Yeah, but the ONS still gathers the data for now.
So, I mean, maybe in 10 years.
I mean, they weren't thinking of destroying the 2020 census, if you remember.
There's one, somehow, 200 years old holdover from the Victorian era still collecting data.
A hoarder.
ONS, somehow.
So this is a crappy graph because I made the end bits there, but this is a graph of net migration in the UK.
This is from the ONS, of course, and this being a huge problem.
You're all aware, I'm sure.
But anyway, the ONS decided to update us and tell us that it's going to get worse, boys, before it changes.
So this is them tweeting.
This wasn't asked for by anyone, they just decided to tweet out a bunch of predictions.
And they say here, between mid-2021 and mid-2036, the projections for the UK as a whole suggest that 10.8 million people will be born, 10.3 million people will die, 13.7 million people will immigrate long-term to the UK, and 7.6 million people will emigrate long-term to the UK.
So what's that official statistic, 6.6 million on top?
Over 15 years there.
And that's not including any people who overstay visas, illegal entrance into the country, people that we just lose track of?
Yeah.
And of course, this comes at a time in which they tell us, at least the political parties tell us that, oh, terribly sorry.
Yes, we got all that wrong.
Vote for us this time.
We'll change it.
The Labour and the Conservatives here, of course, which, um, Well, this kind of betrays them publicly, doesn't it?
That your own Office for National Statistics is outing you as, no, mass migration will continue.
And it will not stop.
Like, huh.
Okay.
But I mean, I'm glad we can at least trust one source.
There must be some kind of rogue British nationalist who's controlling the ONS and releasing these statistics.
Why else would they release them?
Unless, of course, the Tories are proud of this and see this as some form of progress.
We are replacing you in your own home country.
Aren't we a good job, says our Indian Prime Minister.
That's such a backwards way of looking at statistics, right?
Like there's a MAGA guy secretly running the FBI counts.
It's like, yeah, no, the statistics must be wrong, not me!
Okay, but yeah, the reality in terms of, well, added data does match up with nationalist perspectives on this issue.
One thing I do want to note in this before we go forwards is that you remember the endless argument for mass immigration is we don't have enough births.
I don't know if you guys noticed, there's 500,000 more people born in that time period than die.
They will presumably be including the immigrant populations within those figures.
Absolutely, but even with that, then you've killed the argument for mass immigration.
I suppose so.
We have more births than deaths.
You know, your pyramid scheme for pensions, that could still work.
But no, that argument isn't relevant anymore.
It's just 13 more million people, please.
Well, I imagine they're banking on the idea that of those 10.8 million people, a fair number of them will eventually return to the homeland and be part of the 7.6 emigration figure sometime in the future.
So they think, well, English people probably wouldn't move, but you know, some people.
That's us going to Australia.
Let's be frank.
Oh yeah, that is a lot of us going to Australia as well.
I think it's really important that we have huge diversity in restaurants.
I've seen Will Stansel arguing about this on Twitter.
It's one of the key things for me.
I mean, despite the fact we've got the recipes so we don't need the millions of people, but I think if we have 6.6 extra million people then, you know, we can have one or two more Ethiopian themed restaurants.
Well, if we tried to cook them ourselves... So that's worth it.
The logic to me would suggest that we just aren't genetically built to make ethnic food, are we?
We have to, which is an interesting kind of ethnic determinism, but okay.
I've never been to an Ethiopian restaurant.
I'm trying to think if I've ever even seen one.
I've seen Ethiopian slops start to appear on my Twitter timeline and it doesn't look appetizing.
Isn't there one?
There's one right near here on the corner near the Ibis Hotel that's been filled with economic migrants.
Oh, that's West African food.
Oh, is it?
It's not.
Oh, it's West African.
Oh, no, not that place.
Another place.
Another place.
There's a new one?
Maybe it's... Kenyan butchers?
They're popping up everywhere.
Actually, I think maybe it's Yemeni or Oman type food, not Ethiopian.
Well, we'll have to, you know, if we're going to have the diversity, might as well eat there.
Yeah.
But no, the responses to this were not fun.
I mean, everyone, as you can see in the public comments, We're a bit miffed, to say the least.
Lots of reform people, obviously, being like, oh, yeah.
So, literally, if you don't get a new party in that isn't the ones that have already been in, you will just get continuously replaced.
I mean, that's what that promise is there.
7 million Britons will leave, and you will get 13 million foreigners That's a huge number for an island of 60 million people.
So, on the immigration issue, now we've got this image up on.
So that's Rick from the old Pawn Stars TV show.
Did you see what happened to not one of his sons who's involved in the show, but one of his other sons?
One of his other sons, speaking of immigration, OD'd and died recently on fentanyl.
Yeah, so...
Unlimited range of incredible restaurants, guys.
Think of the drugs we could have.
What would Rick have done without all of that Mexican food flooding into Las Vegas?
But this is about, um, because I kind of hate how the conservatives focus on the boat people, because obviously the bigger factor is the mass migration.
And this is a nice reveal of what will happen if those people get into power again.
And what's interesting is that number, because you don't think about it that much, but this guy tweeted a great example.
To put this into perspective, 13.7 million migrants clears the combined population of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, including the migrants in those countries, with enough people left over to fill in extra whales.
You could literally, well, have more people than every Celt on Earth.
In that time period.
So yeah, you could actually completely empty out the Celtic nations.
And when you put it in terms like that, the use of any terms like minorities that gets used is rather perverse, isn't it?
Yeah.
Well, the BBC did a thing on this where they just start off, because whenever they have to talk about, yes, usually they just mention figures and don't want to have a further conversation because Well, duh.
What's the conclusion going to be?
This is probably a bad idea.
And in this, they decided to actually instead interview some politicians.
So I wanted to get their words, because I think they'll piss you off if nothing else.
So the chairman of the Conservative Party said that, I've been clear that migration is too high and we must get back to sustainable levels.
So just 13 million over...
Liar.
Liar.
Don't care about what you've got to say anymore.
The Minister for Legal Migration said that measures would be made to make a tangible difference and show that the government was acting in response to the sorts of figures.
Liar.
Because this is the thing, the ONS have released what will happen and then there's whatever the fuck you say.
No one cares.
Because again, you're so right.
The Labour Party put out a statement, they said that they would reform the points-based immigration system to boost training and better link it to the needs of the economy.
That sounds to me just like they said that we'll lean into it more, if anything.
Why not?
That's all that is.
They are all doctors and engineers.
But the funny thing in all this is I did notice a new conversation.
Caps.
I ain't seen this before.
So, calls for a cap is the headline here.
That's been a thing.
That used to be a thing.
Did it?
Yeah, yeah, back in the day.
And I mean like the 50s and 60s and 70s and stuff.
We'll have a cap.
Even David Cameron used to talk sometimes, used to talk about having a cap.
He used to say there was a target of under, sorry, target tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
And then that was phrased as a cap back in the day.
Well, they've never had one.
Yeah.
But the statement here is that Downing Street is resisting calls from the former Home Secretary Soheila Braverman for a cap.
Really?
So there we are.
That's their opinion.
So let's go and check out what's been going on, because Soheila Braverman did respond, just being upset, where she's like, well, this is mad.
Which, you know, fair enough.
Most people just don't really pay attention anymore, because... I mean, you were her secretary.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't buy any of her... anything she's doing or saying.
I don't buy it.
It's all just performative nonsense to try and keep her seat.
She was Home Secretary, she was at the top of government in cabinet for a few years there and was absolutely part of the problem.
To me, her phony ire She can stick it.
I'm not interested in hearing it.
Well, there was the Telegraph article that got released of the insider, the anonymous insider from the Home Office, who said that, who was kind of blowing the whistle on the whole thing, saying that the Home Office, they all hate the public, they don't want to do what the public wants them to do, and whenever Suella Braverman would come in and say, listen guys, it's time that we start kicking some people back and closing these borders a bit, actually doing what we said they would, they would turn around and say, no, we're not going to do that, and she would be very apologetic for having asked in the first place.
Yes, I've got no sympathy for her.
It's your job as minister to make a department do what the government wants it to do.
That's your job.
You don't go, can you do that please, or you won't, oh well then.
We do pay you over £100.
That's not leadership, that's not doing anything.
So there we are, that's the, well I suppose, outside establishment position?
I don't know what to call it.
The MPs for the ruling party that have done this who are like, I resigned because it was so bad.
Maybe if you'd done something.
Yeah.
That would have been better.
I have no interest in serving the Conservative Party.
That is so indicative of the Tory attitude towards things.
Oh, we failed at something?
Well then I quit!
Fantastic!
Good job!
But the larger conversation, I think, was the funnier one.
So someone came out and said, could someone please think of the houses?
The real problem, of course, is the house.
Yeah, okay.
That's roughly 254,000 homes a year just to accommodate the new arrivals, and 210,000 dwellings were completed last year.
Madness on stilts, this guy says.
Which, I appreciate the house concern, as a man who doesn't own a house, but at the same time, that's not my biggest concern.
What's the point of buying a house in a neighbourhood if that neighbourhood isn't the same by the time I've paid off the mortgage?
If I now live on a foreign land at the end of that 25-year period?
Or even by the time that the rest of the neighbourhood is built.
Yes.
So, yeah, I don't really care for building endless houses if I still live in somewhere that's not England.
Because that's kind of what I wanted to invest all that money in.
But never mind.
There are a list of countries that are bigger than the expected immigration.
Which you can find your own time.
Starts with Belgium.
So we're going to take an entire Belgium.
Or an entire Greece.
Or an entire Portugal.
Or, you know, you could take a couple of Denmarks.
A couple of Finlands.
Take your pick.
Two Norways.
If we had to take 13.7 million people, I'd much rather them be two Swedens, two Norways, something like that.
If we were forced, if I had a gun to my head and said, you have to take 13.7, where do you want them coming from?
You know, Iceland, Norway, the nice countries filled with nice people.
No, you'll never get that option.
But there we are, just to give a perspective about how just insane this is.
Because I mean, the UK is one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
And it's like, yeah, just have 12 more Estonias.
Where?
What are you talking about?
Mad.
So, there's lots of feels about this.
This was mine when I first saw this data.
Local man who's had enough.
But then there are proposals, of course, because just being downy is not a way to fix anything.
So, here's a proposal.
I don't know, I'd be a lot happier if I was downy.
Well, here's a proposal from a local man.
Mass immigration, but in reverse.
I mean, it's a policy.
Certainly a policy.
But I did check out a local man who had his thinking hat on, which really gets you into the mindset of what's needed.
This chap.
Reversing this must be done with the exact cold disregard for human suffering and democratic norms shown throughout or it will not happen.
Steal yourselves.
Which is kind of funny because of course the man is being quite hardline.
But he makes a brilliant point, which is that this was done entirely undemocratically and with a cold disregard for human suffering of the English.
Yeah, we were never asked.
I feel like if they came here against our will, they can go back against theirs then.
There's no moral argument.
Forced re-migration.
Because there just is no moral argument on this.
There was no moral argument to bring them here.
I mean, there's further 13 million.
But we know large-scale deportation campaigns have been done in the past before we had access to the great range of technology that we have at the moment.
In the 1950s, Eisenhower dispelled loads of illegal Mexicans from America, for instance.
Didn't Pakistan deport quarter of a million or half a million people?
Like last month?
Yeah, in about a month's span they got rid of a quarter million.
Right, so if you want to do it, if there's political will to do it, it can be done easily.
But the resources of Pakistan The average wealth of $200 a month.
To be fair, I think the leaders of Pakistan have something that our leaders don't, which is a semblance of a backbone.
Sadly.
So that's the point this chap's getting at there.
Just to check in on everyone, so Najaf Raj, he was upset publicly.
There you are.
He said, many millions will move here that we have nothing culturally, historically, and literally in common with.
And I believe that the implications of that in our society will be very serious.
Well, yes.
Well, not even just that, that actively see us as the enemy and group themselves together and behave in their own interests.
So, I mean, there's not a small number of problems come out of it.
And what is hilarious is that that number of a million a year came out previous year, I think it was.
And of course, British politics, I'm sure you guys can sense it, has radicalized on this issue.
No, we can't go down this path.
This will actually ruin us within 5-10 years.
And irreversibly so, if you go down that path.
Because of course, these people, if you just check out political data, well...
They're also imported for a political cause, which is to displace the natives on political lines, because if you can give them the right to vote, which is Labour and Green Party policy, well they 90% vote for the Labour Party.
So you will never get your nation back.
Because if it's one man, one vote, and we import 13 million, bye!
You've lost all your political power.
Well eventually I would have thought, and I think there's precedence for this all over the world, in all sorts of times, is that once they've got a big enough body, of people, they just create their own party.
So there'll be like a UK Hindu party or a UK... Or the Conservatives!
Eventually even that host will be, the parasite will outgrow the host even.
They'll make their, there'll be like a pro-Sharia party and all the Muslims vote for it and suddenly it's a political power.
So this has happened I think in every Western nation now.
There's an Islam party in Belgium, there was one that was growing out of the Labour Party for a small period and then it hasn't kicked off yet, but absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, there'll be one that's just like, say, we've got quite a lot of Turkish people coming, don't we?
There'll be a pro-Turk party and they'll all vote for it.
And if they've got 5 million, 10 million people, It's a question if they're all in enclaves as well, so they will return people to Parliament that way.
Ethnic parties are really weird and are all around the world as well.
It's actually quite unusual that they're not more common in the West.
Because I'm thinking, I can't remember if it's Poland or some of the nations next to Turkey, but a bunch of them have small minorities and then political parties that literally just represent them, like the German Minority Party and weird stuff like that.
Well, I don't know if it's potentially illegal to explicitly do it in the UK because of the Equalities Act, so they would have to wrap it up in some kind of... We're open to all members!
Yeah, we're open to all members as long as you're in favour of Sharia.
Yeah, so he's a way of saying that.
That narrows it down a little bit, but of course if you were to start a party that explicitly said we are for the interests of the native British people, then you would get the hammer down on you.
Okay, we're being told there's a problem with the chat.
So, I do have to move on just for the sake of time, sorry.
But yeah, the ONS data, which we've touted a lot.
Yeah, that's already out of date.
We'll be out of date very soon.
A ridiculous amount, just keep in mind.
And moving on.
A reminder that this is what the country actually looks like.
Because, of course, the ONS is saying what will happen if the Conservatives or Labour get in.
But when you go and ask the public, what do you think on the issue of immigration, the blue constituents in here are those saying reduce the numbers and tighten controls, which is basically everyone.
So what do you want?
And then there's the question of what Britain will look like.
So this is Matt Goodwin.
He's made a graph with that data.
As you can see here, the blue line is the net births over to 2050, and the red line is net migration.
So, yeah, I mean, the word replacement used to be a bit taboo, but then it just became government policy.
I mean, factually.
When they're just saying, yes, 7 million of you will leave, and we will import 13 million.
That's just the 2030s.
Five, there.
Well, it is a demographic suicide.
It's what it is.
It's suicidal.
Yeah.
And the other responses from this I didn't understand is that there are still some people who don't understand why we don't want to die for this.
So this is Colin Brazier here, who's responding to that poll about whether or not you'd go for conscription.
And he says, a quarter of British men would rather submit to the UK's takeover by hostile power than take up arms.
And he's disappointed by this.
And today everyone in the comments is like, well, yeah.
What are you talking about?
What are we defending?
So, I mean, the kind of settlement we have here is very similar to the West Bank at this point.
So, what do you expect?
But yeah, the MSM response is to waste time on crap like this instead.
Oh, no microaggressions.
Yeah, this is a clip in which BBC Newsnight is spending their time talking about microaggressions.
And the reason I even bring this up is not just because random thing, but most of the responses were from feminist types, you know, Posey Parker.
Don't even call themselves feminists, to be fair.
But they're all just like, no, fix the borders.
That's where all the sexual assault's coming from en masse, because of a recent event, which I bring up another time.
They always say that, don't they?
Say something like, anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise, or something like, you know.
Yeah, by who?
Right, exactly, yeah.
The amount of war memorials that have been desecrated is on the rise.
The amount of Jewish graves that have been desecrated is on the rise.
The amount of just rape, the amount of acid attacks is on the rise.
Oh, just the native white men of England have become significantly more insane?
Well, what's happened is that there's a floating abstract notion of antisemitism floating through the air that's just happened to rise and Jewish people are feeling the sting.
No, there are concrete people doing this.
Flesh and blood people.
They're on camera outside the Holocaust Museum in Germany shouting, Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler, you were right.
We have them on camera doing it, and you look at them and they're not very German.
They don't really speak German.
They're shouting that part in English, for example.
That would be hilarious if the camera somehow just had speakers and started to blast that out of nowhere.
You're entirely correct.
It's not the guys in the country pub who have suddenly become... It's like Sweden going from one of the least rapey places to one of the most rapey places in the space of five or ten years.
All that pickled herring, I tell you.
Yeah.
Or the amount of grenade attacks have gone from zero to the most in Europe in the same period.
It's like, oh, Swedish men have just suddenly become much more grenade-y and rape-y out of nowhere, have they?
Okay, alright.
That's what's happened.
How has the people become more grenade-y?
They just love their grenades.
The Swedes.
The native Swedes just love grenade attacks.
It's China.
China's been flooding Sweden with grenades, clearly.
They go for their fika, and they get yourself a little bit of coffee and a cinnamon bun, and who doesn't want to go for a grenade attack after that?
Nobody.
Nobody ever wants to sit down.
You've just had a cinnamon roll.
I remember as a boy playing Pass the Grenade with my friends.
Oh, good times.
I'll end this off on something rather funny, I think, which is this went viral recently, which is a video from Nas Daily, who is a personal favorite of mine because he makes content, as I've said before, for people who are actually retarded.
Now, I'm not being mean.
Like, genuinely, you watch the content and you realize, oh God.
Who is watching this stuff?
Because it's so basic.
It's the kind of thing you just find endlessly with 10 million views on Facebook.
Kids watching this?
How is this watchable?
One of his employees decided to make one about Iceland.
Yeah, you know where this is going.
We live in a country that is so safe, they have zero military, zero nuclear weapons, and almost zero crime.
But how?
To answer that, we have to take you to the country of... See, it's so safe here that parents leave their babies outside to nap alone.
Because parents trust the community to keep their babies safe.
The babies tend to sleep a lot better outside.
The police do not carry guns because they don't need them.
Everyone helps keep the streets safe.
Iceland is a small country with a good social network and hopefully we're not going to carry guns in the future.
Even the prisoners get keys to their own cell because they are trusted to do the right thing.
See, Iceland was ranked the world's safest country for the past 15 years.
And it's not because they skipped the nuclear weapons.
It's because everyone keeps it safe.
Yep, it's just no guns, no nukes, and magic soil.
If you want a safe country, skip the borders and earn the guns.
Instead, become friends with your name.
That's what- Yep, it's just no guns, no nukes, and magic soil.
You notice she never mentioned anything about immigrants, but at the end they came up with, oh, get rid of the borders.
What?
It wasn't even relevant to the discussion.
Even if you wanted to say that Iceland has no borders or something, it's kind of got natural borders.
The best ones.
The ocean.
The North Sea.
Yeah.
You want to go swimming in the North Sea.
And it's also got another layer of protection which is it's Freezing cold half the year round, which is not the most popular destination for some of the visitors that we're getting.
So for some reason they have, statistically, if you round it to the nearest percent, I think it is 0%, not even 1%.
Someone fact-check that, that might be 1%.
I'm pretty sure in Iceland they do have guns, it's just not a gun problem, there's not loads of homicides due to guns.
So for example, there's loads of countries like, I think Norway, or Canada for example, countries where there's a massive, um, a massive load of hunting goes on.
So in Canada, hunting's a massive thing.
So lots and lots of people have got rifles and shotguns.
I think it's the same in Norway.
Most people have got a gun, because hunting's just a massive part of the culture.
They don't go around Shooting each other all that much.
But we will never know why.
Literally, it cannot be found.
It's impossible to understand.
I mean, being there, having been there once before, I will say the Icelandic people are all the friendliest people that you could ever meet.
They'll do anything for you on the street.
They're absolutely lovely.
Can't explain why.
Nothing to it.
If you just dropped, you know, a random Bermalian, they'd obviously just straight away It's particularly inexplicable considering white people are inherently dangerous and racist and violent.
I was given to understand that.
So it's particularly odd.
Very, very strange.
But there we are, I'll end that there.
Which is, yeah, they literally have no shame.
In fact, we now have a promise from the government that they will continue mass immigration if Labour or Tories win.
And, um, some people are just incapable of learning, I guess.
Why is it so safe?
John might be trying to highlight as well that right now in politics trending on Twitter, there's 230 or so thousand posts about illegals.
Yeah, we'll cover that on Monday, I think.
That should be fun.
Let's move on!
Alright, yeah, let's move on.
Apologies in advance, Beau.
I don't know exactly how much interest you'll have in this one, but I think you might be able to take some interest from it anyway, because there is a major trend that we've seen in pop culture and media for years now of trying to turn the bad guy into the coolest guy, and you need to valorize the villains of any story, and you need to see that the The good guys, the goody two-shoes, they're actually Boy Scouts.
They're evil because they uphold order, order being fascism, and therefore you need to sympathize with the forces of chaos and therefore be the bad guy because, to be honest, our entire culture valorizes chaos, valorizes hedonism.
If you want to be able to live in an orderly, kind place with structure like, say, an Iceland, as we were just discussing, that means that you're a terrible, terrible person.
And this, what I've got coming now, is an excellent example of that, because there has been a new game released just the other day, I think two days ago in fact, called Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.
Now, alright, I watched the original Suicide Squad...
It's not based on the films, although it's obviously taken a lot of inspiration from them.
Nobody really cared about the Suicide Squad until they started getting shoved down people's throats, probably as a result of the oversaturation that we've had of Harley Quinn media in the past 15 years or so.
Harley Quinn used to just be in Batman Universe, Joker's quirky girlfriend.
but over the past 15 years she's morphed from that and they've tried to turn her into her own pop cultural icon feminist empowerment symbol where she got over her toxic boyfriend and now she just lives her quirky goofy life and she's out with her friends doing fun things You know, it's that kind of attitude, but honestly, I'm sick of it.
I want them to retire the character, and I want them to retire this constant safe, edgy, villains are the good guys, heroes are the bad guys, really deep down when you think about it.
And it follows up what I was talking with you about recently on the podcast, Callum, where we spoke about Watchmen.
And how Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen, just can't get over, he can't understand why the one character he wrote with any principles, who wasn't just a nihilist in the story of Watchmen, is the one that loads of people connect with and enjoy as a character.
Rorschach.
Oh, well, he's smelly and he eats beans straight from the tin.
Why would you like him?
Well, because he has morals, he has guiding principles, and he murders the bad guys who need murdering.
Like, one of the scenes you wrote into the story is him killing a pedophile who got away with it.
And you expect... But then again, Alan Moore, I would expect you... Why would people like this?
I have no idea, mate.
Some of the stories he's written, you would probably have been expecting, why didn't he empathize with the pedophile?
Being a fat communist himself.
Yeah, isn't Alan Moore one of those people, a bit like...
perhaps a bit like Stephen King, where some of the things they've written are superb.
Yes, by accident.
There's sort of no question that their ability to write and to tell stories is excellent.
But then when you get them talking about politics in their real life, they're just sort of an insane...
He is an insane communist.
...boom, a libside.
He's a full-on communist.
Right, okay.
And he also, in the 1990s or 2000s, he wrote a story that was about lots of teenage fairytale characters like Alice from Alice in Wonderland meeting up together and sexually experimenting with one another, illustrated by his wife.
Strangely.
So take that as you will.
So the Suicide Squad game is based within the Arkham universe.
Have either of you played the Batman Arkham games?
No.
All right.
I remember one had like nine out of tens all over the place.
All four of them were all very, very highly rated when they came out because the first one, Arkham Asylum, came out in 2009, which was at the tail end of the PlayStation 2 early PS3 franchise games.
Um, uh, trend where you would get lots of PlayStation 2 games and other consoles releasing superhero and other franchise games, licensed games that weren't very good.
You would get the occasional gem like a Spider-Man 2 would come out, but most of them were really quick rush jobs, uh, made so that they could align with the release date of a film.
They weren't very well made.
They were never very well reviewed.
Arkham Asylum was done by a British company called Rocksteady.
who put a lot of love and effort into it.
It really showed.
It was a smash hit.
And then the other two games released by them, Arkham City and Arkham Knight, excellent, very well reviewed.
They even had a spin off Arkham Origins, which was also fantastic, if not quite as well received when it first came out.
And people through that experienced a story of Batman from all the way when he started to the end of his career, and they fell in love with the character.
And Suicide Squad has pissed people off.
Because, as you know... What, you like a good guy?
You like a good guy who explicitly stands up against the forces of chaos.
Can't be having that, can we?
And just to confirm, there are articles questioning it.
Is it set in the Arkham universe?
Before I go on to some major spoilers since the game has come out, although these spoilers have been available for a little bit, for a reason we'll get into in just a moment.
And they say in here, yes, it is in the same canon.
In fact, there are lots of references to the original four games.
And also there is a Batman museum where you can examine all of the events of the original Arkham games.
So this is set within the same universe.
This is done by Rocksteady, who are the game studio who did the original three games.
Not the spinoff, but this is the first game I think that they've released in that time for nine years.
I think they might have had something to do with one called Gotham Knights, but I'm not fully up to speed on that.
And then it came out the other day and immediately articles start coming out like this earlier today from BBC.
Where are the reviews for it?
Why is no one reviewing this game?
Why is nobody talking about it positively in the mainstream media?
After years in development, it's finally out, but where are the reviews?
Guild of Justice League is a tough follow-up for the UK-based studio.
Its Arkham trilogy of Batman games were innovative, influential, and are regarded by some as the greatest superhero titles ever.
I would probably agree with that.
Fans of those single-player adventures weren't too impressed when Kill the Justice League, a multiplayer-focused squad shooter always online, was first revealed in 2020.
That's another part of the trend here.
Single-player game franchise, then you turn it into a squad-based multiplayer shooter so that you can try and extract money from people constantly.
Because with that kind of format, the live service model, you can always have microtransactions Tiny slivers of content that you can be releasing that kind of nickel and dime, you penny pinch your way into making a profit on games like this.
The biggest concern for many was the studio shift from one-player games to a live service multiplayer model where a stream of new content, usually with an extra charge, is regularly added to the game.
After early previews of the game were less than positive, major gaming site IGN, which published one of them, said it had been refused a review copy.
It wasn't alone.
Most journalists only received codes on Tuesday when the online game servers were switched on.
So that's an interesting sign.
And then you get articles like this.
Why Batman fans hate Suicide Squad, kill the Justice League.
And yeah, it's because the game lives up to its subtitle.
Kill the Justice League.
Batman's a part of the Justice League.
So this character, who is the same character that you followed all of this time, you've seen all of his struggles, you've gone through all of his emotional ups and downs.
You kill him as part of this.
Really unceremoniously as well, because the Suicide Squad themselves are Joker characters.
Harley Quinn is the insane girlfriend of Joker.
One of the characters is a big shark.
One of the other characters is a guy who uses a boomerang as a weapon.
Yeah, these are the guys who are going to end up killing Superman, Batman, The Flash, in the most disrespectful ways possible.
So the flagship character that you built your reputation as a studio off of, let's humiliate him and destroy him in the worst way possible, because otherwise, chuds like myself Wouldn't know that he's not cool anymore.
You have to be in with the Harley Quinn crowd.
You have to be Boomerang Man's biggest fan now.
Do they make you shoot Batman in the dick?
Because that is what always seems to be in these feminist reimagined... That was in Ghostbusters.
It's actually in quite a few things where the baddie gets shot in the dick.
Feminist types or soyboys always think it's hilarious.
They always think it's hilarious.
They don't go quite that far, but they do have it so that Harley Quinn is the one that pulls the trigger.
Harley Quinn, who in the second game, Arkham City, when you're first introduced to her in that one, is a joke boss fight because she tries to attack Batman and he basically just bitch slaps her to the side.
Because he's Batman, and she is an acrobatic, former mental health nurse.
Like, she was a psychiatrist.
She's not anything threatening to him.
But no, now she's the one killing him.
And, uh, after this, searches... This isn't exactly translating to direct refunds, but even before the game came out, searches on Google for suicide squad refund surged 791%.
And there was another reason for that, because as with all online service model games, as with all games in general, you can't release them as a proper product, as a fully finished product that works, and there were immediate issues.
After launch of the preview, Rocksteady took the game entirely offline to fix a devastating bug that would lead to new players receiving 100% completion of the entire game without having done anything.
Sounds like a pretty big bug.
Yeah, I really want to bring back physical CD-ROMs for video games, so the developers actually have to fix the f***ing thing before they send it to you.
This led to major story spoilers permeating even further around the web, and considering the story is one of the few positive points, and we'll get to that from the preview round, it comes in as particularly egregious.
As an always online game, even if you're playing solo for the story, you no longer have access as Rocksteady continues its maintenance periods.
So if other massive bugs happen like that, and they need to take the service offline, this game that you paid 60, 70, however much you paid for it, because games are getting more expensive by the day, You can't access it.
You can't touch it.
You just have to stare at a screen that says, servers are in maintenance right now.
Sincerely, bring back, it has to be a Blu-ray disc, I don't care.
I want physical discs again, where I own the thing, and it has to be finished when it's sold to me.
I know, I feel like there needs to be some kind of class action against Game Studios.
So they say, right, if you're selling me a game, if I'm paying for a game, it needs to be finished.
Because loads of games have been doing this for ages where you'll buy the disc, because even if you get the disc, you can still have updates sent to it through your online services.
You buy the disc, you put the disc in, and people have found, I think it was one of the Street Fighter games that came out in the past few years by Capcom, that they sold you Our release day DLC for the game that people jailbroke and found was on the disc already.
It was actually on the disc, they just locked it off, and you had to pay an extra bit of money for a code that would unlock that content on the disc for you.
You should be sued for that!
I'm sorry, there is no excuse for that kind of behavior!
You are a snake oil salesman, you are a shookster!
I have sold you a washer dryer, but you must now pay me 20 bucks for the download code for the washer setting.
Is this a PC game then, I take it?
I think PC and consoles, I think.
So, I was wondering why, before the game even came out, why there were loads of clips and audio files from the game later on, like the audio file of Batman being killed was already on Twitter, and I wondered how they'd got a hold of that, and it was because of this.
Because of this massive f-up that they had that meant, oh, I can just go through the whole- I've not even done anything and I've beat the game somehow, let's watch some of the cutscenes.
Let's see what happens.
There was all that going on.
To add salt to the wound as well, the classic Batman actor, the voice actor for the cartoons ever since the 1990s, Kevin Conroy, had died back in 2022.
And it was originally reported, I don't think it's accurate now, but it was originally reported that this was his last performance.
In the role, because he'd done all of the Arkham games before as well, except the spin-off one.
So people were very annoyed that his last performance for the role was one in which the character was humiliated and spat on.
But at the same time, he was a progressive as much as I respect the work that he did.
And he did agree to do the role and come back for it.
And he agreed to this depiction of the character and said that he quite enjoyed it.
That's on him.
As much as I respect the work that he did, he chose to be part of it.
And then let's go to see some of the other things that have come out about the game.
So we have these screens where you've got the description of Wonder Woman versus the description of Green Lantern, who is... To be fair, Jon Stewart has been a diversified version of the Green Lantern since the 90s, so you can't complain about that.
Although Wonder Woman looks particularly diversified in this 100% diverse cast here.
It's not Wonder Woman.
Green Lantern used to be white though, but just a long time ago.
Hal Jordan, I think it was in the early 90s, a big storyline killed him off for a bit and they replaced him with this guy, Jon Stewart.
Wasn't there a film and it was Ryan Reynolds?
Yeah, he was playing the original.
Hal Jordan's since come back, his comic books timelines are confusing, the stories are ridiculous.
And look, I barely even know the guy past his reputation.
Oh, he's just a wholesome all-american.
I just don't like him.
It's very snarky, very millennial writing.
But then in this one, Themyscira, the all-female land that Diana comes from, is a place where they've solved so many of our society's ills.
Broken democracy, lagging technology, toxic masculinity.
How would they even exist?
Well, that's how they solved it.
Just don't have men, you don't have toxic masculinity.
No men, no masculinity, no toxic masculinity.
It just makes sense.
We had the problem of toxic masculinity and then solved it.
Apparently, maybe they weren't all women in the past and then maybe they were women plus.
There's other things, like I'm not going to show any of the clips because they're way too long, but... Copyright strike.
Yeah, I've verified this myself.
This is a 4chan post explaining what happened.
So the Flash actually gets pissed on after you kill him.
Green Lantern gets stripped down to his dorky Green Lantern themed boxers.
So humiliations all around.
Batman is mocked, then shot in the head on a park bench, but Wonder Woman Wonder Woman.
She, one, doesn't turn evil because the reason you're killing them in the first place is because they've all turned evil due to a villain called Brainiac.
Except for Wonder Woman, who happened to somehow avoid the brainwashing.
Why are we killing her?
Well, we're not killing her.
She gets a tragic death because she almost saves you to kill Superman, but loses in a way that's not her fault.
And then all of the squad members, the people like Harley Quinn and Boomerang Guy and Shark Guy.
Yeah, they cry for her.
So it's so obvious.
It's very telling what they're trying to do here.
And then there's also this stuff in the game.
In this, the accidental funniest tweet ever made, the Suicide Squad says, The villains are yet again on our side.
No, no, Calum, the suicide squad says trans rights.
Oh no!
I didn't even... Oh dear.
I think... Oh dear.
Oh dear, oh dear.
They might not have thought this one through.
So what changed?
What changed?
I'll let you settle on that one for a second there.
You don't think about these things, do you?
It all needs to go.
Um, so what changed?
Because it's the same company, supposedly, the same company, Rocksteady, doing all of this.
You know, we hate everything we did.
Either all of the people in charge, you know, smack themselves in the head with a hammer, and this is what happened afterwards.
Because to be fair, even the technical aspects, the game they did in 2015, Arkham Knight, looks better graphically.
Then this.
So everything has gone downhill.
So let's take a look.
So in the first one, Arkham Asylum, you can see the writing credits here.
Bob Kane is listed just because he's the, along with Bill Finger, the creator of Batman.
So he always gets credited.
Directed by Sefton Hill.
Paul Dini was the writer and the lead narrative designer was this guy.
And then you've got the rest of it.
So who was Paul Dini?
Paul Dini was actually one of the main people in charge of the Batman Animated Series.
He is a very well-known comic book writer.
Here's all of his television screenwriting, films he's written, all of his bibliography with comic books, and he's been given a number of awards.
He's been nominated for Emmy Awards.
He's won Comics Industry Awards.
A man with a great pedigree behind him.
They thought, we need a really good start for this Batman story.
Let's get the Batman writer in for it.
Makes perfect sense, right?
And with him, they wrote some great stories.
The Suicide Squad.
Different director.
Completely different writers.
Paul Dini.
Not involved at all.
I have like 10 of them as well.
That's a good question.
Well, let's find out.
So, who are these people?
So, we've got Ben Schroeder.
Aspiring video game writer.
Pronouns?
Ally B. Ally B. I would choose this to represent myself.
Oh, sorry.
She, they.
Yep.
She, they.
Script writer at Rocksteady Games.
I hate to judge people by their appearance, but another she, her here.
I just... Yep.
She, her.
Writer and narrative designer, Sweet Baby Inc., previously at Rocksteady Games.
We've got Grant K. Roberts.
He, him.
Black Lives Matter.
Trans rights are human rights.
Look at those faces.
Look at the expression on that guy's face.
He's chosen to...
This man is an actual soy jag.
This is what these people choose to represent themselves like this.
If I was going to try and create a character to represent soy boys, it would look something like that.
Yeah.
And then finally, Kim Belair.
She, her.
Writer, narrative designer, CEO of Sweet Baby Incorporated.
I don't remember them.
Yeah, you might remember them.
So, this Garrett Grant is also Sweet Baby.
Amy Lee Shaw, also Sweet Baby.
The actual CEO of Sweet Baby Incorporated is a writer on this game, or at least has been given a writing credit.
So, who are Sweet Baby?
Let's go to their Twitter account.
I was going to ask, yeah.
Well, These tweets are protected.
Narrative and development and design, script writing, consultation and more!
Check out- What is that?
Where's that hat doing that?
No, he didn't.
Pat African hat.
Pat African hat.
Oh, my goodness.
Yep, alright.
We was Ethiopians and Egyptians and... So if you're interested in Sweet Baby Inc, you need to check out Battle Shapers, Spider-Man 2, which we covered, and Alan Wake 2.
And Spider-Man 2, we know how that went, where one of the side missions you could play as a black deaf girl spray painting slogans.
What were those slogans she was spray painting?
We BIPOC artists are birds of a feather to find the next clue all band together.
So actual ethnic resentment and ethnic solidarity propaganda being put into games.
Sweet Baby Inc, you can go to their website and it's very telling.
Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Incorporated is a narrative development and consultation studio based in Montreal, working around the globe.
Our mission is to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry.
We aim to make games more fun, more engaging, more meaningful, and, probably most importantly, more inclusive for everyone.
Also, look at how creepy this website is!
The eyes follow the cast.
Literally, the eyes are following me.
Yeah, swirly things at the top as well.
We believe this is their services.
You need diverse voices to solve diverse problems.
Sweet Baby Incorporated provides a narrative consultation at any stage of development.
So these people will basically prime people outside of just the consultation and writing that they will do for the game studios.
They will also take newbies in the industry and provide consultation services for them where they will prep them.
For being social justice advocates in everything that they do for all of the game studios that they might go to work with.
And they work with a lot.
So here's some of the stuff.
Alan Wake 2 worked on character arc, voice and sensitivity reading.
Alan Wake 2... What is sensitivity reading?
I think this game was about 13 years in the making.
The first one was a very interesting horror thriller based around basically an homage to both Stephen King and Twin Peaks at the same time.
Very interesting, wasn't everybody's cup of tea.
This, for some reason, decided to add this character, who I'm going to call Black Grievance Lady.
To have no real part in the plot, just so that she can stand around and talk about black grievances.
What else have they worked on?
Spider-Man 2, we've talked about that.
God of War Ragnarok, the game where it decided that North Mythology needed some black people in it.
For some reason, an entire hour walking simulator section dedicated to random black character in Norse mythology.
Interesting.
And who else have they worked with?
Our clients, X Rock Game Studios, EA, Valve, Santa Monica, Square Enix, Ubisoft, 2K, Warner Brothers, Deck Nine, who made Connor's favorite games, Life is Strange, Rocksteady, right there, Polytron.
They work With some big companies to make a lot of games and have direct influence on a lot of these games.
They also have their influences.
Put a chick in it and make her gay, essentially.
Make her gay and make her black!
Make her a woman!
It feels like Anita Sarkeesian's dream has come true.
This is why I said she won.
Is this actually her shell company?
She's the secret majority shareholder.
Not exactly, but you can...
Sweet baby.
I can guarantee that these people are all big fans of Anita Sarkeesian.
They also have a sub stack which you can go to where friends of the baby, the marketing, the actual branding around this whole company is very, very strange.
The whole choice for sweet baby, friends of the baby brought to you by baby power.
Very, very weird.
But they talk in here, this is the most recent one, here's all of the games, here's all of the absolute slop that we released and had a hand in.
We put a lot of chicks in it and made them games!
Over the past year or so, we've got six things.
Look at this thing that we're working on in the future.
Our friends at Surgent Studios dropped the trailer for the upcoming action-adventure platformer, Tales of Kenzaru.
Zow!
We had the utmost pleasure of working with Abu Bakr, Salim, and the Surgeon team on this poignant story which has been heavily inspired and influenced by Bantu mythology.
So I assume this is like an African ethnic cleansing simulator?
Why would Abu Bakr be writing that?
Probably East African.
Yeah, probably.
So here's some more propaganda where, you know, the Bantu's, they're just going to be depicted as the most peaceful, nature-loving, cooperative peoples to have ever existed on our beautiful green earth.
And if white man gets involved in it, you just know it's going to be to ruin everything and enslave them.
I feel more and more vindicated in my decision to stop playing any games in my 30s.
In my early 30s.
I haven't really played games since GameCube.
That was probably a good cut off point for us.
GameCube was a good game.
I quite liked Monkey Ball on the GameCube.
Never played Rome Total War or Medieval Total War?
A little bit of Rome 2.
A little bit.
I'm not completely 100% game free.
Play Rome 1.
There are a few, yeah, real-time strategy and large-scale strategy games that you can play where you can just take over the world.
I got hung up on Civ IV, Sid Meier's Civilization IV, which is really old now.
Yeah, I haven't played Civ V or VI.
Got no intention of buying any new content that comes out.
I know lots of people are fans of Hearts of Iron IV, where you can basically make any and all World War II simulations that you want come true.
Have you ever noticed that all of those games, they're incredibly diverse, but they're not short?
No, they're not.
They're not inclusive.
I do see adverts for games sometimes, and I think, oh, if I had endless time and money, I'd buy a brilliant gaming PC and get into that.
Like Cyberpunk, when that came out, I said, I talked to myself, if I had the time and inclination, I would get involved in that universe.
It looks great.
I'm interested.
But not enough to actually go out and buy it and make it happen and spend my evenings Yeah, I'm just not into games anymore.
Interestingly, Polish company, and not as far as I'm aware, it connected to any of these Sweet Baby style studios yet, so they made Witcher 3, which was very famously screeched at by Sarkisian types for not having any black people in it.
Yeah, it's based on Polish mythology.
From the Middle Ages, they wouldn't know what a black person was back then.
Same thing happened with Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Made by a Czech company.
Yeah, there are no black people in medieval Czechia.
That was striving for historical accuracy as well.
For that, I think the developer of that got labeled a Nazi.
So that's always funny.
Yeah, he just put, haha, I live in the Czech Republic.
Checkmate.
So, just to finish this off, I did a little bit of digging and found that there was this interview panel that they did where it's a presentation where the CEO, Kim Blair, one of the people who wrote Suicide Squad, and David Berard, because they're Canadian, so they're French-Canadian, so they've got French-y style names, they spoke about the start of the company, what they're doing, this dislike ratio.
Yeah, it's not great.
Also, comments turned off.
Yeah, that's to be expected.
They say, I'll only play one clip, but there are a few screen grabs I want to point to here, because they talk about how they want to include more marginalized voices.
There is an amusing visual this whole time, which I can only imagine mirrors the studio dynamics, in that the entire time This woman is talking, the black woman is talking, while the white guy is focusing on getting the work done and moving them through the slideshow.
So that's interesting.
So, they used to work in Ubisoft, which is a French-Canadian company, and then they started this after they left in 2018.
They've been part of other companies since then, and you can see a bit of why they decided to leave these larger studios in this, where she says, a long time ago, 2018, this is Kim, her backstory, Abusive Game Studio A.
What did I have to deal with?
Pressure.
Oh no, not pressure.
You don't want to be pressured to do your job.
Toxicity.
Misogyny.
Racism.
Etc.
Etc.
Just because you know how it goes.
Everybody who works for us, you know how it goes.
I don't believe you.
Just don't believe you.
Yeah.
It's like someone who finds problems endlessly in their life.
Just like everyone around me is causing me to be abused or toxic or racist.
It's like an incel who's telling you that it's all the girls that don't like me.
All of the girls are wrong.
All of them.
Right.
Well, the interesting thing with this is that these people were already working in the industry.
They started back in 2013 in very large companies.
And they came from those companies, started this studio, which immediately started to get work with those companies again.
Although it seems the business picked up in 2020, 2021.
Primarily due to BLM stuff, which is unsurprising.
A lot of these companies wanted to prove their anti-racism credentials.
But essentially, it seems to me that if it weren't for a company like this existing, either these places would do it in-house, or there would just be other companies, which there are.
But other companies like this would exist, because this isn't an involuntary thing that these game studios are doing to themselves, it seems.
These are the people who were in the companies, and now they just exercise more control over those companies up to this point.
Because some people are saying that this company is forcing these companies to go woke.
No.
These companies are choosing to do it.
There's also this slide, if I get the time hit.
I'm here.
So year one, what were they focusing on?
They were focusing on getting representation as innovation, which was their thesis.
And they say that the explanation for that was that, um, it's not that they wanted to look at something and say, this offends me.
They were looking at something and saying, I don't see myself in this.
And that's, okay.
Cisco looking a mirror.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's narcissistic isn't it?
It's just all about me.
Have you heard of mirrors?
You'll love them.
Yeah.
But that's most of the actual interesting information.
But there was one last bit at the end that I had to clip.
I had to clip in here because it's so telling because they're constantly going on about how it's very neurodivergent, inclusive.
Kim herself says that she's neurodivergent.
They're really wanting to make sure that lots of mentally ill people can work comfortably for them.
And that impacts, as you would imagine, the work ethos and the way that they manage their projects.
And let's hear how that translates I'm still firmly convinced that us as the neurodiverse people are in the vast majority in this industry.
how that translates into their work ethic if i go about here that's on the specificity of that neurodiversity i'm still firmly convinced that us as the neurodiverse people are in the vast majority in this industry oh yeah it's the people that don't have these issues are the ones that i worry about the ones that i They're also conveniently too often making the production plans and I'm like, wait a second.
No, we can work differently.
We don't do plans.
We procrastinate and then get eight hours of work done in an hour, 30 minutes before it's finalized.
Yes, that's how we work things.
Well, actually, that's a good point.
One of the reasons that we, in terms of payment, we work on retainers.
We do like a monthly rate and it's specifically because I know that there's going to be days where I have a script to write, and it should take me a week, and I do it in one hour.
But then there's also going to be scripts that should take me one hour, and I do it in a week.
But as long as it gets done by the deadline, that's what matters.
So kind of baking in that flexibility and not holding people down to like a certain number of hours that they have to self-report has been hugely, I think, freeing for us as a team, especially one who have different work methodologies.
Spoken like a lazy moron.
Yeah.
So, you know, who cares if you shat it out in an hour?
As long as it's on the deadline, who cares?
What's more important is, is it any good?
Right, yeah.
And so far it's shite.
That's how you behave when you're an undergrad or when you're a child.
That's how you behave.
You're like, I've got this big essay that needs to be done, here's the hard deadline, and you just procrastinate until you've got hardly any time left, and you rush it out just in time for the hard deadline.
Yeah, that's how a sub-adult conducts themselves, yeah.
Well, they are going on about how mentally ill they are.
I used to do it, by the way.
That is the story of my undergraduates and my A-levels.
That's how I got through my A-levels.
But when you're a paid professional working with the biggest game studios in the world, and Valve as well... I don't know, I mean, if she could do it and it was gold...
You wouldn't care.
Yeah, but... But it's not gold, Callum.
That is a fair point.
This was an idea half an hour before the deadline.
Oh, shit.
Black spray paint.
What are they going to say?
Something about black people.
Yeah, I can see how this got made now.
It makes so much more sense now, doesn't it?
Check it at Baker death.
In black.
So there you go.
If you're wondering why games suck now, that's certainly one of the reasons.
So, if you are going to keep playing games, either play strategy games like Callum suggested, or just get an old PS2 or GameCube, stick to the classics.
Well, on that note, we'll have to move to the farmers quickly, I suppose.
Okay, yeah, no worries.
Get me a mouse here.
Well, okay, so I wanted to talk about one of the stories which most of the mainstream media seems to be largely, if not entirely, ignoring, which is all sorts of farmer-based unrest in the continent.
It seems to be in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, researching for this, in Romania even, they've got a border with Ukraine.
So it seems that the farmer demographic has started to come to the very end of their tether.
In all sorts of ways.
And one of the things that blew up in... I shouldn't use that word exactly.
One of the things that almost literally blew up was in Brussels, in Belgium then, at the EU headquarters.
And this is just one of lots of ongoing stories where the farmers from Belgium went outside one of the EU buildings, because there's many, there's actually many, many buildings that are like the EU in and around Brussels.
And they started a massive fire.
Quite spectacular looking.
I don't think it actually did a great deal.
You know, there's no breakdown of law and order.
They didn't burn down the EU and it's gone forever, no.
Yeah, they didn't gut the building.
They didn't ransack and level the building.
But, nonetheless.
Symbolic, though.
Yeah, right.
No, it's better than nothing.
It's some sort of pushback.
There's the argument, there's a lot of people saying you shouldn't really ever protest.
You shouldn't really ever do these things because it's counterproductive because you just get yourself put on lists and all sorts of things.
But, I don't know, I'm a bit of a believer in standing up for what you think is right, even at the cost of your own liberty sometimes and all sorts of things like that.
There you go, I get called a fed for saying such a thing.
Nevertheless, I think it was great when... You believe in liberty?
When they made a statement.
Right?
They made some sort of statement.
For me, that's better than nothing.
The riot police did go in.
There's one clip I've got there, John, where it says tear gas and water cannon.
That clip.
The police in Belgium just did sort of go in with, shot a few tear gas shells and used a water cannon, quite a low pressure water cannon it looked like to me.
I think that's further along, John, on the YouTube Doesn't matter too much.
Here's just some pictures.
Just click through some of the links, John, at your discretion.
I'm not talking about any of them in great specificity.
So you can just go through them.
It just seems that in France, they've been doing what some of them have called the Siege of Paris, where they're trying to cut off some of the roads in and around Paris.
Apparently there's a massive, one of the biggest markets for fresh produce.
It's just north of Paris somewhere.
And the French farmers tried to sort of shut off access to that, not to literally starve Paris.
There's some people saying that you're trying to trying to starve Paris into submission.
That's not on the cards.
That's not exactly what they're trying to do.
But symbolically, you know, again, it's a symbolic statement.
Reminder of who makes your food.
Yeah.
And why would you mess with us?
But at the end of that, you starve and we leave.
Yeah.
I think that's the fire in Brussels, I believe.
What a beautiful language.
And the German farmers... We have a problem.
A serious problem.
Sorry.
The German farmers seem to have a specific grievance.
That's one of the things I want to talk about.
What is the actual problem?
What's going on?
Well, on the surface of it, it's just to do with costs going up, more taxes.
For example, the German farmers say that the Germans are putting their taxes up on diesel.
A lot of tractors run off of diesel, so if your diesel just costs more, if your overheads or your in and out ledger is very, very finely balanced, then one little tax here or there could mean the difference between going bust or not.
Actually, the story's a bit deeper than that, I think.
It's not just simply that in the last year or two or three, there's suddenly been some sort of political or economic war on farmers, and they've decided to get out of their pram and go on protests, sort of suddenly.
I think the story is a lot longer and deeper than that.
So I wanted to talk a bit about, which is one of the things that if the mainstream media, corporate mainstream media, does talk about this stuff, If they do at all, if they recognise it's happening at all, they won't usually go into really any sort of background detail or any real detail.
They'll just say there's some protests going on and that's it, next thing, you know.
Like the Gilets Jaunes, you remember the yellow coats in France, which is still going on, I believe.
It's been years now.
Again, they say, oh, it's something to do with the French law and that they wanted to make everyone wear high-vis jackets and don't really worry about exactly what their grievance is, because the real answer is, There's a massive load of different things that people were protesting against.
And it's the same with these farmers.
It's not just, oh, now there's a bit more tax on diesel.
No, no, there'll be a whole number of things.
Well it seems to me, and John I don't know, I've put it in Studio One if you could get this up, it takes different forms in every place.
We know in England for instance there's been lots of articles for websites and newspapers talking about how the countryside is too white, farming is too white.
And then you see in 2022 there was this program where you could apply for a lump sum payment to leave or retire from farming.
And it seems to me that with the targeting of it and how specific it always seems to be, that there does seem to be some kind of, I don't know, Zimbabwe-ification being attempted of European farming markets.
So, yeah, one of the broadest things that the farmers are up in arms about is just this general trend away from farming in Europe and their demonization and them being crushed economically in all sorts of ways.
That's sort of in the broadest general sense.
But that's been happening for decades, though.
It just seems that it's come to a crunch point where... Well, there's one clip there, John, if you could play it, which says W.E.F.
The War on Farming.
It's the last link, I believe.
Yeah, if you could just play that from about 39 seconds, 40 seconds in, just what this woman's saying.
So, I mean, ecocide as a word is becoming better known around the world and the concept is generally mass damage and destruction of nature.
Legally speaking, what our organisation and other collaborators aim to do is to have this recognised legally as a serious crime.
Because one of the issues that sort of pervades all of this discussion is that we have a kind of cultural, very ingrained habit of not taking damage to nature as seriously as we take damage to people and property.
And that, I mean, if you're campaigning for human rights, at least you know mass murder, torture, all of these things are serious crimes.
But there's no equivalent in the environmental space.
You get the point.
Farming is genocide.
Yeah, we're more important than the plants and animals, sorry.
I don't take this anti-humanistic view of just like, oh, humans are terrible, we need to kill all humans to make sure that, I don't know, blue tits can have a nicer environment to live in.
Piss off.
Don't be so foul, Harry.
I thought we were talking about nature.
A classic sort of upper middle class, champagne socialist, midwit, psycho.
I mean she seems awful.
Just talking about farming and agriculture as a type of genocide.
Absolute madness.
Anyway, I wanted to go back a little bit and talk about the Common Agricultural Policy, if anyone's ever heard of that.
CAP.
Now, the European project now, in 2023, is, you know, got to sort of crazy extreme lengths, but it first started off in a much smaller way after World War II.
Largely, one of the main points of it was to try and make sure that the big countries, Germany and France, don't ever go to war with each other ever again.
That was a big part of it.
If we could work together as one, one political, one economic unit, then we'll never go to war with each other again.
That's sort of one of the key tenets in it.
Another one of the key things, certainly by the early 60s, was how can we save our own farming industry?
Largely in France, actually.
How can we make sure that our farmers don't just completely go out of business in the next few years?
Because even then, even in the 1960s, it's much, much easier just to buy your corn off of Ukraine.
Or somewhere.
Or off of Argentina.
Get most of your food from America.
It's just much cheaper to buy it from them than have a massive agricultural farming sector.
But it really was one of the flagship policies of the EEC, the earlier forms of the European Union, was to get the state involved in making sure French farmers don't go out of business.
Now some people will say, might scoff a bit at me saying that, that's too low resolution, there's much more to it than that, which there is I admit, but very very broadly speaking, one of the main things Europe Has always done, is to make sure that French farmers, and European farmers, but largely French ones, don't go out of business.
To the point where they will get involved in the markets, they'll subsidise, all sorts of things.
And, well, in the early 60s, 80% of the budget for Europe went on the Common Agricultural Policy.
80%.
Billions and billions of Euros.
Just to say, despite the weaknesses that we see now, as a lot of those subsidies are becoming worse for people I'd imagine, I would say in a globalised market, when there is the worry that most people are just going to buy from overseas, it makes sense to make sure that you still have a domestic mode of food production.
As we all need food.
In a globalized market, it turns out that conflicts still do happen between states.
And when they do, if one of those states happens to be where you're getting all of your food from, it makes a lot of sense to be able to have a backup plan.
That being domestic food markets.
That's the safest way to ensure that if war breaks out halfway across the world, that you're not all going to starve by proxy.
Because it did happen with us with gas.
Because I remember Theresa May turned off the last of the gas storage we had in this country.
And when asked why she did it, she said, well, we live in a globalised economy now, in which you just buy gas when you need it.
And that worked out well, didn't it, Theresa?
Banks obviously failed.
What if someone somehow accidentally blows up the gas pipeline you require?
Yeah.
You know, nothing like that would ever happen, would it?
No, no.
But yeah, so just to be clear, I'm on the side of the farmers, essentially.
Not 100% because they've been kept alive artificially for decades at the expense of other European countries.
But still, I'm definitely on their side.
I'm a sort of enjoyer.
Right, yeah.
And to have your country being able to make enough food so that people don't starve to death is a desirable thing, obviously.
And if I had to choose between subsidizing an incredible range of farmers or an incredible range of restaurants, I would much rather the farmers.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, to call the common agricultural policy a type of flagship policy for the European project is found.
I mean, at the moment they spend something in the order of 58 billion euros a year, goes to farmers, European farmers, quite a lot of French ones, to make sure they remain competitive or they just don't go out of business.
Because by the early 90s, They changed policy a bit.
Instead of trying to subsidize them in all sorts of ways, they just simply gave them money.
That's what they do now.
The EU just gives French farmers, not just French farmers, I hate to keep picking them out, but just gives European farmers money to make sure they don't completely go under.
I think, for instance, Farmy got a big lump sum of money to make sure that the farm didn't go under.
Something like 70 grand per year, something like that.
And we turned it off, I think, this year or last year.
It's now zero, they get.
Because we're not in Europe anymore.
So there's this idea of having sort of the free market is the best possible thing.
If something's unsustainable economically then it should die by rights.
But then there's this other thing that you want to be able to feed your country if things should all go wrong.
You don't want to starve randomly if war breaks out in Eastern Europe.
Now, this idea that I said a little bit earlier about this general trend towards just squeezing farms and farmers more and more and more to the point where they're setting fire to EU buildings and trying to blockade Paris and things.
So by 1980, the amount of the budget being spent was down to about 66%.
In 2018, it was down to 38%.
So it's still tens of billions of dollars every year, but it's becoming less and less and less.
And also, what the EU has done, not surprisingly, in the last few years as well, is keep adding more and more bureaucracy, more and more red tape, more and more hoops that farmers have to jump through, more and more environmental-type schemes that you can or you can't do that because of environmental reasons.
And the farmers are just like, well, that's the whole ballgame.
If I can't do this or that, then my whole farm doesn't work anymore.
One example is there's laws about you have to leave fields fallow, i.e.
not using them.
That's a tried and tested ancient thing.
You can't just use the soil endlessly and expect it to still be good.
You have to leave fields fallow.
But the EU regulations, a lot of the farmers say, you're making me leave too much of it fallow and for too long.
You're just taking money out of my pocket.
That's just one example, you know, just one example.
Something about pesticides.
The EU will release loads of directives about what pesticides you can or can't use, what ones you have to buy.
They know better about this.
It's just endless.
It seems to farmers of just being squeezed endlessly from every angle.
And if anything in the last year or two, even more.
It just tightens the screw more and more and more.
If they're also having to potentially spend a lot of money to just be able to fuel all of the machinery that they need, they're going to be being hit with all of the extra taxes that get put in England, for instance, on diesel and petrol.
That's what the Germans were... One of the things the Germans are saying they're really P.O'd about is that you've just whacked up diesel.
That means I can't afford to run my tractors now.
What are you doing to me?
What are we doing here?
And that the EU want to just give loads of money to Ukraine but not to keep their own farmers in business.
Want to import loads more from Ukraine, again putting more pressure on their native farmers.
I don't know if you got the answer of this, but I was suspicious because as I understand it, what we decided to do to support the Ukrainian state was we said, okay, we'll de facto on farming basically let you in.
We'll send you a lot of money and we'll buy your grain, which is super cheap because of Ukrainian soil.
It's a marvel of the world.
And well, that's a massive market shift because now the French guys and the German guys who are growing the same stuff have to compete with one of the most bountiful places on earth for making grain.
And they didn't vote for that.
There was no discussion.
It just happened.
Is that actually a big impact or not?
I believe so.
Yeah, people are saying.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, Ukraine has for a couple of hundred years been shorthand for sort of one of the breadbaskets of the world.
Right.
I think it is the breadbasket.
Right.
Yeah.
My understanding is they've got black soil, which is just brilliant.
And there's only a few places on Earth that even exists.
And the places on Earth where you can farm it, where it exists, is Ukraine.
That's basically it.
To actually compete on a level field with Ukraine in terms of wheat, it's going to be very difficult for a German farmer to do that.
I don't see any quick end to this because the powers that be in Europe Uh, seem committed to it, like the immigration issue.
Like, yeah, you're destroying something beautiful and ancient and it seems very, very deliberate and they've got no intention of slowing down, let alone stopping or reversing it.
I mean, there's just one, just the picture here.
Um, if you scroll down a tiny bit, John, just so you can see.
In a Marie Antoinette style, Macron is still just, you know, having state dinners and things whilst his farmers that are, you know, staring defeat and penury in the eye.
He's just still going about his business.
I mean, I just thought it was worth doing a little segment on this, seeing as if nothing else, the mainstream media are largely blanking it.
Like the problem on the southern border in America, where Texas decided to go against the Federals on the southern border in America, the mainstream media, at least in Britain, just decided to look the other way, and just essentially not really report on that.
They seem to be doing a similar thing with this.
Every now and again you'll see something... That seems like a huge issue.
It seems like a giant, giant issue because this sort of thing, I don't think this is going to happen, but this sort of thing can snowball into full rebellion, full revolution, full-blown social unrest.
This sort of thing in history, in the past, can be the kernel of something that snowballs into something much, much, much bigger.
I suspect, I fear it won't in this instance, but nonetheless.
At least if you get, a lot of our audience won't, but if you get most of your information off of mainstream media, you can be forgiven for not even hearing about this, it's really happening.
So I thought at Lotus Eaters we should try and bring it to some people if we can.
Brilliant.
That was it.
Well on that note, we'll go to the video comments.
So, since the borders are wide open and drugs are flowing through, fentanyl is a huge problem.
And it's a huge problem because it's 100 times more potent than morphine.
So, to see what a clinical dose of fentanyl looks like, this is about 50 micrograms.
That's it.
It's hard to measure.
I can't get it correct and the scale is fluctuating.
And here's 2 grams, which is considered to be a lethal dose.
Is fentanyl coming as a pill?
Is it a pill?
I don't even know.
My understanding.
I'm so naive.
I've never seen a fentanyl.
Can I have one fentanyl please?
I think George Floyd was having pills that were laced with meth, wasn't it?
Because he was taking fentanyl when he was murdered in police custody.
Yeah.
Didn't he swallow a whole bag of pills, wasn't that?
Yes.
All right, all right.
You can see them all over the cop car.
Yeah, wasn't the excuse that there was given that, well, you know, his body was just so used to it that a lethal dose for anybody else was just a Tuesday morning for him.
He had a fentanyl vaccine.
Yeah, which is just take enough of it, apparently.
Let's go to the next one.
All right, look.
It's nice how the Barbie movie showcases the feminists' incompetence in making their propaganda.
But if you keep mentioning it, eventually it's gonna lose all of its novelty.
Maybe like Biden with his about face on the border, but I imagine that is more like the border has been open long enough to accomplish what he wanted to.
Or his puppet masters wanted to.
Oh well.
Time to play some MechWarrior 2 in the mech.
You jammy git.
How do you do all of this?
That's amazing.
Yeah, I'd probably agree on the Barbies.
I don't care about Barbies.
I didn't really think it had much novelty.
Anyway, I have a message from Pete, who's our administrator, who's told us, um, can we apologize on his behalf about the chat?
So the chat on the website is a thing.
There's one on Rumble as well, but the one on the website, uh, it's buggered.
Things happen.
Terribly sorry.
Um, we'll try to have that fixed tomorrow.
Sorry.
Monday.
Oh God, yeah.
Anyway, the Shadow Band has donated a hundred buckaroos on Rumble to say, Happy February, lads.
National holiday out here in America.
The whole month.
I'm going back from Georgia, the most beautiful but boring country in Europe.
Oh, he's going to that Georgia.
The other Georgia.
You never hear about that Georgia.
Unless you're talking about Stalin.
Although they have gun shops in the underground mall next to the food stalls slash faux leather.
So that's neat.
I don't know if you... Oh, nice.
This might be a bit cruel because if you're leaving it, but they actually sell Sargon wine, if you would like to get some.
And it's just complete coincidence that the company just loves Sargon of Akkad, the historical figure.
So they sell Sargon of Akkad wine.
We should get some.
Yeah, we should.
That's a great idea.
Quite expensive, though.
But anyway, Sean also donated ten buckaroos to say, do me a quick favor and look up Justin Trudeau's quote, old stock Canadians, a relic of the past, And must be replaced.
Too many do not believe that this is real.
So, um, John's looking that up, and I suppose... I can absolutely believe that Justin Trudeau would say something that I personally, some would say this is hyperbolic, I consider literally genocidal.
Let's, uh, let's click on that YouTube link, because I assume that's going to be the one, John.
And, uh, we'll enjoy it, because the guy paid ten bucks, so.
Is there a sponsor?
Mr. Harper in the debate yesterday used a term that many Canadians found offensive.
That term was old stock Canadians.
Why did you not take that opportunity on that platform to call Mr. Harper on that term?
Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is Mr. Harper is always eager to use the politics of division.
Always eager to highlight differences between Canadians rather than pulling them together.
Quite frankly, Mr. Harper's approach has been well seen for a long time by people who have been following politics.
His willingness to set new Canadians against people who have been here for generations, against the people who have been here for millennia, in the cases of First Nations people.
So, the fact is, Mr. Harper is yet again highlighting that he doesn't believe that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.
That there are different categories of Canadian, and that, quite frankly, is not just offensive, it's harmful to the country we are building.
But he defines the different categories.
He said new Canadians, old Canadians, and First Nations peoples.
Those are three separate categories there, Mr. Justin.
I'd forgotten, it's been a long time since I've even heard Trudeau speak, I'd forgotten how sort of fey he is.
Mr. Harper isn't willing to lie, unlike me.
He's not at all like his dad.
Fairy Kemp.
Old Fidel wouldn't be proud.
So, I'll let John look that up.
Yeah, we'll have to carry on with the comments.
Animosity says the data on immigration numbers are scary.
But what I really wonder is if any of the Lotus Eaters think there will be a tipping point similar to how the farmers are acting across Europe.
There seems to be an awakening on immigration in Germany and in the inner cities.
The natives are not happy to have their benefits provided to by immigrants.
The question is, will this matter in the upcoming election?
So reform, I think, are now on 13% averaging on the polls and growing.
And that is in spite of some of the lackluster communications, in my view.
But they've still got the Nigel Farage card to play, bringing him back in.
So I'm quite excited on the UK front that actually there is an opportunity there in the next election to just kill the Conservatives.
I don't even have a huge opinion on reform, it's just I think the narrative of British politics has to be the mass immigration thing was done and in response the Conservative Party were ended.
Like, after 300-odd years or whatever it was, they died.
That becoming part of the British political narrative of history is invaluable.
So that's why I think that's a perfect opportunity.
Yeah, it needs to become a rule of British politics that if you try that again, your party will be murdered.
And they'll never come back.
That would be nice.
Maybe, maybe, we'll see.
But, anyway.
So, JJHW says, it's not demographic suicide, it's murder, and the murderers are in Westminster.
Precisely my point, I think.
They need to be tried.
I would love to try them in The Hague.
I know we don't own it, but let's keep it for a bit.
One of the things I've said before is that Tower of London has been a tourist attraction far too long.
Yeah, row them to Traitor's Gate.
Old school style.
Now, I thought that if we've got a government with some actual balls and did a policy of mass re-migration, but then, yeah, at least every leader, every Home Secretary, all the permanent civil servants in the Home Office since 1997, at least all of those individuals that are still alive should be put on trial.
There is a trial.
For treason.
For treason.
What did you say?
And then we decide whether or not you're guilty and the appropriate punishment.
First, who was it that said they needed to rub the right's nose in diversity?
It's Mr Blair.
Was it Blair who said that personally?
Oh sorry, no actually it wasn't.
It was one of his underlings.
Thunderbler.
No, yeah, it was one of his underlings.
That person goes first.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
There's a special tribunal in the works.
We shall move on.
Let's go to your comments.
Yeah, so Richard Monekendam, this scamming by the games industry has to stop.
I stopped buying them because of this nonsense.
If it isn't a physical product or finished and complete, no more microtransactions or season passes, then you can't sell it.
Go back to when games were good, creative, and had no agenda.
Yeah, I too would like it.
Even just them be good and creative and be finished.
Sell me something that's finished, please.
I don't go into the cinema and halfway through they stop and they go, we'll get the rest of the film reel tomorrow.
Come back then, I'll have to pay an extra fiver for it, guys.
I'd be happy to just dig out my old PS2 and play San Andreas again.
Oh yeah, the PS2 is great.
I'd be happy to do that.
Happy to dig out my Neds from the loft somewhere, play Mario 1 from the beginning again.
You know, I'm really showing waves there.
Hey there, great games.
George Happ, the destruction of the Justice League is Gramsci's tactics of demoralization.
These clowns want to make a mockery of the modern myths like Batman and Superman, but no Wonder Woman because feminism.
The fall of Rocksteady, one of the best British studios, is a tragedy, giving WB any money is a mistake.
Yep, Israeli Crusader on the Suicide Game.
It has to be said more than anything.
It's just really bad characterization.
The Flash is almost always well regarded by his Rose Gallery while Batman is well respected by his enemies.
Once again, these people, we saw these people writing the stories.
They don't know anything about this and they have no respect for any established history that any of these characters have.
It's not the same people writing them.
them, it's not the same people directing them.
General Hai Ping, loving Bo's new catchphrase, does he get shot in the dick?
It's a catchphrase now.
Another one for the never-thought-that-had-happened-2074 bingo.
And I'll read one more.
Andy-o-non... Andy-o-nomous... Anonymous.
Anonymous.
Yeah.
I think the DC Alternative Universe stories still have great potential.
Imagine an alternate reality where Superman is the good guy.
I know.
They don't do that anymore.
And on to your comments, Beau.
Someone need to scroll down for me.
I think John's trying to help.
I'll let John do it.
Michael Brooks says don't bite the hand that feeds.
Yeah.
I mean, again, it's sort of a suicide-stroke-murder thing to destroy your own agriculture.
Right?
Your own agricultural industry.
It's like being energy efficient and deciding not to be anymore.
You know what's a good idea?
If I have to be dependent on handouts from my neighbours.
That's fantastic.
I don't know if this is an upside, but even if this goes ahead, right, and European agriculture gets destroyed in the way they're planning, there might be a positive out of this.
So this is my copium pill, which is-- I'm pretty-- What?
What?
That's the white pill.
Even if that doesn't happen.
Even if we're in the worst possible timeline.
My understanding is the Japanese, they import loads of their food and what happened after World War 2 is they realized they basically couldn't do what they were doing because there's just too many cheap imports and the Americans weren't going to force that on them.
So Japanese agriculture became incredibly luxury, so that's why they're the ones making all the really high quality stuff, all the random weird stuff like square watermelons.
That's because you've got limited land.
I'm googling that.
It needs to be a really high price.
You've never seen square walnuts?
Yeah, yeah.
They're not perfectly square, but they are square.
They're square.
What the hell?
Yeah, yeah.
Or like Wagyu beef.
Super, super high quality things.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's a thing going back since ancient times that Japan could not really feed itself properly.
A lot of food from the sea.
They were invented by a graphic designer.
I'll let people look up cube watermelons in their own time, but we are out of time.
If you would like more,
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