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Feb. 12, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:32:24

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #848

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	Hi folks, welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters for Monday the 12th of February 2020.
	This is a prerecorded podcast because we're having some work done in the building.
	And so we're losing our internet access for that day.
	So we couldn't broadcast.
	So we had to record this in advance for you.
	I'm joined by Josh.
	Hello.
	And today we're going to be talking about, are you a consumer?
	Alexander the gay and diversity fatigue.
	So without further ado, let's get into it.
	So I wanted to talk about whether you are a consumer or not.
	And this is of course, a bit of a meme and it's been going on for many years now, but I thought it'd be worthwhile covering it because I don't think we've actually covered this sort of thing before.
	And I think it's very important actually.
	And I think it's important coming from me as well, because I'm a bit of a diehard free marketeer.
	No, not at all.
	I have a pretty austere apartment, to be fair.
	So although I'm very much, you know, free market, you should be able to buy things and not be impeded by the state.
	So I'm not saying anything should be banned.
	But I think that personal responsibility is important.
	And I think that society needs to sometimes shame bad behavior.
	You know, I think I'm anti-free market.
	Don't say that.
	I'm not even joking.
	We'll have a long discussion about it another time.
	For goodness sake.
	And as well as that, I'm also going to be talking about some of the psychology that determines this sort of behaviour and how I think it ties into human nature and things like that.
	But first of all, I'm very excited to present the fact that Calvin's Common Sense Crusade has come to Lotus Eaters and it's every Thursday at three o'clock.
	That is British time.
	And if you use the code CRUSADE for 50% off, you get the gold tier membership for three months, I think.
	So if you sign up to a highest tier, it's half price.
	So that also applies if you're a pre-existing subscriber or a new one.
	You can also submit video comments for his Fatherly Advice section and make sure to open it with Dear Father Calvin so our editors know that this is a video comment for Calvin because of course we still do video comments for the podcast as well.
	So definitely make sure to check it out.
	I mean, you can't turn down that cheeky grin, can you?
	You've got to go and sign up.
	I think you can't turn down the aesthetic.
	Look at the background.
	I know, it's great, isn't it?
	Jack did an amazing job.
	Anyway.
	So, I think in the context of modernity, you have things like this.
	Millennial melancholy.
	Nine in ten young Brits believe their life lacks purpose, according to a shocking new study.
	And this was in 2019.
	And I think it's all the more true now than it was then.
	And I think that this is the sort of context for which this sort of behavior that I'm talking about seems to exist.
	You also have things like this.
	This was a report done by Harvard in October and it suggests an alarming new trend as well.
	It suggests that young adults are actually facing more mental health challenges, as they euphemistically refer to it, than teenagers.
	Normally the trend is that, you know, teenage years are tumultuous, lots of hormones, they tend to go through the most problems.
	So it's shifting to young adults in such a significant way, seems to indicate that there's something very tangible going on for the young adult population.
	It's very concerning.
	So I'm going to read a little bit about some of the data that they have gathered because I think actually it was a very good report.
	So it says, based on a nationally representative survey of young adults aged between 18 to 25, teens and parents conducted a survey in December of 2022.
	It's taken almost a year for them to do it.
	36% of young adults who responded to the survey reported anxiety, compared to 18% of teens.
	29% of young adults reported depression, compared to 15% of teens.
	And it says, legions of young adults reported financial worries, 56%, and achievement pressure, 51%, negatively influencing their mental health.
	And alarming percentages reported they lacked meaning or purpose in their lives, with 58%.
	So it's perhaps not as much as that previous survey from 2019, but it's still 58%, which is very worrying.
	It's over half of people feel like they don't have purpose in their life, which in any other time would be considered the most pressing issue of your age.
	It's very worrying, but it's not surprising because I think that one of the main Features of maturity and growing up and passing the teenage stage is that you start believing in your own self slowly and steadily.
	But right now, the whole education system is geared to make people believe that if they do that, they're a toxic people and that part of their identity is the worst thing ever, and that they should atone for guilt that they have never even done themselves.
	So it's not surprising that they feel this way.
	Sure, there's just a couple more percentages that I want to read.
	Relationship deficits too appeared to be an epidemic among young adults including loneliness 34% and a sense of not mattering to others 44%.
	I think actually the factors they've outlined here perfectly encapsulate What's going on to a whole generation of people?
	And I think it is broken it down into the factors quite nicely.
	And I can certainly sympathize with many of these.
	You know, I don't really feel the achievement pressure because, you know, I'm in my later 20s.
	I feel like I've kind of done a decent amount of the groundwork for that sort of thing.
	And I don't feel the loneliness because I've got close family and friends.
	But the rest of it, I certainly understand.
	And so I think that this seems to be a sort of void that people are seeking to fill.
	And, um, I, the final thing I wanted to mention before I go onto the actual consumerism part is this, and I was very surprised by this one.
	This is from 2019 as well.
	A quarter of millennials say they have no friends, which seems pretty shocking to me.
	The actual percentage I think was 22%, which.
	I find hard to believe, but I suppose it must be true to a certain extent, even if they've got a dodgy sample.
	And so I suppose that this is what's creating this desire to fill that void.
	I think it's totally expected.
	This is what the last men at the end of history are.
	This is what liberalism has been working to bringing into existence.
	People who are not reliant on other people and don't have anything to worry about but themselves.
	So this is inevitable.
	Literally what Fukuyama is talking about.
	And the main concern that Fukuyama brings up in The End of History and The Last Man is the desire for recognition.
	And that's what this is.
	These people want to be appreciated by others and no one does because point is that you are so totally free from the constraints of others that all there is, is you and yourself.
	Okay.
	No, but who said that was a good thing?
	You know, if what these people are showing is everyone says, actually, that's awful.
	Um, actually it's kind of a punishment because, you know, that's what isolation is form of punishment.
	So why are we doing this?
	I mean, like when there wasn't, I'm sure there wasn't a single English soldier on the rolls of Henry the fifth, who was like, yeah, I'm just struggling with depression as I marched in France.
	I bet there wasn't one that was like, you know, my life as an Englishman to be depressed, rolling through the French, but there wasn't a single one of them was like, yeah, my life lacks purpose, you know?
	And this is the problem with the intellectual paradigm of the entire West is all we can create our consumers.
	All we can create is a state in which nothing matters and you have nothing to do.
	I want to add something here to spice things up a bit.
	It seems to me that this is really bad.
	It's really bad that young people say this, that they have no friends.
	Usually this is the stage in life where people think they have too many friends and they're completely mistaken about it.
	But saying that they have zero friends shows complete lack of socializing.
	I think that this is a very important problem here.
	But I think that in a way, The solution is not to say that we will give you meaning.
	The solution is to say you should show a kind of stiff upper lip.
	Is that the thing?
	I don't know.
	Because meaning in life is not to be created by a centralized thing.
	Because, for instance, you could say that this is a journey of individual self-discovery.
	And sometimes these journeys, they have some really bad stages.
	So that could be an opportunity that Is turning people more mature?
	No, the problem with this is what it does, it turns people inwards and there is a whole genre of TikToks which I guess you could call gender journeys and it is woke leftist kids who are talking about their experience with gender as they move through the world and they're entirely within their own heads and they're not concerned really about Anything important.
	Yeah.
	It's just about how my gender expression was recognized this day.
	And it becomes entirely solipsistic, just self-absorbed and utterly not respectable.
	That's all of TikTok to a certain extent.
	Well, it's a, it's a large portion of it.
	And actually in previous eras, um, we actually had civilizational missions.
	Yeah.
	Um, yeah.
	The Crusades, defeating the Nazis, whatever it is, you know, we had like civilizational goals.
	And so people had something they could genuinely buy into and try and achieve.
	But the thing is, all we have now is the further spreading of the liberal order.
	And it's like, okay, but these are the victims of the liberal order.
	These are the people who are like, actually, I don't just want to be on my own with no purpose in life.
	Why am I going to go and inflict that on the Ukrainians or whoever?
	You know, why am I going to make sure that all of Africa feels this way and all of Asia feels this way?
	And what this speaks to is the sickness at the heart of the West that we just can't seem to identify properly.
	I think that there's an element of it as well, that it's technology.
	It's never been easier to be friendless because you've got endless entertainment at home.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	The technology is not incidental to this.
	Technology is part of progress, because the progress is to get to a point where no human is reliant on any other human.
	So it's like, okay, why do we want that?
	Well, I think that you can have technology and have the correct social attitude.
	You don't necessarily just need to be a slave to the tools you create.
	The tools you create reflect the philosophy that underpins your civilization.
	Can I say one thing?
	Because in a way, I think that it's a game of numbers and you're correct in saying that these are Big numbers, and big numbers do indicate the need for extra research.
	But it seems to me that there may be a trend of, let's say, overreacting.
	So, for instance, you mentioned Fukuyama.
	Fukuyama is someone who is the paradigmatic thinker who overreacted in the 90s, if we take a specific interpretation of his claim.
	I think that Fukuyama is actually given a lot of short shrift by people.
	Yes, that's why I said if they give one interpretation of his claim, because I think he's making a normative claim, whereas people think that he's making a descriptive claim.
	And they say that descriptive claim is obviously nonsense.
	Therefore, the book is nonsense.
	It's a bit more complex than that.
	I agree.
	But it seems to me that I don't see how the point of technology is to completely keep people apart.
	Because, for instance, I grew up with lots of technology.
	It didn't harm me, in a way.
	And there are many people who have grown up with technology, but what is lacking, I think, here?
	Because I want to move with more of a surgical precision.
	Technology isn't just a single gestalt entity that descends on us from above.
	Technology is created in, I guess I can describe it as an organic way.
	to meet the needs and the interests of the people who make it.
	Yes.
	And so there's a reason why it is the Western liberal project that produces smartphones and then the Apple VR goggles and stuff like that.
	Because the point of the technology is to give a heightened sense of self-indulgence in every sphere of life to make everything more personalized rather than anything more collectivized.
	And for example, China will probably create collectivist technologies, technologies that facilitate society.
	Now, I'm sure you would hate this because what this looks like is the state having drones that could monitor every single person.
	In a 20,000-man apartment.
	Yeah, you're right.
	I do hate that.
	Because they treat people as passive recipients of pleasure.
	That's the idea.
	But that's the status mentality.
	No, no, no.
	It's not that they treat people as passive recipients of pleasure.
	We do that as well.
	It's the approach to doing it.
	They treat people as merely numbers that need to be just accounted for because they are, like you say, top-down, looking at a huge system.
	Well, we're looking at this as the maximization of individual pleasure.
	And it's like, okay, but that's also not great, actually.
	You know, I'm not suggesting we need to do what they do, but the problem is our technology is really just to get to Nozick's pleasure machine.
	So, um, I kind of take the position that technology is sort of morally neutral and it's up to us to habituate ourselves and adapt to the technology we have.
	So I use technology.
	I don't think it is morally neutral.
	So I know I'm jumping in on you again, but that's the point.
	I don't think it is morally neutral.
	I think actually there was a moral teleology in the technology as in why would you create the Apple VR goggles unless you wanted people to have a heightened sensory experience in all aspects of the world?
	That's a moral position, right?
	Because what you're doing is you're creating a barrier that separates you from the relations of other people.
	You're looking very skeptical.
	I am, yeah.
	That you could say that in a way that are creating barriers between other people is also something that doesn't that's also the toilet does it?
	I mean you could also say that we're presenting this in front of cameras rather than addressing a room of people is creating a barrier.
	Well, no, this, the camera is not a barrier actually.
	The camera, it facilitates a wider projection of what we're saying.
	But here's my point.
	Because we could do this in front of an audience, but it'd be much smaller.
	So like a live audience, but much smaller.
	But here's my point.
	I think that habituating using technology as a facilitator of real world interaction is the sort of sweet spot.
	And that also.
	Yeah.
	Seems logical as well as being backed up from my experience of using it.
	And a good example of this is like concerts.
	Think of like the massive concerts in the 80s and 90s.
	Like that's a good use of technology to bring lots of people together into a massive social experience.
	Yeah.
	But the problem is, our technological development now is the opposite direction of that.
	We're trying to make highly customized, unique, individual experiences that mean we increasingly don't really relate to one another's experience.
	Should we get on to the consumption part?
	Can I say one thing to close this without hijacking the segment?
	Sure.
	I'll be very brief.
	For me, the main problem has to do with parents not monitoring their children's use of technology at a young age, and also a school that tells children from the very beginning that your civilization is the worst thing ever that makes it.
	Because when it comes to educating children, You don't teach everything at every age.
	So, for instance, you don't teach differential equations to six-year-olds.
	There are things that are not good to expose children to at a young age.
	And I think that that's where the issue lies.
	That is part of it, but I really think that it's about shared experience.
	The problem with social media is that we think it's a shared space, but actually it's just a multiplicity of individual spaces because everyone's timeline is so... I realize I'm taking this off topic.
	Yeah, it's alright.
	Apologize, Josh!
	I agree with what you're about to say there.
	Actually, I think less personal cultivated experiences would be good and more shared communal experiences might be good.
	Sure.
	I think to summarise my view on the whole thing, if people were moral and virtuous, technology wouldn't be a problem.
	Oh yeah, that's true.
	So anyway, back to consumerism, and this is the meme term.
	A consumer, a person who bases his identity on consuming the latest tech and entertainment or anything else that is not significant improvement for his or her life due to this.
	Many products and franchises plateau as consumers who buy those products without any regard for quality.
	And I think it's an offshoot of the term Kuma.
	I think it's applying that same logic of mindless consumption.
	It's the individualized basis, whereas more collective experiences are called for orgies.
	But this is kind of inevitable.
	Like, why wouldn't you, if you're in a paradigm where everything is designed to give you sort of maximized individual experience, then why wouldn't this come about?
	Well, I think that it's true of some people, but I think the fact that this isn't particularly widespread, even though it's possible for it to be widespread is reassuring in a way, but it's still a big problem.
	The thing that actually put me onto this was this.
	The new Stanley Cup craze and lots of mainstream media outlets have been trying to understand it and of course it's just an arbitrary trend.
	What are these?
	Insulated cups?
	I think so and I think because TikTok has made a big deal about them for some reason everyone's just like oh I'm so You know, I'm so passionate about hydration now that I want all these cups, which is just ridiculous because, you know, even when I was a young child, I hated sort of following trends and all that thing.
	I was, I was basically born a hipster and this sort of thing really wound me up.
	And so I think I get a very instinctual hatred of anyone who does this sort of thing.
	You're not passionate about hydration?
	I like hydration.
	I don't think I need to buy some branded mug.
	A cheap glass of water works just as well.
	But it's being done not because they actually care about hydration, of course.
	It's because they're following a trend and they want to get cheap social capital.
	And it's got to such excesses that you see things like this.
	16 year old claims her parents have spent $3,000 buying her 67 different Stanley Cups as the giant mugs become the ultimate playground status symbol.
	It's just ridiculous.
	I mean, when I was in school, the playground status symbol would be like a pair of football boots from... Yeah.
	Spencer pair of football boots.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Not a mug.
	If there's a picture.
	This article doesn't have a picture, but there was just this massive collection of them.
	And this sort of thing kind of knocked me for six, because it's one thing having a trend, but to my mind, these are not cool.
	I suppose, you know, I've got to the age where the young people these days are doing things I don't understand.
	My oldest daughter was like, can I get some Crocs?
	the ugly shoes which is like yeah cool now i'm like god if anything that just shows you how easily influenced young people are right frogs are now cool but you know your eyes they used to be really cheap because they're crap and ugly and now they're expensive and hip and it's just like In Greece, they're everywhere, especially during summer.
	I bet they are, because they're functional, but like, they're still ugly and crap.
	But now they're cool.
	And it's like, that's so weird.
	But, um, yeah, if you had one good cup, that's fine.
	You don't need to collect 67.
	And I would like to point out as well, the parents have a lot to answer for, for facilitating this.
	If I went to my parents and said, I want 67 different Stanley cups, they would probably get me a psychiatrist instead.
	Yeah.
	Rather than paying three grand to get all of that.
	So that's bad parenting in my view.
	I really hate this kind of mechanization of humanity as well.
	Like, I'm really concerned about my hydration as if you are just a series of figures.
	Well, that was me sort of paraphrasing and teasing them.
	I'm not sure they're actually saying that.
	Well, no, no.
	This is like, I've seen like, you know, the TikToks of like fitness freaks who are like, I eat this many calories and I do this many workouts as if like they're a video game character whose statistics they have to keep Sorry, I have to say, because I've had some weight issues in the past, but calculating macronutrients has saved me.
	Well, me too, but like, it just, it frustrates me because it isn't a healthy way to view what you eat.
	It frustrates me when I, when I gain weight, if I eat food.
	Oh yeah, me too.
	Yeah.
	You know, but for a normal person who is not like struggling with their weight like we are, this just isn't the way they should think.
	It's unhealthy.
	So I'm going to go through some examples of some potentially excessive amounts of consumption and we're going to assess whether they're maladaptive and whether they truly belong to the label of consumer.
	I'm just going to render them all as consumer and then I'll evaluate them.
	Well, there might be one that you might disagree.
	I've put in a trap for you.
	Okay, okay.
	So, this one I think is pretty obvious.
	I really hate the, what are the things in the boxes called?
	Funko Pops.
	I despise it, yeah.
	I hate them.
	The idea that something collectible can be mass produced and sold in every shop.
	It's like, that's not a collectible.
	That's junk.
	So my sort of notion, my way of dividing up the consumers with, um, sort of healthy hobbies is whether you actually do anything or whether you just buy something that's mass produced and stick it on a shell.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Like, um, if a guy's got loads of fishing rods or something, okay, fine.
	Cause he uses them to fish.
	Yeah.
	We make sense.
	Like probably the closest thing to this for me would be I've got lots of guitar effects pedals, but each one does something different and it's to facilitate my hobby of playing guitar.
	And so someone might see that I've got about 30 effects pedals and say, hang on, why do you need all of those?
	You can't even use them all at once.
	But they're sort of different flavors.
	They add something to it.
	The function.
	It's an extension of a hobby.
	I'm doing something with it.
	It can also be social because, you know, you can't play in a band without a band.
	Yeah.
	So that's my way of justifying it.
	If you think differently, please let me know.
	And here is another one.
	Similar sort of vein of an entire wall of someone's house filled with these Funko Pops.
	There's bobble heads.
	Yes, and it's just needless.
	They're just awful.
	I feel like this is like a manifestation of the human impulse to gather resources, but it's misfiring in modernity.
	It's not sticks and stones and gathering tools.
	It's instead Things that don't serve any purpose.
	And although that, that, that, that impulse to gather things, you know, I think it's why men cover a good stick.
	Yeah.
	It is that same impulse.
	And so this is clearly going on here to my mind that someone's using this, this relic that made sense at one time.
	And it doesn't make sense in modernity.
	And I think the way to do it healthfully actually is to apply that to, you know, your career, your workplace.
	If you want to acquire resources.
	There's this horrible thing known as fiat currency that you can... I have two Bobbleheads.
	Oh yeah?
	Yeah, I have Archangel Taro from Diablo 4 or 3 and Daryl from Walking Dead.
	Yeah, I actually do have a couple of these.
	People have given me them as gifts and I've had to like, oh, thank you so much.
	You know, but I hate the passion.
	So moving on to this, it's a bit of a small picture, so I'm sorry, but these are all Star Wars figures.
	I feel like, you know, if you're a child and you have a few, that makes perfect sense.
	If you're an adult and you have a full army, one has to ask some questions.
	I mean, if you're going to play a war game with them, okay.
	Because it looks like they're about to play a war game, but they're not.
	So no, that's weird.
	They're about to strike an alliance.
	You only won war.
	Yeah, I do, yeah.
	Now this one is sort of the one that trips me up, is this massive record collection.
	Now I collect records and I've probably got the equivalent of one of those crates maybe, if not two maybe, and is this excessive?
	Is this too much?
	I mean, I would suggest possibly that's too much, but at least they're functional.
	At least you can do something with them.
	Yeah.
	And I feel like I've seen record stores that actually have fewer records than this.
	So I think it's, it's going over the line to a certain extent, but also if you're like a collector in the sense that perhaps your, your Building up a catalogue of records that you like and you're really into music, I could understand this even though it seems quite excessive and there's probably lots of things that will never be listened to there.
	Yeah, if you go four crates down and six crates across so you're in the centre at the bottom, he has no idea what's in there and he's never going to listen.
	This is the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria.
	You're selling it to me.
	Yeah.
	So I don't see much of a problem here.
	I'm not a treasurist.
	You can walk around my house.
	But I don't see much of a problem here.
	I mean, with books.
	I have thousands of books.
	For me, they have value, and I'm sure the lovely person here would say that his CDs have value for him.
	Better this than Funko Pops.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, you are right, it is a little bit excessive.
	But I mean, at least there is value in the collection.
	Yeah.
	If you're someone who's like, right, I need to find that, what are they called?
	LPs or something.
	Yeah.
	If you want to find like an LP of a particular thing that's really hard to find, well this guy might have it.
	So like you say, it acts like kind of the Library of Alexandria.
	There is a purpose to it.
	These people also serve a sort of social purpose in that a lot of obscure music, and I know about this, It doesn't actually exist in digital media.
	You can rip it off an LP and actually disseminate it to the population as a whole.
	I've actually found music from these sorts of people.
	So I have a bit of a soft spot for it, even though I can recognize it's probably not fiscally responsible.
	So this next one is a bit left of field.
	This is someone's hand collection.
	And what do we reckon?
	I don't know.
	Is it a restaurant or something if it's not Gordon Ramsay's house?
	Yeah, it seems a bit much.
	I think it's their kitchen.
	Which, you know, the fact they're all matching as well, it seems to be a bit of an obsession.
	But they're also slightly different pans.
	Maybe you're cooking a dinner party.
	I'm trying to be charitable here.
	You know what?
	This reminds me of some pictures that they show, that the police shows when they, when they catch criminals and they say, this is the findings and they show guns and drugs.
	You know, these, these are the stolen pans.
	So this one is my one to trip you up, Carl.
	I mean, oh, uh, well, again, um, speaking about excessiveness, uh, yeah, this is a bit excessive.
	So I'm actually gonna come to the rescue of this.
	Um, when I first started working at Lotus Eaters, I did used to make fun of Warhammer.
	And then you've slowly won me around because you've told me about, you know, you spend time with your son playing it.
	You do it socially as part of the game and the actual process of painting them.
	Yeah.
	It's not just you're buying a piece of plastic and putting it on the shelf.
	No, no.
	It's involved.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so I feel like actually it's a lot more justifiable than it might first appear.
	There's a reason that it's 40 years old now.
	It really taps into the sort of autistic side of the male brain and it allows you to do something with it.
	So it's got to function as well.
	So you get to play, you know, and it feeds into the competitiveness of you and your friends, you know, so I'm going to beat you.
	So, but, but you are right.
	Like this, this is excessive 144,000 points, right?
	Just for anyone who doesn't know, that's colossal.
	A normal game is 2,000 points, right?
	Okay.
	And also, this must have cost about 50 grand.
	So, my sort of carrying water for this guy is that this is a YouTube channel that is dedicated to this sort of thing, and I think they've been doing it for 10, 15 years, if not more.
	And so, if it's his career, it's a bit more excusable.
	If that were his private collection, I'd be like, what are you doing?
	But as he does this for a living, records it for YouTube, the kind of spectacle of it.
	It has millions of views.
	Yeah.
	It has 1.7 million views.
	So, you know, in many ways you can justify it.
	Even though if it were a normal person, it might be a little bit aggressive.
	It is still a bit excessive.
	It is.
	And, uh, here's another one.
	This is taking a slightly different tone.
	I don't know what.
	Go through someone's head to do this to themselves.
	Yeah.
	Pepsi Max is gross.
	Coke Zero is what you want to drink.
	Is this like dentist propaganda or something?
	They want you to rot your teeth.
	I've no idea, but yeah, it's not good.
	But just two products in a large fridge as well.
	I don't understand.
	I'm not sure what the thing on the left-hand side is.
	Something bad for your health.
	Yeah, yeah.
	This is obviously bad.
	There's no reason to have this level of brand loyalty.
	It's basically an obsession at this point, isn't it?
	I think it's an addiction.
	Probably, yeah.
	I mean, there's caffeine in there, isn't there?
	It's just not good for you.
	And just an honourable meme here that is pertinent is of course talking about the same sort of lefty types who don't like things like confederate statues will also get a statue venerating a villain if it's a Funko Pop.
	I just had to throw that in there.
	And the final thing I wanted to mention is this.
	This is obviously excessive.
	Sorry, are the walls covered in titanic VHSs?
	Yes, they're all titanic VHSs and every bit of media in this room, they've basically got a titanic room.
	Part of me thinks they're doing this for a meme.
	There's no way you get that much just for the meme.
	But what if the Titanic VHS's are like five pence a piece?
	Like no one really wants them.
	Might be cheaper than wallpaper I suppose.
	Yeah and I think that... This is not a meme.
	It's a little bit scary actually.
	I think if someone were doing this seriously and you went into that house, I would quickly leave if I were you.
	That's right.
	Wow, you really like the Titanic then.
	It's okay.
	I've only watched it once.
	Are you planning to die in a boating accident?
	There are some spots there on the wall that are not covered yet.
	That's true, yeah.
	The collection is imperfect.
	Actually, there is one more that I found and I personally hate this and it is the collecting of Prime.
	The whole notion that YouTubers can release a horrible energy drink and, uh, it's somehow desirous in any way.
	They're marketing it to gullible children.
	They literally are.
	My eight year old came back from the shop when one time with Prime and he was like, dad, look, I've got Prime.
	I was like, that's great, son.
	Yeah.
	Dear, dear.
	Anyway, it just goes to show that marketing does work.
	Here's another thing that kind of depressed me.
	What is American culture?
	And it's mostly brand logos.
	There's also the Democrat and Republican logos and the American flag.
	Just bullet points of the Constitution, I think.
	In the right hand side, it's basically been broken down into branding, which I think is pretty depressing.
	It's not about the moral virtues or even the beauty of America as a country.
	It's just these logos, which I think epitomizes how some people view culture.
	It's something to be consumed rather than Why are young people acting like they've got no purpose, they've got no future?
	Well, I wonder.
	It's become almost like a pseudo-religion brand loyalty, hasn't it?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	So here is some bingo that we can perhaps do for ourselves.
	Um, I think for myself, I have a gaming PC.
	That's true.
	Um, I have discord for work, but that comes with a gaming PC as well.
	Um, I have a thousand pound, a thousand dollar collection of my guitar effects pedals.
	I have X premium again for work.
	So most of these are for work, right?
	But a lot of these other ones, I feel like, don't really apply.
	Like, I refuse to pay for YouTube Premium or Spotify Premium.
	I don't even know what a Squishmallow is.
	Squishmallow?
	I don't know.
	But yeah, there you go.
	That's how you assess it.
	What about you guys?
	Anything there?
	Okay, I don't have Reddit Gold.
	I do have YouTube Premium because I'm sick of bloody adverts.
	Adblock.
	Sorry?
	Use Adblock.
	On my phone.
	Okay, fair enough.
	Have watched the Star Wars sequel.
	I do have X Premium.
	Oh, yeah, that's true.
	I hate watching the Star Wars sequel.
	I have drank a soda in the past week.
	I probably have a gaming PC.
	I have a very expensive PC.
	I don't know what it does.
	I don't have a handbag.
	I don't smoke weed.
	I don't have an anime figurine.
	Technically, I have a Funko Pop, but that's only because it was forced upon me by GIF.
	I haven't watched a Marvel movie in the past year.
	I don't know what a Stanley Cup is.
	Oh no, I do know what a Stanley Cup is because we covered it in the beginning.
	I don't have a $1,000 phone.
	I don't have $200 sneakers.
	I do have a $1,000 collection of my Wyamirams.
	I haven't eaten junk food in the past week.
	I don't subscribe to any fans.
	I don't have Pokemon.
	I don't have a console.
	I don't know what Amiibo is.
	I don't have Squishmallow.
	I don't have Spotify.
	Two plus streaming services.
	Well, yeah, because I have kids.
	I don't have Discord Nitro and I don't have cable.
	So I'm kind of half Kuma.
	I think, I think you're okay.
	You haven't got over a majority.
	Half Kuma, it's not good.
	So I have eaten junk food and I also have the thousand dollar plus phone.
	If you go by sort of, it's a Great British Pound conversion, I suppose.
	No, no, I would be very, it's ranked very low in consumerism.
	So I think that what is to blame is this.
	This is a real thing.
	I did my research and If you're listening, it says turn customers into fanatics, products into obsessions, employees into ambassadors, and brands into religions.
	Is that Zuckerberg on the stage?
	It's not.
	It is from Qualtrics, which is a service I've actually had to use in a previous workplace before.
	I think there's something to do with business in some capacity.
	Yeah, I think so.
	And they've got that same slogan there, and I think it's from their summit in 2018.
	Yes, yeah.
	It says down the bottom.
	So it is a real thing, this dystopian speech, I suppose.
	And I think that this advertising philosophy is what has hooked all of these people who are empty.
	They're looking for meaning, but they're doing it in the wrong places because buying material things might make you feel good in the short term when you actually buy it, but then they just become part of the furniture.
	You don't pay attention to them.
	I think the way you get meaningful experiences, at least in my experience, I'm certainly not You know, an expert necessarily, is you go out and you make them.
	It's about doing things.
	It's not about being a passive consumer.
	You're an active part of the world.
	I think that the word active is the central part.
	You're out doing stuff.
	You're out meeting people.
	Yeah.
	You can say you're doing something with your life because you are and you know, going to work, coming home and just buying stuff.
	There's no way to live your life.
	Yeah.
	Everything except my Warhammer armory is consumerism.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Hitherto, all people we conventionally refer to as historians are to be thought of as prehistorians.
	There's only one objective historian, it's called Netflixius, and the people at Netflix are the only ones who have access to his annals of history.
	And he says basically that Homosexuality was incredibly prevalent in ancient Greece and especially when it comes to Alexander the Great and Achilles and Patroclus.
	I don't know.
	When I read the Iliad, I never saw the passage where Achilles and Patroclus were rubbing tips or something.
	It just wasn't there.
	I mean, there's the passage where they're with their women and then there's Achilles being like, He took my woman.
	I need my woman back.
	I'm deeply in love with her, but he doesn't actually have sex with a man.
	Yeah, but I don't know.
	Maybe that was a way of subtly hinting that he was gay.
	His wife and concubine.
	Yeah.
	Anyway.
	Now, speaking of resisting dumbing down, you can visit our website.
	Calvin Robinson has joined us, and you can use the code CRUSADE to take 50% off Gold here.
	And this is for new subscribers and those who have upgraded.
	And also you can send video comments for fatherly advice, and make it clear that it is for Calvin, if you want to send it to Calvin, by opening with Dear Father Calvin.
	It helps us sort our emails out.
	Now, let's move forward.
	Netflix made a documentary about Alexander the Great called The Making of a God, and within the first eight minutes they turned him gay.
	Can I just point out that Netflix has got this wrong.
	I was aware Alexander was black.
	Yeah, I thought he was played by Denzel Washington.
	Well, he also hints that Caesar wasn't a lesbian, so that's also a problem.
	Caesar?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, Caesar was a lesbian.
	How's that?
	Netflix uses someone who has got some things wrong.
	So anyway, what you see there, there's a video with Alexander in very intimate relationships with Hephaestion.
	He was a man of penetrating military insight.
	And they had several community notes on this tweet by Nwokeners.
	And I noticed the community notes were all gone.
	Yeah.
	That's interesting, isn't it?
	Yeah, so I rate all of them as unhelpful.
	And I wasn't the only one, let's say.
	Okay, so what was fun about it is that if you see here, you don't have to look at that, but there is a dude here, a Netflix dude saying there was no vocabulary in Greece about homosexuality.
	There was just being sexual.
	That's not true.
	So that's profoundly mistaken.
	And let me just say that because this has to do with one of the worst features of ancient Greece, the direction of sexuality and attraction was profoundly understood.
	And the word pedo comes from pederasty.
	And if they didn't understand that where sexuality is channeled and where attraction is coming from, they wouldn't have coined that word.
	Yeah.
	So this is someone who is genuinely claiming that he is making a historical account of actual figures and knows nothing about the culture he is talking about, even in its bad features.
	You can read Plato's Symposium and you know, it's a short book.
	It doesn't take very long.
	And you'll get all you need to know about that sort of thing.
	It disproves what he says.
	I mean, I can't believe he hasn't read it.
	If he's talking about ancient Greece.
	Well, in Xenophon's and Abbasis, he gives you a description of the 10 generals of the army and points out that one of them is a notorious boy lover.
	And he had a lust for boys.
	And this was just something that Xenophon says.
	This is just a characteristic of this man's personality.
	And then he carries on.
	So they absolutely did have a language and an understanding of that.
	So I don't know why he would say that.
	Yes, so let me just say here that you would expect the main sources, the main historians who wrote about Alexander to write about things like that explicitly.
	And the main historians are Arian, Quintus Curtius Rufus, the other is of Sicily and Plutarch.
	But they didn't write explicitly about scenes of homosexuality.
	They didn't.
	They did write explicitly about scenes of heterosexuality.
	They did.
	So they would have mentioned it.
	They would have mentioned it.
	And speaking of the Anabasis of Cyrus, there is also a very weird passage with a guy called Episthenes, who absolutely fell in love with a boy that was about to be executed and went to Xenophon and the other leaders of the of the Greek mercenaries who were trying to go back to Greece, and he told them basically just I don't want to live and carry on without this boy, and they allowed it, and they left.
	So if you would write something like that about a soldier, you would expect the main historians to write something like that about Alexander the Great?
	Yeah.
	If it was something that he did, they would have mentioned it, like they did for other people who did that, and they mentioned it.
	And although they didn't use the word homosexuality, because it's not a Greek word.
	Although it has some Greek origins, they absolutely had an idea of the phenomenon.
	And also, let me just say in the symposium of Plato that you mentioned, There is a myth of Aristophanes who's talking about the origins of attraction.
	And he says something like, in the beginning, human beings had composite bodies and you had men and men in one body, women and women in another body.
	And men and women in one body.
	And Zeus thought that he should punish them for their pride and split them up with thunder.
	And ever since, they are trying to join the body of their previous body.
	And anyway, Plato has the idea that this is a very sexual analysis of the situation.
	But the point is that That is a myth that is used as an explanation for how you can have all the kinds of attraction among human beings.
	So the idea that there was zero understanding of it is completely ridiculous.
	And also, let me just say, there are many passages where people refer to things like that, and one thing also, which is, Aristotle in the Politics talks about homosexuality, and also how in some ancient cultures it wasn't seen as necessarily bad, and it wasn't.
	He also mentions the Celts as being very tolerant of homosexuality.
	Celts are lame and gay.
	If there was zero understanding of that, there would be no passages of the sort.
	Speaking of Aristotle, you can definitely check our premium content and the symposium we did with Carl on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Part 1 and Part 2.
	You can subscribe with £5 a month to all our premium content and Be sure to give it a watch.
	Now, let me just say also, because there's another idea about the word.
	There's also the word kinedos, and I'm going to talk about the Oxford University Press blog, which is not just any website.
	It has some interesting features here about the word, and they say the word in 4th century BCE, The orator of the Mosthenes is labeled a Cynodos in the courtroom by his opponent in order to besmirch his masculinity and accuse him of shameless conduct.
	The Gorgias Plato cited the life of the Cynodi as being the prime example of hedonistic living.
	Romanov has a more detailed as to what exactly makes the Cynodos behavior so wretched.
	Katty Luce Marshall and Juvenal all portray Kennedy as desiring sexual penetration by other men and often as displaying extreme effeminacy.
	And they are saying about the term here, and let me just also say that there was a kind of twerking involved.
	And that should generate an issue about cultural appropriations, especially on Netflix, because it says that Marshall and Juvenal specifically associate this individual with a particular form of dance in which the cinedos wiggles his buttocks salaciously.
	So it's a form of a male twerker.
	So what you're saying is that black women in America are culturally appropriating ancient Greek culture?
	I don't know.
	I think essentially if you look deep into the old groups that are the protected groups of those who play identity politics in the left, they're not compatible groups.
	Did you have Waffle Houses in Ancient Greece?
	I'm sure people were fighting for America.
	I am definitely certain that we did.
	Okay.
	Now, one thing to say, because the community notes were the worst community notes ever, and you could definitely see so many community notes being taken down.
	And people, they reacted very vehemently, and they said, no, no, it's an absolute fact that Alexander was gay or bisexual, and here's the evidence.
	And if you click the links, it just didn't suggest anything.
	Most of them were just, trust me, bro, I'll show you some of them.
	But let me just say the other thing, because they just had the passage from Arian, and I'm just going to show you some bits of it.
	Atek Vatana Alexander offered the sacrifice just as he was accustomed to do after any success and held athletic and musical contests.
	Efestian fell ill on the seventh day of his illness.
	They say that the stadium was full as there was an athletic competition for boys on that day.
	When Alexander was told that Efestian was in a bad way, he quickly left to go to him.
	But he was no longer living by the time he arrived.
	And anyway, they're saying basically he was profoundly grieving.
	Oh, no.
	What's so gay about mourning?
	Well, being upset that your friend died.
	Yeah, your best friend's died.
	And you're like, Oh, God, you know, oh, that's right.
	You're a homo.
	Yeah, so I want to say that basically this is bad against straight people because it suggests and is based on the assumption that straight people don't have feelings.
	It's also a cultural difference, right?
	Well, there's also an element of, it reveals something about the people asserting that this proves anything, that you can't have a relationship with someone without it being sexual.
	I mean, it's very Freudian.
	Very porn brain.
	It is, yeah.
	But the thing I think is interesting is, in Anglo culture, crying is very unmanly.
	Whereas actually in ancient Greek culture crying was an appropriate expression of sentiment.
	So I mean Alexander spends like three days mourning in his tent or something for Hephaistion.
	This is totally normal and completely appropriate in that culture.
	That wouldn't be appropriate in our culture but we're different people in different time and different place with different mores.
	So it's this doesn't so what we the our perspective from now this seems like a very strange and excessive gushing of emotion.
	But that's only because we're different to them.
	And let me just say that this has to do with the publicity of emotion and especially you can find it in Greece and Italy right now, especially in the Mediterranean, South Mediterranean.
	And you have plenty of theatricality into it.
	That's why if you see if you compare the politics and the public dialogue of Greece and Italy on the one hand, and the UK and the US, you see much more theatricality in Greece and Italy.
	Obviously, I'm not saying that public discussion is ideal in the UK and the US, but the idea of public emotion is very prevalent in Greece and Italy.
	But there were other sources that maybe, you know, what would the Aryan know?
	He was the earliest, wasn't he?
	Yeah, but he never read Netflix.
	Some people here have read it.
	He was the closest in time to Alexander's life.
	We have here, Who Loved Alexander the Great?
	Transcript and zero sources.
	Someone says here throughout his life, Alexander married three women and fathered at least two children.
	Average gay man.
	But also had several male lovers.
	Source?
	No.
	No source.
	And this is also in Cambridge.
	Among his closest relationship was that with his general and bodyguard, Hephaestion, with the relationship often compared by ancient authors to that of the Homeric heroes, Patroclus and Achilles, who were considered to be a couple in classical literature.
	No, they weren't!
	Alexander, upon his conquering of Persia, is said to have taken King Darius's eunuch, Bagos, as his lover.
	How could you take a eunuch as a lover?
	Where?
	Again, sources.
	I mean, he was just said to by this guy right now.
	They said, source, trust me, bro.
	If Esteon unfortunately perished from fever the year before Alexander's death, Alexander was said to be devastated and lay weeping on his comrade for a day and night before being cried away.
	He carries here in mourning and stage elaborate funeral games to honor him.
	Such relationships were fairly common in the ancient world.
	It is only in the relatively recent past that homosexuality became viewed as deviant, and it is only recently that... Okay, so...
	Whatever.
	Where are the sources?
	There are none.
	Yeah.
	And also, you see, they also try to make, they also link it back to the Iliad and Achilles.
	And because there were some passages, I think, in Arian where Alexander is talking about his, he wanted to associate himself with an origin from Argus.
	And he was constantly talking about Achilles and Hercules.
	And in fact, there are passages where he was talking to his men that we've been further than Hercules did.
	Yeah, but again there's nothing in the Iliad to suggest that Achilles has a sexual relationship with Patrick.
	Another person here who reacted to the second community notes that was raised against NWokeness, Samuel Vlodovsky, and he says, it's actually not unproven.
	It's a well-known fact that Alexander of Macedon had an affair with his top general.
	Source.
	Where's their source?
	Where's the source?
	In fact, he grieved greatly when Hephaestion died.
	That means he must have been having sex.
	I doubtless will grieve greatly when my best friends die.
	But you all don't want to accept history you don't like.
	Whatever.
	What's the source, again?
	You only feel sentiment to people you're having sex with.
	That's the real revelation here.
	Yeah, that's exactly it.
	The Manchester Historian, that was another of the sources, says here, one must examine the sparse evidence about Alexander's life to understand his sexuality.
	In his early years, he showed little interest in sexual relationships.
	Quintus Curtius, the writer Quintus Curtius, stated that Alexander's parents purchased a courtesan fearing that the young prince was a gynis, meaning womanish.
	So how is that a suggestion?
	I mean, sorry to break it down to you, but there are many, many people who fear that their children are going to be like that and because they think it's a bad thing.
	No, whatever.
	It's their opinion.
	Just by saying that I fear my son is womanish doesn't mean that the son is gay.
	It means that the parent is Afraid that the child is going to be in a way that they don't like.
	But I mean, Alexander took over Macedon when he was 19.
	I think he might have had things on his mind.
	So I didn't worry about girls.
	It's like, bro, I'm literally next in line to the throne.
	I'm invading Persia.
	Like, I think I've got more on my mind than girls.
	Sorry, you know?
	Yeah.
	So again, my dad was just assassinated, you know, like, anyway.
	Here is another tweet from Nwokeness and I'll just, and I just copy pasted the note, the community note, because I knew that they were going to take it down.
	It said, readers added context.
	This is a source, trust me bro, by the way.
	Readers added context.
	They thought people might want to know Alexander the Great having sexual relationship with other men is not unproven.
	Speculation it happened.
	The debate among historians is more in defining his sexuality using modern standards as these definitions were not used in ancient Greeks.
	And they just had the link to Google Scholar just saying here are the people who say this.
	And they're all 20th century people.
	There's a guy there going, well, you'd complain if they put the Sacred Band of Thieves in there.
	It's like, well, they were explicitly a unit made up of gay lovers.
	Like, okay, make a documentary about that.
	If you want to make a documentary about ancient Greek gays, you know, but it's just, it's not that they didn't exist or they didn't know.
	And if they had thought Alexander was, I mean, in the previous one, they were like, oh, well, you know, there's no evidence.
	It's just speculation.
	Hephaestion was, go down a bit, go down a bit.
	Um, well, it's never explicitly stated as Alexander's lover yet because it wasn't.
	He was always referred to as the friend of Alexander.
	Yeah.
	That doesn't mean they had sex.
	I find it strange how they're trying to capitalize on the prestige of a historic figure.
	It's similar to casting people as black when they weren't.
	When there are actual figures in history that might be good characters to make a series about, they overlook and instead want to paint over European ones or straight ones.
	Because they want to take something away from you.
	And if you see also down there, they say that the shrines of Achilles and Patroclus, two other likely lovers that suffered history's homosexual erasure.
	Yeah, but there literally wasn't.
	They're like, look, the Sacred Band of Thebes is a band full of gay people.
	Okay, great.
	It gives a whole different meaning to, you know, a general trying to rally up his troops.
	Let's F them!
	Did they say that in ancient Greece?
	The reasoning behind the Sacred Band is that the men wouldn't run away because they wouldn't want to be Yeah.
	So, Josh, you mentioned something about Netflix here, because again, it all comes back to Netflixes.
	And I don't know, because Netflixes knew everything about history.
	I don't know if it's a collective project or something, but he also knew everything.
	And this is also another magic thing from Netflix, comes from Queen Cleopatra.
	We have covered it and we have spoken about it.
	It's definitely the face of a Greek person, isn't it?
	Yeah, especially also a Ptolemaic Dynasty heir.
	And it has 1.2 out of 10.
	I think that's 1.2 too much.
	But I'm glad that they sort of gave that to it.
	And let me just show you this from Liberocrat Media.
	just saying, you know, it just shows you the thing that Netflix is doing.
	Game, anime, books, Netflix adaptation.
	They have to fill the diversity quotas.
	The crusade of inclusivity.
	Yes.
	Now, I'm going to say something that is going to sound a bit weird, but I do think that Netflix is an instrument for propaganda.
	Hello, hello.
	So the question is, what is going on right now in Greece?
	Why would, for instance, something like that be a good idea for those who are playing progressivist identity politics in Greece?
	Let's listen to Peter Tatchell.
	If you want a source on it.
	It says, The Greek government's bill legalizing gay marriage and adoption rights has received widespread support among parliamentarians.
	Bravo!
	If passed, Greece will become the 37th country in the First Orthodox Nation to recognize same-sex marriage in national law.
	Hurrah!
	Now, this is a conversation that should take place in Greece.
	But not in the way that it does.
	You don't get ignoramuses from left and right and anywhere to just shout in a catty way to each other.
	This is a dialogue that hasn't taken place in Greece, a serious dialogue about it.
	The people haven't been asked.
	And I don't know to what extent this is an agenda that is popular also with, not only with the people, but also with the main party.
	So there are concerns that the ruling party right now is pushing forward an agenda that is, you could say, progressivist-friendly on all sorts of things without people wanting.
	And let me just say one thing.
	In December, they pushed forward a bill that legalized 30,000 illegal migrants, and they said that Greeks are not working in the fields.
	We need them.
	But they did it in a way that was really interesting.
	The main party said, if you don't vote for it, and you're a member of that party, you're erased from the party.
	You're losing your position from the party.
	So if all of you don't agree, if anyone doesn't agree with it, they get erased from the party.
	Now, I don't think they're going to do the same with this, because I want to be fair in presenting, but the point is that the...
	The family law in Greece is so intertwined that if they grant gay marriage, they sort of immediately grant adoption rights.
	And the conservative argument would be, well, if several countries, as Tatchell says, 37th, if other 36 countries have walked down this road, why not?
	And there are significant concerns about how this impacts Children, why not wait and see the long-term effects on children from the other 36 countries?
	And instead of doing that, which is the appropriate and the sensible thing to do, to just rush and virtue signal to the progressives of the West that, you know, we are pushing forward that agenda.
	So that's something that is an interesting side to note.
	And just to end on an unimportant point, history is intertwined with memory.
	It is a form of creating a collective memory.
	And it is also who we are.
	The more we learn about history, the more we learn about our origins and how we have been shaped from historical forces and influences.
	So this is something that requires the utmost reverence.
	It requires focus on method and seriousness.
	It shouldn't be used for short-term political gains.
	This sort of is an agenda that just says, I'm going to use history just to brainwash you.
	I'm not going to care about who you are.
	I'm not going to care about how your identity has been shaped.
	I just care about The short-term political gains of a group that is being represented.
	So I think that's profoundly disrespectful.
	And just say that it's not just Netflix.
	You could say it's also Disney.
	Elon Musk circulated this, and feel free to look.
	It says, an anonymous source just sent me this from Disney.
	It's mandatory institutionalized racism and sexism.
	It's all about the quotas.
	And that was also, you know, when you want to apply to several key positions and jobs in several institutions, one of the questions is, how do you promote diversity?
	For instance, in the university I was in, they were saying, how do you promote diversity?
	How have you promoted diversity?
	All these quotas there.
	So we live in an age that profoundly disrespects history.
	By profoundly disrespecting history, national identity is being profoundly disrespected.
	And I think that this is unbelievably pernicious and should be resisted.
	Okay well on that subject let's talk about diversity fatigue because there has been a great deal of diversity promoted across the entire west and of course going into various uh the extremities of it and this has been something that people have been pushing back against and actually uh don't worry about grabbing that link John I won't worry about it
	And actually it's come to the point where the left is realizing that this is giving them diminishing returns.
	And so they are going to try and change their strategies.
	But before we begin, go to the website, sign up for either £5 a month or use the code CRUSADE to sign up the gold tier and go and watch Calvin Robinson's Common Sense Crusade.
	You can send Calvin video comments and questions in his fatherly advice section.
	Just make sure that you specify it's for Calvin Robinson.
	In the beginning of the comment.
	Anyway, so the word woke was weaponized by the right.
	And this is a four year old article.
	So you can see they've been like, hang on a second.
	We, we have this wonderful word that as they, uh, they point out in the beginning, it's like, well, this, this came out of black culture and it was, uh, staying woke.
	And it was, it dates at least back to the sixties.
	Although other articles I found, uh, dated back to the thirties.
	It's like, okay, that's great.
	So you guys, the white liberals have appropriated this from black people.
	And they say, well, like politically correct before it, the word woke has come to connote the opposite of what it means.
	Technically, going by the Merriam-Webster's dictionary definition, woke means aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues of racial and social justice.
	But today we are more likely to see it being used as a stick with which to beat people who aspire to such values.
	So it still means that thing.
	It still means essentially you are a racialist, a sexualist, a genderist, a whatever, you know, all of these things.
	And you think that society should be organized on those lines and attentive to those lines.
	But it's not a very popular thing because, of course, people would like individualistic meritocracy because they think, well, I just want to get on with my life, bro, and not be unfairly profiled by the fact that I'm a man or that I'm white or that I'm whatever, straight, you know, blah, blah, blah.
	I think that part of the reason that it's been turned against the left from the right is because it's a stupid, grammatically incorrect word that paints them as stupid.
	Like you're either, you know, you know, you're either awake or you're asleep.
	You're not woke.
	That doesn't make sense.
	No, no, no, it's fine because it becomes like a colloquialism.
	It does, yeah, that's what it has become.
	Yeah, yeah, and that's fine.
	We use them all the time.
	I think actually the problem is the idea of trying to redistribute resources in society along the lines of race, sex, sexuality, or any other of these arbitrary characteristics is, well, Frankly, it's illiberal.
	It looks to people to be a method of overt racialist discrimination, and most people are actually not racist, and so don't want to see overt racial discrimination.
	I know this is going to sound crazy in the year of our Lord 2024, but I think that most people do think that way.
	And so they are complaining that criticizing woke culture has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself, rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status.
	Isn't that amazing?
	That's amazing because there are some questions to be asked.
	Whose speech is being silenced constantly?
	Let's go further than speech.
	Let's talk about who's being actively not hired for jobs or suppressed for jobs.
	Like when the RAF had a leaked document saying, well, we keep getting useless white males applying when we want black people or brown people or women or whatever.
	Okay, well, who's the victim in that circumstance?
	It actually is.
	I mean, there was a chap a couple of years ago who sued a local police force because they had actively discriminated against him for being a straight white man.
	British people in particular are basically being made second class citizens in our own country because the laws apply to us differently.
	That is completely true.
	I mean, if you were to do a study on who has gone to jail for hate speech, You'll find almost all, I bet every single one of those people is white.
	And probably a man too.
	No, no, there are women who go to jail for hate crimes.
	Sure, but it'd be a majority.
	It'd be straight white men.
	You are right.
	But this, notice that, criticizing work culture has become a way of claiming victim status because rather than acknowledging that some are more deserving than others to hold that status, but that just says, well, victim status is the highest thing you can aspire to in our civilization.
	I think that shows the hypocrisy of the left, because their modus operandi is rights for me, but not for thee in the name of rights for all.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	They constantly talk about human rights, they can shut up about it, but they just want rights for those who they claim to protect.
	And they don't care about the rights of others.
	And just to point another thing that I think the left has completely lost the native population in Western countries.
	That's why there's so much they want to change the mix and talk down to the native population.
	I think trying to couch being a victim and somehow being virtuous is really quite pathetic.
	That's the pernicious thing.
	It is, yeah, because In my sort of frame of mind is that victimhood is probably a mindset.
	Like, you know, I've had people try and start fights with me before.
	I didn't consider myself a victim of that because I didn't let it get to me.
	It didn't really result in anything that negative for me.
	So if I were to describe myself as a victim, it would seem weird.
	So if you view yourself as a victim of even more nebulous things than that, like our society has kind of left me unequal to certain other people, then that's even weaker than that.
	But it's not just that.
	It's to suggest that the problem is a virtue is something you yourself cultivate.
	So a virtue is something you have to practice over and over and over within a certain sort of prescribed bound to get the best outcome through doing a particular thing.
	Being a victim doesn't require you to do anything.
	It actually requires someone else to do something to you.
	And so suddenly you are considered virtuous that you've taken no action yourself.
	So it is actually the opposite of a virtue that's being masqueraded as the virtue.
	So this is, I mean, the way you're describing it, it's a vice to wallow in victimhood.
	Absolutely.
	And this is being flipped around.
	So now this is the virtuous status.
	This is what people should aspire to be.
	And of course, that's just going to incentivize more and more people to become victims, consider themselves victims.
	and so this this is the problem with the entire frame of the left so this is why conservatives have been hammering them on it and they're starting to notice i mean this is from january this year um but they're saying well look the term has been co-opted by republicans as a pejorative term Yes, because you are reframing what virtue and vice are to be the inverse of what they traditionally mean.
	Exactly.
	And the best example is courage, because you can say that courage has to do with the willingness.
	The traditional example of courage is definitely not painting your hair in a weird color, just screaming how oppressed you are in a room full of people that cheer you.
	It's worth mentioning as well, I don't know whether you guys remember when the woke stuff started coming on the scene, but the thing that made you realize that these people are wrong and they're lunatics is their personal conduct.
	They viewed themselves as victims and conducted themselves in ways, and I remember these sort Feminist freak out compilations on YouTube in you know like 2015 and you know you were doing videos on them and you could see their lack of virtue on display for all to see and that's people's gateway into understanding these so-called progressives is that they're weird unhinged lunatics that aren't good embodiments of virtue.
	No, they want to take the opposite of virtue and present it as virtue.
	And so this is why Republicans have gone so hard on this.
	And I think they're, of course, right to have done so.
	I mean, the DeSantis administration they're using here has just essentially criminalized woke ideology, making sure that it can't be promoted in schools, in government institutions or anything else that the government has direct control over.
	And so they're complaining that DeSantis has implemented policies in schools that restricted the topics of race, oppression, gender and sexual orientation in the classroom through the Parental Rights and Education Law and the Stop Woke Act.
	Why wouldn't you?
	Why wouldn't you want to stop people who are like, look, what we want to do is promote vice.
	We're going to promote all the vices.
	And we're going to tell you these virtues when in fact they are literally constitutionally the opposite of what a virtue is.
	Why wouldn't you want that stopped?
	The only people who benefit, the people who literally want to gain a special status for having done nothing.
	Again, to be a victim, something has to happen to you.
	You don't achieve victim status, you suffer victim status.
	It is also worth mentioning as well that a lot of the psychological literature suggests that the people who signal that they're a victim actually score quite high on the dark triad measures.
	I hope I'm not pre-staging.
	No, you're not.
	Okay.
	And so actually, people who do this seem to be signaling a sort of transition of resources from one person to another.
	So it's being used in a sort of manipulative, yeah, it's emotional blackmail basically to try and get resources from one set of people to themselves.
	If you don't agree with me, I'll kill myself and it's going to be on you.
	Yes, it's that sort of style of rhetoric, perhaps not as extreme as that.
	It's your oppressing me.
	But that's the point.
	It's essentially the transfer of resources from people who are traditionally virtuous and good to people who are vicious and evil.
	And it's unjust.
	It shouldn't be done.
	Uh, and so they are concerned that, you know, the conservatives are depicting wokeness, uh, as a bad thing.
	And this is, this is making them unpopular.
	It's like, yeah, but it's so obviously a bad thing, but you don't have to be politically engaged.
	So yeah, actually, I don't want a bunch of black lives matter grifters stealing billions of dollars from well-meaning donors and then buying themselves giant mansions.
	Like how many mansions do they need to own?
	It'd be terrible if that happened, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, you know, that was just a hypothetical.
	It also happened in the UK as well, didn't it?
	Yeah, I know.
	It's funny that all these fundraisers just happened to fund thieves.
	Yeah.
	But of course, you know you are just a racist, don't you?
	Yeah, of course.
	Because WOKE is associated with black people, capital B, it's been a useful club for those who want to beat those seeking justice over the head with white grievance politics to win elections without deploying explicitly racist terms.
	So what they're saying is, oh, you saying WOKE, that's you being a dog whistle.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, shut up.
	Okay.
	Don't even care.
	And the great thing about it, because it didn't matter.
	People are beyond it, right?
	No, no, no, no.
	You are woke and we're not having it.
	And that's what they've come to the conclusion of.
	And so they've realized that, hang on a second, our once sensible call for social awareness has been broken by the right.
	It's been bludgeoned beyond recognition by the right.
	So that's good.
	The right has smashed the term woke and managed to make it a toxic thing.
	Which is good, and they are very outright and explicit by saying that Wright has made this a poisonous thing.
	But they also say that outside of right wing spaces, the term woke has also died, so in their own left wing spaces.
	But a lot of the reason for that, they say, is that because even though the right successfully made the term radioactive, but some of its collapse is also tied to the way the slogan was mutated and bankrupted in predominantly white liberal spaces.
	Because, of course, instead of radical structural reform to make sure that vice is equally rewarded as virtue is, the white liberals are kind of guilty about their virtues because they are self-aware and they think oh yes well i have to do these things because these things virtues but i have to try and recognize the equality of vice along with that so the dark triad types who are just here to grift your money they're supposed to be as morally equal
	I have to say something on this because we were discussing it yesterday on a discussion that is going to be released soon.
	I think one of the interesting features in the mindset of those people, I'm going to say woke, some people are pissed off when I do this, but I like annoying them.
	I love annoying them.
	They say that they don't want, on the one hand, equality of results.
	Some of them, they will say this.
	But they want equality of opportunity.
	But they tie them together by treating equality of results as the criterion for equality of opportunity.
	So wherever you have unequal results, they say opportunities were unequal.
	And the example is Ibram X. Kendi says wherever there are racial disparities, There are racial discrimination, that is axiom.
	Yeah.
	So that's why they are used as people say that they are crypto Marxists.
	And to a friend of mine who says that the right wing is panicking over Marxism, please answer me that.
	I mean, they are literally race communists and they say it.
	But the woke has been bludgeoned successfully on the right.
	It's also dying in the left because in the left, they've come to the conclusion, actually, when Pepsi's like, yeah, maybe we're going to become woke or when Disney's like woke.
	That's not going to bring structural change, actually.
	It's a way of solidifying the institutions in the new paradigm.
	And so what this opinion writer says, he calls the subculture recognitionism.
	The overarching focus on the subculture was advocating for individuals and organizations to show they recognized the existence of systems of oppression.
	And this focus effectively cast aside the issue of taking collective action or pursuing policies that would address the roots of those systems.
	Instead of seeing Woke as a mandate to do something big, this group remained stuck in the zone of awareness and crafted a culture of intricate signaling.
	So it's not that Woke is bad, it's that Woke is not successful.
	Because they've finally recognized, and we were pointing this out five years ago, If a corporation can become your best friend because it signals the woke talking points you want, that means you are contained.
	You are contained.
	And they finally got to this.
	This was written last year.
	It's funny that after the Occupy Wall Street movement, you see a skyrocket in these sorts of terms.
	Obvious containment.
	And so the recognitionist set took anti-racist educator Robert DeAngelo as their prophet and honed in on approaching anti-racism through the lens of awareness, education, and DI-type initiatives.
	They encouraged placing black squares of solidarity on Instagram, circulating reading lists about the history of racism, and blah blah blah blah blah, right?
	To change the behavior of white people to try and make people feel more included.
	And of course the issue, as you were saying, is actually it doesn't matter because if you act in a vicious way, you do not get the same results as if you act in a virtuous way.
	Exactly.
	And they are robbing people of agency because if you are recognized as an agent, You're also recognized as an agent who can fail to take advantage of some opportunity, as an agent who can go wrong.
	But they are saying that whenever you have people doing wrong, it means that there was structural inequality.
	Yes.
	And structural problems.
	Which means that they don't, that they are talking about recognition on the one hand, but whenever we're talking about recognition, it's always recognized as what?
	And they want to recognize people just as passive recipients of well-being, pleasure points.
	But they are right.
	It is true that there is a structural bias in favor of virtue and against bias.
	You don't get the same resources for being an indolent drug addict that you do for being a hyper-conscientious, hard-working person who arrives at their job at the crack of dawn every morning and then works until night that evening.
	Thanks, Carl.
	Yeah, but you don't get the same results.
	That produces different results.
	That is correct.
	The structures will facilitate resources going to the person who works hard than the drug addict who does nothing or just robs people, right?
	So that is true, but that's what they're saying is structural racism because if that system produces different outcomes in different groups, which it does, then the system itself has to change because of course they are exactly the same race communists.
	And this, they want a complete leveling.
	So the vice is considered to be the moral worth and equal of the virtue.
	And this is what people are arguing against.
	And this is why wokeness itself became so toxic.
	But it's also, like I said, become toxic on the left because it's the whole structure has become one of containment.
	Because, of course, people don't actually want to give up having good things.
	They don't want to say, oh, the guy who does no work deserves just as much as the guy who does lots of work.
	It's just not the case.
	And so this moves on to what we can call diversity fatigue, because they are aware That won't is actually probably not going to get them to the destination they want.
	They have been contained.
	They have been stigmatized.
	This means that the mission is running into roadblocks.
	There are legal barriers from people like DeSantis.
	So DEI and various other things are being rescinded.
	But the crusade is not over.
	It will never be.
	Exactly.
	It will never be over until the vicious man is given the same as the virtuous man.
	This is what they will eternally attempt to achieve.
	And so this is just a description from January.
	From one non-profit called 110, which was created amid a crescendo of calls to address racial injustice after George Floyd's murder.
	And so they had members and clients, including AT&T, Bank of America, Cisco, Delta Airlines, Dow, General Motors, Nike, Walmart, to pledge towards hiring and promoting black workers based on skills instead of college degrees.
	So they have realized they're part of the containment.
	Oh, we got contained, actually.
	Structural change isn't coming.
	But at least we can still try and make sure that the racial preferencing that we're advocating for is going to push on.
	But they say, fast forward and the social climate has changed dramatically.
	Pushing these hiring programs has now grown increasingly controversial.
	Particularly in the wake of Supreme Court's ruling last year against race-based affirmative action policies at universities.
	And so 110, I mean, that's their entire business model.
	Their entire business model is like, hey, you should just hire black people and not white people.
	And the Supreme Court's like, you can't do that.
	The comment I'm going to make, I'm not going to make about color, I'm going to make about the idea of victimhood.
	I'm just surprised how no one saw that if you just promote people who scream constantly that they're victims and see victimhood everywhere, how do you expect that they're not going to be insufferable to work with?
	I mean, how are you going to expect that they're not going to be rubbish?
	You can't.
	No, they're not going to work.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Funny enough, if you hire based on anything other than merit, you don't get merit.
	That's strange.
	Yeah, it's really weird, isn't it?
	But anyway, so this means that OneTen has fallen far behind the pace to reach its initial goals, and the organization has had to modify its messaging in the past year because of the Supreme Court decision to emphasize that the policies it advocates will help black talent and others.
	Uh, and so what they've done is realize, okay, we can't just say it has to be black people.
	So they've taken an opposite tact to try and in fact, change the way that the companies present, um, hiring practices.
	They, they, they do the hiring practices, uh, in order to get the effect that they want without saying we want you to just hire black people.
	So for example, one thing they've done is, uh, there.
	Working with organizations and they give the example of Delta Airline.
	This is going to be great news for anyone who's taking a flight soon.
	What they've done is they want to get them to rewrite the jobs at Delta Airline and revise their approach.
	So Delta removed the four year degree requirement from 94% of its job listings, including for pilot roles.
	The idea.
	So there's going to be a pilot in the cockpit and their console is going to be chirping and they're not going to know what to do about it.
	Quite possibly.
	Um, because previously about half the jobs at Delta required a college degree and they say, well, that, that excludes 73% of black people.
	And it's like, okay.
	But it's also worth mentioning as well, that the group that is most overrepresented in the UK or university places is black women.
	That's worth focusing on.
	Because of funded action hiring?
	Yeah, because as a percentage of the population, they're more likely, about two or three times more likely than a working class white man to go to university.
	But the point is, you can see that they are not just going to stop, even if you put laws in.
	They're just going to change their tactics.
	And the vocabulary.
	And the vocabulary.
	I mean, that's exactly it, right?
	So, I mean, Debbie Dice and the CEO of 110 said, there is diversity fatigue.
	So what we're doing can't be, this is a diversity thing, but changing the thing from qualifications to skills.
	How that's measured it's like oh yeah well if you have a qualification from the university or some other accredited institution that says right this person has learned this skill that's a guarantee that that person has that skill that's how they got the qualification but if you just say it's untested skills then it's just paving the way for liars isn't it well yeah just claim to have skills that you don't actually have the certificate to back
	Yeah, I mean, how that's going to be known is epistemologically unsound, but skills give you an alternative path.
	So good luck.
	So this, as you can see, they are very aware that, okay, yeah, the DEI stuff's going to have to stop.
	Being overtly racial, you're going to have to stop.
	But the mission doesn't stop.
	They're still going to achieve race communism.
	They're still going to achieve the virtuous getting the same as the vicious.
	And they're very clear.
	Look, this is just a rebranding, right?
	So the DEI, they're rebranding their DEI programs to avoid legal risk, because now it's not that they're going still higher on race base.
	CEOs are telling them they're not eliminating, but they are recalibrating and rebranding their DEI programs.
	You see a lot of colleges now using zip codes as opposed to race or ethnicity, because in general you know the people that you're going to find in a certain zip code.
	So they, they, they will literally dog whistle their way into doing this.
	Um, so just to be, uh, just to be clear, woke is not going away.
	They're just going to stop saying that it's woke.
	Uh, I'm sure a new word will come up to represent the, uh, persistent, uh, attempt to destroy our civilization through race communism.
	Um, but, uh, the, the laws themselves didn't just work.
	Anyway, let's go to the video comments.
	When it comes to the upcoming Cyberpunk Dystopia, I'm trying to build the fun bits using low-cost open-source stuff.
	That way we don't have to rely on the corporations to have fun.
	Exciting bit is a bipedal prototype is looking good, which means there might be two-legged mechs and computer-controlled power armor in future.
	I certainly feel like that's a bit of a white pill.
	I've got another episode of our Cyberpunk Dystopia that's nearly done.
	I'm looking forward to sort of the Doom style armor, where you can just, you know, punch demons in the face.
	That's what I'm hoping to see out of you, Nick.
	So, on the subject of Harry and Carl disagreeing on whether white liberals are either ideological or malicious, it's kind of both, because my father's kind of one of these mid-ranking Apparatchiks people, and Well, it is definitely true that a lot of what they're doing is just to maliciously stick it to, like, their perceived white enemies.
	There is this weird idea in their head that they genuinely believe that the diversity is just gonna do what they say in perpetuity and will just respect the rules that they're given.
	Yeah.
	Which is kind of puzzling.
	The ideology creates the enemies.
	And so, yes, they do hate their enemies, but the ideology not only defines the enemies, it defines the ideal and goal.
	And so it makes them think that they're doing the moral thing.
	So it's not either or, basically.
	You're a classical liberal, Stelios.
	What do you reckon?
	Well, when it comes to the woke ideology, I think that it's an issue of power politics.
	It will always be relevant, so long as power politics is going to be relevant.
	So it will always be.
	But there's still a great deal of idealism in there, and they think it's the moral thing to do.
	I think that there are several tiers.
	I think that, you know, lots of people, they think that they're doing the right thing, but I think that the masterminds behind it, or at least the intellectuals behind it, they're just in it for power.
	I think they don't care about anything else.
	I don't know.
	Again, I think that it would be nice to think that because then they're just evil, right?
	I think a lot of them do think what they're doing is good.
	Anyway, let's go on to the next one.
	For anyone wondering where to find that Sabaton interview, it was one of their conversations with the Great War Channel people when they were doing crossovers together.
	Although I can't really remember which one it was because those videos were like four or five years ago.
	But I do like how during that conversation though, he was talking about how when the human rights guy was like Fed posting at the security people, he's like, I do not know this man.
	I am not with him.
	I do not share his values.
	I don't think they really understood the implications of that whole conversation though.
	I've not seen it.
	Sabaton are this sort of metal band with lots of historic focus, aren't they?
	I'm sure we need Harry here to translate, but I think I've heard one or two of their songs before.
	I'm not the expert on it.
	Not either.
	So let's go to the next one.
	Yeah, I have to say, nothing beats having a real skill.
	Something you know you can do because you work for it.
	You put in the hours and now no one can take it away from you.
	And technology is never going to do that for you.
	It's something only you can do yourself by putting in the work to learn that skill and it just, it feels good, man.
	That's like a personal trainer's inspirational speech there.
	Well done for learning an instrument.
	I'm obviously a bit biased on that in that I spend a lot of my time doing that, but it's amazing how much it benefits you in a way.
	I was playing guitar last night for about an hour and it just felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders.
	You feel so much better even though, you know, Nothing has changed.
	Honestly, it's the same with exercising almost any skill.
	Like one of the things I do is just go and paint a model, but you know, and then when I've done a really good job, I'm like, Oh, that looks great.
	I can imagine it being very meditative because you're sat there concentrating on something.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Everything sort of slips away from your mind.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, that's totally true.
	And then, but the things you're also creating something beautiful out of it, you know, you've got something to show for your effort.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The creation of beauty that, um, is genuinely, uh, Uplifting.
	Yeah.
	Rewarding.
	Nourishing.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's nourishing and it's, it's my wife doesn't understand why I just want to eradicate.
	It's like nine o'clock.
	I can just go sit in my office and chill out, put some music on and just paint this thing.
	And it's like, no, no, it's totally Zen.
	You know, I don't know how to describe it, but, um, I know exactly what you mean though.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	It's, it's, it's very wholesome.
	Anyway.
	Uh, thanks for joining us folks.
	Um, we will be back tomorrow.

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