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May 6, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:29:19

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #908

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	Hello, and welcome to the podcast, The Lotus Eaters.
	Today I'm joined by Carl, Hello.
	And Josh.
	Hello there.
	And we'll be talking about today, the March to Zero Seats Continues, Dismantling the Slavery Narrative, and the Helldivers Revolt.
	So, gonna be good.
	I suppose I have no announcements.
	So let's begin.
	Okay.
	Well, I actually do have an announcement quickly before we begin.
	If you're interested in becoming a production manager for us, go to the website, check out our career section and see if you fit the bill because we're hiring.
	Anyway, let's begin.
	Uh, there is no right wing opposition in Britain.
	Doesn't exist.
	For some reason, the British public just won't vote for it.
	They won't vote for the Conservatives either.
	And so everything is... We're going to turn into basically a Labour ethnostate by the end of this, which is not great.
	It's not good news, everyone.
	Yeah, this is not good news.
	Sorry.
	Happy Monday.
	So I guess we'll begin with the local elections.
	Oh, no, we will begin with the local elections.
	So to begin, there were 107 English council elections held with more than 2,000 seats being contested last week, 58 district councils and 11 mayoralities.
	Well, sorry, 12, including the London mayor.
	And so this is quite large, but it's not The entire country, it's a significant portion and is good as a kind of indicator of what future elections might look like.
	And excuse me, good for giving us a kind of weather vane on the mood of the country.
	These elections are cyclical.
	So the district councils typically elect a third of their seats on a four yearly cycle and it's not every year.
	It's not every single one in this cycle.
	So as you can see, it's kind of, you know, it's a portion of them.
	And there's been a kind of air of inevitability about all of this, but very little exuberance in victory for the people who were inevitably going to win, which is of course the Labour Party, because the Conservative vote is just completely collapsing.
	And since the Conservative vote is completely collapsing, you might think that some plucky, turquoise, Brexiteer party might be making massive gains right now.
	I mean, you would just think, okay, we're going to have on the ground, nonstop, our pro-Brexit, pro-British, anti-Tony Blair, dare I even say?
	Activists are going to go door to door and go, hey guys, we're going to fix all this.
	We're going to fix all this.
	You just vote for us.
	We're going to fix all this.
	Look at those conservatives have let us all down.
	The Labour Party are a bunch of insane communists.
	We're going to, we're going to sort this out.
	And so reform, we're fielding 323 candidates.
	This is their big chance.
	I mean, out of 2,000 potential seats, it's not that many, of course, but you think, OK, they're going to be tactically placing these candidates, efficient use of resources.
	So we'll find places where the Conservatives held and the Conservative vote is going to be collapsing and fill them out, which I'm sure what they did.
	And so let's go and have a look at the results.
	I mean, you see the BBC here aren't even listing reform at the top.
	But as you can see, Labour got 186 councillors.
	Liberal Democrats, the second place party, got 104 extra councillors.
	So Labour got 1,158.
	Liberal Democrats got 522.
	the second place party you got 104 extra councillors so Labour have got 1 158 Liberal Democrats got 522 the Conservatives lost 474 councillors out of their nearly thousand councillors leaving with 515 so they've lost about half of their councillors and And so why that's particularly important in the light of the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, is they didn't really make that many gains.
	The Labour Party didn't even get half of those council seats, which is interesting.
	So not a massive swing to Labour, not a massive swing to the Lib Dems, a kind of general dissolution of the Conservative vote is what I think we're looking at.
	Independence got 93 of them.
	So we've got 228 just independent councillors just running around.
	The Greens got 74.
	The Residents' Association got 11.
	The Workers' Party of Britain, that's George Galloway's party, got 4.
	Reform got 2.
	George Galloway, twice as good as reform, supposedly alternative to the Conservative Party.
	So I think the story of this election, really, isn't so much that all of these other parties are succeeding, you know, they're sweeping the nation, it's just Tory failure.
	Regular Tory voters just didn't turn up.
	Yeah, and they're not really going elsewhere, because remember, the Labour Party may have gained these councils, but that's not because people are flocking to the Labour Party, it's because the Conservative voters just aren't turning up.
	Complete disillusion with British politics.
	Yes.
	You were saying about those campaigners who were massively pro-Brexit, massively anti-Blairite era, want to reverse anti-woke, etc.
	And my thoughts on this are that we had that, we'd done that multiple times.
	I mean, you and me have been there in UKIP and whatnot when that was basically going on.
	I had a dinner with someone who was quite prominent in the whole thing.
	And I won't say who, because what I might say next might get me in trouble if I said.
	Right.
	Which is that it was their birthday and so we were all sat around and every one of the political people who had been through that era as well and long before, you know, long before we joined UKIP, they were doing their thing, and then go on to other stuff.
	And we all sat around and everyone's opinion at the table was that, to say this legally, electoral politics was no longer worth even engaging with.
	That is their position and the position of the majority of the British public.
	Yes.
	Yes, as we will carry on and look into.
	So, the prominent point, I think, here is that the Conservatives are a party that are rotting from the inside.
	It's not that anyone else is doing particularly well, actually.
	There's a few other zombies lying around.
	Labour Party's a zombie party, Lib Dem's a zombie party.
	Yeah, no, that's absolutely true.
	They're still lurching, obviously, because they've got momentum of the previous steps that they've taken.
	But they're going to fall over eventually.
	So I thought we'd go to... So one thing I couldn't find is an overall turnout for these local elections.
	I guess it's just no one's done the numbers.
	So I thought we'd look at the Swindon results.
	Because Swindon, Labour, increased their majority of control over the council.
	So now they've got some 25% extra seats or something.
	And as you can see, these are really low numbers for the particular areas.
	So for Blundon and Highworth here, As you can see, there were a electorate of 9,000, there were 3,000 ballot papers issued, so a 33% turnout.
	So that particular one, a Conservative Party candidate, Vijay Kumar Manro, was elected with 1,399 votes.
	That's still not too dissimilar.
	I imagine that's actually a higher turnout relative to the average across the UK because normally the local elections are about half of the general election turnout.
	Yeah, the turnout of 33% is about the average for Swindon, which I imagine is not remarkable around the entire country.
	I think the turnout is going to have been about 33%.
	Two thirds of the electorate are just like, I don't care who's in charge because it doesn't affect my life on a daily basis.
	Everything's terrible and it always will be.
	I mean, I forgot to vote, but I was going to spoil my ballot anyway, so.
	As you can see in Swindon Central, the Labour Party, 2,000 votes.
	Turned out 39%.
	Staggering turnout.
	Cunningham and Dawkin.
	The winner, the Conservative Party, Barbara Parry, 1,400 votes, 36%, East Cots, 35%, Gorse Hill, 28%.
	Interestingly, Gorse Hill, not a very wealthy area.
	And we'll get on to the correlation between engagement in democracy and the personal wealth of the people very shortly.
	But as you can see, just 30%!
	Ray Ballman won for the Labour Party there.
	There's only 350... 309 votes in it between them.
	As you see, it's 30% turnout, 31% turnout, 27% turnout.
	them.
	It's, as you see, it's 30% turnout, 31% turnout, 27% turnout, and three quarters of people just didn't bother.
	I mean, what have you got to vote for?
	Not much.
	Old Town voted for the Labour Party as well.
	35% turnout.
	That's the wealthier area.
	Bloody hell.
	Penn Hill, 24.97% turnout.
	I mean, Penn Hill does have a bit of a reputation, doesn't it?
	Yeah, it's a deprived area.
	And no one cared.
	No one bothered, basically.
	29% turnout.
	37% turnout.
	28% turnout.
	As you can see, point proven.
	Most people were just staying at home.
	They're just like, no, this is nonsense.
	And so the legitimacy of anyone elected on these sorts of numbers Very questionable at best.
	Not very impressive.
	Doesn't exactly scream electoral mandate.
	Anyway, let's go to the mayoral results.
	So there were, as I said, 12 mayoral elections.
	Labour swept the board basically on these.
	But I was quite impressed with the Manchester one because, as you can see, the third place candidate there, new, is some Mr Buckley.
	Who actually did really quite well, considering he was an independent candidate with absolutely no backing at all on 7.6%.
	Look who he beat!
	Do you know why?
	Go ahead.
	So Nick Buckley, you may remember, last time we spoke, was a mayoral candidate for Reform.
	And then they got a defector at Reform.
	They got someone defecting from the other parties, kicked Nick out, and shoved the defector as the candidate.
	So Nick decided, screw you guys, I'm going to run anyway.
	And he got more votes than the defector, the plastic candidate for reformer.
	Well, it was a former Conservative.
	It wasn't just any defector.
	And the whole sort of reason, the raison d'etre for reform existing is that it's an alternative to the Conservatives.
	And if you're kicking people out and then replacing them with Conservatives, it doesn't really help you with your voter base, does it?
	Especially when Nick beats you on his own.
	Well done, Nick.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Brilliant job, Nick.
	Honestly, 7.67 is a really good result for a new independent candidate that is... I mean, it's not like reform aren't nationally recognized or anything like that.
	Nearly beating the Conservatives, frankly.
	Getting shockingly close.
	If I were the Conservatives, I'd be panicking, frankly.
	Obviously, Labour held it.
	But generally, it was a good day for Labour.
	They kept winning all of these things.
	What I thought was, one of the mayoral elections I thought was interesting was the Mayor of the West Midlands.
	Now, I'd never even heard of this.
	So I looked it up, the Mayor of West Midlands was created in 2017 by the Conservatives, and so it was held in 2017, I did say that, and it was held by a Conservative Mayor twice in a row, and they narrowly lost West Midlands to Labour.
	Now, this guy, Richard Parker, narrowly beat him.
	Knife-edge, 1,500 votes.
	Very, very, very close election, especially as Andy Street had generated himself a very good reputation.
	You might think, okay, hang on a second.
	West Midlands.
	West Midlands.
	What's in the West Midlands?
	Oh yeah, Birmingham is in the West Midlands.
	Who's been ruling Birmingham like a caliphate for the past decade or so?
	Allah!
	Through the Labour Party.
	Through the Labour Party.
	And how have they done?
	So in the face of Birmingham, the second largest city in England, literally going bankrupt because of the Labour Party.
	It might be the most embarrassing city in all of Europe.
	Quite possibly.
	And possibly the ugliest.
	Yeah, I can't think of one.
	Architecturally, it's genuinely hideous.
	The entire continent.
	Yeah.
	Birmingham is like... Well, I mean, there's more charm in, like, a Venezuelan slum than there is Birmingham.
	Like, Birmingham is just the greatest, most boring city you've ever seen in your life.
	It's just hideous to behold.
	And it's bankrupt.
	So it has the finances of a Venezuelan slum.
	It's been ruled over like a caliphate by the Labour Party.
	And somehow the Tories lost to this.
	And this is where the local councils as well heard, I think the person in charge of the contracts was Pakistani and the person given the contract was Pakistani.
	They're being paid millions and millions to ferry disabled children to and from school.
	In taxis?
	A handful of children and they're being paid millions for it.
	Don't know what taxis, were they limousines?
	They had a bottle of bubbly in the back?
	It's a massive grift and it's obvious that it's a massive grift.
	And the Conservatives could not even win here.
	Do you remember why they exactly went bankrupt?
	What's the thing that finally killed it?
	Um, no.
	It was wokeism.
	Of course.
	So there were bonuses being given to dustbin men, because it's a crap job, nobody wanted to do it.
	And some women who were primary school teachers complained that this was sexism, because dustbin men are mostly men, whereas primary school teachers are mostly women.
	And so they got a bunch of other female professions together and sued the council, and the council had to pay them, the court ruled, which bankrupted the entire city.
	Amazing.
	But it's not like the finances were doing very well anyway up until that point.
	Um, and so just perpetually embarrassing.
	One thing I was really disappointed about is that Birmingham Council wasn't, uh, doing council elections, which was really sad to see, because I really wanted to see the people of Birmingham vote for more Labour councillors, because you know they would have done.
	No, no, no.
	Oh, I see what happened in, what was it, Blackburn?
	Oh, well, Independent Islamic Council.
	Independent candidates!
	Sweat for the entire town and it's like, oh, why?
	And you go look at the footage and everyone's just screaming, Palestine!
	Yeah, yeah.
	But Bo's actually going to cover that tomorrow.
	I'm going to let him deal with the, uh, the independents who were victorious.
	I just wanted to focus on the collapse of the main party.
	It has no place in like general elections, like national elections.
	So to have it at a local election where... It might be more relevant, to be honest.
	Yeah, this small region of Blackburn, we've been elected for Palestine, because of course Palestine, you know, they're notorious for caring about Blackburn.
	Yeah, and it's just, again, it just shows you everything about the demographics of the area.
	But yeah, so the Conservatives, so incompetent, such a collapse, can't impress anyone.
	People would literally rather be bankrupt than vote for a Conservative mayor.
	Amazing.
	When you put it like that.
	So anyway, coming on to London, there were rumours that Susan Hall had won the London mayorality before the results came in, because there was an extra day for some reason.
	What do you mean, rumours?
	Her own PR firm?
	Who believes that?
	I have no idea.
	I didn't post anything about it, but lots of people were posting on the Twitter that, oh my god, rumours coming out from the campaign staff that Susan's won.
	Who the hell's Susan Hall?
	But the problem with the Conservatives, I have no idea who they're running, why I should vote for them, or like anything.
	It is left to the opposition to do the campaigning for them.
	And I forgot to get the links actually, but they were like, Susan Hall said that, I don't know, some anti-immigration thing was good.
	And they're like, shock!
	And it's like, yeah, okay, that's good advertising.
	Yeah.
	I mean, obviously I'd vote for her then.
	She said that Nigel Farage should be treated with respect.
	Yeah.
	Sadiq Khan retweeted that going, how dare she?
	And Nigel Farage retweeted that, going, what the hell are you talking about?
	It's like, Nigel, did you forget you're dealing with Sadiq Khan?
	The guy probably wants to see you dead in a ditch.
	Of course he doesn't think you should be treated with respect.
	And anyway, so she had said vaguely right-wing things, such as perhaps we shouldn't persecute our political opponents.
	And so everyone was getting really excited.
	My God, we think she may have won.
	Yeah, well, I mean, obviously she didn't.
	So Sadiq Khan has now made history.
	There's been three mayoralities in a row.
	Not much to say, apart from the fact he only won on an 11% margin, which is presumably why the staff is inside or whoever was counting votes.
	I was like, "Oh my God, there are actually quite a lot for Susan Hall here.
	Maybe she's won this, blah, blah, blah." Because an 11% margin is not great, but we'll talk about that in a minute.
	The votes that turned out for London was 40%, 40.5% all right, I guess.
	Nothing to write home about though.
	Marginally higher than the average for the average in Swindon and probably the rest of the country, which again, I can't, I haven't got the numbers, but I reckon it's gonna be about 33%.
	And so Keir Starmer was like, oh, not just Keir Starmer, sorry.
	The Times like, well, local election results, there's big wins for Labour.
	And it's like, eh, not really.
	It's far more accurate to say big losses for the Conservatives than anything else, isn't it?
	Yes, absolutely.
	across the lines were there right we're here with one it's far more accurate to say big losses for the conservatives than anything else isn't it yes absolutely uh i mean you know thankfully the regional branch manager of your local lidl turned up that's so accurate i I see it, yeah.
	It's just so true, isn't it?
	Literally, this is the guy who comes down to tell you that profits are up 3% so that you get a day off at Christmas.
	I don't know how to describe it.
	It's just, like, he was like, ah, look at our historic wins in Blackpool, for example.
	The swing towards Labour in Blackpool South is historic.
	Yeah, historically bad for both the Labour and Conservative Party.
	You're losing all of your legitimacy.
	Like, no one thinks that the British public are crying out for, what's the guy from the office?
	David Brent.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Like, literally, a more boring version of David Brent.
	Like, no one's asking for that.
	And so him being like, historic wins, there's no energy to this.
	No energy whatsoever.
	I mean, he's only got 7,000 likes on this tweet.
	He's gonna have millions of followers on Twitter.
	Like, there's just no... Look at that, 1.4 million followers.
	Oh, 7,000.
	Is that it?
	Yeah.
	He only got 300,000... 300,000... 400,000 views.
	Like, there's just no energy in any of this.
	Everyone's just like...
	I guess we're going to have Labour for another five years now.
	Even within the Labour Party in the left, he's not wildly popular, is he?
	Especially amongst the far left, they really hate him, don't they?
	Yeah, because at the last Labour conference he was like, we're going to have a British flag on our thing, and they were like, look at that, BNP.
	Which, unironically, is what they were saying.
	So yeah, The Guardian pointed out that it is the poorest areas that aren't voting, incidentally.
	They did an analysis, well, they didn't, but an analysis by Locality, a membership group for community organisations in England, found 20 wards with the lowest turnout in the last elections have Really, really high score on the government's index of multiple deprivations.
	And of course the 20 highest ten awards were doing quite well.
	And this is something that obviously everyone can see.
	Poor people are checked out of politics because it's not serving them.
	The politicians, every day, are making their lives worse.
	And no matter who they vote for, and they keep consistently voting towards the right, Well, it didn't work and so now they're just not voting and so the rump Labour voters who are just like, we vote Labour because we vote Labour, they're winning the elections because there's just the opposition has cleared the field and reform have failed completely to capitalise on this.
	It's actually kind of embarrassing, I think, how badly reform are doing it.
	The reform should be sweeping this.
	Well they're not.
	The Conservatives really dropped the ball and there was a lot of space for reform to basically pick up the mantle and become the main right-wing alternative and they've just not done it.
	There is no main right-wing alternative anymore, apparently.
	And the thing is as well, turnout in English local elections has not always been this way.
	Since 2015, it hasn't exceeded 40%, but in the decade prior to this, it would regularly go over 40%.
	So it's not that people have always been this checked out.
	It's getting worse.
	And the guy gave us a quote from a lady called Abby, who I guess they were just going out to the high street, literally pushing her baby in a stroller along the high street.
	She says, I know nothing about voting.
	I wouldn't know what to vote for.
	We're trying to move out.
	It's not very nice around here, which is just the story of English politics.
	There's going to be nowhere to move to.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Who do you speak to who doesn't have that opinion at this point?
	I don't know.
	Like, this is the thing, people are like, Swindon sucks.
	Yeah, but what if it doesn't?
	Take the electoral stuff.
	Like, how many times have the British public voted to lower immigration?
	Every time.
	At least since 2010.
	So you've got, what, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019.
	Yeah.
	Brexit referendum.
	Trying to think what else.
	So at least five times.
	Definitely the EU referendums were swinging very right.
	So that's at least five times you voted for something, and every single time it's just not happened.
	No, it's got worse.
	It's not that it's not happened, it's got worse.
	Exactly.
	So why would you believe in voting?
	I just realised I misspoke, I meant the EU elections leading up to us voting to leave.
	That's another one, the 2019 EU elections you're thinking of, yeah.
	So it's just the case of, I can understand why a lot of people are completely checked out and been like, this is like the Soviet Union, I actually can't enact political change via the ballot box, so screw it, I'm just going to do what's best for me, and what's best for most people at this point is leaving.
	There would be no reason to stay, it would be foolish.
	They've got other options.
	Speaking of leaving.
	Speaking of not staying.
	You hear that?
	Sorry, silence.
	Because there's a vast vacuum where the populist right-wing figure of the UK should be speaking.
	Where the hell is Nigel Farage?
	Is he making money?
	That's exactly where.
	Roger Farage is hanging out with Donald Trump in America, talking about the American elections, because that's where actual success might be found.
	He spent the local election week in Florida, in Texas, with Republicans, and he told The Telegraph that US elections are more important than the UK vote.
	Yeah, whoever becomes US President is way more important than who gets into Parliament at this point.
	But also, it's going to be Trump probably, and Nigel Farage is obviously very pally with Trump, and he'll probably make a lot of money campaigning for Trump.
	But also doing this.
	So Nigel Farage has now become a media figure because that's how he makes his money.
	He's making a lot doing it.
	And I can't really blame him.
	No, no, not at all.
	I've got complaints of the guy.
	I'd love him to come and save the country.
	But from his perspective, I mean, again, all those elections and before he did his work, got Brexit passed, ran the EU elections with the Brexit party, blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah.
	And then immigration just got completely worse.
	I mean, you know, he's an old guy.
	I would be checked out as well at this point.
	Yeah, he's 60 years old.
	So he's not, he's old, but he's not that old.
	He's 60.
	What?
	Five years from retirement, but not that old.
	Well... This is what US politics does to people.
	Hasn't retirement age gone up, actually?
	It has.
	It's about 67 now.
	Yeah, so he's not five years from retirement because of what the conservatives have goddamned done to this country.
	I just hate that, though.
	It's like, yeah, he's a politician.
	Don't worry, he's only 60.
	60 is not that old.
	He's not insensible.
	He's still in full command of his faculties.
	He can't have a 30-year-old politician, ever.
	No, well, we can, we just don't, okay?
	Nigel Farage is the one who's built up the political capital of being Nigel Farage.
	He's had his victories.
	And yeah, I mean, you can't really blame him for blowing up.
	Look, I'm going to have a nice retirement, quote unquote, in American politics, where they're going to pay me a lot of money to be the British guy who got Mr Brexit, who supports Donald Trump, and who's going to get lots of adulation, have lots of fun in Florida or whatever, right?
	You can't blame him at all.
	That's where all old people go to retire.
	But that does mean that in Britain, there's just this tremendous vacuum where nothing on the right is happening.
	There's just no one here.
	There's not a single decent populist figure at all in politics.
	And the British public are just like, well, okay, I guess we'll just sit here and just get pummeled to death by the Labour Party then.
	And That's British politics.
	That's where we are after the elections.
	Like I said, tomorrow, Beau is going to go through the ascendant force in British politics, because it sure as hell isn't the English.
	Yeah, inshallah.
	We'll leave it there.
	Okay, so I am going to be talking about slavery today.
	That sounds bad.
	I'm not doing it.
	I'm talking about ending it.
	But first, this is a terrible segue, if you want to come and work for us...
	We're looking for a production manager and I've been given something to read here.
	It says we are looking for people with skills in videography, audio and editing.
	Available to work in London or Swindon if you're interested in the full job specification.
	Here it is on our website.
	LotusEaters.com slash career production manager.
	Just in case Josh hasn't made this clear, this is a paid position.
	It is, yes.
	That's not my best shill.
	But yes, we will pay you.
	But anyway, we've spoken about slavery before.
	I think I've even covered this before.
	This was back in August of 2023, when a UN judge estimated we owed £18 trillion as a slavery debt, and he said that that's an underestimation.
	It's worth saying that this is eight times our GDP, and absolutely insane.
	Yeah, I was going to say, no, make it £100 trillion, mate, because we haven't got anywhere near that amount of money.
	Yeah, he did go to the Dr. Evil school of coming up with monetary figures there, didn't he?
	It's ridiculous.
	And of course, no one should take this seriously.
	And yes, we shouldn't pay for the sins of our ancestors, not that many of us are descendants of slave owners anyway.
	I was just going to take a guess.
	Go ahead.
	I wonder where this figure comes from because I'm pretty sure I've heard this crap before and I'm pretty sure this crap comes from an Indian nationalist.
	She's a historian and she basically just argued Britain stole this many trillion from India and then AA did a video going through trying to find out how she even got to that number because the number doesn't make any sense.
	So how would you even get to that?
	And it's just mad on every level.
	She just says, probably about this much stolen, convert this into pounds in 1859, just for some reason, and then times it by four for good measure.
	I mean, we are dealing with people who aren't serious on every possible level.
	They don't even care to make their nonsense make sense.
	This feeds into my theory that most of politics is just resource extraction, and that people like to put a bow on it and say that, yeah, well, I've got a just claim to this, but a lot of the psychological research into people's motivations for engaging in politics is just, I want to take money from other people.
	That's what it is.
	People are self-interested.
	Surprise, surprise.
	It does sum up politics for the last 3,000 years, yeah.
	It does, and there are also things like this.
	Slavery stole Africa's ideas as well as their bodies.
	Reparations should reflect this.
	This is from UCL, quite a prominent university in the UK.
	Slavery stole their ideas?
	Yes, it's worth mentioning as well.
	There is research out there.
	Well, they had the wheel!
	Wheeled transport in pre-colonial Africa.
	They didn't have the wheel, actually.
	I stole the idea of walking from them!
	Whilst we had, you know, the steam engine, you know, West Africa had not adopted the use of the wheel.
	Which ideas did we steal?
	Yeah, good question.
	Was it braided hair?
	You seem to copial about this on YouTube.
	What's that?
	There's a video that went viral a while back.
	It's got like 2 million views or something, where it's just some historian being like, look, they didn't need the wheel.
	They had their heads to carry things on.
	I've actually seen that in Swindon as well.
	It's just like, we have roads.
	Even Swindon has roads.
	You don't need to do that anymore.
	But, to save us from this madness, the Institute of Economic Affairs has done a report, I suppose, on the cost of the empire, a cost-benefit analysis of Western colonialism, focusing mainly on Slavery, but also colonialism more generally.
	And they've done some good work here, I think.
	And actually, their reading into the topic sort of matches my own reading.
	So I've privately researched this because I find it interesting, because it sort of melds history and politics together, as well as economics.
	So it's lots of interests sort of intersecting in one.
	But I'm going to be reading mostly from the summary of it because it's quite long.
	But I do encourage people to have a read of it in full, as I have, because it is well written, well researched.
	And to sort of summarize what it's arguing here, it basically argues that slavery and colonialism were bad investments as they did not provide substantial profits despite substantial administrative, martial and shipping costs.
	So it was just bad economically for us.
	It wasn't really a good economic decision.
	And, of course, it is the Institute of Economic Affairs.
	They're not going to be there wagging their fingers saying, oh, well, we're talking about all of this morality stuff.
	No, they're looking at it purely from an economic lens, which is actually quite important because everyone's sort of recourse for slavery and colonialism is we need more money, despite never being enslaved.
	Actually, you owe us money.
	Sorry, you just didn't pick Cod and Faust enough.
	Sorry, we need money too, we haven't got any bloody slavery.
	If slavery was the source of our wealth and we abolished that 150 years ago, 170 years ago or whatever it is, we haven't got any bloody money either.
	Yeah, have they been to a UK high street?
	It's starting to look a lot like the colonies these days, both in demographics and conditions.
	But I'm going to read Some of the summary from here, and it says, before modern container shipping, transport, logistics, telecommunications, technologies, etc.
	Stuff we stole from Africa.
	Yes, of course.
	Made high volumes of trade possible, trade and overseas investment accounted for a much smaller proportion of the British economy than they do today.
	In the 18th and 19th centuries, the great bulk of Britain's economic activity was domestic.
	This doesn't get emphasised enough, but is obviously true.
	Even then, Britain's most important trading partners in the 18th and 19th centuries were not its colonies but other industrialising powers such as Britain's Western European neighbours.
	God, there's a pro-EU argument being made now.
	Well, it's also pretty common sense because why would we be trading with people who don't have the technologies we desire, right?
	People who have yet to adopt money.
	Yeah, or the wheel.
	You know, if we were looking for wheels, we wouldn't be looking in West Africa because they don't have any.
	I was actually doing some research into the slave trade and do you know what the Portuguese originally traded slaves for?
	What was that?
	Initially it was brass bracelets, but then they fell out of fashion and it became cowrie shells.
	Like cowry shells, as in they're putting shells around cows.
	No, as in there's a little mollusk.
	Oh, right.
	That has a pretty shell.
	They were going to the trouble of slavery for knickknacks.
	Bracelets and shells, stuff that you'd see in a tourist shop.
	In some Devon coastal town, yeah.
	Imagine being captured, put up for auction, and then you find out you're only worth ten shells.
	That's what your life is worth.
	That's got to be depressing, hasn't it?
	But it carries on to say, the acquisition, defence and administration of overseas territories required huge upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs.
	This is why, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and other colonial empires had higher levels of military expenditure than their less imperialistic neighbours and consequently a substantially higher tax burden.
	Yeah, before massive wars that would have cost unbelievable amounts of money.
	But it's also just common sense, like if you're an investor and you're living in the 1800s, do you want to try and set up a factory in, oh I don't know, Zimbabwe or in Birmingham?
	Like, just think of the logistical nightmare it must have been at that time, to bring even just the materials to build the factory in Salisbury.
	Yes, because all the things that go into building, like, a 19th century factory, you need, for example, just the bricks to build the thing, then all of the complex machinery, you need the expertise, the labour costs, presumably, that's without slavery.
	Where are you going to find the customers?
	Well, not in Zimbabwe.
	You're going to then have to send them back to South Africa to be exported globally.
	It's just needlessly expensive, yeah.
	It's actual madness that people think, oh God, they made money.
	I mean, what money was there to steal?
	Resources?
	They took all of our cowry shells!
	Yeah, they're shell-less now.
	The economic benefits of empire are often overstated.
	Empires boost trade between their constituent parts, but they are far from the only determinants of trade volume.
	At least some of the trade between Britain and India, for example, would have occurred anyway, even if India had never been colonised, or even if it had been colonised by some other European power.
	The cost-benefit analysis for other European colonial empires is similar.
	The only major counter-example, i.e.
	colony that was most certainly profitable for the coloniser, is the Belgian Congo.
	But this is also a highly unusual example.
	A colony that was run like a private for-profit company.
	I don't know what private for-profit companies cut off the hands of their workers.
	Welcome to Hands Incorporated!
	The handy hands of... Pretty much anyone who wants to know what it's like, go read Heart of Darkness.
	I'd love to make a Los Pollos Hermanos, you know, employee training video, but it's the Belgian Congo.
	I mean, that would be very dark.
	It says, with the Belgian Parliament stubbornly refusing to subsidise, it was also a region that was exceptionally rich in sought-after natural resources.
	Rubber, mainly, I think.
	And it says the transatlantic slave trade was no more important for the British economy than brewing or sheep farming, which is quite the condemnation here.
	But we do not usually hear the claim that brewing financed the Industrial Revolution or sheep farming financed the Industrial Revolution, which is true.
	I don't know why, but I'm getting Liz Trusses, we make more cheese than France, echoing in the back of my head for some reason.
	Yes, cheese was the thing that financed the Industrial Revolution.
	More than slavery.
	But it carries on for a little while and these two parts are the key parts I think.
	The best predictor of how rich or poor a country is today are economic policy and governance indicators such as economic freedom index and the ease of doing business index.
	This tells us a lot more than whether or not a country was involved in the slave trade, how many colonies it once possessed or how long it held on to them.
	It's worth mentioning as well that Germany didn't really engage in much colonialism but it industrialized pretty soon after Britain did.
	Well it did try to engage Compared to Britain, nothing.
	Well, yeah, okay.
	I mean, they did have Germany, East Africa, and various other bits, but we beat them and took it.
	It was kind of minuscule compared to Britain, but they industrialized to a similar degree, didn't they?
	I think a better example has got to be Sweden, because they beat themselves up still over, like, the colonial era.
	It's like, you weren't involved at all, but you just weren't there.
	And how did you make your money?
	Well, the same way everyone else did, just industrializing.
	It's not complicated.
	I mean, there's a great quote here.
	The economic benefits of empires are often overstated.
	Yeah, because the narrative is Britain was a poor country and got rich by stealing the wealth of India.
	It's like, yeah, but empires are made by rich countries because to have an empire is a very costly and difficult endeavor.
	And so a poor country actually can't manage it because you need a really high tech or well-advanced army to be able to do it.
	And actually sending armies across the world to loot other places is an expensive endeavor on its own.
	There's a reason it was Rome and no one else, right, in the era of the Roman Empire.
	Even then there were lots of other empires 2000 years ago, but they were all big rich states, because of various geographic reasons often.
	But the point is, how did these impoverished Englishmen turn up on your shores and steal everything?
	What the hell are you talking about?
	Why wouldn't you have had an army that you marched out?
	And the answer is they did have an army and we just beat them because we had an army as well.
	Because actually it wasn't just all the money is piled in India or Africa and there's zero money in Europe.
	It's just not how it worked.
	There's also the fact that many of the domestic groups would side with the British against their enemies and then we would create a nation out of the conquered and the people who sided with us.
	We didn't necessarily fight everyone.
	Some people chose to side with us.
	In fact, when you look at the number of men the British are sending around the world, it's like, yeah, we've got 2,500 men invading Afghanistan.
	It's not very many, is it?
	It's tiny!
	The population of India, when we colonised it, was still much, much greater than that of Britain.
	The only way you can rationalise that is either our soldiers were exceptionally good, which they were... Well, we had guns.
	We had guns, yes.
	For a long time, they had guns.
	Yeah, I mean, they could have still beaten us if they really wanted to, I think.
	It was definitely possible that we would have lost, yes.
	Absolutely.
	But another thing, this book has been drawn to my attention before.
	This is useful because it estimated that at the height of the slave trade, it only accounted for 0.5% of our GDP.
	Which is basically nothing.
	I think that's smaller than fisheries in the modern era?
	It is, yeah.
	So yes, the comparison from the previous report kind of makes sense that they're comparing it to brewing or rearing sheep, that it just wasn't that significant to us.
	Man, there's something sad about this though, isn't there?
	You've got entire industries at this point who get up all day and all day every day talk about the British enslavers, the British enslavers, right?
	And essentially the British opinion is, I don't think about you at all.
	We're worth less than sheep.
	Your work just wasn't productive.
	0.5% of the economy is like, okay.
	Yeah, it's sort of laughable, isn't it?
	I almost feel a little bit bad.
	I almost want it to be more significant.
	Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
	It's like, oh, actually, that was a really unimportant part.
	And that's why we could end the slave trade worldwide without becoming bankrupt.
	And I want to draw attention as well to the fact that the way in which people talk about the slave trade is kind of a bit misguided.
	And I know you're both... My favourite African king, yeah.
	Yes, this is the King of Dahomey, which I find funny that it's called Dahomey, but that's modern day Benin.
	And he said, the slave trade is the ruling principle of my people.
	It is the source and glory of their wealth.
	The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.
	And that's because, he's saying this because most of the land in Africa was not used for agriculture.
	To any significant degree, and there weren't really any major efforts to extract the resources, which are rich in Africa.
	Do you know why he's saying that?
	Because his entire kingdom was built on slavery.
	Yeah, but the reason he's saying that is because the British... Because we were trying to end it, yeah.
	Yeah, we've come to him and said, look, the King of England has said, no more slavery.
	And he's like, but that's all we do to make money.
	And they were then forced to do plantation farming, and the economy crated.
	But the success of kings, like the King of Dahomey over here, sort of depended upon how many people they rule over, more so than anything else.
	It wasn't the land, like in Europe, you know, more land equals more good.
	Well, it's the same principle for any empire.
	To a certain extent, but you know, ruling over somewhere like India might be different than all of Europe, say.
	You could have the same amount of land in India with far more people than you would in Europe, but it depends how productive economically the land is.
	So the main spoils of African wars, particularly in West Africa, were that of slaves and people.
	This was why there was a slave trade in Africa prior to the Europeans turning up.
	It wasn't that we just turned up and were throwing nets on people.
	That wasn't what happened and I think actually we have things like roots to blame for this.
	I'm just going to play a short clip from this because of course this was wildly popular and you have a bunch of people running after just a lone man out in the bush.
	Who's this other Africans?
	You see other Africans capturing them, but then you see, where is it?
	Oh, you've got all of this dramatic stuff.
	I mean, don't get me wrong.
	And then, there he is, there's the white man.
	I think there's a good scene here where he sort of comes out of the bushes after he's been captured, smiling.
	Here he is.
	There we go.
	They're just going around capturing lone people wondering about.
	That's not how it works.
	So what happened is you had a bunch of slave trading kingdoms in what is called the Bight of Benin, which is the curve on the inside of Africa there.
	And Dahomey's one, and then you've got Benin, and then you've got another called Wayar, I think it was called.
	But you've got a bunch of them.
	They've got big slave trading markets.
	And what they would do is just go on military expeditions into the interior of Africa.
	And capture as many, they'd attack whole tribes with armies, capture as many people as possible, come back and then sell them in the markets for cowrie shells.
	Yeah, well it would be the coastal regions going inland, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	The slave trading kingdoms are on the coast and they go into the interior to capture primitive tribes and some slavery.
	But you hear about the damage that the transatlantic slave trade did to Africa in things like this.
	The abduction, abuse and enslavement of Africans by Europeans for nearly five centuries dramatically altered the global landscape and created a legacy of suffering and bigotry that can still be seen today.
	Stop there, stop there.
	Wrong, wrong on the premise.
	Enslavement of Africans by Europeans.
	No, enslavement of Africans by Africans, then sold to Europeans.
	Yeah, the Portuguese didn't invent the slave trade, they discovered a slave trade.
	They've been operating for thousands of years.
	All of the European countries that engaged in the slave trade didn't exist when, you know, the advent of slavery, which is probably as old as mankind itself, right?
	But in particular, the African slave trade definitely existed long before the Europeans turned up.
	Absolutely.
	So it's just this ridiculous notion that if an African enslaves another African and then sells him off, that means Africa has now been wronged.
	Well, no, that guy's now super rich because he sold someone into slavery and he's now what Africa is.
	Sure.
	But but the thing is, there is an argument that, OK, well, the slave trade did damage Africa.
	Yeah, sure.
	Well, many Africans were engaged in it.
	Even Britannica here has been doing some debunking.
	I'm trying to find... I'm not sure if you can search on this page, John, for 45,000 a year.
	That's roughly where I'm going to be reading from, but it says the slave trade was at its height during the 18th century.
	The export of slaves was averaging 45,000 a year.
	Here we go.
	This loss would have been equal to the assumed natural increase in population, so that the effect may have checked population growth rather than having actually diminished the population.
	And it says, it carries on to say, but these are gross calculations that do not take into account the uneven selection of slaves for export since the American planters and hence the slave traders looked in particular for fit slaves in the prime of life between about 15 to 35 years old.
	It may be argued that robbing Western African people, particularly of this group, Would have been particularly significant in reducing birth rates and thereby reducing the capacity of the population to maintain its numbers.
	But on the other hand, however, the planters preferred their slaves to be male and only about a third of those exported were women.
	Thus, since Western African men who could afford it were polygamous, the birth rate may have been less affected than might have been expected.
	There is also evidence to suggest that the fitter or more intelligent slaves were often kept at home and the lesser individuals were in many ways prepared to deceive the European buyers as to their age or condition.
	That implies there that they actually preferred to be enslaved by the Europeans.
	And this is actually...
	Okay, well, I don't think that anyone prefers to be a slave, right?
	If the choice was between being a slave in Africa and being a slave by Europeans, they wanted to deceive the Europeans because they didn't want to stay with the Africans.
	Sometimes.
	There was also this weird rumour that went around that the Europeans would eat them.
	I've heard about this before.
	Yes, Africans have never engaged in cannibalism, ever.
	They still do not.
	Where did they get the idea from?
	In the 90s, actually, the British actually sat down and interviewed a bunch of these slaves, like, why do you think we're going to eat you?
	And the answer is, of course, well, because that African tribe over there was going to eat me.
	And so why wouldn't I think that you're going to eat me?
	It's like, right, good point, to be fair.
	I mean, you know, OK, well, if it's entirely possible you'll get eaten by some people, then some other people have come along.
	Well, maybe I'm going to be eaten by them.
	So it's a very complex thing, basically.
	But one final thing to mention that Britannica mentions as well is that about half of these slaves were unfortunates in their own societies, criminals, mentally and physically handicapped, debtors who had been sold for debt or pledged as security for a debt.
	Those who had offended men of power or influence or simply those who had in some way become outcasts from the family and community.
	And so these are people who had already been, you know, seen by their local community as in some way less than your average person there.
	Sure.
	And it's still, you know, I obviously don't agree with the moral aspect of slavery, right?
	It's also just not the best slave stock from a slaver perspective here.
	I mean, because if you want slaves, I mean, you don't want the criminal slaves.
	You'd rather have, like, honest slaves.
	You're suggesting our slavers were being ripped off?
	I think they were.
	We want reparations for our ripped off slavers.
	Every stakeholder needs their interests to be taken into account.
	That's all I'm saying.
	Thanks, Klaus.
	Stakeholder slavery over here.
	Yeah.
	It's also worth mentioning as well that we paid off the debt from abolishing slavery in 2015.
	We've talked about this a lot.
	That's right, my taxes helped end slavery.
	Yes, so the British people have sort of paid their lot, and you always hear the thing of, well, you didn't pay the freed slaves, did you?
	But also, you know, if we did that as well as paying off the slavers, it would have bankrupted the country, probably.
	Why can't Nigeria pay the freed slaves?
	They're the ones who captured them.
	But also, if we do the economic argument, the slaves actually owed us money by the end of it.
	That is true, yes.
	But also, the people who complain about this don't talk about modern slavery.
	And there are more slaves now than there have ever been in human history.
	50 million people, according to this website, the International Organization for Migration, ironically enough.
	Yes, no one ever talks about this.
	Nobody ever talks about the fact there are open slave markets in Libya.
	No one's trying to stop them.
	In fact, people are encouraging the flow of people because we are accepting the migrants that are going from Africa, across North Africa, to Europe.
	I can't believe encouraging people traffickers ended in this.
	And the thing I wanted to end on is that there are people in Africa right now treating Africans like slaves, and I don't want to play this because it's a bit brutal.
	I'm trying to pause it, but basically a Chinese employer in Africa is whipping his African workers with a belt, which is not what I thought Belt and Road meant, but This is all going on today.
	People don't care about it.
	Viewers are discussing how the Chinese are far more racist than the white man in Africa.
	Huh.
	No wonder that, isn't it?
	Yes, it turns out that it's all just a grift.
	There's not really the historical backing to suggest that we really owe anything.
	They had been enslaved already.
	It wasn't a significant part of our economy.
	Alrighty.
	Let's move on.
	I have good news, boys.
	Finally.
	There's been a revolt.
	eight times our GDP today is owed, is madness.
	And that all the people that are saying these sorts of things just want your money.
	That's what it's all about.
	They want to take your money.
	It's not like we didn't spend enough ending it anyway.
	Exactly.
	We've paid our debt and then some.
	Alrighty.
	Let's move on.
	I have good news, boys.
	Finally, there's been a revolt.
	The Helldivers, they've risen up.
	I've been part of it.
	Yeah, it's been good fun.
	Democracy has prevailed here, ironically enough.
	Before I continue, I must promote this.
	This is a production manager job at lotuses.com.
	So if you go to lotuses.com, scroll down to careers, there is a job there where you can go and read about it.
	And if it's for you, apply.
	If don't, don't.
	Anyway, we shall move on.
	Because some people may have noticed that over the weekend, this chart floated around a bit, and it's Steam reviews.
	And as you can see, for quite a while, Helldivers 2 was getting some nice, good, positive reviews, who now look rather tiny by comparison to that big, long, three-stretch of That is significant, isn't it?
	That's literally 100,000 negative reviews.
	Yeah.
	So yeah, something happened, and all of a sudden... More than.
	Something happened in the last weekend.
	Some people did something?
	The entire community, plus some, decided to all move their reviews to negative.
	Hundreds of thousands of them, which... What could have happened to provoke this?
	Well, it turns out it was this.
	So Helldivers 2 decided that you had to make a PlayStation Network account if you wanted to continue playing the game beyond, I think, May 8th or something like that.
	And PC gamers took this news well.
	Yeah, well, I'm a PC gamer.
	I don't have a console.
	I've never owned a PlayStation.
	And I don't want a PlayStation account.
	So the reason that PlayStation are involved in this is they're the publisher for the game, and they insisted, apparently, that this be part of the game.
	And it was at launch, and they crashed the entire server, so then they got rid of it, because you were breaking the launch and ruining the opening few weeks.
	So they've just let everyone play it, and it's fine.
	And then as part of the contract, this was meant to be the circumstance, and now they're trying to bring it back.
	And as you can see, this is not just kind of crappy, and we'll get into how kind of crappy it is for those of us who can make a PlayStation Network account, but don't want to.
	It's these people as well, in any of these countries.
	They're just buggered.
	Too bad.
	If you bought the game, you now own a brick.
	You do not own a video game because you won't be able to play it.
	What does Sony have against the people of Palestine there?
	Are they taking a side?
	Gibraltar's on the list, the Faroe Islands.
	Weirdly, Japan's on the list.
	So Japan's a unique circumstance.
	So Helldivers 2 has a Japanese-only version, not a global version.
	So those people, that's why they're separate.
	Every other country on that list would have just been banned.
	For example, I can understand why they didn't bother with Papua New Guinea.
	I don't know, there's one guy.
	Pakistan?
	But it seems like they are taking a stance here, doesn't it?
	Yeah.
	Not the Northern Mariana Islands.
	You know, the People's Republic of Korea.
	No, South Sudan, no.
	But there are some decent ones in there, which, you know, will have some players, if not one.
	I mean, North Korea will have presumably one.
	Kim Jong-un, yeah.
	Then you've got places like even the outside territory.
	So you've got United States minor outlying islands, you've got... Svalbard.
	Island of Man?
	That's why!
	Parts of our kingdom that you're cutting off, never mind the Falklands, etc.
	You've also got Falklands and the Isle of Man.
	British Indian Ocean Territory as well, so if you're in the sea, you can't play.
	But literally all of Africa's on this.
	Pretty much.
	So it's just like, no, if you're in Gambia or... Serbia just gets kicked off.
	Is Sony saying this out of... They want to preserve the quality of good players.
	They want people with the best internet connections.
	Libya.
	No, you're gone.
	North Macedonia.
	The Maldives!
	Are they going to be underwater anyway?
	That's a holiday destination!
	I think Russia might also be on the list, but I can't remember.
	Montserrat!
	Nigeria!
	Point being that... These are not small countries!
	Yeah, Sony doesn't offer their services in much of the world, so these people also wouldn't... But holy C!
	Well, one player.
	He's not allowed to play Helldivers?
	No.
	So the people in these territories who had brought the game, because they were allowed to and could play the game, were just going to be screwed.
	Life over.
	Pope's just sat there disappointed at his desk.
	I need a VPN!
	Those people were upset.
	I mean, also, yeah, if you move to any of these countries, you're buggered.
	Because it's an always online game.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You just won't be able to log in.
	You'll just be screwed.
	I was like, great, thanks.
	Wonderful for that.
	And, well, there's some more stuff.
	I mean, it was kind of nice that the game itself, people who haven't played it, it's a very team-based game, and fosters a sense... That's all it is.
	Fosters a sense of unity, that we should all work together as players of the game for something greater.
	To defeat the automatons and the bugs.
	Which then turned out to be Sony Interactive.
	And we all came together to put negative reviews, at least, at stage one.
	We happen to have trained our player base to be highly cooperative.
	And fight anything which harms their interests.
	So, they also decided to do this.
	Now this guy, Pirate Software, big fan of his work, but we'll get back to him later.
	He noticed that they had a frequently asked question section on Sony about games, and it used to say, signing into the PlayStation Network is optional when playing a PlayStation game on PC.
	That makes sense.
	Just as a quick thing, that makes perfect sense.
	Yeah, and then overnight they changed it saying some games may require you to sign.
	So this is the other part, which is this is obviously a new thing.
	This is just something Sony wants to force on players.
	And the thing about PC players, I saw someone put this on Twitter, it's so true, the console players are more broad, casual, normie.
	PC players, they're not really players.
	They're more like independent contractors.
	If they don't like your contract, they'll just give up.
	They just won't provide you service anymore.
	And that's what players are in a game that ultimately relies on there being a large player base.
	Because playing Helldivers 2 on your own sucks dick.
	You play it with three other people, it's pretty damn good.
	And you need that player base.
	So if those people decide they're going to quit, you don't actually have a game to offer anymore.
	But also, there's a distinct difference in mindset between PC gamers and console gamers.
	Console gamers, you get, like, you know, historically, you've got the disc.
	I'm sure you just download stuff now.
	But it was very much, okay, this is a compact, discrete thing that is on its own, and that's what you get, and you bought it, and you know what you're gonna get, so you play FIFA or whatever with your mates and drink some beers, right?
	But PC gamers have always had access to everything.
	Like, we've got, you know, the PC.
	So we can deconstruct it, we can mod it, we can change it exactly how we want.
	And this has always been a long-running part of the thing.
	And they're less stupid as a result.
	For example... It's not that they're less stupid, they're just more technologically plugged in because that's the kind of... Well, there's also a higher monetary investment in the actual hardware itself.
	But being more technologically plugged in means you're not so gullible to nonsense.
	That's why they're less stupid.
	For example, do you remember when Xbox 360 came out and they insisted that you must pay every month to be able to play video games online?
	Oh, the Xbox Live paying thing is the dumbest thing ever.
	I used to hate it.
	That's why, part of the reason I went to getting a PC.
	Well, I did have a PS3 as well, yeah.
	But then, obviously, Sony fell to that rock-bottom position as well and did the same.
	You don't have to pay money, obviously, because they're, you know, spending all that money on keeping the servers up.
	They'll spend anything on the bloody servers.
	They're just pocketing cash.
	Oh, it's owned by Microsoft, isn't it?
	And they're not exactly hard up on money.
	They're one of the biggest companies in the world.
	But that's what the whole thing was about.
	It was a lie.
	And obviously most casual people would be like, oh, you know, they've got to pay for the online service and not think about it.
	But obviously PC players are just like, I'm not stupid.
	You're not spending this much.
	I'm keeping a server up.
	Don't be dumb.
	If people don't use PCs, know how these things work.
	If you bought 12 months, it used to be like £40.
	It's probably even more now.
	I wouldn't look.
	I would never pay Microsoft any money.
	But the point being, people won't stand for nonsense.
	When you feed them crap, because they're independent contractors in this analogy, they know what they're looking at, and you tell them, oh, you need to sign up to PlayStation Network for... safety?
	They're just going to laugh at you.
	Don't be stupid.
	I mean, Pirate Software, being a guy who used to work for Blizzard, went through all this on his own channel, which is... The reason I use a PC is because I don't want safety.
	If I wanted safety, I'd have a console.
	Like, ignore me.
	You'd do other stuff as well.
	But here's the player counts for this as well.
	Because keep in mind, you know, relatively new game.
	So I'm just going to scroll that out a little bit so we can have a big look.
	Oh.
	So you can see, blew up.
	This is pretty normal.
	You know, new game, slowly pulled down.
	I mean, these numbers are amazing anyway.
	100,000 peak players, but averaged out here.
	That's nuts.
	So they've lost a larger number of their player base?
	No, that's just pretty normal.
	Like new game, it's the new thing.
	People jump on, people jump off.
	But then it finds a place where it hits.
	Sure, but you can see a definite dip there.
	No, that's just people going to sleep.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Just before.
	What are you talking about?
	There we go.
	Yeah, that's nothing to do with us.
	You sure?
	Yeah, because that's April 28th.
	All right.
	So as you can see, that's just the average where it bottoms out.
	About 100,000 people, enough invested that there'll be that number of people playing at any given, you know, after work time.
	That's what that shows.
	But that means that they waited.
	So they took the application for signing into PSN off until they knew they reached basically their audience.
	So none of the casuals.
	And then decided to force this back in.
	So that's what I'm showing this for.
	But the reason people hate it, the PSN thing, is you might just think, okay, that's another stupid bloody account.
	I've got the Ubisoft version of Steam.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I remember it.
	Uplay or whatever.
	Yeah, all of the different launchers are really annoying.
	Rockstar have one as well.
	And I actually bought Red Dead 2 again, just so I didn't have to use the Rockstar launcher, which is kind of silly, but still, it's annoying.
	What?
	So, I mean, you might think that's fine or whatever.
	No, it's not.
	It's really not.
	Because as you can see here, I mean, part of the verification now includes taking a facial scan of yourself.
	What?
	And also issuing a government ID, such as a driving license or passport to Sony, which...
	What?
	Yes, for safety.
	Are you going to be talking about some of the problems with Sony in a bit?
	Not particularly.
	Okay, because there's a very long list of data leaks from Sony.
	Yeah, they've been hacked loads of times.
	Millions and millions of people's data.
	Your face and your ID being attached to their name is terrifying to anyone who knows anything about anything.
	Also North Korea hacked them that one time, which was good fun.
	But you can also see on this graph up here, it's very small, sorry, but you can see some of the areas they're not offering it.
	Some of the areas they're offering it are obviously part of the EU, and some of them are not part of the EU.
	But then there are some countries, like the Baltics, where they're not offering PlayStation Network services, but they're part of the EU.
	So that would actually end up causing some rather large legal trouble, as in you wouldn't be compliant with EU regulation, meaning you're going to get banned from the entire EU unless you comply.
	That would be the problem Sony would run into as well.
	So they're not just pissing off the player base, they're also going to run into international or trading block obligations just with this one small move.
	It's like, okay, yeah, no, this is pretty bad.
	As you can see, there are a lot of people who are just, I love company people, I hate calling them fanboys.
	Yeah, leave the multi-million dollar corporation alone, people.
	Yeah, this person's like, oh my god, what a bunch of Karens whining about this.
	It's like, no, those are very serious issues.
	But why do you care about them?
	It's so weird.
	And this came out, so this is a quote from the CEO saying that he confirmed that this was part of the contract.
	Post Sony were going to publish it, they wanted people to sign in, they did it on launch, it blew the game up, so then they deleted it, and then they were having a lovely time, and then Sony have come back to force it in.
	Yeah.
	And that has been a massive backlash.
	So this, I didn't know about this, but it was evident that this is not something the developers themselves are going to be like, yes, I'd really like this unnecessary and irritating step to take place, please.
	This is obviously going to be something from the publishers and say, look, we just need this to happen now.
	So you might be asking, why?
	Because, I mean, a lot of people were just posting memes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Endlessly being like, why?
	We had a good thing.
	You had to ruin it.
	Do your job!
	Your ego!
	Yeah.
	And, um, well, there wasn't a good one.
	No one could really offer a good reason, and it didn't really make any sense, other than they just, they wanted it.
	Yeah.
	It was like, okay.
	And then what happened is that Steam started offering refunds.
	Which, uh, no matter how long you've been playing the game, No matter where you were playing the game, you were going to get a refund.
	That is a sign of a bad thing happening.
	I assume that that's in regions that aren't on the PSN network.
	So I think they were also applying it to regions that were on the PSN.
	Well, I tried to get a refund last night to see if it would work.
	And they said no.
	Some people have been having no's issued to them.
	Some people have been having yes's issued to them.
	So I think it was the John saying you have to talk to a person rather than the automated system, which makes sense.
	But the point being that once Sony realized that people were just going to refund the game en masse and they were going to lose all their money and player base and therefore the entire product, which is wildly profitable, they buckled.
	Good.
	They gave up.
	It worked, boys.
	The revolt actually worked.
	As you can see here, they came out and said, Helldivers fans.
	Hello.
	This is awkward.
	We heard your feedback.
	Well, we were going to require this, but we won't be doing it.
	Not going to do that.
	We're still learning what is best for PC players, and your feedback has been invaluable.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Japanese companies seem to have a big difficulty with learning in the Western PC world.
	Isn't that interesting though?
	They're like, oh, we're not PC players, so we have no idea the kind of shackles we can put on you.
	All our console players are perfectly happy to be total sheep.
	Isn't it just, sort of, competition between, you know, consoles and PC, right?
	They're trying to make it more and more annoying to have a PC.
	Well, they're trying to break into the PC market, obviously, and they're trying to apply console principles to it.
	Well, no one can really... I'm sure someone who's better in the industry, like probably Pirate Software, can explain what the official motivational... not official, unofficial motivation was.
	Because the official motivation was about safety.
	Yeah.
	Me?
	Maybe.
	Wait, me?
	Me at best?
	What safety could there be?
	Like, hacking, maybe?
	No, no, no.
	I think I know, but sorry, Karen.
	So these places are still banned.
	So Pirate Software has released saying, well, I'm not changing my review back to positive until you unban these nations.
	Because you've made a tweet, call, that you're going to follow through.
	So who knows?
	Who knows?
	We'll see as things go forward.
	I love that the people in Turkmenistan are like, what, we're not safe now?
	What have we done?
	Tunisia!
	The CEO's trying to make a laugh out of it.
	He said that he's going to turn the negative reviews into a cape for downloadable on the game, so that's one thing.
	That's actually pretty cool.
	Yeah, it's fine.
	I mean, you can tell he didn't really want it.
	Yeah.
	He jokes here he's going to charge a thousand dollars for it, why not?
	But the safety point I don't know.
	Nobody knows, it seems.
	Maybe someone who does know can tell me what the unofficial actual reason for this is.
	Were they trying to force shackles on people?
	I think I can guess.
	Were they trying to get the console market?
	My guess would be that if it is legitimately for safety, if it's sort of chained to a PlayStation Network account, it's going to be easier to ban someone.
	Well, they can't ban someone from Steam.
	Because here's the thing.
	It's harder to ban someone on Steam, I think.
	Steam don't generally de-platform, especially not for political reasons.
	They do it for cheating only.
	So the story usually ends for most people here, and what I wanted to do was go a little bit further, which is to go and see what's going on, because some people have some thoughts.
	Anon has had some thoughts on that basket weaving forum that is 4chan.
	He mentions here how they, you know, made a game for budget chuds, guaranteed it was going to be successful, hire a bunch of questionable janitors for the community.
	Politically engaged janitors, which Grums did a good job of exposing.
	Well, he was asking what's the motive here and it turns out it might be the case that, yeah, the safety aspect is they just wanted to ban people with the wrong opinions.
	Because it seems to be the line that the community managers are taking.
	They're saying this is why they did it.
	So this is one of the community managers saying that they knew this was going to happen from day one.
	I'm actually happy for us to be able to take action against player reports and make the game safer across the board.
	And people are like, what?
	Why?
	So the community managers knew this was going to be the case, and they're justifying it to the community by saying, oh it's to ban players for, well, not being safe.
	What does that mean, exactly?
	You can't be harmed from playing a game.
	Yeah, because you go and check it out.
	Because it could be a cheater, that's a fair argument, but it doesn't seem to be about cheaters.
	No.
	Because here's Gruntz, who's, well, got the information.
	So here's that particular community manager.
	She, her.
	Yeah.
	Trans flag, LGBT flag.
	Okie dokie.
	Also a person of size by the looks of it.
	Definitely a person of size.
	But there's some tweets in here that he's put together, and they'll be very small on screen, so I'll read them instead.
	So, some of the best ones.
	She writes, I also don't like terms like casual and hardcore, because they come with the implication that skill equals passion.
	Those words are something gamers are clinging onto, but they will be rendered meaningless as games become more accessible and inclusive.
	Oh god, god damn it.
	How do these people always end up in the gatekeeping position of community managers?
	How is it possible?
	Another one of hers, this is during BLM, she tweeted out, I'm not talking much because it's not my turn to talk.
	It's time for black people to be heard and for white people to listen.
	She also wrote, Helldivers is pretty woke dog, in response to someone, saying the game was made by a lot of LGBTQ and brown people and black people and women who are not people.
	According to her writing.
	Hello, Islamic world.
	Did you know you're woke?
	Are we?
	You're brown.
	Yes.
	Hello, wokes.
	No, being brown doesn't make them woke.
	Saudi Arabia.
	The game was made by- Pakistan, woke!
	Women, browns, alphabets, and is a satire of jingoism.
	It amuses me that they don't know that Super Earth is bad.
	It doesn't sound bad, it sounds super to me.
	Yeah, it looked quite good in the trailer.
	And he goes on to some other ones here.
	I mean, this is another community mod who's just saying that all gamers are toxic and entitled.
	And then there's another one here that says that the reason they implemented it is to ban people with the wrong opinions.
	Did you not know that Super Earth is bad?
	Why is that?
	Well, you know, it shuts down rebel pirate broadcasts.
	It doesn't allow dissent.
	Much like the community managers!
	Yeah.
	Can we have a side note just to talk about the lore real quick?
	Because before all of this, there's also an interesting conversation going on.
	Because your article about Warhammer hits so perfectly on how to deal with these bollocks.
	So this is some footage of one of the automatons sacrificing itself to save a different one.
	And a lot of people interpreted this as, oh my god, the automatons, they have feelings, emotions, blah blah blah blah blah.
	Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was.
	And there's this strain throughout the Helldivers world of maybe the automatons are people too, and were the bad guys.
	But then you find out, Thomas did the digging on this, the automatons, if you run into their bases, you notice that there's a bunch of humans who have all been smashed up and their heads removed.
	It seems to be the case that they remove the brain, stick them into automatons, so the automatons are actually humans who have been turned into robots for killing.
	And you can hear them sometimes say that they don't want to do this, or shout, I'm sorry, as they charge at you.
	Couldn't get more evil.
	So they're actually not the Tao.
	I mean, and not only that, I mean, if we've established the automatons are actually humans, then suddenly they're the bad guys again.
	Well, they're humans encased in a robot body and have no control, but do have consciousness.
	I also noticed that their weird automaton logo in their basis looks a bit mid-century German.
	I think that's not an accident.
	I don't think it's coincidental, yeah.
	So that's one faction.
	The only other faction are literal bugs that will eat you.
	Yeah.
	And then there's Super Earth, who are a bit miffy on the whole idea of voting.
	Super Earth who are woke.
	Okay.
	Agreed.
	I'm with the bugs.
	Didn't you know SuperEarth are bad from her own woke mouth?
	I agree, just like you!
	We're just talking about Warhammer 40,000.
	You've got to side with the humans.
	Be siding with the Tyranids, the Necrons.
	Don't be silly.
	Sure, but the woke community managers are like, yeah, SuperEarth is woke.
	Also, SuperEarth is bad.
	It's like, yeah, you are woke, you are bad, you are the managerial democracy, you are condemning yourself every single time.
	Wait, before you go off for this, Callum, have you considered that they have glowing red eyes?
	Well, that's what I don't like.
	Yeah, I feel like that's a pretty good signifier that they're evil.
	Exactly.
	That's just a side note about the law.
	But getting back to the community managers, because here's one of them pointing out here, this is the one I mentioned at the end there, admitting that, well, they're bringing this in and people were angry.
	She says, no, no, it's for us to ban people.
	That's the sole reason.
	Yeah.
	He says, so couldn't you ban people before?
	That's a lie.
	She says, we could, but this increases the effectiveness of what we can do.
	Yeah.
	So you can only ban people by going through Steam and saying, Steam, this person is cheating, therefore they need to be banned.
	Because Steam's like, we don't care about safety.
	He called you mean words on Rust, did he?
	I'll call you them too.
	Get off my chat line.
	That's Steam's approach to shit-talking.
	She writes at the end here, there are certain legal requirements we have to follow to ban people, this being it, whereas with now it also being tied to a PSN account, they can ban you from PSN because you said a naughty word or the community manager didn't like you, and you're gone.
	You can't play the game.
	You know, I had the feeling that this was going to come up when I was playing a while ago, and someone with the username womensrightswasamistake popped into the game.
	And this, I've seen lots and lots of screenshots of other people with just, again, they're just comedy right-wing, right-wing usernames that they've changed it on Steam to.
	So when they joined the game, it's like, you know.
	Islam's right about women.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Stuff like that.
	And I get the feeling they may have seen these things too.
	Most likely.
	Because there's some more in here as well.
	So this is one of the other senior managers.
	Which, uh, he, they.
	Yeah, of course.
	Of course.
	And, um, this person, because Grumps has been tweeting about all this, showing off the real reason the community managers- He sexually assaulted many people he worked with.
	Yeah, they've started making up that he's sexually assaulting people.
	Right.
	He's just like, I don't know what's wrong with them.
	They've also banned the use of his name.
	Just grum serial rapist.
	The point being, they're clearly very, very angry, bitter people who come from a certain political persuasion.
	And they say that their justification for why he was brought in is so they could ban people for having the wrong thoughts.
	So who knows?
	But that's their opinion.
	That is the senior community managers of the game we're talking about, not nobody's.
	But literally Steam doesn't ban you for having wrong thoughts.
	Exactly.
	And so the only way they could do it is by tying it to the PSN network, so they have control of that.
	And this is obviously very different to what we spoke about before, like when the game launched.
	They were banning anyone for just talking about anything to do with racism.
	That was just from the Discord as well.
	You could still play the game, you know.
	Yeah, just the Discord.
	But even if you were pro-LGBT blah blah blah, the policy was, just get rid of it.
	No, we're not engaging in politics.
	Which is the correct position.
	It was respectable, at least being consistent.
	But instead, we now have to deal with this, because I'll be honest, I also did notice a trend in awful lot of the community managers, which is men have had enough of dealing with that.
	And that's where I'll end this there, I suppose.
	That's the Helldiver Revolt, which, um, well, it works.
	Good job, lads.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	Hello, loader series and crew.
	This one's for Callum.
	The weekend after Anzac Day we have our Anzac Rifle Shoot where we shoot our old military WW1 and WW2 rifles.
	Here in my collection are some of my favourite British rifles.
	The one on the top is a Vickers Martini Rifle, chambered in .22, made in the 1920s, so it's about 100 years old.
	The rifle below that is a Greener Rifle, that's also a Martini but in 12 gauge shotgun.
	And the rifle below that is a Lee-Anfield Number 1 Mark III set up for prone positional shooting off the shoulder with central iron sights.
	So we shoot at 300 all the way up to 900 yards and ranges in between.
	That's awesome.
	Yeah, this is really cool.
	If you could tell me what the gun laws are in Australia as well, because we get the meme.
	I think it was John Oliver's video on the Daily Show where he said they banned guns in Australia.
	They did a buyback thing.
	Presumably you're still allowed them.
	I just don't know in what capacity.
	Let me know.
	Let's go to the next one.
	You know, I've been thinking a lot about growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s.
	It was a time of skateboarding, mountain biking, monster trucks, and a borderline anarchic sense of personal and cultural liberty.
	God, it was glorious.
	I remember at the time thinking that this must go on forever, because while every successive generation does rebel against what came before, how do you rebel against rebellion and a totalizing liberty?
	Of course, it's clear now that the Galilean antithesis of all that is a totalitarian safety.
	It's also clear now that totalizing liberty was sort of the early warning sign of this post-modernist paradigm.
	If anything goes you're kind of left believing in nothing.
	We seem to be at the end of the epoch of totalizing safety.
	Perhaps we can reinvigorate that spirit in the coming days.
	This is a really interesting point and like one thing that I noticed is that Generation X put a lot of stock in friendship and they really took friendship seriously because I guess they were just like okay I'm out on my own basically in this civilization so you've got to be good friends with people and so like Trustworthiness was really important.
	I never had a good friend betray me.
	I spent loads of my teenage years skateboarding.
	Whenever I was out of school, I would be on a skateboard for hours and hours.
	I'd be throwing myself down sets of stairs and things like that.
	I know people wouldn't guess that looking at me now, but I think it is really important because it...
	It's sort of, it's proving your mettle in a way that is dangerous, that isn't necessarily fighting and getting into trouble, that is going to land you in trouble and not help you in the long term.
	It's a sort of pro-social way of doing it, of bettering yourself.
	Alright, let's go to the next one.
	I've seen centrists comparing use of state power to the one ring for, you know, conservative governments, but I feel that the thing that most applies to this is actually leaning into diversity politics, which a lot of conservative parties have been trying to do, like the Tories, and all it seems to really do is lose them their own base and earn the contempt of the minorities in question.
	At the end of the day, diversity politics is not something meant to be wielded by conservative parties.
	They should be avoided, Al.
	Yes.
	Mm-hmm.
	Nothing to add, just obviously.
	So the whole bear thing, Raiders Reek of Immaturity, and they always act as if firearms aren't a thing.
	A 9mm round is perfectly adequate to stomping a man, but for a bear, entry level is 44 Magnum.
	Which, by the way, you guys should carry with you if you go hunt in bear territory, because if you shoot a deer, the bear will come towards you and try to scare you away from all that.
	And bears start at 6 feet tall, and they go up to about 8 to 9 feet tall, depending on the species.
	And they weigh over 1,000 pounds.
	And yeah, you're not scaring anything away.
	The whole thing isn't really about bears though.
	It's about women are afraid because they're on their own.
	Give them big guns.
	I don't know.
	I mean, I went through the segment and what I saw online was women, as in like normal women, were sensible.
	And then there were just feminists who all are obsessed with the subject of rape, who were just constantly talking about, the bear won't rape me.
	I was like, okay, I think he might.
	No, he won't rape you.
	He'll eat you and rape you and do whatever he wants.
	Getting eaten alive by a bear is pretty horrible.
	Yeah.
	It's pretty bad.
	Have they not seen the Revenant?
	But the point being, the whole point of it is that they're like, yeah, but we don't know what men's bears are predictable.
	That was the constant refrain.
	It's like, okay, yeah, but they're predictably evil, but men might be or might not be.
	It's like, okay, so this whole thing is just a way for you to complain that you don't know what some men are like.
	It's like, okay, well, if you live in a more traditional society, like Did any of the women in the village you grew up in think the men around them were unpredictable?
	No, of course not.
	Of course, exactly.
	Of course not, right?
	But these women have grown up, moved to a city, and now they're surrounded by, like, lots of people they don't know, lots of immigrant men.
	The social rules are all out of whack, and they're just like, okay, well, I'm a bit afraid now.
	It's like, well, this is the feminism that you ended up inheriting.
	Yeah, but it's two levels of delusion.
	It's taking on the feminist delusion of like all men are rapists and then the delusion of I don't know what a bear is.
	But it's not about that.
	It's not about that.
	It's about the women being afraid because frankly they don't have any men who love them around to protect them.
	That's what it is.
	You've got to be ignorant of a bear.
	Yeah, but they're not really choosing the bear.
	Because, I mean, literally, if, like, a bear turned up, they'd turn to you and go, AHH!
	Yeah, that's the point.
	They don't know what a bear is.
	I know that it's not about the bear, right?
	What they're saying, it's about you and how they feel about you.
	They feel that you, and not you personally, but, like, men, they don't trust men because the men around them are basically, like, living in the social contracts, like, not my business, you know?
	I think they're actually using the knowledge of bears being bad as a barb to attack men.
	That was my point.
	I don't think it's all women though.
	It's not even a significant amount of women.
	It's literally just some lunatic feminists who are like, men are rapists and also they do live in cities.
	Yes, the tiny fringe of man-hating feminists who are afraid constantly are just trying to use that to pacify you, essentially, because what they want is for you, they want all men to say, actually, no, we're kind, we'll look after you, so they can feel less lunatic and afraid.
	Yeah, they're just mad.
	Yeah, totally.
	To the next one.
	Callum, very soon you'll be gone.
	This is my last opportunity to sing you a song.
	So I wanna ask a favour before you get on with your life.
	Hey, I need to be stopped.
	Callum, I wanna make love to ya.
	Callum, I just wanna make a sweet love to ya.
	Just once, I wanna make a sweet love to ya.
	Sweet love to ya.
	You're wired.
	I can't refuse that off account.
	Is that you face swapped with Jonathan Ross there?
	I think so, yeah.
	Yes.
	Although, um, I'm sure you could just message Mr. Bean personally if you wish.
	Let's move on.
	It's a lot of effort.
	Reasons why Governor Cox sucks.
	In 30 seconds or less.
	Reason 1.
	He supports the invasion of America.
	Reason 2.
	He supports the message.
	Reason three: he has failed to win against his opponent in the Utah caucus and has gone the signature route instead, which is very lame and Yeah, he sounds sounds terrible All right, let's go next one what governor was he?
	Utah okay It was Helen Joyce in a past podcast that mentioned that Australia was heavily influenced by Jeremy Benfman and its founding Which was a real light bulb moment for me?
	While I strongly disagree with utilitarianism as an ethical system, as a political system, there might just be something there.
	Entirely possible actually.
	has its downsides and that's often when australia makes the news up here in the uk but there is a reason why the english are flocking here in droves maybe a pure utility calculus might just form part of a response to carl's critiques of the liberalism promoted by rousseau and locke entirely possible actually i should go and look into it i don't know i think probably the reason people are leaving on mass is literally just because that homeland's being evaporated a lot Like Palestinians moving to Egypt or something, it's just, okay.
	They're not.
	No, back when Israel was founded.
	Oh, right, right, right.
	Next one.
	Hello, last week Father Calvin, Stelios, and Callum were discussing the bear question, and I wonder if people would answer the question differently if it were expanded upon a bit.
	Because the type of bear absolutely matters.
	Black bears are the kind that can be scared off if you make noise or make yourself look larger, though that doesn't always work either.
	Brown bears and grizzlies, you're basically screwed unless you can find shelter.
	And the same goes for white polar bears.
	The fun part would be when you apply the same scale to humans and find the color to danger ratio I was making a similar joke before we came here.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You know polar bears are actually black?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Are they really?
	Yeah.
	I could make a joke here.
	Alright.
	I'm not going to.
	But the point is, it's not about bears.
	It's not about bears.
	Do the next one.
	This is an interesting place I wanted to show you guys.
	It's a fossil gorge.
	Apparently more than 300 million years ago this place used to be a seabed, so there's a lot of coral fossils here.
	It's a little difficult to distinguish the fossils from the rocks, but it's fun to go looking for them.
	I found one here for you guys.
	It's got a really cool pattern.
	And then there's a little one here as well.
	You can see them in the rocks.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	I'd love to go to a place like that.
	I was saying, only this weekend, I wanted to go down to the charm of coastline, I think it's in Dorset, where you can basically chip away at the slate.
	It is, yeah.
	So I've been there a couple of times before and I found like an ammonite that had been formed in fool's gold and it's like golden.
	That's amazing!
	It's great, yeah.
	I found loads of like squid things, found some petrified wood.
	It's great, you're going out there and finding your own fossils.
	It's fantastic.
	A place like that is cool.
	It has been a while, but I was incredibly busy with work.
	But since it is Greek Orthodox Easter or Pascha, I have to wish everyone Christos...
	Nope.
	The rest of that comment has been cut off.
	But I hope you have a fun Greek Orthodox Easter.
	Yeah.
	As you don't know anything about Greek Orthodox customs.
	There doesn't seem to be a failure on our part either, just to be sure.
	Like, that was the end of the video.
	Alright, let's go to the next one.
	The Editor.
	Please keep your video comments less than 30 seconds or less.
	Yep.
	Good advice.
	Yes.
	Don't touch Willy.
	What?
	Go to the written comments on the spot.
	We've got some super chats in the air and Realist says, not only did it seem the Tory party got shellacked in local elections, it seemed like the biggest winners were Islamist candidates.
	Saw videos of Islamists celebrating results.
	Gaza u Ba'alas.
	Well, like I said, Bo's going to cover that tomorrow because actually two very definitive things have come out of this.
	One, the I don't know how to describe it.
	It's not the British establishment, but the consensus reality of the British political system is, like you said earlier, just zombified.
	They're just zombie parties lurching on with no ideas, and no one cares about them.
	Really out of touch as well, aren't they?
	Yeah, just default alternatives, and then the insurgents of Islamist types taking seats in councils.
	Ben's going to cover that tomorrow, because that's actually just... I mean, that I think is alarming for a lot of normal people.
	Sean says, you think elections bad as polls tighten in Nevada?
	They have passed new law accepting ballots four days after the election.
	Must have a post-it on the envelope.
	Is election day no requirement to keep the envelope?
	I'm sure 2024's presidential elections are going to be nice and safe, aren't they?
	They're going to be- Forcified to hell!
	Sean again says Trudeau appointed 50% of women in their 30s and 40s who have literally destroyed this country.
	Yeah, so you sure you don't want old politicians?
	You know?
	Sorry, what?
	As if old politicians haven't done such mental stuff.
	Hey man!
	As if the current US president is not a man who shits himself.
	They have less stuff for money, at least.
	I agree, I agree.
	Other than Joe, obviously.
	I'm just saying I am a bit bored of the whole, like, we're glad that this politician is only two years away from dementia.
	Yes.
	I've had enough.
	I'm not surprised he's got at least a decade.
	I want all politicians to be falling asleep at the House of Lords.
	If they do nothing, I'm happy.
	Just leave us alone.
	But then there'll be one person in there who's some radical AOC type, and they should just be running rings around these morons, because they have no idea what's going on.
	The kind of people who are still tweeting today.
	Man, the left has gone a bit far, haven't they?
	To be fair, AOC did get whipped into position by Pelosi.
	See, the old matriarchs were just like... Skeletor herself.
	The old men going to stand up to that?
	No.
	Sean also says, so what did the Ottoman Empire's slavery of 700 years do to Europe?
	All by blue pirates.
	1.3 million pirates, 40 million Ottomans.
	Well, exactly.
	But the point is, there's no recounting or writing historical wrongs.
	You can only go into the future.
	And let's go to some of the written comments.
	Stelios casually un-virgining a bottle of olive oil says, Rishi Senak is due to make an important announcement today.
	I have an Insight source that told me a general election is going to happen a lot sooner than we think.
	Oh really?
	TMMT says the MSN is putting a lot of emphasis on the swing to Labour at every opportunity.
	There was no mention of turnout yet.
	That's a point I didn't highlight enough.
	Lots of them are saying, oh look at this Labour victory.
	It's like, yeah, but it's very hollow.
	The energy isn't there.
	Everyone can feel that that's not the case.
	Derek says, since this our democracy is not working out, can we get a refund?
	Asking for a friend.
	Lars says, what England needs is an English independence party.
	Make Parliament English again.
	It'll never happen, to be honest.
	That's why I support Scottish independence.
	Yeah.
	Get a shot of them.
	Yeah, Omar.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	I vote for the SNP.
	You can vote for the SNP, right?
	I don't think so.
	They're not running any candidates in England.
	They've got to be in your constituency.
	Right, yeah, of course.
	But they could run.
	They could run in our constituencies.
	I suppose technically.
	Wouldn't that be a laugh, actually?
	That'd be hilarious.
	Run loads of Sinn Féin and SNP candidates in England.
	Can we just join their parties?
	Yeah, can we?
	Stand-in candidates!
	I'm going to run for Sinn Féin!
	I think my family might murder me if I do that.
	I'm definitely SNP.
	Omar says the Conservatives are losing to none of the above.
	That is true.
	That is totally, totally true.
	So is everyone.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Jordy Salzman says, of course we stole ideas from Africa.
	Without them, we'd never have come up with the idea of enslaving Africans.
	That's actually a great point.
	Is it a great turn of phrase as well?
	They've got us.
	They've got us.
	We didn't steal the wheel, but we did steal slavery.
	Shouldn't Saudi Arabia and Turkey be paying a whole heck of a lot more than England, says the Shadow Band?
	Yes, but they don't care, and so they won't.
	They won't even have this conversation, and for some reason we are.
	Maximum Toast said, I brought a $1,500 gaming PC just to play Helldivers 2.
	This crusade was a big deal to me, so I'm happy the boycott is over and democracy has prevailed.
	Looking forward to killing bugs with you one day, Carl.
	Well, I'm sure we will.
	Grant says, you knew what you were doing, Sony.
	You were just hoping you could get away with it.
	And that's really what it's all about, isn't it?
	They will get away with whatever you allow them to get away with.
	Great job, everyone, by the way.
	The thing is, I was boycotting Helldivers.
	I uninstalled it.
	Yeah, I tried to refund it.
	I tried to refund it.
	I would have just bought it back if it had gone away.
	I can actually play it again now, which is nice.
	Man of Lords has come out, so I've kind of done that Toy Story meme of, I don't want to play with you anymore.
	How is Man of Lords?
	I saw some people playing it.
	I absolutely love it.
	It's great.
	There don't seem to be enough battles in it for me, though.
	They pick up the further through the game you go.
	Right, okay.
	I'll talk to you afterwards because I'm curious.
	Alright, on that note, we're out of time.

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