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May 24, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:32:05
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #922
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*Music* Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eater's episode 922 on the 24th of May 2024.
Struggled for a little moment there, thought I was going to forget.
Didn't.
I'm your host, Harry, joined today by Beau.
Hello.
And also by our special guest, Luca Johnson.
Say hello.
Hello, thank you for having me, Harry.
You're welcome.
What brings you here and where can people find you?
Well, they can find me on my ex on at amybelargument.
It was the name of my now defunct podcast.
I'll probably change that.
But for now, that's where you can find me.
And you can also find some of my published guest contributions, writings for Below Two Seaters on the actual website.
Oh, lovely.
Well, thank you very much for that.
And we recorded an Epochs earlier today.
We did.
Another one.
Yeah.
Can you give any hint on what that's about?
Yeah, it's no secret.
Yeah, we talked all about the career and achievements of Captain James Cook.
Yes.
One of the greatest explorers of all time.
So we went through that, so that will be up.
It won't, probably won't be up for a, I might not have told you this yet.
No you haven't, no.
It won't be up for a couple, a good couple of weeks, maybe two or three weeks even, because I'm in the middle of a mini-series.
Wonderful.
At some point, if you've, if you're a subscriber to LotusLeaders.com, which you should be, you will be able to get that content.
Yes, so today what we're going to be talking about is how you must clean the teeth and how if you don't we're going to press dentists into becoming part of the NHS.
We're going to be talking about our beautiful, lovely, svelte Islander magazine in the second segment and we're going to be finishing it off with some misery, that being the destruction of the British steel industry.
Well, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, we're just going to have a little bit of a look at a few factors surrounding it right now, what it's up against, and yeah, just spitballing some ideas about what can be done.
Yeah, and after this we're also going to be doing Lads Hour at three o'clock.
That's for our premium subscribers as well.
What is it we're talking about?
If you could live at any point in history, where would it be?
Well, I can give a hint right now.
WrestleMania 3.
WrestleMania 3?
Yeah.
WrestleMania 3.
Hogan slams Andre the Giant.
The crowd goes wild.
Also, Ricky Steamboat v. Randy Savage for the Intercontinental title.
Now that's a classic.
Just that and a time loop.
Endlessly.
Well, that might turn into a form of Hellish Torture if you were to do it quite like that.
That must have been before your time.
That's like 1984 or something, isn't it?
Yeah, but I can still know about it, I can watch recordings of it, they captured it on camera.
Was that the one, there was one where Mike Tyson was in, do you remember that?
There's a few, there was Wrestlemania 14 where Tyson was, I think he was the special guest ref for Shawn Michaels v Steve Austin.
I think, if I remember correctly, people in the comments will correct me on this if it's wrong, but I think Mike Tyson's like an honorary member of DX.
Yeah, that was the one.
Is that right?
But then he betrayed Shawn Michaels at the end because he counted the pin 1, 2, 3 and put the, I think it was the Steve Austin 316 t-shirt on Shawn Michaels while he was lying down.
That wasn't supposed to happen as well.
You really know the history of it.
When I'm not paying attention to politics, I much prefer to just watch wrestling documentaries.
It's so much more interesting than politics, let's be perfectly honest.
Should we do a wrestling podcast instead?
I was a macho man around a savage man myself.
I mean he's a classic, one of the greats.
Macho man.
Rest in peace.
Rest in peace.
Yeah, rest in peace.
But that's a little hint as to the kind of conversation you can enjoy in Lads Hour.
We should probably get into the podcast, shouldn't we?
Right.
Yeah, you vill clean ze teeth.
As you know, in Britain right now, there's a bit of a dentist scandal going on, which is we don't have enough.
There's lots of people who want their teeth brushing for them, and the dentists are refusing to do so because they're all working private.
And so we might have to kidnap dentists, put them into vans, and send them to the farthest flung corners of this great nation so that they can brush your teeth for you.
At least, that's what I'm picking up from all the information that I've seen.
Or re-migrate a few hundred thousand people who've got no right to be here in the first A bit of a conservative side, a few hundred thousand, but you know, I respect your restraint there.
That might be something to do with it, but we'll get into it as we go along.
First, I'd like to remind everybody that you are still able to pre-order our lovely Islander magazine through the links that are available on the website.
I've got to say without spoilers, it's doing very well at the moment, and rightfully so, because this is a gorgeous gorgeous piece of print magazine work right here and we're all very very proud of it so everybody who's ordered one already thank you very very much and you can also find the merch on the website as well which i think is doing pretty well as well because i think we've really upped our game with this new brand with this new line of merch because i think it looks great i've stolen one of the shirts myself
we've been modeling on the on the podcast well you know when you've got such beef cakes like us here for it.
Well, you've got to do a little bit of modelling, don't you?
Six foot eight, three hundred and fifty pounds.
The twisted steel and sex appeal that is Larry.
You may be mistaking me for Hulk Hogan there, but okay.
Here you can find the merch store, look at that.
You can get yourself Islander, you can get yourself an Islander mug, you can get yourself some awesome t-shirt designs.
Well worth it.
If you've got a friend, a relative, a loved one, this would make an excellent gift for them, wouldn't you say?
But anyway, so a few months ago, you might remember that Callum and I were talking about this that was going on, which was the famed Bristol Dentist Queue.
Look at that.
Look at that bad boy.
So this was a dentist that had closed and then reopened post-pandemic St. Paul's Dental Practice in inner city Bristol, where there was 1,500 patients waiting to queueing so that they could register.
And this was in about two days and eventually they just said, "No, we can't take any more registries." Because there is an absurd deficit of dentists to patients.
I think some reports I've seen that I'll be going to later from the Daily Mail said there's about 2,700 or more patients per single dentist in the UK.
Which is an absolutely absurd number and, like so many problems in this country, completely avoidable.
completely manufactured, completely unnecessary, unnecessary, and completely solvable.
But we won't be able to solve them, not with our current crop of leaders.
So, according to the British Dental Association, 23,577 dentists carried out NHS work in the 2022 to 23 financial year, the lowest number since 2012.
The BDA says the £3 billion dental budget has remained static for a decade, falling in real terms by more than £1 billion since 2010.
So, of course, the Guardian is trying to push the, oh, it's a funding problem.
Oh, it's like clockwork.
Yeah.
If you just throw money at the problem, it will go away.
Don't worry about where that money might come from.
Or whose pockets it might be going into as well, if we're perfectly honest.
Because I don't trust any segment of government these days to not be as corrupt as the worst South American country.
And it's got to the point where it's embarrassing us in front of the refugees.
The Ukrainians are coming over here and going, so that's why your teeth are like that.
That's why you all look like that.
That's where, you know that Simpsons joke of the great book of British smiles?
This is what explains it at this point.
So guys, you're embarrassing me in front of the migrants.
One woman in her 30s, Bokya, said, uh, told researchers, we don't have a dentist.
It's crazy!
For us, it's like impossible!
In Ukraine, the dentist industry is huge, you know?
Everywhere, and because it's everywhere, you just go and it's like £10, £8, and you can clean it, whiten it like a Hollywood smile.
When you have some more problems with £2,000, you have all new teeth from scratch.
Here we came, can we?
No, no, no, we are full.
Some British families, and bear in mind that Ukrainian refugees who come over here get all of their dental work for free as part of the refugee scheme, but even then they say some British families who have taken Ukrainian refugees have noted that their guests organise dental appointments during their visits home.
So, the Ukrainians who come over here to escape war and get dental work for free decide that actually, I'd rather go back to the war zone.
If a bomb lands on me while I'm getting my teeth done, maybe worth it.
Maybe worth it if I get kidnapped by Russians.
It's better than dealing with the NHS.
And you know what?
They're probably right.
They're probably right.
Going into a war zone is probably better than dealing with the NHS at this point.
But this is fantastic, because as we know in this country, minoritarian points of view just hold more weight, they have more clout than the majority population sort of view of things.
So if we just trust this minority opinion that the dental care is better in Ukraine, then we can just persuade them to all go back to Ukraine.
Maybe, but I have a bad feeling the Ukrainians are not the right shade of minority to allow their opinions to curry that much favour.
I always think it's odd when asylum seekers, in inverted commas, Return home for a holiday or for a wedding or something.
It's really common.
You know, you're here as some sort of acclaiming asylum in some way, refugee status, something or other.
But there's a wedding back in Albania or Macedonia or Nigeria or Pakistan or Bangladesh, whatever it is.
So you pop home for the wedding or whatever it is.
Have a nice two weeks with my son.
You've got what it feels like over here in jolly old Britain.
And then come back just in time to sign on or whatever it might be.
Bit weird.
Bit weird, that.
Well, not in time to sign on to the dentists.
No, because you're going to miss out there quite badly.
And it's to the point where the Mirror is running this article.
First baby born on NHS, having to save to go private because she can't get an NHS dentist.
Anira Thomas' son had to pull out two of his own teeth with pliers.
Now, this is a big sob story.
This is a very big sob story that I've seen in quite a few articles talking about the state of dentistry right now.
Note that she, being born as the first NHS baby, was named after the female version of Nye Bevan's name.
Is that what that is?
Yeah, that's what I knew.
I think his name is... What was his full name?
I only know him as Nye.
Was it Ernest?
No, no.
Definitely a Bevan.
Yeah, yeah.
Nye Bevan was the guy who set up, well, he was the mastermind behind the NHS, so she was named after him.
They're doing a play in the National Theatre right now celebrating him.
Michael Sheen, isn't it?
Yes.
Yeah.
Whenever I go on YouTube, the adverts for that pop up and it looks unbearable.
It looks terrible.
Socialist twaddle propaganda, as you would expect.
I saw that and I thought, because I've seen this around the place, man pulls out his teeth with pliers.
There's a story here that isn't being told in this single sentence because they're making it sound like this man must have had some kind of terrible toothache and was unable to use the NHS and it got so, so bad that he had to, he was forced out of sheer necessity to yank his own teeth out.
Would you agree that that's what it's making it sound like?
What it suggests?
Is that not what happened?
Well, it says here, Nye's son Kevin Thomas, 54, had his life saved by medics at the University Hospital of Wales after suffering a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage in 2005.
He's since had three brain operations for aneurysms, which have left him with lasting health problems.
Inira said he suffers with chronic pain because of the brain hemorrhage and has severe daily headaches.
He was in severe pain with his back two teeth.
I came in and he said I've done it and he showed me a pair of pliers.
He said I've taken my teeth out.
Nye has partial denture but needs a bridge for her healthy teeth.
So they finish off the paragraph like that.
But that story is someone who is not well.
Who has issues with his brain, who has lots of other health conditions, and it seems like in a fit of frenzy, pulled out his own teeth.
And this is, this is the government's fault because they need to just keep throwing more money for the NHS.
Constantly, this endless pit of burning money, we just need to keep throwing more money onto it and maybe that will satisfy the gods of dentistry.
And I agree it's the government's fault, But not for the same reasons that the Mirror would say.
No.
And I agree that, yeah, he shouldn't have been forced to do this, but I feel like it's a bit deceptive, the story that they're telling here.
Pliers as well.
Probably wanted to use a pair of mole grips if you got them.
Well, if you got them.
Yeah, I think of Twelve Monkeys when Bruce Willis pulls his teeth out because he thinks he's being, or is being, watched.
I didn't know that.
Oh yes, yes actually yeah.
Wasn't that because they got frostbite?
ran off fines cut his own fingers off i didn't know that oh yes yes actually yeah yeah wasn't that because they got frostbite he got frostbite in them and he had to wait he had to wait quite a while before they were surgically removed he just couldn't hack it so he went down the shed used the hacksaw bloody hell the ends of a few of his fingers off if that if it takes a certain amount of sheer determination of willpower to be able to do something like that it's Especially if it's out of pure necessity.
Fair play to the guy for doing what needed to be done.
Obviously these are all problems.
The NHS dentist system is pretty terrible.
At the moment, by every metric that we can look at, it's doing very, very poorly.
Even if some of the ways that they're putting it forward are sob stories meant to manipulate you into going, what we need to solve this is more socialism.
What Britain has always lacked is socialism.
What has always solved Britain's problems is socialism.
So if we have more of it, if we just become a fully communist nation, Then all of our problems will be solved, I think.
Works every time.
Yeah.
Centralised command economies always work.
History has shown us this.
They never fail whatsoever.
So if we just do that, then we'll have endless money for endless dentists.
So the government is trying to solve this problem at the moment, weakly, pathetically, in ways that aren't going to work.
So from March 1st 2024 dentists will benefit from extra payments for seeing new NHS payments, participating NHS practices to benefit from payments of up to £50 per new patient treated.
Oh, that'll plug it up, won't it?
Part of the government and NHS's plan to deliver an additional 2.5 million dental appointments.
What they're also trying to do is introduce this thing called a Golden Handshake, where if you're a dentist and you decide to move to an area that doesn't have very many, they'll give you 20 grand for it.
So they're hoping that's going to draw more dentists into areas that are underserved.
But as I said, basically all of this reporting is the NHS system doing what it always does and saying, Gibbs, holding out a little tin can, saying more, more.
I've got a visual interpretation for everybody.
Right here.
So this is the NHS.
He's got the British teeth as well.
He does.
Just off screen is the taxpayer.
Who never asked for any of this.
He's holding out their empty pockets.
Yeah, he's holding his moths.
Going like, I'm already being taxed half to death, mate.
What do you expect me to do?
Inflation has hit pretty hard.
There is another way you could interpret this.
Another way that you could think, what's causing so much of a surplus of patients to dentists?
You're not about to notice, are you?
Ah.
Well... You really shouldn't do that.
If I just scroll down here for a moment, we can find this nice graph.
I found this just on the internet.
I don't know what it means.
I can't understand it.
So around here, around these lines, is when the dental emergency started to happen.
And also when a lot of dentists decided to move over and work in private dentistry as well.
Because I think it's something like only one third of dentists go on to NHS dentistry.
But, I feel like, if I just...
Look at this queue here.
Hmm.
I don't know, guys.
Maybe I'm just seeing things, but it says non-EU massive spike immediately after, well, during the pandemic even.
I guess, you know, I can't figure it out.
We don't know what happened.
All we can really say is that something happened that led to a net migration of 627,000 people from the beginning to the end of last year.
That's a non-sector, what's that got to do with what we're talking about, surely?
You're right, sorry.
That's a little incriminating.
It was slightly less than government analysts predicted, although not less than they were hoping the actual figures would turn out to be.
So it's still abysmal, it's still awful.
I think I saw that Reform were saying that we're going to bring it down to a manageable 500,000 a year if they get into power.
It's so deceptive the way that they phrase it though as well, because it's, we're going to freeze migration or net zero, one in, one out, but it's...
It's playing word games when not addressing the actual issue, which is such an easy issue.
It's an issue that the country is crying out to be resolved.
For our entire lifetimes, this has just been something there in the background that has just been looming.
It's been building and building and building.
It's like a balloon that somebody's blowing more and more air into and it's on the verge of bursting and you're supposed to just ignore it.
I think we should talk about reform and Tyson giving some clarity around the net zero migration policy because before then it was sort of assumed he meant sort of gross zero migration i.e.
just zero people coming in but no it's net so one in one out.
Yeah.
Still 500,000 odd people or something in that ballpark.
Still worse than Blair.
So not addressing the problem in any real way.
Of course, I'm an advocate for re-migration.
Let's make it a negative number.
That's beyond the power, obviously, as far as Tyce Hope Not Hate and Toby Young are concerned.
But still, I stand by it.
But you would.
So, OK, what we really want is at least, at the very least, gross zero migration.
Is that what...
Can we just stop?
Can we just have zero, in real terms, zero?
Well, no, because it turns out that UK dentists are begging for a solution to the problem of serving more patients who may come from who knows what kind of background, is that you need to hire more dentists from overseas.
As always, the problem to not enough socialism is more socialism.
The problems created by too much socialism is more foreign replacement.
We've accidentally allowed the borders to be open.
The only way to fix that is to force them wide open and keep it that way.
Yeah.
Whoopsie, did I do that?
Whoopsie.
Oops, too late now.
That's the government's approach to everything.
The owners, they talk about Bristol.
They talk about the St.
Paul's dental practice, which is what everything was focused on back in February.
And they said they were only able to reopen because of recruiting practitioners from overseas.
There are many dentists like us who want to work for the NHS.
Why not make it easier for them, says Shivani Bhandari and Gauri Pradhan to the Financial Times, in the wake of the incident.
The UK's dental regulator is facing calls from the industry.
Calls from the industry, I'm sure.
To speed up the registration of overseas dentists to practice in the UK at a time when children's dental health is deteriorating and waiting lists for appointments are high.
The Association of Dental Groups said the obstacles to recruiting almost 2,000 dentists who have qualified overseas Not in the UK, they've qualified overseas.
I'm sure India has this exact same quality of standards that we have over here.
Was fueling a recruitment crisis in the NHS at a time of staff shortages.
But there has been some other complaints about this, which is people saying that actually that's a terrible idea.
That's going to make everything worse, because yeah, you may get more people getting served, but the quality of service that they're going to get is going to absolutely plummet.
The Royal College of Surgeons said that, hit out at this proposal, Charlotte Eckhart, Dean of the Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons said, this proposal puts UK patients at significant risk.
It would give the General Dental Council powers to provisionally register dentists who have qualified overseas without passing examinations to prove their competency.
The college said many overseas qualified dentists may be accustomed to different standards from the UK.
Eddie Crouch, chair of the British Dental Association, said in a statement after the proposals were put forward, any risk will hinge on whether a new model will be as rigorous with overseas dentists as it is with UK colleagues, which of course it can't be if the plan is to just get them through the door.
Get them putting people in the dental chair and then getting the drill out, then the whole point of that is that you can't qualify them as well by necessity of making it an expedient service rather than a good service, which is of course all the NHS has turned out to be over the past who knows how many years.
Just get it done, get it done quick, don't get it done well.
And if you remember correctly, I kind of remember how this one goes, if we just start to outsource everything to foreigners who've qualified overseas, which is, well, do you remember this?
happening where uh drukpa put uh kundley drukpa put out this compilation thread of africans tweeting about fraudulently completing their family members medical degrees and this goes on for quite a while there is a lot of it and then they all got really annoyed when steve laws decided that uh hey have you guys noticed this and they all just decided to go oh my god the racists have realized that we're fraudulently filling in people's medical degrees what do you accept
Like, look at this.
I didn't realize African kids were actually out here doing their parents' uni work.
No wonder so many nurses seem mad.
They're not qualified.
People responding, I could tell you all about septic shock.
Nah, I remember my auntie made me do this when I was like 12.
Sis said she wasn't dropping me home until I finished her work.
My name needs to go onto that certificate.
They're just taking it as a joke.
They're treating it with that kind of American black girl sass, almost, where they just go, yeah, yeah, I committed fraud.
Mm-hmm.
We're at the same intellectual level as my grandma told me Cleopatra was black, aren't we?
That's where we're at with this.
Mm-hmm.
Hit the face on that one.
Just at a glance, a moron, right?
Well, let's see what she has to say.
Can she disprove that she's an idiot?
Well, actually, it seems that she isn't quite as much of an idiot as you would think, because she knows that people are fraudulently committing their, like, filling in medical degrees.
So she says, this is true.
This is why I don't care.
I make it clear.
I don't want to be treated by them in hospital.
So she's in maybe a British hospital going like, black nurse, no thank you, I value my life.
Get me the white people, please.
Surely the standards of sort of medical training and dentistry are not lower in places like Senegal or Chad, surely?
We're not just gonna, we're not just assuming that, are we?
I don't know.
They're the same standards in sort of London training hospitals as there are in the Ivory Coast, isn't it?
It's the same, basically.
Perhaps.
Just without the anaesthetic.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just resources.
It's environment and resources.
That's all it is.
So, you know, I've got a bad feeling.
If we do just start to open the floodgates even wider and get overseas people in, I do see this kind of problem being Made even worse, just in dentistry.
But if we're not going with that, what else can we do?
How else can we solve the dentist problem?
Well, we can break out the Wile E. Coyote method of just bringing dental vans out and throwing them across the countryside so that they can just, I don't know, I would assume this would work like the one-child policy in China where you're just walking down the street and someone pulls you into a dental van, gives you invasive surgery, and you get thrown back out again.
You know, sorry, do you have yellow teeth?
Get in here!
And also, there's so many opportunities for exploitation of this, you know?
Hey kids, need your gums checkin'?
Ah, you wanna get in the van?
I'm a qualified dentist!
But even then, that's not going to work.
That's not going to work because it's being scrapped.
Ministers have been accused of abandoning plans to send dentists in vans around the country in an effort to tackle the shortage of dental workers.
I can only imagine they would be going around in capes with little poker masks on.
The vehicles which are kitted out to provide mobile care to rural communities were announced this year as part of a government effort to allow more people to get attention.
A procurement document published by NHS England last month said there was a limited availability of dental vans as well as dentists to run them.
I can only assume that for some reason too many paedophiles were applying.
It adds that the NHS was now exploring non-van solutions to work alongside the vehicle.
Really thinking outside the box?
We could just build dental practices, guys!
I didn't know we could do that!
The British Dental Association said the revelations were a new low for the government, who they claim are failing to tackle the UK's dental crisis.
And yeah, they really are.
So what's the last option, guys?
What's the last option?
We'll do this the hard way.
We will just press gang newly trained dentists into joining the NHS.
Even if, on balance, it's a worse financial and career option for them to do so, we'll just force them to join the NHS.
Newly trained dentists will be prevented from going into private work in a bid to populate dental deserts suffering from a shortage of NHS practitioners.
Taxpayers spend an average of £200,000 to train each dentist, but there is no requirement for graduates to work for the NHS.
This is despite parts of the country having more than 2,700 patients for every NHS dentist.
The new rules would force dentists to deliver NHS care for several years following the completion of their training, Currently, one-third of the 35,000 dentists registered with the General Dental Council in England do no NHS work.
So just force them to do it.
Don't solve any of the other problems that causes all of this in the first place, but just force them to do it.
You know, I can see the logic behind it, and it looks like they're doing it under consultation.
There's going to be eight weeks of consultation, and they'll see whether this is a good idea or not.
They've announced it on the website.
But there is a broader problem.
With this, that is not being addressed, that would mean that you don't have to force newly trained dentists into years of unfulfilling or worse paid work than what they could otherwise be doing, especially the more highly qualified ones.
Obviously the real problem here is mass migration.
Obviously.
But assuming we're going to ignore that, as they see, as the establishment, as our overlords insist they're going to.
I'm going to say a good word for reform, actually.
Oh, right, OK.
Oh, wow.
They did have, or have got, a half-decent policy.
It was because one of their deputy leaders is Dr David Ball.
And who is obviously an actual medical doctor.
And he said, well, one of their policies is that for doctors, but it could apply to dentists as well.
Yeah, the state subsidizes you to be trained as a doctor.
So they'll make the law that you're not allowed to not work for the NHS for a few years after you've graduated.
So that may be the first five years or something.
You sort of, you're obliged legally to work for the NHS.
And then after you've sort of done your time, so to speak, Then you're free to go and do... Now, I suppose it is, if you, you know, in sort of the libertarian framing, it's a curtail on their liberties or whatever, they should be free to do what's ever best for them.
However, again, we're not really going down that route in our civilization anymore, are we?
No.
If you were going to ignore the mass migration thing and take away people's freedoms even more, then...
If you look at it through that lens, maybe you can sort of force dentists and doctors to work for NHS for a few years.
I can see the logic behind it personally and it does seem that the government has probably seen that policy and decided to co-opt it themselves because it seems that this is that same policy.
Yes.
They added their own flair though and put some vans in it this time and thought a bit too ambitious.
Well yeah, you come out of your graduation ceremony and they shove you straight in the van.
I just think it's a real terrible sign of the decline of this country that at least back in the day we were press ganging people to, you know, go and conquer new territories on behalf of the Empire and to do heroic actions.
Now we're such a poor and poorly managed, poorly governed country that we have to press gang dentists.
There is something to be said though.
In addition to Bo's point about sort of keeping it within the dental industry, keeping them within the NHS system so that that money you've spent on their training can obviously bear some actual fruits in the end, which is just that also this goes on an international level as well.
All the, you know, millions of people who come here every year Their own homelands are being impoverished by the fact that they're either having their education there, having their upbringing there, getting their rudimentary dental training there, and then not putting that money back into their own economies that they've come from.
So not only are we impoverishing ourselves, but we're also impoverishing them as well.
I think this is something I remember the There's the phenomenon of the brain drain.
Yes.
Yeah, right.
And this was something I remember a specific video of the president of Ghana.
I think it was literally stood right next to Macron saying, we don't want our people going to France.
We want them to stay here.
We want Ghana to be.
I think that's pretty understandable because all of the most qualified, most intelligent people, well, unless of course it's that their niece or nephew do all of the work for them.
But despite that, It's all of their best people going to European countries, or possibly America, so they could get better pay.
But that's brought up an interesting thought on my mind, is that is there, under this scheme, any disincentive for these people to not just go and work in a foreign country?
If they get the opportunity once they've finished graduating and they've got a choice between, I could maybe go work somewhere private in a foreign country that'll pay me more, or get stuck in the NHS for five years.
Is that going to encourage people to go elsewhere?
That's a question.
If you just go to America or Dubai or almost anywhere else and make way more money, yeah.
Ukraine, maybe.
Oh, right, yeah.
But brain drain's a very real thing.
I remember Diane Abbott saying a couple of years ago, mentioning brain drain.
And people were like, wait, what?
What's this coming out of the mouth of someone like Diane Abbott?
It's just definitely a real thing.
Even someone whose brain has been drained can recognise it.
Because people used to say, if people on the immigration side of the debate would mention brain drain, they'd say, that's a conspiracy.
That's not even a real thing.
That's just, you're just coping.
You're just saying anything that comes to mind to try and keep people in their own countries.
And it's like, no, no, it's... Yes.
Number two, it actually happens to be a real phenomenon that quite quickly takes effect and can be seen.
I'm just wondering where the van initiative is going to end.
I mean, what's next?
Like the abortion van is going to come around.
Well, there's China.
In and out in 10 minutes flat.
There's the China policy for you, isn't it?
Or Canada will have a euthanasia vans.
I believe that's been tried somewhere else before, wasn't it?
Didn't Hitler have euthanasia vans?
I think he did.
Let's not get into that.
I think I know what you might be referring to there.
Involuntary euthanasia.
Yeah, Justin Trudeau is close to that.
Well, I mean, he's dressed up as him before.
Yeah, not that Trudeau isn't a fan of, you know, dictators being the probable son of one.
But anyway, I think we're drifting off of the central topic now of dentistry.
So yeah, UK dentistry explains our bad teeth.
Do I think it'll be solved anytime soon?
No.
Let's move on.
All right.
So it's next, I think it's the Steelworks to cover.
Seems to be up on the screen.
End it on a happy note.
Yeah.
So I want to take the opportunity to cover something about just the general state of the British steel industry, because obviously it's It might sound like a sort of mundane thing to cover, but the fact of the matter is that you'd be very unlikely to go a day in your life and not use something that requires steel.
And we are Britain.
We are the founders of the Industrial Revolution.
It's a proud heritage.
That we managed to start all of this and bring civilization to the world and through such incredible, industrious engineering.
But I wanted to, before I go into all of that, I should as well, myself, promote the brand new Islander magazine from the Lotus Eaters.
In it you can find all sorts of wonderful articles by people such as Bo himself, Karl, the academic agent, Nima Parvini, Rorag's nationalist, and yours truly.
I've written a piece of my own for it as well.
Now that I've mentioned that, oh yes, and you can also go over to the gift shop on the website and you can find some merch that runs in nice synchronicity with the magazine itself.
It's got some wonderful aesthetics to it and the magazine is also a limited time, so if you want it, when is it?
You have to have it ordered it within a few weeks?
I don't know!
Let us know!
Behind the scenes, get us out of this ditch we're in!
Well, I've been hearing on the podcast that it's up for a few weeks, so buy it now!
End of June.
I think end of June is also when we're planning on getting the issues out to the buyers, so make sure to get your pre-orders in.
Yes, fantastic, thank you.
Now from there, so I'll go over to the first part.
Thank you, yes.
Back, you can see this is dated the 7th of February, but from the very start of this year, Tata Steel, who own the steelworks, the blast oven furnaces down in Port Talbot in the south of Wales, they've obviously, as you've seen here, there is no way that the blast furnaces can stay, says the Chief Executive.
Why?
Right, well, this is where we run into a little bit of schizophrenia within the establishment, because essentially what's happened is, Tata, it's very hard to blame them for this.
Bear in mind, they're an Indian company, right?
They have no sort of loyalty to the United Kingdom on the basis of it, right?
They're profit motivated, right?
And obviously they would be, they're an international business.
You might want to sit a bit closer to the microphone just to make sure.
No trouble.
But they're an international business.
However, we are internally crippling our steel industry because really this decision to close the blast ovens, which is going to, has and will lose thousands of jobs in the Port Talbot area, is really a product of net zero and the climb towards zero carbon emissions.
Um, in the United Kingdom, because obviously it goes without saying that these old, you know, steelworks produce an awful lot of CO2.
Now, within all of this, if I could ask you to go to the next one, Sam.
Thank you.
Um, it can't help but be noticed by the Guardian of all people that there's some hypocrisy in this, because Tata, it's not stopped Tata building blast ovens in India itself.
So they take with one hand and give with the other to their own country.
And again, it makes sense because India's not under these self-imposed rules.
I think they are climbing towards net zero themselves.
They've agreed to certain treaties, tangentially.
They won't know.
But no, but they won't, obviously.
Hence why they're doing this.
Obviously what happens when you sell off your domestic industries, especially your domestic manufacturing and industrial industries to foreign countries, is that you're giving foreign interests the opportunity to completely cripple your own independence as a nation.
Absolutely.
Clearly that's what's going to happen.
That's what empires do.
Empires like the British Empire where we went around our colonies and we basically made it so that they had to get 95% of their economy from the rest of the empire and we basically made them specialize in one thing.
That was purely as a way to make them purely dependent on us.
We've played this game before, so the fact that we would bend over and allow other nations to do it is just a sign of the complete betrayal of this nation and the weakness that we exhibit on the international stage.
How we can present ourselves as any kind of global power when we, what, won't have a steel industry soon?
Right.
I mean, there is that soft power that David Cameron raised.
Oh yeah, sorry, what was it?
Number two in soft power, which means that London is a big financial centre.
Fantastic.
Maybe some people in London can manipulate Indian interest rates somewhere.
Fantastic.
Yeah, well, they can build things and we can't.
But there is, this is not entirely, to be transparent about it, this is not entirely an issue of just taking things away from part Albert, because obviously the government can't be seen to just be closing things, they have to at least be seen to be opening things as well.
And so really the whole...
Uh, project under the guise of net zero is to create these electric arc furnaces now.
This is the new plan.
Uh, now the important thing to note about the electric arc furnaces is that they don't, then it's not making steel from scratch.
It's not using your iron ore, it's not using your nickel, it's not using your coke.
This is a process by which you recycle scrap steel.
In order to create new steel.
The problem with that, as it stands at the moment, is it's a very inconsistent technology.
And so there is a real risk that the standard of our steel, that we both use domestically for our railways and our military and all those sorts of things, will just gradually decline.
I mean, obviously technology can get better and I'm sure they're working to refine it, but it's still...
It suggests that, for the time being, we're sort of going to be stuck in limbo with Well, if you could move to the next one for me, in fact, Sam.
Thank you.
When even the Labour Party are pointing out national security concerns, given that they are a national security concern themselves, it's quite rich, really.
But he's quite right.
Port Talbot closure forces UK to rely on China for steel as MPs raise national security concerns.
The same way that Europe relying on Russian energy was so good for us the second an international crisis cropped up.
I know that the quality of steel really, really matters as well.
That is one thing I know a little bit about.
You don't just make steel and then you've got steel.
There's many, many different grades of steel and there's actually quite a process to it.
It's not the easiest thing in the world.
During the Great Leap Forward, Mao insisted that everyone would open up a little kiln in their back garden and that millions of normal Chinese people would start making steel for themselves.
And it was ridiculous.
The most brittle, crappiest quality.
It didn't work.
You couldn't really build anything with it.
You certainly couldn't build girders or anything like that with it.
Right.
So it's actually...
Like a real industrial process, and you can't half-arse it.
I see.
Right?
Yeah, no, no, quite.
And so, and it's absolutely one of the things, even going back to the mid-20th century, it's still the case today, that if there's certain things you can't do for yourself, you're in trouble.
If you can't field an army for yourself, you're in trouble.
If you can't make steel for yourself, You're in trouble.
It's the way it's been for a couple hundred years now.
It's still the same today.
It's not OK to rely on India or China for your steel.
No.
Because if for whatever reason, whatever reason, they decide, oh, we're cutting you off, you're screwed overnight.
But the problem is as well that we actually, as it stands right now with the blast ovens in Scunthorpe, my hometown, which I'll get to a little bit later on, it's that we already import the raw materials as well now.
The coke ovens were closed just last year and we import the iron ore now because either our own supplies in Lincolnshire were of too poor a quality Or we'd run out, you know, whichever it be in the case of the individual mine.
But I'd just like to go back to this, with it says about the UK to rely on China for steel would be a national security concern.
If I could ask you to go to the next one, please.
What might be even more of a national security concern than that is having British steel owned by China itself.
Would you suggest that's a natural conclusion to come to?
Again, just on your point of the importing of raw materials, again, there is a benefit to that if you are an enormous empire and you're getting all of these raw materials from places that are colonial administrations which you have the boot over.
Because, well, I mean, you're in charge.
You can get what you want from them, you can cordon off all of their industry purely to making that raw material for you.
It's actually great as a way of meaning that they have no opportunity to grow their own economy naturally, while you get to get all of the benefits from that.
On the global free trade stage, well, you're just kind of relying on handshakes.
You're relying on handshakes and the goodwill of other nations, and I don't know if these people who've done all of this know that the goodwill of other nations is not something that can reliably be counted on.
Yes.
Well, no, I mean, your suspicions are quite well founded.
Especially China.
Right.
But this is, correct me if I'm wrong, this is all a product, it was David Cameron, wasn't it, who wanted closer ties to China and bound us further and further into the Chinese markets.
I wasn't Thatcher the one who opened up the British properties and industries to international markets?
Yes, that's right, yes.
So we're at a position now where, if I could ask you to go to the next one, Sam.
Thank you.
Actually, I'll skip this one.
Thank you.
So, speaking about the handshake deals and the honesty of China, job fears as ministers maul £300m bailout for Jinghe, the Chinese parent group, because British Steel's Chinese owner broke promises to bail the ailing industry.
So essentially, the Chinese came in as the highest bidder to the steelworks in Scunthorpe, which is the other place now in the UK, other than Port Talbot, but obviously the blast ovens are closing in Port Talbot, which leaves Scunthorpe as the last bastion of blast oven furnaces in the UK.
And without that, we've basically wiped out our steelmaking capacity.
Now obviously I am aware that there are other sort of industrial positions up in Redcar and other such, but this is particularly relating to the blast ovens.
Now what's interesting about this is, if I could ask you to scroll down a little bit...
Thank you, a bit more.
I've not been able to figure out how to use this.
It's okay.
But I think essentially the Chinese offered about 1.2 billion to invest into British steel, into the British steel industry.
And when it actually came to them taking over the industry, they basically fell short of that promised investment by a few Just a few hundred million, really, and then have the audacity to ask our government to bail out the industry despite not putting in the money that they promised to put in in the first place.
If I could ask you to move to the next one, Sam.
Thank you.
Government support crucial, says British Steel, as unions say the closure of Scunthorpe blast furnaces would be devastating.
Now, Scunthorpe, just like Port Talbot, is very much underway with the net zero thing.
There is already a commissioned electric arc furnace that is going to go up, and from what I've read of it, it seems to be that once the electric arc furnace is up and operational, the blast furnace will have about 18 months left Before they'll turn it off.
Which, once again, like Port Talbot, will leave Scunthorpe in a position where it's lost thousands... people have lost thousands and thousands of jobs.
And Scunthorpe is the second... Steelworks is, I think, after Scunthorpe General Hospital, is just the bigger employer... biggest employer in the actual town itself.
So they can look forward to be working in service-based call centres soon, instead.
Possibly.
A vape shop or Griggs.
Turkish barbers, perhaps.
Vape shops don't generally hire English people, so... Or Turkish barbers.
Now obviously... Or Griggs!
Right.
Now obviously this is deeply concerning but I just wanted, before I go on to the next one, I just wanted to touch on something else about this which is just from my own sort of, dare I suggest, lived experience.
Which is that within my own living memory growing up in Scunthorpe, I remember sort of every summer there being a gala Sort of in which the community would come out, and the people who worked on the steelworks.
And there'd be a fair, and you could buy mugs, and you could go on rides.
But this was back when it was owned by Chorus, which was a company that was a merger between British and Dutch.
But there was something there to give back to the community as well, right?
There was better social bonds than there is now, and that's in my own lifetime, so I can just about remember it.
It went on for about 75 years, I think, this gala, every summer, and I think the last one was in about 2011.
So it's not just the loss of the jobs, but it's the loss of pride in the community.
It's the knock-on effect that all those job losses will have on the locals who do own the local shops, who the workers get the dinner or the packed lunch from every day.
It all just goes in to having a net drain on a town that fundamentally has already struggled for a long time as it is.
The Chinese are not going to continue that.
Tradition then.
Guangdong Jingzhe is not going to keep that going.
My favourite restaurant there actually.
They're not even going to build you a colossal statue of Deng Xiaoping or anything.
Come on, guys!
Pull your finger out!
But no, if I could ask you to go to the next one, Sam, thank you.
So, now, it's not all demon gloom, and I don't want to paint it as that.
There are still, you know, because the fact of the matter is that our boys in the scumthorpe make a damn good product.
And British Steel is still a very highly sought after thing because you know when you buy British Steel that you're buying something, as you say, good quality.
It has standards.
Standards written on it.
Your girders aren't just going to fold on you at the first opportunity.
Right.
Yeah, it's not made by a million little Chinese children under Mao's dictatorship.
And so the multi-million pound contract made it right away for Turkey in Scunthorpe.
This is very good.
Scunthorpe was actually almost bought out by a Turkish company before the Chinese came along and saved us from the Turks.
Thank God.
And there is just one more thing that I want to highlight in all of this, which is just the last additional factor, sort of just hammering the nail into the coffin, which is that if you could, yeah, move to the next one.
Thank you, Sam.
Now, France to force the EDF to take 8.4 billion euro hit with energy bill cap.
Now, this might not seem related at first, but the reason that I bring it up is because the EDF, which is rather incriminatingly stands for Électricité de France, is a full state-owned French energy company that also has command of a lot of our energy here in Britain.
A lot of our energy is owned by the French.
And so when it was already something like 83% state-owned, but then when the Russians went into Ukraine, the French seized 100% of it just as a precaution so they could have absolute control over the energy prices.
And so in the In France, they put a hard cap on energy prices going up by about 4%, something like that.
Whereas in the United Kingdom, because again, news to people, the French don't have our best interests at heart, old habits and all that.
But they just let the prices just rise with the free market, which means that the steelworks at Scunthorpe, on top of net zero, on top of the job losses, it's really struggling to make a profit or turn over a profit because the energy prices are just so astronomically high.
So we were subsidizing the French energy cap, essentially?
Could put it like that if you wanted to.
So between the French, the Chinese and Mr Biden's inflationomics, our steel industry, what little is left of it, the zombie of our steel industry, is getting completely stomped out.
Yes, more or less.
Brilliant.
So yeah, sorry, that is quite the downer, which is why I thought I'd put it before the magazine.
It's funny though, because there is a broader thing about when you nationalise companies and when you don't.
Everyone seems to have a fairly strong opinion on it.
You know, how can you be on the right and be for nationalising anything, for example?
Or you're insane not to nationalise things because we've all seen that the markets are screwed over from New York.
So a real patriot would, not the leftist, not the Corbyn types, a proper patriot would nationalise things in order to protect them.
And it's like, well, I don't know what to think anymore.
I don't know.
But this is my general thesis with all of this information, that it shouldn't be unreasonable for us to, one, have all of our industry owned domestically by British companies, Um, and second of all, we shouldn't be relying on foreign energy companies either.
To obviously... Of course.
You know, this is just, as you say, that there's no... I don't think there's any problem in nationalizing these things.
It might not make sense in the purely abstract realm of economic theory.
Yes.
Of course, if you're going to put price caps on things then they've had terrible side effects in the past.
Yeah, of course.
But from the perspective of national security, you do have to take common sense steps to mean that you're not completely dependent entirely on foreign interests.
And by being foreign interests, by definition, they are not your own national interests.
They do not have your national interests in mind.
Even if it is just that a foreign company is seeking to make a profit, that doesn't mean that they're going to be seeking a profit with the best methods for your country.
Machiavelli talks about this sort of stuff, he was mainly talking about really mercenaries and armies, but the same could, or does, apply to key industries like steel, or your railways and things.
That if you let a foreign entity control it, That's a slippery slope, a very steep slippery slope, to you getting screwed over.
It's just not a good idea.
Like you say, there's the purely economic theory side of things, that only a red would nationalise certain industries.
But it's that, or China's going to own it anyway.
In the global economy, it's... yeah.
So I saw an amazing quote the other day, I forget who it was from, but I've been using it since, which is just fantastic, which is poking a bit of fun at the pure economic theory, which is, yes yes yes, that might work in practice, but does it work in theory?
Right, yeah.
And that's the way that a lot of people tend to approach these things, where if you're talking about operating in the real world, in the real global economy, when you're a real nation surrounded by other real nations that don't have all of your best interests in mind, little touch of pragmatism here and there can't hurt.
Well, of course, this is all made ten times worse by net zero as well.
Of course, yes.
This is also inflected by our own government.
Yeah, exactly.
So I can talk all I want about how we should have our own national interests in mind, but our leaders don't have our national interests in mind.
They have their globalist cabal interests in mind more than anything else.
So you talk about Tata and Modi, you know, he has got India's Is he actually a full nationalist, an Indian nationalist?
Is that what he is?
He's generally described as one, but I couldn't stress to know a lot about him.
Yeah, people have crazy different ideas about Modi.
On one end of the spectrum he's some sort of saviour figure, on the other end he's basically a Hitler.
It's hard to actually get a gauge on the guy.
I think he's interested in basically spreading India across the entire world, which can only have positive results.
I think, I need to double check it, but I think there was some kind of deal struck between India and Russia recently, where Russia is going to allow free movement of Indians into the country without the need of a passport or something.
Into Russia.
Into Russia.
I don't know if that's exactly true but basically there are moves to try and make sure that Indians can just go anywhere in the world.
The entire world will be Modi's India soon and I can't think of anything worse.
Don't do it poop poop.
Don't do it Vlad.
Dear Vlad, don't do it.
When we move into the next segment, I'll double check that.
I want to fact check myself.
But if that is true, I might.
Yes.
Because that'll be the plan for everywhere else that India's dealing with as well.
That'll be Modi's plan.
Just take a few hundred million Indians.
Just let us outnumber your native population by a few hundred million.
It'll be fine.
At least we'll solve that dental crisis.
Oh yeah, thank God.
I wanted to visit St.
Petersburg before it was ruined.
But yeah, as you see, as you can see, the reason I brought this up is because it's a very important issue and I don't feel like it gets enough said about it, really.
Especially seeing as the fact that this is all happening within this year, generally.
You know, that things are moving fast and the floor's coming out from beneath our feet, really.
If we were ever in another sort of total war type situation, assuming it's just not a full nuclear exchange and the world falls into a nuclear winter that way, if we was in another World War II type situation, where we were doing sort of strategic bombing, where we would see like Germany's industry, oh they really need like a ball bearings factory and there's only two of them, so if we take those out, That makes all their industry grind to a halt.
They really, really need sort of blast furnace facilities or oil refinery facilities and they've only got one or two or three of them.
If we bomb those, then again we cripple them sort of profoundly.
Well again, we'll be in the same, you know, one dirty bomb in Scunny and it's all over for us.
We can't produce anything.
Yeah, they've been through enough, trust me.
They don't need another bomb.
Shall we move on to something a bit happier, gentlemen?
Also, don't take my word on what I just said.
I can't find it.
That might have been some rubbish that I saw on the internet.
I hope it was!
We'll let you know when we look at St.
Petersburg videos next year.
Yeah, when Beau goes to St.
Petersburg and he finds himself in the middle of New New Delhi.
We'll see.
Okay, for this segment, we're going to talk for a bit of an extended period of time about Our new magazine, Islander, brought to you by LotusEaters.com.
If you hadn't noticed, we've been chilling it a bit recently.
Just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
Trying to push it.
But we're going to do a whole segment about it now.
Now, I've said before that I only really like to promote things or push things if I genuinely like the thing.
We did a little bit of paid advertising, didn't we, before?
And my only thing I said to Karl is, don't make me do something I actually don't care about.
Raid!
Shadow Legends!
Or MeUndies.
Don't make me shill MeUndies.
I don't want to do that.
If it's something good, like Audible or something, I'll happily do it.
We're Islander.
If you can, do go out and buy.
It would really help us.
Because once we got demonetised off YouTube, our margins are quite tight actually.
So not just the money side of things, which would be nice, You can get it on our website now.
It's actually, I think, it really is good because it's the idea of it, the concept is that it's supposed to be something in the real world which can make a difference and, you know, the idea of optimism and morale building and a bit of a white pill.
So there's nothing in here, even though our stocking trade is really black pills, isn't it?
This isn't.
This very, very deliberately is a conscious decision not to be that.
Yeah, remember that there's this idea that on the internet Everything is permanent.
I think in practice, not really.
On the internet, everything is transient.
Anything can be taken off the internet at any time.
People can be deplatformed, videos can vanish, and if nobody's done a backup of it, you're never going to find that again.
But if you've got this in your home, at your bedside table, Then as long as you don't lose track of it, it's there with you forever.
Yeah.
And it seems like it's great that, you know, when something's on digital, it's on the internet digitally, it's there for all time.
If someone archives it or just downloads it for themselves, it's on their hard drive for all time.
Yeah, okay.
But also at the same time, it's completely transient.
Who goes back and watches this stuff?
It's like taking pictures of a meal.
You had one time.
Yes.
Who goes back and looks at all those pictures?
Who goes back?
You put them on Facebook.
No one's scrolling back through four-year-old breakfasts you had.
Oh, that looks so tasty.
Yeah.
So it's actually really transit.
It's both there forever and worthless at the same time, right?
Yeah.
Whereas this, the concept of it is that it's supposed to be sort of positive.
And well, Rory's written in it and Rory's a very good writer.
Carl Benjamin, Mr. Carl Benjamin, Our leader has written a piece in it.
I've written two pieces in it myself.
Been a busy man.
You greedy hog.
Yeah well, Rory likes my style.
What can I say?
Oh really?
If you don't say so, yeah.
That's not from you.
That's not coming from you.
That's coming from Rory.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, they're not my words.
Not my words.
And there is of course the venerable Dr. Nima Parvini.
A.K.A.
A.A.
There's a good piece in there.
He's a good writer.
Shot's fired!
I'm only kidding, I love YA.
Rorik Nationalist.
He is very good, isn't he, Rorik Nationalist?
You see him on Tucker that time.
He was on Tucker, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was.
I think he was part of Tucker's Reclaiming Masculinity documentary or whatever it was.
His takes are good.
Yeah, on health, on just masculinity.
And he publishes Man's World with Passage Press as well.
Well, just to say there, on the aesthetic.
The aesthetic of it, I don't want to give it all away otherwise people might not buy it, but the aesthetic of it is excellent.
It really is excellent.
I mean, um, again, I'm probably don't, probably best not to show loads of it to the camera because otherwise people might not buy it, but uh, oh, well.
Just Marlon Brando as the ancient Roman smoking a cigarette.
I mean, what's not to like?
That's just an example.
That's just an example.
Without spoiling too much, do you want to give some of our viewers an idea of some of the content and themes that you touched on in one or both of your articles?
There's lots of other articles.
We've got Charles Haywood in here as well.
We've got you, Luca, in here.
Morgoth is in here.
Morgoth.
Now, if I could take a quick moment to sing Morgoth's praises.
I've never met the man.
If only very, very, very, very, very briefly interacted on Twitter.
I've met him once and I would say he's just as kind and amiable as you would expect.
What I would say is there's very, very few people Who I've never really seen miss a beat.
Yeah.
Very rarely, if ever, I think ever, seen a bad take from Morgoth.
Where I'm like, ooh, that was a dodgy take.
I just don't agree.
I just, I can't see it.
Like, pretty much never from Morgoth.
So, I won't go too far, because I'm a sicker fan.
But Morgoth's in there, and it's material you won't get on our website.
It's not going to be on his sub stack.
So if you want to read it, you've got to buy the magazine.
There's other people, you've got one in there.
Yeah, I wrote one which will be part of sort of an ongoing series, hopefully.
So I'll actually have one in the series of this with each publication.
Just a little bit about it.
I've started a series based on the works of Tolkien.
J.R.R.
Tolkien, I've always been a huge Lord of the Rings fan, but I wanted to, and don't get me wrong, I adore the Peter Jackson films, I think they're phenomenal adaptations, but I really wanted to get back to the heart of what Tolkien himself was trying to say in his books about morality, about heroism, about What is good?
What is evil?
And I wanted to explore that through several of his most complex characters.
And so, just to give you some sort of tease to get you going, this first piece I've done is all about Boromir, Sean Bean's character from the film.
You know, one does not simply walk into Mordor.
But, you know, that's what I've... The genuine Northern accent as well, brilliant.
Close enough, yeah.
Richard Sharp himself.
So yeah, that's mine and if you buy it you can have a look at what I've written about that.
Yeah, there's even, I keep forgetting but I flicked around here, there is even an essay from returning guest contributor Thomas Downing.
Which, who you may remember from the podcast from back in the day, we do still associate with him, and he's written a very, very interesting essay.
For anybody guessing, yes, it is about Hegel.
It couldn't be about anything else, but it's very, very high quality, as you would expect from this.
And to be honest- He's a PhD student.
Yeah, very close to getting his doctorate, I believe.
I believe he's on the doctorate program, wherever he's going to right now.
So yeah, he's doing some excellent work.
And I'll say, I'm not in this, but when the second issue comes out, I think we're aiming for something like a quarterly kind of release schedule.
That's what I've been told, but I don't take my word on that.
I'm getting an article in the second issue and I've already written it.
It's already been edited.
It's ready to go whenever we get that one out.
And I saw this because it feels so high quality, so prestigious.
It is really high quality.
It's nice and thick.
It's not a cheap bit of paper.
It kind of inspires you to try a little bit harder, to work a little bit harder.
And so I've tried to push myself a little bit and I think what I've produced Uh, when you get to read it, eventually, all of the people, it is some of the best work that I've, best written work that I've produced ever.
Not just for Lotus Eaters, but ever.
Uh, so I feel... That's without Rory saying it.
That's just you.
Yeah, yeah.
I feel, I, yeah, exactly.
Those are my words and you can quote me on them.
Um, so I, I feel it's a privilege to be, uh, part of something that feels very legitimate.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not sure whether it'll be monthly or quarterly, like LE quarterly, like GQ, LQ.
Could it be that?
I don't know.
Yeah, again, the aesthetic's just like a badass dude climbing a mountain.
It's a bit Rorik Nationalist sort of stuff.
It's supposed to be vitalist, inspirational aesthetics.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Harkening back to European myths and legends and the spirit of Europe and the spirit of the British.
Yeah.
So one of the things I wrote in it was just sort of a statement of intent, sort of thing, like what it is.
Because the Lotus Eaters is obviously a reference to Homer's Odyssey, the Isle of the Lotus Eaters.
There's all sorts of odd connotations to do with that.
So to be clear about Islander, the magazine, brought to you by LotusEaters.com, available at LotusEaters.com.
Pre-order now.
It's just talking about how, you know, we'd like to be able to provide something that exists in the real world physically, that you can keep for all time, and that isn't just like a sort of a throwaway black pill.
You know, we've done that.
Hopefully we can move some way beyond That paradigm.
I think people were screaming out for that a bit now.
It's like, okay, we got it.
We're blackpilled.
We've got it.
We know, especially people in our circles, our audience, people that are adjacent to us.
Yeah.
You can get too blackpilled, right?
We get it.
So what is next?
What is to be done?
What can be done?
Well, we should start that conversation.
This magazine is all part of that.
Yeah, we don't just need endless sort of Peter Hitchens telling you to give in.
It's all over.
You know, we're done with that.
I don't want defeatists and doomers.
They're just poison.
Don't need them.
He won't be contributing.
Well, I don't know.
Well, maybe we could get a nostalgia piece from him.
That's another thing for future issues.
We hopefully will get bigger, more established, more famous people if we can.
I mean, Carl and Connor and a few of us, but mainly Carl have got all sorts of connections.
You know, we've got our fingers crossed.
I won't name any dropping names.
We've got our fingers crossed for a few fairly big hits.
Tony Blair.
Could you imagine that?
Tony Blair reveals all.
How I got away with it by Tony Blair in Islander Magazine.
We're aiming for Tucker.
We'll get Tucker to write a piece.
No, I don't know.
Of course not.
But in the sort of statement of intent here, just talking about having the metaphor of an island, an oasis in an ocean of backpills.
You know, in an ocean of despair, there's sort of an island of hope in some way.
Yes, which is very much what my article on Boromir leads into, actually.
It's about all the pieces more in various ways.
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just saying it's about, you know, that conflict within yourself, giving you reasons to hope and and carry on when things seem darkest and bleakest.
And so it's one of those things.
I know you're Not a particular fan of the quote though, the Spengler one, what is it?
Optimism is cowardice.
But it's one of those that I think it's...
People are more inspired to live with hope than without it and they will push themselves to achieve more and do more with their lives if you have a reason to believe that it can come to something good in the end.
I will say that the Spengler quote works a lot better in context of the book Man and Technics that it's featured in.
I think when it's wrenched of its context it becomes more just a statement of Dumourism where it's a bit more than that but carry on.
I think Spengler lived in a different time to us and had Whole different set of things going through his memory banks to what we're dealing with in Britain in the 2020s.
So it's just a different thing.
But yeah, I've got no time for despair and pity parties.
No, no, no.
Buck up.
We're going to do this.
Get with the program.
Get in.
We're going to turn this around.
There's nothing that can't be done.
You're literally the get-in-loser-we're-going-to-save-the-west meme right now.
It's going to happen.
Here I stand.
I can do no other.
I'm not going anywhere.
No Peter.
I'm not going to run away to somewhere.
No Nick Griffin.
I'm not going to go live in bloody Poland until two generations go by and then start the Reconquista.
No, no, no, no, no.
Also, everything that's happening here is either already happening where we could go, or is going to happen in about five years, wherever we could go.
The times they are are changing.
It's a new generation.
Past performance is not indicative of future results, is it?
Just because attempts in the past have failed, Nick Griffin, doesn't mean That we are doomed for all future generations to, at the end of time, to fail.
It doesn't mean that.
No, no, no, no.
We are the music makers.
We are the dreamers of dreams.
There's nothing that can't be done.
The future's not yet written, etc, etc, etc.
This magazine, as I say here, is a bastion against the rising tide of anti-Western propaganda.
It's just, you know, it's just one small piece, one small chink, one small chain, one small link in the armour.
It's something.
You have to build movements from scratch often.
And you have to build them with sentiment as well.
Nobody was ever convinced from a purely abstract, theoretical, statistics-based argument.
They get to where they are through feeling.
But you can tell in the tone of someone's voice when they hold something to be a genuine conviction.
You can't really fake your sincerity in many ways.
You either feel something on a passionate level, you either feel patriotic and that will show through in your conduct and how you carry yourself, or you don't and will know if it's just lip service or if it's a real deal.
And just one other thing on the aesthetic and what you were talking about of something real in the real world.
I will say, what we've got up on screen right now, I wish, I wish this was real.
I wish I could go through a CEX bargain bin of PS2 games and find this glorious little ditty Somewhere in the real world.
And if, as Lotus Eaters expands and gets bigger, I want to be in charge of making this a reality.
Whatever this game would be, a strange Far Cry-esque salsa Donald Trump versus Mecca Biden.
First person shooter action RPG set in an island that's also Rome and Athens, maybe.
That's huge, terrific, and bigly.
5 out of 5 from Anita Sarkeesian herself.
I want this!
This needs to be a real thing.
Yeah.
I get sort of Vice City vibes off of it.
Oh, yeah.
But set on an island that's also Athens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
It's great.
It's going to be huge.
It's going to be huge.
It's going to be terrific.
Never going to find anything like it anywhere else.
Believe me, folks.
Yeah.
First time I saw this magazine, I thought it was great.
I said I thought it was going to be great.
It's great.
Yeah, just the idea of, you know, don't give in.
Don't despair.
There's no need for that.
Don't panic.
Don't panic.
There's nothing that can't be turned around.
There really isn't.
And so, yeah, just that, you know, don't submit.
We're not going to submit.
The idea of the Dunkirk spirit, the British throwing two fingers up in the face of seemingly insuperable odds.
No, no, it's what we do.
is we fight against the odds.
A thousand years or more of glorious tradition, in that sense.
There's no need to be a doomer.
Stop doing it.
It's weak.
Stop being weak.
I don't know if Royal Nationalists have said those exact words, but that is sort of your sentiment in all sorts of ways, isn't it?
Well, make yourself stronger.
Make yourself more vital.
Make yourself more useful.
That's kind of his vibe that I get from whenever I see him posting or whenever I see his writings.
Eat loads of meat and raw eggs?
I assume so.
Pump some serious iron?
There you go.
Become the strongest in your bloodline.
What's stopping you?
What's stopping you right now?
Literally, you can get cheap protein, you can get cheap food, you can get a cheap gym membership.
Boom.
Become the strongest, best version of yourself by buying Islander Magazine, available at lowcheaps.com.
There you go.
And with that, I think we'll go into the video comments.
Do we have any video comments?
Looks like there's four there.
Oh, lovely, lovely.
So I saw Harry on the Proper Horror Show channel talking about how fictional tales can have profound effects on the real world.
And this is always an issue I see with liberals where they like defend the leftist media saying, it's just a fictional story brah, why do you care about it so much?
Which I always find curious because they're usually atheist anti-christian folk and that kind of contradicts their stance.
Well yeah, the best question to ask in that is, okay, if I shouldn't care about it so much, why do you care about it so much?
If it's not important that you're turning every character trans and black, why are you turning every character trans and black?
It really mattered when you were going through the process of subverting this thing inside out, but when anyone tries to push back against it, it's all, where do you care, bro?
And you can see surveys, and you can understand how much fiction, what people consume on TV, how it actually affects their perception of the real world.
There was that one from a few years ago, I think it was YouGov in the US or something, when they did perceptions of how much of a population they think Is in the U.S.
versus the reality and they said something like 15% of 15% of the U.S.
is trans and it was 1% or less than that.
Some people think that 40% of the U.S.
is black.
It's 13%.
Less than that.
Some people thought that 40% of the US is black.
It's 13%.
I think they thought 50% or more was Jewish, and it's 2%.
So that's just, where have they got those ideas from?
Because it probably won't be stepping outside.
Most people, even in the US, live in relatively homogenous neighbourhoods and communities.
So where have they got those ideas from?
It's not from going outside and speaking to your neighbour Pat, is it?
It's from what they see on TV.
So, that's obviously a bullshit argument that leftists throw out.
It's interesting as well, though, because it's a bit like with The Lord of the Rings, right, when those films did actually come out in the early 2000s.
Within that, the Haradrim, who are obviously the southern people, in Tolkien's Legendarium, They are actually black-skinned people.
But when they actually came to casting for the film, they made all the Haradrim white because they didn't want to be like, well, we can't just make them African.
And so they actually didn't put any, you know, even though there was an entire nation within Tolkien's Legendarium where it makes sense for them to be so.
And so that's how times change.
So accidentally made it more homogenous.
Yes.
They were like, we want this to sell in Chinese markets, so we can't put too many black people in it.
Oh, I love the old Black Panther posters, when those first ones came out.
Where in China, you know, in the US it's just a picture of Chadwick Boseman's face.
And in China, it was the mask.
Yeah, rest in peace to Boseman.
But it was the mask, because they didn't want a big black guy's face.
And they didn't think the Chinese could guess who was under there, or...
Well, I don't know the thought process behind it.
I think it's just that it didn't want a black man staring at them from posters.
A John Boyega effect.
Oh yeah, a tiny John Boyega.
Just shrink him down.
Let's move on to the next one.
Those LGBT scapegoating slides in yesterday's show plainly demonstrate that the insane have no self-doubt.
They're incapable of imagining any scenario where they could be wrong, whether through ideological possession or intellectual deficiency.
It's best just to treat them like the naughty children they are.
Yeah, they left this mindset, and also very impressive.
I was captivated by that.
Yeah, I feel like it'd be cool if that was like a super heavy weight though, that like a normal man couldn't pick up.
You gotta start somewhere, right?
Yeah, no, sure, sure.
I don't know.
You gotta start.
You can't hit Eddie Hall straight away.
Right.
You've gotta work your way up.
That's the weight would still go down through his knees.
Anyway, wouldn't it?
Well, yeah.
Well, maybe he's going to build a lower half to it to reinforce that.
It's very good.
But definitely in Aliens, that thing.
Oh, yeah.
I think that's just like a piece of industrial machinery in the universe, isn't it?
But yeah, the leftist mindset is pure arrested development.
That's all it is.
You can't tell me what to do, Dad, and then you stay in stasis in that mindset for the entire rest of your life.
And if anybody else tells you to do anything, then that's your Dad telling you to do something, which is fascism.
That's literally it.
The idea that all money and all wealth And all advancement is a zero-sum game.
So if someone else is doing well or making money, they've effectively stolen it from you.
Just that, that concept, that very idea of looking, that way of looking at the world, it's just, it's childish.
Yeah, I'm sure that grows from maybe one time they misbehaved and their dad said, you've got no pocket money this weekend.
That's how they assume the economy works.
Is that some, some evil man from on high has said no pocket money today.
Anyway, move on to the next one.
Is there more, Wendy?
But wait!
Of course there's more!
Order now and I'll throw in the Easy Scrambler, just for you!
It mixes the egg inside the shelf of perfect scrambled eggs every time.
Now it's yours, free!
So get cracking and order now!
What's wrong with America?
I'm unconvinced.
So does it just spin it and it automatically scrambles it in the egg for you?
Is that what it does?
I've got no idea what I just saw.
Sam's been having some fun finding absurd products from yesteryear to showcase to us.
I find it quite fun.
The only one that I'd actually buy is Flex Tape.
Well, I mean, Flex Tape is obviously the tool of the gods.
Right.
That's what they built Olympia and Valhalla out of.
Let's go to the next one.
In the last election of my home state, the Labor government smashed the Liberal Party and reduced the party to an unprecedented two seats.
While COVID fearmongering was the biggest factor, the defeat was exasperated by the Klan, key powerbrokers that controlled member selection, and installed a weak puppet for a leader.
Sound familiar?
People thought this would lead to reform, but instead a tokenistic effort was made and the new round of pre-selections has revealed that nothing has changed.
It's a lesson to keep in mind in the UK.
Losing MPs will not remove the powerbrokers.
Fair play.
I mean it is right and we talk about zero seats and we hope the Tories get smashed and etc etc which I do but of course that will lead to Labour which of course will be worse but then that's just the next battle and then perhaps over that horizon then we'll lead to a truly new politics.
Where there's entirely new parties or we start moving into the realm of independence, the age of multiple, multiple independents in Parliament and the stranglehold of the two-party system, in Britain anyway, Tories and Labour.
You need to smash the Tories first, because they're in government, obviously, and they're standing in the way of any sort of real right-leaning party.
They have to go first.
Yes, then the very next battle will have to be immediately to smash Labour.
It's not like, oh, once the Tories are annihilated at the ballot box, it's over, we've won.
No, of course not.
That's just the first wave.
That's just the first battle.
Well, everybody knows that the reason that Tories are doing so bad is not because all of their voters are shifting over to Labour.
It's because their voters are staying home.
So what is that?
If you're in the democratic system, you need to work within it.
That's an enormous voter base of people who are completely disenfranchised, who see their towns and their homeland going to shit, who recognize that their leaders hate them and hate everything that they stand for and want to replace them.
Everybody knows at this point, even in the villages, you can't stop but notice that there is change going on that people never asked for.
So that's going to be an enormous base that, once the Tories are out of the way, if we can do it, that are going to want to be mobilized, essentially, and they need the right people to mobilize them in the right direction.
It's a remarkable thing though, isn't it?
Because you'll know this better than I do, Beau, but going back to the Victorian era, if you were Disraeli, or you were Gladstone, and you were the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister of the largest empire on Earth, that's sort of the biggest job you could ever have.
But now we're in a position where being the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is just something for the CV, something that will get you in with the tech crowd in Davos or Facebook like Nick Craig, right?
It's not even the most prestigious honour you can be given anymore.
Callum and I described it as regional manager of England.
That's what you are.
You're part of the big global American empire.
You're just the temporary regional manager.
You're not part of a continuing tradition.
You're just part of the global system and you can get shifted like a piece on a chessboard from wherever they want you to go.
I do often think it's a history nerds thing to sort of sit there and think about but I do sometimes think about who's the most powerful person ever to have lived?
And first immediately when you start thinking about that it's like well how would you measure it?
Would it be someone like Genghis Khan perhaps because his power was absolute?
Would it be someone one of the British Prime Ministers at the height of our empire somebody like perhaps Disraeli?
Would it be someone perhaps you are my I often think it might be Harry Truman in that window when the Americans had won World War II and got the nuke but Stalin hadn't yet got the nuke?
So his empire wasn't as big as the British Empire, but it was much more powerful in a sense.
You know, it's a difficult thing to... Constructive capability, yeah.
Is it O.J.
Simpson?
Because he can do anything!
How did he get away with it?
He wrote a book!
He wrote a book about how he did it and nobody said anything!
But I was going to say, so being the British Prime Minister in sort of the late Victorian period, let's say, high Victorian period, you'd be certainly, you could argue, you're one of the most powerful men, if not the most powerful man in the world, and one of the most powerful men ever to have lived.
Now, are you even in the top 20?
Perhaps in soft power.
Yeah, let's not forget that.
Yeah, that counts for a lot these days, doesn't it?
In terms of nuclear submarines at your disposal that you're never going to use.
Up there in the top five.
Anyway.
That's an interesting question.
Perhaps we should note that down as a lads hour topic or something.
That'd be quite interesting.
I would totally bogart the time.
I'd just be talking the whole time.
I've got more things to say.
Fantastic.
Enough to turn it off for me.
Brilliant.
Or just all that drinking at the side.
Yeah, just nodding.
Good point there.
Indubitably.
Well, there is salad in because... no.
But we've got some rumble chats that we'll get through while we've still got a few minutes.
Is that the last video?
I believe that was four.
Yes.
So that was the last one.
Got some rumble chats I'll read out.
So for $10 Sean 487 says, by the way Canadian veteran and even disabled veterans often have no dental care.
People often are completely ignorant of how little they get.
Bo could sell me some nice underwear I would buy.
No.
Moving back onto this comment, that's really sad to hear.
I do think it's awful how a lot of countries, for some reason, just completely disrespect the people who've sacrificed the most for them.
It's disgusting as hell.
BaldEagle1787 for $2 says, Don't give the Canadian NHS any ideas on how to expand their euthanasia program.
You know they'd go full bore on the vans driving around in political opposition areas.
That's a good point, actually.
BaldEagle1787 again for $2 says, Net zero means you have to become third world so that new slaves the global order are trying to raise can become mindless consumers and take your place until the next wave of slaves is ready for harvesting.
Yeah, sadly.
Sean487 again for $10.
Thank you both for sending in some money for us.
says, China uses Canadian steel to dump its steel on American markets.
The steel is made in China, probably going to do the same to Europe from England.
Great.
Yeah, but it's all good because it's all in this academic economic textbook, which speaks from a purely abstract perspective.
If you think about it hard enough, it makes perfect sense because I can force a square into a round hole and make it make sense, so therefore it's okay.
My bullshit imaginary scenario says it's fine.
Bald Eagle 1787 for two dollars, Says Boromir was done dirty in Fellowship of the Ring, the cut scenes that showed how he was the most relatable character in the whole group and how amazing he was as a person.
That, my friend, is why you watch the Extended Editions.
Absolutely.
Yes, because the Extended Editions also include the extra Boromir scene in The Return of the King.
Oh, yeah, it shows how it was with him and Faramir.
Yeah, was that in Two Towers?
Yeah, Faramir remembers it.
Yeah, yeah, him and Faramir.
It really shows off that, yeah, Boromir was one of the most human characters in the whole series, which is why he was so vulnerable to the Ring, because it preyed on the desires of men.
But he'd suffered more than any of them had that far, maybe other than Frodo, because he'd been on the front lines of this war.
They were at the gates of Mordor the whole time.
He was the one leading the men, keeping Mordor at bay.
So, you know, he was, like you say, he was the one who had the most experience combating this, knew the threat, so of course he's going to be the one to think, well maybe we can turn this around.
Isn't that the bit where Boromir does, it is in his head, he's physically got it and he's just sort of told to give it over and he does though.
Oh, well, it's, yeah, they take it from the, in the film, they do it on the mountaintop where Frodo drops a ring and he picks it up.
But that doesn't, there's only in the books, it's only when Boromir tries to take the ring from Frodo, but the dialogue is lifted from it.
So he still has that, that thing about it's so strange, we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.
You know, that line, which is, yeah.
My favourite whole scene from the very first film, and I've only ever watched the extended edition, so I don't know how effective it is in the original theatrical cuts.
There is no theatrical cuts.
Is when he tries to take the ring from Frodo near the end of the film, right before they're set on by the Uruk-hai, and he...
Frodo manages to kick him away and he tumbles down the hill and he seems to come to his senses and the immediate hit and realization and regret that comes upon him is one of the most emotionally affecting parts of the whole film.
Oh it's such a fantastic bit.
And then how he tries to save Merry and Pippin from the Uruk-hai as well before they get carried away.
He's one of the truest heroes in all of fiction.
But we're starting to just nerd out about Lord of the Rings.
Thanks very much for watching.
We'll be back in about half an hour for Lads Hour.
Make sure you tune in if you're subscribed.
Pick up a copy of Islander while they're all still available.
We'll see you next time.
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