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May 30, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:35:06
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1176
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Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters.
Today is Friday the 30th of May, and this is episode 1176, and I'm joined today by Firas and by Luca.
And we're going to discuss how Britain is broke, how the Wheel of Time TV series turned everyone, including men, into lesbians, and how it's so over for Harry Potter.
But we have two announcements to make.
Number one, we have a Gold Zoom meeting at 3pm.
See you all there.
And we're selling courses.
In case you don't know, we're selling the Trivium.
This is a bundle of courses, but you also can see them individually.
The courses are Foundations of Writing, Foundations of Logic, and Foundations of Rhetoric.
I think they are the courses of Academic Agent.
I don't think I know, basically.
So, definitely check them out.
Check them out.
Right, so...
So, I wanted to sort of explain why Britain is broke, and I wanted to start with a bit of a technical story and explain what it actually means.
The Labour government, Rachel Reeves, in her eternal genius, has decided that she wanted to do And what she wants to do is to force everybody who is on a direct contribution pension fund, it means that you're actually paying into your pension, to actually have that money in mega funds that are at least 25 billion.
But then she also wants to force these pension funds to invest at least a portion of their assets in projects that suit her.
Be it equities in Britain or be it financing infrastructure or perhaps one day buying government debt.
Now, why does this matter?
Because the only responsibility of a fund manager, typically in Britain, of somebody who you give money to manage these assets for you, their only responsibility is to you as a shareholder.
Or to you as a customer whose money is being managed.
That's the extent of it.
They don't have any sort of, you have to do this in the national interest, you have to do this for the sake of the state.
The Chinese do it, and they do it with some success, but they do it actually for the benefit of Chinese citizens, whereas there is a bit of a complicating factor here in that these guys think that they want to save the world.
Go on.
Can I have a question?
So basically what you're saying is she's taking her money.
She's taking the money that you're taking for your retirement.
Exactly.
And she's using it to funds that you don't think are going to give money back.
She's using it.
So they haven't specifically said what they're going to use it for.
Which is not good.
Which is not good.
But they've said that they will gain the right to decide what to use a portion of it.
And the portion they're talking about right now is 10%.
You think 10% is a little, but it's actually a lot because these funds rely on annual returns.
You have to keep growing the fund by a couple of percentage points every year so that by the time you retire, there is enough money saved for you to be able to retire on it.
That's the logic behind it.
So taking any amount of that money is actually a problem.
And there's a market issue here, which is that, you know, if you have a preferred provider that you save that money with, you might prefer to work with a smaller provider for all kinds of reasons.
People might prefer a smaller company that they think they can trust.
She wants to make sure that all of the funds are at least $25 billion.
Why?
Because So in a way, it's easier to impose things on them and it's easier to impose an omerta on them to keep them absolutely silent in case her decisions don't really work out.
So there is a political logic to this here where the state is trying to More fully consolidate over the money that's available.
Now, why do they think that this is necessary?
Well, the reason that they think is necessary is that they can't stop borrowing money.
They keep on spending.
They forecast that they're going to spend a certain amount, and they usually miss it by a billion or a couple of billion pounds.
And it's happening at a rate that is slowly becoming out of control and astronomical.
Their government borrowing, they hit the third highest record in the last fiscal year.
The only two times they exceeded that record was during COVID, when Rishi Sunak just started printing money left and right like a lunatic.
Furlough and all the rest of it.
All of the other insane stuff that came from the COVID lockdowns.
And the previous one was during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, where they were dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 fiscal crisis, financial crisis, which we haven't recovered from since.
So they keep on borrowing more and more money, and they're doing this at a record level now without any kind of crisis.
Like, there's no sort of overarching reason for this.
They just have an agenda, they want to implement it, and they don't care about the consequences.
Now, it's incidental when it comes, it's frequent when it comes with big government, because they want the people to pay, to use their money in ways that support their agenda.
Yes.
They want to limit, in a sense, economic freedom.
And say, I know how I'm going to use your money better than you.
Exactly.
Last week we were talking about the way that the Equalities Act is being applied and how this is forcing everybody to get onto the same wage level.
And this is trying to sort of socially engineer Britain to make sure that everybody is getting paid the same, no matter qualifications, no matter language spoken, no matter capability, etc.
To force this kind of thing is very expensive because it's insane and extremely unnatural and this is not how society actually works.
A healthy society relies on a level of freedom and on a level of individual decision-making.
This has always been the Western tradition.
These guys think that the Western tradition is wrong because it's based on white supremacy.
And so to implement their ideals, they need to spend Absolutely abhorrent amounts of money.
And this has led Britain to having a debt to GDP over 100%.
Now, what's debt to GDP?
How much you borrow in absolute terms, like the dollar amount or the pound amount, is not that important.
What matters is how much you borrow relative to your income.
So if you're paying 50% of your income on debt, you're clearly managing your life extremely badly.
If your borrowing is five times what you've earned, you're clearly managing your life very badly.
The standard EU fiscally responsible level for debt to GDP is 60%.
Now, all of the EU is missing that.
Britain's is at 105%, 106%.
The World Bank data, I haven't looked at the methodology, says 160%.
So it's quite catastrophic.
The number sounds familiar from Greece.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And we saw what happened to Greece.
The unofficial number when you include all of the pensions is closer to 400% of GDP.
When you include the money that is owed for It's 400%.
And this is also comparable to Europe.
This is not a Britain-only story, but we're just using Britain as an example here.
Well, the goal is to crash everyone with debt and say, number one, because we care about the debt-to-GDP ratio.
We want to implement policies that make GDP go up.
Yep.
And there's no course correction when data shows that GDP sometimes doesn't go up.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So basically, they've borrowed an absolutely insane amount of money.
And with all of that, the amount of spending relative to the size of the economy is at a peak.
So they're basically maxing out their spending.
Relative to the size of the economy.
They've never spent that much.
They keep on borrowing more.
And part of the problem that they have is that the debt is growing faster than the GDP is growing.
And the debt is bigger than the size of the budget deficit.
Let me see if I can find the deficit here somewhere.
Anyway, the deficit is around 5 or 6% of GDP.
The growth is around 1% of GDP.
Which means that this 1% of GDP wouldn't even exist if they weren't borrowing money and pumping it into the economy.
So they're borrowing to fund growth, and the growth is below the amount that they're borrowing.
This is crushing the economy because apart from that, there is also the element of increasing taxes.
So if you crush the private sector, if you make everyone who wants to engage in entrepreneurship want to leave, some of them will actually leave.
Sorry, carry on.
Yeah, and crush everyone with debt, the economy is going to be destroyed.
Well, we're going to mention both of these points.
Firstly, this is the sort of amount that they're spending and the amount that they're taxing.
And they expect it to keep going up indefinitely.
And they expect to take more and more money out of the economy.
And secondly, and just as importantly, they're failing to achieve any kind of growth.
So this is called the PMI, the Purchasing Managers Index.
This tells you how much companies are spending and The extent to which they expect the economy to grow.
So it's not a measure of GDP, but it correlates very closely with whether or not there's economic growth.
50 means that it's neutral.
Above 50 means that it's growing.
Under 50 means that it's falling.
And you can see that especially the manufacturing output is falling apart.
So Keir Starmer was attacking Nigel Farage yesterday because Nigel Farage doesn't support British industry and he's a bad guy and Farage, Farage, Farage, Farage.
Well, Keir Starmer's policies obviously are not supporting industry in any way.
And part of the reason that they're not supporting industry is because not just they're pursuing this insane woke agenda of trying to create the utopia of total racial equality, But it's largely to do with net zero and the fact that Britain is paying 50% more for energy costs than Germany and France.
Yes.
I actually, this is something that I previously covered on here about the fact that in particular to the, well, I say steel industry, that the single steelworks in Scunford, but yeah, the energy.
That is required to make steel is owned by Electricité de France.
It's owned by a fully nationalized French energy company.
So the energy prices are entirely dictated by the French state, who obviously love us and have our best interests at heart.
Always have, always will.
Yes.
There's another interesting thing about this article.
I can sort of understand it for France because France has a...
Nuclear.
Yes, exactly.
But it's interesting for Germany because this is a 2024 article, as I saw, and that means basically at least two years after the war in Ukraine started.
Yes.
I think that's all September was being two and a half years.
And Germany based almost all of its energy on cheap Russian gas.
Yep.
So the very fact that in Britain people are paying...
You can thank Theresa May for imposing the net zero mandates and you can thank Ed Miliband for being even crazier.
Britain pays four times more for electricity than the United States.
The United States is doing everything that it can to deregulate.
And to pump more energy to make its energy even cheaper and to make it expensive to produce outside the United States.
Britain wants to sign a free trade deal with the United States with these energy prices.
So there's no way that they can make this work.
And on top of the energy prices, there is the extreme insane regulation that we spoke about.
Last week, that is also paralyzing manufacturing, paralyzing industry, paralyzing pretty much everything.
So they're borrowing more and more.
They're achieving less and less.
And in order to solve their problem, they're seizing the assets that you're supposed to be saving for your retirement and trying to push them into their ideological projects.
So you could easily see them deciding to force your pension providers to put their money into Ed Miliband's harebrained energy schemes.
Or in the NHS, which continuously just isn't.
Or into buying government debt to fund the NHS.
Right.
Which is a void of an institution that money just disappears into with no improvement whatsoever.
Yep.
And they have zero coherence in their plans.
So they were saying that they were going to cut spending and that they were going to sort of have to be financially responsible.
And so they removed this benefit and that benefit and the winter fuel, and they want to make it harder for people to claim benefits and so on.
And they're U-turning on all of this, while at the same time giving pay rises above inflation to the civil service.
Politically, this is wise.
Because their voting constituencies include the civil service.
The civil service is a collection of extremely liberal, extremely progressive left-wingers who all join in the worst kind of groupthink.
And then they have their aging lefties and their benefit claimants and so on that they have to keep paying money to in exchange for their votes.
So they can't actually do the sensible things that are required for them to survive, for the economy to survive, and also survive politically.
The sound economics are very bad politics, especially for the Labour Party, especially for the party of welfare and the party of endless dependence on the state.
And then you look at what they are spending the money on.
There's other, which is the biggest one.
18.3% of government spending is going to healthcare, to the NHS.
Only.
You'd expect it to be more.
I expected it to be more.
Fair enough.
Good news, everyone.
Because we don't think like leftists.
That's why.
Yeah.
And then there are So the benefit costs for people of working age are 10% of their total spending.
Education.
Fair enough.
Good for you.
9%.
But maybe less funding for people studying random disciplines that can't actually do anything productive.
I won't name names.
Almost 10% on paying interest rates.
Paying off the interest on the debt.
So that's quickly becoming a huge expense.
And the more they borrow, the bigger this proportion becomes.
They're okay for now, but it's getting really bad.
Defense, 2.2% of GDP, something like that.
So 4.8% of spending.
And necessary things like transport are 3%.
Public order, another 4%.
So it's mainly being spent on just...
This is the graph that is most terrifying, though.
the total amount of spending that is going to investment, which is what's going to generate future growth, is something close to 0% or 2% out of their total spending.
So the spending that they are making They're just buying votes.
They're just buying votes and buying time.
They're just buying votes and buying time.
And now they want to use private pensions in order to fund the ability to buy votes and buy time.
That's the last genius idea that they have.
Now, if this principle is conceded, if they do get to dictate what do pension pools spend their money on, why should they stop at 10%?
Why not 50%?
Well, this is, you know, I'm no hardcore Thatcherite, but it really is the Margaret Thatcher dictum of, you know, the problem with socialism is eventually run out of other people's money.
100%.
100%.
So if they allow this to go through, it will start at a limited amount, 5%, 10%, whatever it is.
But it will not by any means stop there.
Because these guys, in their minds, they don't have a breaking mechanism.
Evidence doesn't matter.
Reality doesn't matter.
Or they think that the problem is not going to knock their door.
It's going to knock the door of whoever comes after them.
Well, that's the disaster with democracy.
The disaster with democracy is that you think about a five-year time span when the question requires a hundred-year time span.
These kinds of decisions, what are you going to do to provide for your retirement?
What are you going to do to provide for your children?
These are decisions that are taking on a time frame of 30 years, 40 years, 100 years if you're wise.
These people can't think beyond the next election.
Well, this was entirely the case when the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives And I believe it was Nick Clegg who said, oh, well, you know, it'll take 15 years to get it all up.
It's like, well, it's 15 years later now, Nick, and we could really be doing with those nuclear power stations right about now.
Yep, exactly.
And that's 15 years, never mind 100.
They're not green-friendly.
Nuclear is the greenest.
Yes.
But these people are so ideological.
It's hilarious that they think that.
It's true that this is what they believe.
It would be inconvenient for them to acknowledge the cleanliness of nuclear energy, because if you acknowledge that nuclear is by far and away the best option, and you just get the nuclear power stations up, all of a sudden you don't have...
I think there is an explanation in this that it's basic.
I think it's where their survival instinct kicks in because to have nuclear power you need competent people.
They know they're incompetent.
They know the people who support them are incompetent.
So they say best not to go down this route.
Yep, don't touch it.
Don't touch it.
Yeah, it's very short-term thinking.
You can see from Keir Starmer's last press conference that the knives are completely out for him, which means that now they're making their spending decisions based on whether or not there's going to be a leadership challenge and based on the polling and what that means for 2029, not on anything like the kind of timeframe that you need to be thinking about.
If you're investing in infrastructure.
And the starkest example of this is the collapse in investment spending in Britain.
There's no spending on investment from the public sector.
Yeah, it's bloody startling.
I think it's a criticism of the system and of The fact that with a universal franchise, you have a fundamental problem, which is that people can vote for more money for themselves.
And that automatically leads to a broken system.
It's just not sane for people who are dependent on others to be making these kinds of decisions.
And it's not saying to make these decisions with a two-year time frame or a five-year time frame when you should at least be thinking in a 50-year time frame.
And these people are incapable of any long-term thinking.
No, and it's also a case of, you know, when you go back to Starmer's recent rhetoric on all of the immigration stuff, you know, Starmer's saying, well, you know, look at this hand, what this hand is doing, but in fact, if you see what the other hand is doing, you'll see something far more sinister and just as crippling.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, the immigration policy is the ultimate example of short-term thinking.
We think that it might boost GDP by 0.x%, but it will destroy the ability of young people to get jobs because there's alternative labor.
It will increase the pension liabilities because you have people who will become pensioners and rely on the state.
It will destroy social cohesion.
And it will destroy the need for automation, which is what actually underpins labor productivity and therefore wages.
So it's the ultimate in short-term thinking.
And that's all these guys are capable of.
Right.
Should we go to the comments?
Yes, sure.
Right.
So rage quit ninja.
Will this pension...
Sorry.
Okay.
Will this pension policy also apply to SIWP or just auto-enrolled pensions?
I'm not 100% sure.
It depends on what they decide to do with which funds.
But so far, it seems like it's the auto-enrolled direct contribution pensions.
Great.
Okay, so that's a random name.
It says, we don't think like leftists.
That's where you're wrong, Stelios.
You think leftists don't.
That's a random name.
Says also, the problem with democracy is that the system is set up to turn everyone into mercenaries.
The politicians sell out for voters and voters sell out for gibbs.
Is it any wonder that they hate patriotism?
Jobs McGee.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
And we wonder why we shrink.
Exactly.
I'm actually continually fascinated by the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona because it's one of those last buildings in Europe that when it was first starting to be constructed, the people who began the building were like, we're not going to live to see the end of this.
You know, now, oh, if it's not up in two years, a year, we don't want...
We don't want to try.
Never mind generational thinking.
You know, passing on missions and processes to the next generation.
Yeah, 100%.
And Tomrat247 says, It sounds like you agree with me for us when I say Heinleinianism fixes this.
Okay, maybe.
Right, okay.
So, in case you haven't heard, the Wheel of Time TV series has got cancelled.
Now, I don't know what exactly to feel about it.
I feel bittersweet, because on the one hand, a lot of it was atrocious, but on the other hand, I think it means that we aren't getting any adaptation of it in the future.
So, let us get things straight.
The last 25 years, the last quarter of a century, has been described as the golden age of fantasy TV.
And I can think of The Lord of the Rings, which I think is basically the best.
It's the best triplet of movies ever made.
Incredible.
Easily, easily.
For me, it's just top number one.
And we also had the Game of Thrones, which was a really good TV series.
if you make an exception of the fact that the last two series were mostly people just sitting there looking at each other and breaking, and some occasional skirmishes breaking.
And at some point, people...
And I was very skeptical of it from the beginning because as an endeavor, it has several problems of its own.
First of all, it has huge length.
It's 14 books.
I think it spans around more than 11,000 pages.
It's just a huge, a huge...
Okay, it's a huge series.
Something for retirement then for me.
Exactly.
And it's a high fantasy epic series.
And when you want to do something like this, you want the main theme to be the battle between good and evil and the clash between destiny, freedom and duty.
And this is essentially what the books were.
But the people who were involved in making it didn't think so.
They thought that epic is about inclusivity.
And we will say more.
The other problem with turning the Wheel of Time into a series was that it relies a lot on magic.
It has a very sophisticated system of magic, which means that when you're going to try and portray it on the screen, you're going to have many constipated faces.
Faces like this.
And sometimes faces like...
You're going to have weird things here just...
So you're going to have weird visuals.
We also have your other magic visuals here by Rosamund Pike.
She is weaving a spell.
To be fair, it improved as the series got along.
So it was one of those things.
Because I've read the books, I would watch it regardless.
And I would also be the person who would be ranting at every episode.
What are they doing?
You're totally different to me because when The Rings of Power was announced and the interview started to come out, I was like, I'm not even hate-watching this.
I was like, I'm not giving them a second of my time.
So fair play to you.
It's a different approach to things.
Honestly, I think it's my second favourite fantasy series after Lord of the Rings.
Right.
And I just wanted to see it.
But they messed it up.
And the people who were involved in it show the same kind of disassociation with the general public that we see when we're talking about elites and the public.
Right.
They just live in another world.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's actually my birthday.
And it says Prime Video's returning fantasy series sets record-breaking Rotten Tomatoes'score for Season 3. And they're saying basically that this is a huge thing
Since the third season has only just begun, these numbers are bound to change when more episodes are released, but the difference will most likely be minimal.
In any case, the ratings have only improved with each season, with the Tomatometer scoring 81% and 86% for the first and second seasons, and the Popcornmeter scoring 60% and 80% respectively.
This steady rise in ratings implies that there has been a significant leap in the series' overall production, making Season 3 potentially the best one yet.
However, with five episodes still to come, the scale could sway to either side.
And they're saying, basically, as opposed to many fantasy stories that tend to lose momentum over time, I'm reading a lot from this because it's very, very representative of the kinds of mentality these people have, that tend to lose momentum over time, or in the case of many Netflix series that are cancelled before they have the chance to shine, The Wheel of Time certainly defies the norm.
Actually, it didn't.
The show's growing success may lie in the creator's liberty to make some changes to the original story.
Could that be actually the problem why it didn't work?
And following the premiere of the first three episodes on March 13, fans criticized the adaptation for straying from the books.
So we have fans and we have critics.
Critics say this is just a masterpiece.
Fans saying this is deviating a lot from the books.
Many such cases.
Many such cases.
And Rafe Judkins, who is basically the main reason behind this failure, defended it saying, I'm sure it will drive people crazy.
They're supposed to be the people who are going to watch it, by the way.
But there's a reason why we do it.
And that's because we want viewers to emotionally understand the relationship between these characters and how each one affects the other.
So you wanted to do something that just wasn't in the spirit of the books and actually it failed.
And you were making triumphant statements about it.
So, The Wheel of Time cancelled after three seasons.
This is two months afterwards.
Okay.
And basically, they're going to say it's about money.
You see them here saying, it seems that there simply isn't enough money in the show to continue to justify its high-end cost to produce.
Obviously, if a lot of people were watching it, there would be money.
So if they hadn't said, bragged, oh, I'm going to drive the fans crazy, I'm going to drive the people who care about this absolutely insane, there might have gotten a little bit more money and more people would have watched it?
Yeah, most probably.
And they have absolutely zero excuse for doing so.
Capitalism is crazy this way, huh?
It is.
They have absolutely zero excuse for doing so because we live, in a sense, in the golden age of fantasy.
Amazon wants to make money.
Amazon has money.
It's not exactly poor.
So if you failed, the failure is on you.
Exactly.
Okay?
Right.
So let's move on.
So on Rotten Tomatoes, they did have 88%.
In IMDb, it had 7.2%.
So 72. Which, you see, The thing is, though, when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb, I don't trust the ratings anymore because we know from previous cases that they will just shadow ban a whole ton of it, as they did with Rings of Power famously, just erasing negative reviews by the thousands until it averages out at something just...
Exactly.
So it got 7.2 there as a series.
You know, Lord of the Rings, for instance, The Return of the King got 9. 2.1 million ratings.
And that's authentic.
Game of Thrones got 9.0, which I think is...
Well, it's funny, actually.
Just no universal.
Because I, um, So it was even higher.
And then the last season came out and it lost 0.3, just purely off the back of just how...
of all time it's the best TV series of all time the interesting thing with Game of Thrones though as well was that when it first started coming out in 2011 sure you had quite a good choice But we were still in that stage where the streaming services, you know, Netflix and Disney Plus and Amazon Prime, Paramount Plus, all these things didn't exist yet.
And so there was actually a greater concentration of what people watched.
You found more common, you know, between you having your Netflix show that you were into and someone else having their, you know, it was one of those times when Game of Thrones came out, you either were watching it.
Or you knew someone who was watching it, right?
It was kind of the last great TV series that everyone kind of knew something about.
Yeah.
And now...
You want a movie or a series to generate affection.
Yes.
And before the third season, it was even lower.
I think it was somewhere like 6.7 at some point.
So people weren't that much into it, the critics were, and the people who made it.
Now, lots of people are trying to do damage control and point the finger to Amazon and point the finger to many, capitalism and, you know, society at large.
But it had two main problems.
I'll start with...
When you want to do music for one of the most epic depictions of a battle between good and evil, you want it to be absolutely epic.
You don't want it to be meh, epic-ish.
You want it to be absolutely epic.
Or like mock epic, where it's just...
Exactly.
There's not actually much thought put into it.
So think of Howard Shore's score for Lord of the Rings.
Yes.
Best music for a movie ever made, hands down.
No, probably.
Right?
Okay, but also think Game of Thrones.
It's a catchy tune.
You hear it.
You want to hear it again.
You want to hear it when you exercise.
You want to hear it when you want to be motivated.
It boosts you.
It boosts your morale.
It makes you think of battle and glory in the battlefield.
You're weightlifting to the Game of Thrones.
Yes, exactly.
And then put some Two Stairs from Hell.
Remixes.
Yeah, exactly.
This is what it should do.
So the music, it wasn't necessarily bad, but it highlighted the mysterious aspect of the series, which was there.
It was a very good part of the books.
But at the end of the day, you want this to be epic.
And it wasn't epic.
When you have an epic fantasy novel, epic fantasy series, you want it to be about epic themes.
You don't want it to be about LGBTQ presentation.
So, I'll say there were two main problems with the agenda, which was the basic problem there.
And I will say this.
The agenda is a huge issue for me because it's not diverse casting that's an issue with me.
The issue is forced diverse casting.
I'll give you just One example There was a comedy With Jim Carrey I think God for Who was playing Who was God for Yeah.
Morgan Freeman was playing God.
At the time, this wasn't communicated as an issue of woke.
I didn't hear anyone saying anything about it.
I think actually he was really good at the time.
It was one of those times where every second trailer at the cinema had a Morgan Freeman movie.
You kind of wanted him, wanted to see him anywhere.
When you say he really is omnipresent.
Right.
I was just going to say, the thing with Freeman with that as well is that I feel like so much of the reason why he felt like an appropriate casting was because of the text, the richness of his voice.
You know, he had a voice that you just wanted to listen to.
It was so smooth.
It was so, you know, and, you know, it has a very wise sound to it.
So I feel like the voice was one of the main things.
So I don't think that it's so much diverse casting per se.
It's the force.
It's the message.
It's the rumming down your throat.
But also there are times where it's just inappropriate to have a diverse cast in any sense.
Yeah, you don't want an Irish peasant to play Obama.
Well, actually I do.
Right, okay.
So I'll talk a bit about the casting, but then talk to you about Rave Judkins, the showrunner and the philosophy behind it, because I think they made some good choices in casting, some choices that were incomprehensible.
but we are gonna move forward to things that are, you know, a bit more severe and show huge failures of the show.
So there were some good, And I'll use the fandom website because it shows fan art as it develops through the years.
And you can see sort of the fan art depiction of characters and the actors that were chosen and the actresses that were chosen for this.
So here we have Randall Thor who was essentially the chosen one.
He's the person who is essentially going to lead the last battle.
Okay.
And the Wheel of Time is a universe in which time is cyclical.
You have seven ages.
And every time, you know, there's a sort of defeat of the good versus evil.
And the bad one is being imprisoned.
But then the seals of the bad one are weakening.
And then the bad guy's influence over the world.
It sounds a bit simplistic.
I'm following it.
Is increasing.
And then all the bad forces.
Essentially, it's like a cyclical view of history.
Fair enough.
Seven times within a universe.
Okay.
Right, so here is The Chosen One, essentially Randall Thor.
And here's the actor who they chose to portray him, which I think is a good pick, at least the way he seems.
Looks like faithful to fan art.
Then we have The Baddest Witch.
Okay.
Not with a B?
No.
Lanfear.
She's essentially one of the 13 forsaken.
They're basically the officers of the ultra-bad force.
And she is in love with him.
And she was essentially a very beautiful woman, but also very powerful.
And she had a soft spot for him, which was her weakness in a sense, because she didn't want to kill him.
Right.
Because she wanted to basically control him.
Is she like a femme fatale Morgana?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think the casting choice was really good.
You can sort of see how this is the case.
She was a good pick, and also she was playing well.
Fair enough.
Now, we also had Ishamma, one of the bad guys, who gives here some He was good.
and he gives some Persian vibes.
And now I'm going to talk about...
And I think it's Avienda.
Avienda is one of the three women of the chosen one.
It sounds sexualized, but it actually wasn't sexualized because the three women represent something.
And he was more of a person who just wanted to be left alone.
He didn't want to have a harem, essentially.
Okay.
So Avienda is portrayed like this.
She's one of the Aeels.
She is ginger-haired.
She's basically like Amber Valletta.
You know Amber Valletta?
Who?
No idea what you're talking about.
Samson, could you please show us Amber Valletta?
yeah, Samson is going to do this.
Is this someone from the same...
Yeah, okay.
Okay, she may be a bit old for the cast, but that's the type of person you are looking for.
That's the type of...
And here we have this depiction, so wouldn't you say that that would be her?
Okay.
Yes.
No, it wasn't.
It was actually her.
Now, I don't want to be unfair.
It's not unprecedented that characters who don't look like how they're depicted in series and books have done a good job.
Example, Idris Elba in The Ganslinger, one of the very few characters.
Right, I've not seen that either.
Just atrocious.
Idris Elba was one of the very few good things.
But Stephen King has said that when he was writing it, he was thinking of Clint Eastwood.
So if you are a fan of the Dark Tower series, such as I am, you are reading the novels thinking of someone like Clint Eastwood.
But Idris Elba did a good job.
It was still too early.
We don't know if she did a good job or not.
But the point is...
That was forced.
It was forced because it was integrated into a very forced narrative that was just...
Also, I don't remember her being a lesbian.
And you see here Elaine and Avienda, they're also women of The Chosen One, by the way.
He has a thing.
Yeah, they made the women of the trozos.
Yeah.
In the original, there was no sexual interest.
And then in the series, they made the wise women to be lesbians.
Okay, wait, wait, wait.
As a way of saying wisdom is lesbian?
Let me rephrase it a bit.
Let me rephrase it a bit.
So in the books, and this is what has angered many fans, is you already have a diverse set of characters.
Okay.
Because it involves massive world building.
It's world building at a whole new scale.
Right.
You have tens of kingdoms.
Okay.
So you already have a diverse set of characters.
You have all sorts of Okay.
Basically a queendom.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
So they didn't need to touch anything.
All they had to do was just stick to the books, but they didn't.
Right.
But not at the extent that they did it.
Right.
So you see here Elaine, who was actually a good casting choice for this character.
And at the end, they're looking at each other.
You'd expect them to just say things to each other and be friends.
But actually, they were about to get it on.
Right.
Okay.
So we have here Avienda in the fandom character.
They created a special wiki thing here with the LGBTQ plus flag.
That's atrocious.
Yeah, so you see Just hover over where it says six more.
Where?
At the top sentence, where it says, "Oh, well, it said something like there was a particular There you go.
LBGT plus...
Yeah, and you see here saying, someone said here, the Nerdist, the Wheel of Time TV series fixed some of the book's major issues with women characters.
There weren't that many.
So, I want to say something.
So, I really despise the fact that they took one of the greatest fantasy epic novels.
Right.
It has sold more copies than the Game of Thrones series, than A Song of Ice and Fire.
The fanbase was there.
It has sold more than 100 million copies.
They didn't have to touch anything.
They didn't have to touch anything.
All they had to do was stick to the book.
A very successful and good franchise that existed.
Yes.
And then DEI did to death.
Absolutely.
And I really dislike the fact that they made it about You have women in places of power, and they are trying to control him.
This doesn't necessarily mean that it's, you know, anti-male.
There are elements of that universe, and these women who are anti-male, essentially, to say that men shouldn't use the power because last time that they used it, it was tainted.
And it broke the world and it was destroyed.
So that's there, but you can also see, you don't have to see it that way at large.
You can also see it as powerful people trying to control exceptional individuals.
So you're arguing that they needed nuance and that they needed subtlety and they needed to respect the tradition.
I'm saying that it's a massive epic.
It's a massive epic.
It involves massive world building.
Already involves an organically diverse set of characters.
Some of them are anti-male, some of them are pro-male, some of them are anti-female, some of them are pro-female, something, whatever.
But that's organic.
Woken has destroyed it because it tried to mess with it without even having to by enforcing a top-down vision.
Well, this is always, if I may, what constantly comes up.
This word, fixed.
Oh, well, we fixed it.
And, you know, because that fundamentally obviously implies that there was some great flaw, you know, in the original work.
You know, you always get this with Tolkien.
It's like, well, you know, Tolkien's world was wonderful, but we fixed it with diversity.
It's like, no, it...
Well, one, that implicitly implies that homogeneity is in itself an evil and a flaw that needs to be fixed, which it doesn't.
But second of all, it also implies that You have ideology.
But you don't have creative ideas.
And so it just comes down to using other people's more successful work as a vehicle for your own ideology until you just run it into the ground in three seasons.
Exactly.
And it's just about epic fantasy.
You want to see epic themes, epic battle.
You don't want people to mess it and make it about identity politics.
Speaking of which, I asked Google Germany how many gay characters were there in the Wheel of Time series.
I read it about a decade ago.
I don't remember if throughout these 11,600 pages at some point there was a place I missed where there was a massive orgy or something.
My memory may fail me occasionally, but it says here, Google Gemini, the representation of gay characters in the Wheel of Time series differs between the original books by Robert Jordan and the adaptation.
And it says essentially in the books, Robert Jordan included various instances of same-sex relationships.
So there were there.
It didn't have to touch anything.
When were these first starting to be written?
In the 90s?
I think the first one was published in 1990.
Okay.
Primarily among women, often referred to as pillow friends.
Yeah, okay.
I hope they haven't shown any scene of them biting pillows or something.
Okay, sorry.
These relationships are common, especially among the Aes Sedai.
They're essentially the witch class and are generally accepted with the cultures depicted.
However, some fans have noted that Jordan's portrayal of these relationships could be seen as somewhat vague or not explicitly queer in the modern sense, sometimes implying there were a phase or present which men weren't available.
To keep each other occupied.
So you see here that they sort of, in the Amazon Prime series, the show has significantly expanded and made more explicit the LGBTQ plus representation, drawing in hints from the books and making them central to certain characters'arcs.
They have polyamorous relationships, and they are talking about general acceptance of queerness.
The show's creators have stated that homophobia, does not exist as a societal problem in the world of Wheel of Time.
There was zero reason to change it.
Just leave it.
This also fundamentally comes down to a consistent pattern that you get with these fantasy series and the way...
I think just shows in general, to be honest, where you get this expansion of queerness, whatever you want to call it, because fundamentally it's not about...
You're not looking at, even though I don't know the series, you're not looking at Wheel of Time, its stances on morality, its stances on good and evil and going...
In fact, what you're doing is those heroes need to be more like me.
Yes.
There's a vanity and a self-narcissism to it that's really corrosive.
And to speed up a bit, it says, in summary, while the books had several implied or subtly depicted lesbian relationships and a few explicitly gay male characters introduced later in the series, the TV adaptation has significantly increased and foregrounded queer representation, particularly for central characters and etc.
So that's the issue.
They...
And you see here, this is Rave Judkins, the showrunner, who says, diversity and representation expands inclusivity while staying true to the world's richness.
And here we have an article from Hollywood Reporter saying that the show is expanding the queer universe, and that was all they wanted to do, essentially.
So, at the end of the day, in a nutshell, I'll summarize.
What they did, what they had to do was do nothing, stick to the books.
The books were perfect.
They were epic.
Instead of focusing and highlighting upon the epic thing, they highlighted about their political agenda.
And the fan base was there.
It has sold more copies than the Game of Thrones series.
There are millions of people who wanted to watch it.
But somehow they didn't watch it.
So to the people who are involved in the production of this show, keep being in your bubble that you destroyed a lovely fantasy series.
And I hope this doesn't mean that the fantasy genre is going to completely turn its back to the Wheel of Time.
Well, in 15 years we'll get a remake, won't we?
I hope so.
So the hapsification says the Elder Scrolls also have an epic theme.
The Engaged Few says, I love how someone who couldn't write a pithy limerick with a gun to their head thinks they can fix perceived problems that are known only to them.
And again, that's a random name.
Says, you should have shown the scene of a pregnant woman fighting in a war while giving birth.
I've worked with women going into labor at the hospital.
They can't do backflips, even with magic.
Lol.
Right, so are we going to talk about Harry Potter now?
We are, alright.
So, as I'm sure everyone's heard at this point, HBO are remaking the Harry Potter series less than two decades after the original films came out, because what are new ideas anyway?
But ultimately, this is, well, on the face of it, regardless of how it was going to turn, I was against this from the start.
If only for the reason that, as I say, it's not good to be recycling ideas, especially that soon.
If you want to do it in 50 years...
Maybe an argument could be made.
But, you know, it's one of those things that, you know, I remember being a child and going to see a Harry Potter film became almost an annual occurrence, you know, and you go with your family and, you know, especially those early ones, those Christopher Columbus ones, they had a real warm, childlike, you know, whimsy to them.
And then, of course, they got darker as they went on.
But fundamentally, one of the things that was most important about the Harry Potter film And this is me speaking as not the greatest Harry Potter fan.
Like, it's fine.
I personally wouldn't consider it to be one of the all-time greats, but I would consider it to be the last great story to come from old Britain, to come from old England, that feels like it was a part of...
the mythos, the continuum of narrative storytelling from the heritage of what had come from before it in the parochial sense of what life was like for the British Isles, right?
You get this in the sense that obviously, J.K. Rowling, you know, Scottish author, and you know, but all of the aesthetics of Harry Potter are just dripping with British architecture It's like Oxford for wizards.
You know, everything about it is exclusive and everything about it is based upon the idea of excellence.
Right.
So, and all down to the characters in it, you know, you've got characters like Hermione Granger.
And let's face it, growing up in England at school, we all knew a girl who was just like Hermione Granger.
you know, that prissy, teacher's pet, hot, you know, sort of, but, but.
*laughter*
Or maybe my school days were just particularly bad.
But also in terms of the enchanted nature of it.
You've got elves and goblins and trolls.
And these are all mythical creatures.
totally lifted out of the European, you know, pagan European, you know, foundations.
And so it's, and one of the most important things I would say was the fact that,
And very famously, this led to the American actor, of course, Robin Williams, not being cast, even though he was obviously a titan of Hollywood at the time.
He was barred from being a part of it because he was American, which is, of course, Enormously based.
So it's interesting to see as well that there's a quote here from the casting director at the time, Janet Hershenson, and she says, The only British rule was so important that Robin Williams was even turned down to play Hagrid, and that Robin had called Columbus because he really wanted to be in the movie, but there was this British-only edict on it.
This says two things.
One, that even very early in her career, J.K. Rowling had enough bargaining power over her own creative material to be able to make that demand of Hollywood and for them to actually go along with it.
And it also speaks to, on some level, her loyalty, her love of Britain, that she was interested in Harry Potter feeling as authentically British as possible.
And so, naturally, we were all wondering what the next chapter would be like.
And then we heard this.
HBO says Harry Potter series will benefit from J.K. Rowling's involvement after committing to inclusive, diverse casting.
Mamma mia, here we go again.
Go woke, go broke.
Right This is just Well I don't No, I think that it will just soldier on for as long as it takes and get through the cycle.
Because I feel like a bit like with Rings of Power, whatever happens, however bad it actually is, it would be a greater defeat to cancel it than it would be to admit that you were wrong and that actually people don't want this, right?
the ideological battle is more important.
Unfortunately, yes, for now.
Although I am trying my best to change that, personally.
I've been writing letters every week.
Angry letters to Amazon.
And so, naturally, the castings started to come out.
And this is the most recent one, and what prompted me to do this, that you had the casting of Hermione, Harry, and Ron.
And, of course, one of them is a little bit different.
Also, one of them doesn't wear glasses.
Isn't Harry Potter supposed to wear glasses?
Well, I'm sure he'll wear glasses for the actual thing.
Let's not be petty now.
There's more than enough criticism.
That was when I saw the link.
Yes.
And then, of course, they've essentially race-swapped Hermione.
Now, obviously I don't know what this particular girl's heritage is.
Is she Spanish?
Is she Mediterranean?
Is she a little bit Arabic?
I can't tell.
And I don't know enough about her.
And also, fundamentally, I want to make it clear that I'm not going to start dunking and being mean.
To a small child.
Right.
You know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, this is a girl who's grown up in Britain, probably loved the books, you know, grown up with the books as, you know, her mum probably watched the films and then she's read the books to her, whatever it may be.
And as far as this girl's concerned.
And so I'm not going to lay blame at a child.
I am going to lay blame at the casting director, and I am going to lay blame at J.K. Rowling for licensing it in the first place, but this is not something...
You know, Britain's just more diverse than it was back in the 90s when all of this was going on.
And so, yeah, what is a race swap here and there?
And so fundamentally, it comes down to this thing where even J.K. Rowling herself, and I've just got these slightly out of chronology, but when the stage sequel thing, which I didn't go see, came to the West End, this was the new Hermione.
And at the time, J.K. Rowling got very defensive, very defensive about this casting.
She said, I had a bunch of racists telling me that because Hermione turned white, that is, lost colour from her face, this is a passage from the book in Prisoner of Azkaban where it remarks on, It says, the loss of colour from her face after a shock, that she must be a white woman, which I have a great deal of difficulty with, but I decided not to get too agitated about it and simply state quite firmly that Hermione can be a black
woman, with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm.
And so it's one of those things that, look, if that's the case and you're saying, look, That's one thing, even though I don't like it.
But what I will not tolerate...
she was white as well.
She was British because it's one of those things.
For an author writing in the 1990s, Right?
It was, you know, Britain was much more homogenous back in the 90s than it is now.
And of course you would have just cast the protagonists of your British novel as actual British people.
I think it goes to the essence of the project, which is that the past isn't real.
The present is great, and it was always this, and what you think is the past just isn't real.
So there is this ongoing falsification of memory and falsification of history.
I think they had a Black Anne Boleyn or something like that?
Yes, they did.
Which is just hilarious in the magnitude of untruth, but quite nefarious in the fact that they're trying to reinvent a completely new history.
This is what ends up rubbing people the wrong way, I suspect.
Not only was there a political project to foist an experiment on the public that nobody asked for, but there is also the attempt to impose the narrative that it was always thus, and it is good, and you're a bigot for noticing.
You haven't seen Britain change in front of your eyes for decades?
No, no, no, you haven't.
I mean, I came here 20 years ago, and I noticed an insane change, and a very extreme one, and it's not for the best.
So this is what rubs people the wrong way.
It's not, oh, well, this poor little child, and everybody's going to say, oh, you people are attacking a child.
No, absolutely not.
What's being discussed is a project to falsify history and to falsify reality.
And to insist that the experiment was a success in the face of all of the evidence.
Also, I think fantasy fiction, and I don't know if Harry Potter technically counts as fantasy fiction, but it counts definitely.
Maybe not epic fantasy, but it counts as fantasy.
A lot of it is escapism.
We want to read fantasy fiction, watch fantasy TV, fantasy series, because we can sort of escape the world around us, which contains stuff sometimes that we just don't like.
All this, the DEI stuff in the genre, all this is doing is ruining the escapism thing.
Yes.
Because it's the forced nature of it.
Yes.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
in a way it's a deliberate let me rub your nose in it yeah you are not allowed I can't remember.
It might have been Jack Straw, but I might have been...
Right, okay.
I'm not sure.
But there is definitely this element of...
And it happens in video games and it happens in television and everything that they can get their hands on.
Yes, you're not allowed to escape.
We're in control.
We're in charge.
We're going to impose this on you.
And if it feels forced, it's because it is.
Absolutely.
But one other thing that I think is worth considering is that you have to get into the mind.
Regrettably.
Of these HBO executives.
I know, it's a scary place.
But you have to get it.
You have to just go with it.
Okay.
You have to go with it.
The thing is that as far as they're concerned, they are just going to look at Britain, go, wow, it's more diverse, you know, 30 years on than when these original films were made.
We just need to reflect modern Britain.
We need to reflect Britain as it is now.
And it's not fair.
to gatekeep all of these minorities out of this very, you know, hang on.
And you have to understand as well that fundamentally, even though we, you know, as Europeans and as people who fundamentally want to reverse mass immigration, reverse the damage that it has done to our society, there is no reason on earth why we should expect some Hollywood executive not to think that the permanent demographic state of European countries is not going to be a permanent state of affairs.
Right.
Right.
Why would some Hollywood mogul ever think that...
Or that, you know, we're going to at least, you know, stop the boats or just reverse the Boris wave.
Any of these sorts of things.
They're not paying attention to that.
They find it inconceivable.
And the reason that they find it inconceivable is because it's totally contrary to their idea of progress.
because progress and diversity in their minds are inexplicably linked.
I don't understand why I would want...
It's escapism.
It's a story.
That's it.
More than that, the purpose of art is to create something that is timeless.
And so if what you're doing is merely replicate the present, that's not art, that's photography.
Which is not quite the same thing.
So they don't have a notion of anything timeless or anything eternal, including the nation, including normalcy, including the family.
These conceptions don't exist in their minds.
What exists in their minds is just, you know, current year.
And what current year says is what you should always believe, and we are in the eternal year zero.
That's the nature of the mindset that animates these kinds of decisions.
So it's not, you know, I like this actor, I don't like this actor.
You can be of any race and be a wonderful actor.
Fine.
But Ryan Gosling is not going to play Mandela.
And it only goes one way, and that becomes jarring.
You know, I say this as a Mediterranean person, you know, it's not.
You know, I fit in in multiple cultures and multiple places.
I don't care.
But there is something when you...
If you were poking black people constantly, I would find it annoying and insensitive and unnecessary.
And if you were poking white people constantly, I would find it annoying and unnecessary and just...
So that's what I think people find most insulting about this.
There's no sense that this is something timeless.
There's no sense that this is art.
There's no sense that this is supposed to provide an escape.
There's no respect for any kind of tradition.
Every tradition must be diversified because this is what we must believe today and these are the requirements of year zero.
End of discussion.
And a story fundamentally cannot belong to a particular people.
That's the assumption, right?
Yes.
You see this with, You see this with Little Mermaid.
But Tolkien is an even better example.
Because Tolkien fundamentally wrote The Lord of the Rings for the English people.
You can't have that.
Tolkien has to become accessible to the entire world.
It has to become accessible to...
you know, universal audiences and they think that the only way that can happen, despite the fact that Lord of the Rings was enormously successful all over the world on its own terms, that the only way that can come to be is by making it look like the entire world.
When in fact what people, as I said at the beginning, loved about Harry Potter, the reason why, you know, whenever you go to King's Cross Station, Yes.
They loved the fact that it felt authentic, that it didn't feel like a corporately decided decision-making process that currently follows, as you say, just modern fads and trends based on where we are at now.
And so let's go to Snape.
Because, obviously, again, I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I do know that Snape was regarded as one of the most complex, the most well-recognized characters of the series.
And, of course, he was given an extraordinarily memorable performance by Alan Rickman.
you know, the great Alan Rickman.
And so even though I wasn't willing to dunk on a child, I am more than fair game at dunking on grown-ups and adults.
So this is one of the things that I wanted to address.
Because when it comes to adult actors, then all of a sudden it becomes a question of, okay, you're not a child.
You actually know whether or not a part was made with you in mind.
Or whether or not you're...
And this is something that I've seen many, many comments online with a lot of people.
Those people saying, look, I'm not racist.
It's just this isn't what the character was envisaged as.
This is what they're saying.
Here's what comes to my mind.
I think Jack Nicholson refused a role in The Godfather.
Because he was of the opinion that it should go to an Italian actor.
I'm not sure.
I think it was The Godfather.
Right.
I think it was The Godfather.
And so Jack Nicholson said, no, I'm Irish or whatever Jack Nicholson is.
And this should actually go to an Italian actor.
So these guys have been so marinated in this.
And Hollywood has been woke-ish for a long time.
And it's only peaked in recent years.
But this has been going on for decades now.
So these guys are marinated in this mindset.
What frustrates people, understandably so, is when things go only one way.
Again, there is never going to be a sort of white guy playing Nelson Mandela.
It will never happen.
But if I could just eliminate something on that point, to go to your Jack Nicholson example.
You see, I personally would consider that to be unnecessary.
I agree.
Because you can at least change your accent and have, you know, you can characterise yourself as Italian, right?
Whereas with something like, and we also don't want to fall into a trap with, you know, because you get this a lot, because you have to bear in mind as well that the acting world, the theatre world, they see themselves as the vanguard.
Yes.
Of progress, right?
These people genuinely think that they are the changes of the world.
The dreamers of dreams.
The dreamers of dreams.
And the music men, yeah.
And fundamentally, they see just all of these barriers, you know.
So then when you get something like Shakespeare, it doesn't matter if Cassius in Julius Caesar is suddenly played by a woman.
It doesn't matter if Hamlet, young, vital Hamlet, is played by an 80-year-old man.
You know, all these sorts of things.
Like, all of a sudden, does any casting actually matter anymore?
Does anything actually feel like it belongs or it should?
Because it's obviously, to act is to visually represent something.
And if you're not representing something convincingly, then, and this is the case with him, look, he might be a very talented actor, but does he visually look like the character?
As it was originally intended.
Does it allow you to slip into the world that was being created in those books and to actually have an immersive experience without being constantly reminded that there is an agenda that is being imposed?
And there's always the mistrust that comes with forced diversified acting, which is that Once you know that this is imposed diversity, you will not trust it because you will not trust that it was done in the same way.
Any film by Morgan Freeman doesn't have that problem because you know that Wesley Snipes, Morgan Freeman, whoever, these are great actors.
Like The Blade, you know.
We put him in the same category.
I mean, he's been in other films, whatever.
So it doesn't really matter because you trust that this is going to be whatever the role is, it's going to suit him.
Yes.
Whereas here, because you know it's forced, for all I know, this guy might turn out to be a great actor.
For all I know, he might be wonderful.
I mean, I'm never going to watch a Harry Potter film.
I haven't done it and I won't start.
However, for all I know, he could be a great actor.
But every time you look at it, you're going to be, is he really?
I know why you're there.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what makes it annoying.
Right.
So I'll just come towards the end of this then.
So he actually ended up being one of the actors who signed an open letter supporting trans rights.
Snape appearance, by the way.
Yeah, yeah, this is.
After the British Supreme Court decided to just acknowledge reality.
And that men and women exist.
Snape wore necklaces and gold watches.
So is this basically J.K. Rowling being made to repent for being realistic about sex?
So J.K. Rowling went on to say, you know, in view of this, she said, I don't have the power to fire an actor from the series, and I wouldn't exercise it if I did.
I don't believe in taking away people's jobs or livelihoods for holding legally protected beliefs that differ from mine.
Absolutely fine.
Totally understandable.
But I would just draw to the end on this particular point, which is that J.K. Rowling is probably the most famous TERF in the world.
And the entire crux of her argument relies on the fact that, look, there is just something immutable about being born a woman, in the same way that there is a man.
You are born it, and then based on that, you either are the thing, or you are not.
Why can she not do the same for a British person, right?
All of a sudden...
So, sex is this great immutable thing that can never be changed.
But in this, look, JK, he's not British.
I'm sorry.
I know he was born here, but fundamentally, he's not British.
And this is one of those things where I get very wound up with the TERFs, because they seem to only really care about things that personally affect them.
And she's not being considerate of the fact that in doing this, she is essentially bastardising the vision.
Of her own work?
Oh, she's an eternal liberal.
She will always be a liberal.
Yes.
It won't change that, but it's just that there was one issue that she objected to and that was it.
Exactly.
And good for her for objecting, but I think any kind of expectation from somebody in that world is just, you know, don't expect anything from them.
Yes, that's it.
So, the Harry Potter series is going to come out.
I'm very sorry if it ruins it for a lot of people.
I won't be watching it for myself, but for those of you that do, let me know how it is.
Right, okay, so let's go to read the comments.
The engaged few.
Robin Williams was forbidden to participate because his accent in Mrs. Doubtfire qualified as a hate crime.
Okay, so Ryan rambles 1993.
Hermione getting cold, mudblood will be interesting.
I think that's a term in Harry Potter.
Yes, I didn't want to say it on air, in the segment, but yes, fair enough.
That's a random name, says in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Arian.
Thanks to his mudblood, Snape was able to use the forbidden curse that starts with N to kill Dumbledore.
Truly tragic but not unexpected.
The hapsification says, look when an outsider views England with movies like Castle in the Sky.
Miyazaki came to England and Wales.
He also saw and witnessed the miners' strike in the 80s.
Right, okay, and that's a random name again.
No amount of polyjuice potions will ever make a woman Malfoy, said Hermione the Turf before punching him in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Auschwitz.
All stupendous comments.
Okay, so do we have beautiful videos?
Yeah, we do.
Let's play the first one.
It is ironic that Carl made a video about being concerned about AI, and then a day later admits on the podcast using it to get information.
Now, I called it years ago that folks would use AI as some sort of perverted oracle of science.
I still remember when I had to teach ChatGBT the phrase, the lady doth protest too much, me thinks.
Remember, AI only works by giving the statistically most likely answer, making it actually sophisticated statistics.
Yep.
That's a lovely place you're building.
Yeah, very cool.
Let's go to the next one.
Sophie.
Before panicking over AI, it's worth noticing that it still can't do everything.
I mean, look, they are looking at each other.
AI actually can't do that, as well as just drawing the same character multiple times from There are plenty of stuff it cannot do well at the moment.
But I think at the end of the day, I don't know, I'm not as pessimistic as other people are because if we bear history in mind...
I'm just ready for the Wittlerian Jihad.
Nice.
Let's play the next one.
Good morning, a lot of suitors.
Hope all the Americans had an excellent Memorial Day weekend.
It's a shame my neck of the woods only shows up in the news when leftists continue to ruin everything.
Watch out for local DAs not pressing any charges.
This is far more important than arrests.
Anyways, with a break in the rain, some friends of mine and I hiked up to Snoqualmie Lake about an hour and a half away from Seattle.
There weren't a ton of individual things to take pictures of, but the whole hike was gorgeous, with the lake as the cherry on top.
Take care, y 'all.
Beautiful.
Stunning.
Thanks, man.
You're sending us really beautiful pictures, so thank you.
Very wholesome.
Let's play the next one.
No longer my town.
Brutal.
Brutal.
Sorry.
Let's play a video by Zesty King.
Bad!
Fuck!
It's it!
The battering ram.
They have hot oil they're gonna throw.
What a siege.
This man sitting there at the back is like, you know, this was supposed to be my day off.
You know what they're going to do, aren't they?
In the end, they're going to ask him to do it.
You know when a woman just has to go to open the jar.
It's going to be like, can you just...
Let's go to the next one.
I've been seeing this weird trend of liberals trying to say that, oh, the founding fathers would have never stood for crushing their enemies.
And I'm thinking, they...
Same thing they did to the Native Americans in that period also.
And let's not forget that, like, the reason Nova Scotia has loads of black people is because the black soldiers had to flee up there or else they'd be re-enslaved by the Founding Fathers.
Not to say they were evil, but they were men of their time, and there's this weird trend of pretending that they were, like, Jesus Christ.
It's exactly what you're talking about.
The ideology of today being retrofitted to every single thing you could imagine.
No, the Boston Massacre was the least massacry massacre of all time.
Yes.
And the American Revolution was entirely, you know, unfounded.
It was fiery, but mostly peaceful.
Let's go to some Westerns video.
In his video "Why intellectuals are effing idiots" Mark Manson correctly points out that intellectuals construct models based on rigid measurements and analysis and when confronted with reality they double down on these models even though it's obvious that they fail to account for certain outcomes and are impractical.
Just textbook ideological thinking.
Whenever theory clashes with facts, reject the facts.
Yep.
Let's go to the next one.
Welcome back to the Gun Channel of the Lotus Eaters.
In yesterday's Akkad Daily, Carl went over a call to blunt kitchen knives by one of the victims of the Southport stabbing and pointed out correctly that she was trying to render the world around her harmless in order to feel safe and that this was impractical.
he didn't really go into the fact that it is also immoral.
Harmlessness is not a state that a man should voluntarily let himself be Yes, very true.
Absolutely.
Very true.
Absolutely.
Completely true.
Next one by Thane Scotia Swindon.
I know I usually submit silly content or niche, but not necessarily groundbreaking, political observations, but I saw this recently and I thought it'd be nice to share instead.
I got into Zuby's music and content following his release of OK Dude and the ripples that caused in the Cultural War, and he's always been a daddist in his philosophy.
A couple of days ago, I saw this announcement from him, and I'm genuinely happy for the guy.
I can't send him a personal message to say congratulations because I'm not verified, but if you are, go and tell him that he's the man.
Oh my God, lads.
Aren't you going to give him a cheer?
Ha ha ha ha.
The greatest TV show of all time.
Sharp.
Bar none.
Next one.
Okay, so let's go to some comments.
And we can take a few extra minutes, Samson.
Yep, great.
So, do you want to read comments from us?
Yeah, sure.
From Brian Tomlinson, regarding high energy costs in the UK, on-street EV charging is up to double the price of petrol.
EV charging is now so profitable that BP and Shell now operate EV charging only on their forecourts.
Home EV charging equals 7.9p per kilowatt hour.
Public EV charging up to 95p per kilowatt hour.
What?
That expensive?
As with COVID lockdowns, we live in a two-tier society.
A big house with a large garden and off-street parking is only available for the wealthiest among us.
The rest of us are second-class citizens.
Yeah, absolutely.
Also from Brian, I can confirm that thousands if not tens of thousands of wealthy Londoners have left the UK.
Yes, absolutely.
Sir Keir wanted to tax all their overseas profits, so they all disappeared overseas.
Another case of ideological bureaucrats not understanding that people like to spend their own money and not give it to scabby LSE graduates to spend on Marxist claptrap.
Labour have reduced their growth and our GDP per capita because money has flown to Dubai, Singapore, etc.
Can't agree more.
It's all extremist ideology.
Yes.
dirty belter if we cut off the end of this rug and sew it onto the other end will have made the rug longer this way of thinking will doom all who adopt it you can't borrow your way out of incompetence inefficiency or debt yes so true yeah Incorrigible frog.
I made the mistake of looking at my annual tax summary last year.
Yeah, man.
According to HMRC, 11.1% of all the tax I paid was spent on national debt interest alone.
This country is cooked.
That is very much an enormous long-term problem.
AZ Desert Rat.
The British government's poor planning does not constitute a financial emergency on the part of its citizens.
Correct.
Lord Inquisitor Hector Rex.
What a name.
I love this name.
Okay.
Have we considered turning the NHS off for one day?
Imagine the many.
Right.
You know, it's going to happen.
They can't keep the NHS.
It's going to break.
Right.
Sophie Liv, I'm going to be extra careful.
For some reason in modern Hollywood, new scriptwriters and directors are actually explicitly told not to engage with the source material and research it.
So they can make the new show their own thing.
What a horrible thing if the new show is just too close to the source material, huh?
And yeah, one of the new Harry Potter writers has also outright said he didn't read the books and Warner Brothers itself told him not to.
So yeah, that explains a lot, sadly.
You had this with the Witcher series where the producers got really angry with Henry Cavill for being like a fan of the source material and wanting to try to do it.
But also, there are rumours of NDAs They tell them that if you want to be involved, these are things that you are not allowed to do.
Anyway, Omar Awad says, Drawing from a tainted source only leads to madness and ruin.
Yeah, like in the book.
There's a certain irony in feminists tainting one of the most pro-women series ever written.
Absolutely.
Daniel Butchers.
Of course, they had to change it.
The wood is basically ruled by backstabbing, screaming women who need a man to save them.
This is the great flaw they saw in the story.
Arizona doesn't rat.
How much you want to bet none of the critics have read the books and all the fans have read the books?
Yeah, I'm actually going to bet a lot on it.
If the critics haven't read the books, they're not going to know what they're missing in praising the show.
Anne E. Moss.
If you like the novels and fantasy, you should be happy Wheel of Time was cancelled.
Perhaps next time they might actually want to follow the source material, instead of working on driving away the millions of people who like the books, which is why the IP was This is one of the main reasons why wokeness needs to be completely stopped.
Because so long as wokeness exists, will of time will not be readapted.
We need to hammer the message that the reason why it failed was wokeness, which is true.
Lord Inquisitor Hector Rex, I salute you.
Okay, now for all the magic casters, remember to not use the toilet before your seams to ensure you have the right facial expression when casting magic.
Magnificent.
I'll just go through a few that we've got time for.
zombie Philip, the rest, with Hermione and Snape being race-swapped.
They're not doing it for the sake of diversity.
They're doing it so they can insert the topic of racism and racial supremacy.
due to the fact that both characters have a heritage to muggles in some way.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have been speculating on this, and I could see them going down that angle.
Stuart Beresford says, "I used to work with someone who was in the same school year as Rowling.
She based all the characters on her friends, including herself, Ginny Weasley, Kind of interesting that she's done this as she's almost revising her own life.
By the way, the story about her living out of a cafe with her kids while she was writing novels is true-ish.
Her sister owns the coffee bar in Edinburgh, hardly a greasy store.
I do love a greasy spoon.
Furious Dan, we race-swapped Harry Potter to better represent your race-swapped country.
You're welcome.
Magnificently stated, sir.
And Lordenquist, Hector Rex, how dare you stand where he stood in Harry Potter's AXE?
It certainly does, Rex.
It certainly does.
Right, thank you.
Right, and on that note, we have run out of time.
See you at 3pm at the Gold Zoom, and for those of you who are not going to be there, have a lovely weekend, and see you at Monday, 1pm.
June is coming!
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