The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1381
Aired: 2026-03-24
Duration: 01:31:03


=== Chronicles: When Woke Ideas Become Lethal (02:42) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1381 for Tuesday the 24th of March 2026.
[00:00:09]  I'm your host Captain Darling, joined today by Josh.
[00:00:12]  Hello.
[00:00:12]  Stelios.
[00:00:13]  Hello.
[00:00:14]  And today we're going to be talking to you all about when woke ideas become lethal, when they actually start to kill.
[00:00:23]  We're then going to be talking about the fall of the Lords and the end of hereditary peerage in the House of Lords.
[00:00:29]  And then we're going to end today's podcast by doing a touching tribute, we hope, to the great late Chuck Norris.
[00:00:37]  So before we get into the meat of the segment, just want to alert you to the announcements, of course.
[00:00:43]  We do have a live event coming up in a few weeks, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:00:46]  It's going to be on the 11th of April, which is a Saturday, which should hopefully make it far more practical for you.
[00:00:53]  And yeah, come down to join us at the local Mecca in Swindon, not to be confused with that religious city in the Middle East.
[00:01:01]  And we'll have a live Radzauer.
[00:01:05]  We'll have a podcast.
[00:01:06]  We'll have some great discussion.
[00:01:07]  It'll be a wonderful chance to meet many of the fans of the show, of course.
[00:01:11]  We'll have some drinks together.
[00:01:13]  And it should all be really, really good fun.
[00:01:16]  Also, I just want to let you know that Harry and I, when I find it, now have three parts, first three-part Chronicles series all about Macbeth.
[00:01:28]  Because if you're going to go into anything in detail, Shakespeare is kind of the thing that you should focus in on.
[00:01:34]  And Harry and I had a really great conversation about Macbeth, about a lot of its wonderful themes and characters.
[00:01:41]  And I'm not normally one to like toot my own horn, but I think this is some of the best work on Chronicles so far.
[00:01:47]  So if it's of interest to you, check it out.
[00:01:49]  And that's a good thing because Chronicles is a wonderful series.
[00:01:54]  Thank you.
[00:01:54]  So if you are saying that this is one of the best works in Chronicles so far, you definitely have to watch it.
[00:02:02]  I don't know.
[00:02:02]  I think this one was, you know, better, obviously.
[00:02:04]  It's very damn good.
[00:02:05]  It was damn good.
[00:02:07]  Well, I mean, if we're going to have a Chronicles pro, we've got Amadeus with Josh Firm, whoever that may be.
[00:02:12]  That guy, yeah.
[00:02:13]  Stelios and I did one on the Mandrake.
[00:02:15]  We've done many Greeks and many more, but I have to say that I was one of the voices who said that in the thumbnail on the thumbnail, we need the F. Murray Abraham's.
[00:02:26]  Oh, we were all for it.
[00:02:27]  We're all for it.
[00:02:28]  Anyway, all right, then.
[00:02:29]  Let's, without further ado, shall we go?
[00:02:31]  I need to get back.
[00:02:33]  Here we go.
[00:02:34]  Okay.
[00:02:35]  So I'm going to be talking about when woke ideas kill.
[00:02:38]  And of course, ideas can't kill.
[00:02:41]  It is people.

=== Danger to Ordinary People for Mental Health (15:49) ===

[00:02:42]  But what can be done is these ideas can permeate institutions which facilitate people being able to kill others in ways in which they wouldn't otherwise be able to.
[00:02:53]  And this is one of those stories that in all my years of journalism really sort of shocked me.
[00:02:59]  You know, I'm used to reading institutional failures.
[00:03:02]  I'm used to reading about wokeness.
[00:03:04]  But this combination of things was just such a stark realization to me just how deep the rot goes into Britain's institutions.
[00:03:15]  But it also shows you in great detail how these things can happen in the first place and how many failures went on to allow it to happen.
[00:03:26]  One thing before I get going is that we do have a live event in Swindon on the 11th of April, which is a Saturday.
[00:03:34]  If you would like to meet us and have some fun, it'll be a very jolly occasion.
[00:03:39]  And please do come along.
[00:03:41]  It'd be nice to meet you all.
[00:03:42]  And it'll be nice to do something a little bit different in person.
[00:03:47]  So get some tickets while they last, I think.
[00:03:50]  You've got to get there.
[00:03:51]  They are selling.
[00:03:53]  So I wrote an article about this because I was shocked when I was reading what is known as the Nottingham Inquiry, which is an investigation basically into institutional wrongdoing dealing with the 13th of June 2023 attacks by Valdo Callocaine, who is, I believe he's from Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, a Portuguese-speaking country.
[00:04:20]  And he moved to Portugal and then from Portugal to Britain, but when he was young.
[00:04:26]  And so it's worth mentioning as well.
[00:04:28]  Another dynamic of migration is that people can move from one country to another European country and then on to Britain.
[00:04:34]  And so it might still be the case that you're getting dangerous people from dangerous parts of the world from European countries, which is something to bear in mind when you're talking about immigration as well.
[00:04:44]  But I'm going to read the actual series of events leading up to the attack because this will genuinely be shocking to most people.
[00:04:56]  I'm not saying that as like a slop.
[00:04:59]  This will shock you.
[00:05:00]  As in this is something that you should be sending to people and saying, look at how bad the situation is.
[00:05:07]  This is unbelievable.
[00:05:09]  So do excuse me reading my own writing a little bit, but as you can probably guess, I think that my write-up is the best.
[00:05:17]  Otherwise, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[00:05:21]  So I'm going to read a lot, but please do stop me if you want to interject.
[00:05:25]  So Callocane's first notable contact with authorities came in May of 2020.
[00:05:30]  He attended A ⁇ E believing he was having a heart attack.
[00:05:32]  After returning home from hospital, he kicked down the door of a neighbour's flat, resulting in police arresting him for criminal damage.
[00:05:39]  A mental health assessment concluded that he was experiencing psychosis and he was released for community monitoring, which is interesting because, of course, if he's going through a period of psychosis, wouldn't you think that perhaps it'd be good to keep an eye on him?
[00:05:54]  Maybe he's a danger to himself or other people, which, funnily enough, was what happened.
[00:06:01]  So mental health professionals were inclined to section him because of the nature of the incident in that he violently kicked down a neighbour's door, but ultimately decided against it when they considered the research that shows over-representation of young black males in detention.
[00:06:16]  This is something that came out in the inquiry.
[00:06:18]  So because there are lots of young black men in mental health detention, they had to let him go, apparently.
[00:06:27]  So this is exactly like in the Manchester arena bombing where there were people who were suspicious of the terrorists beforehand, but in order to avoid the stereotyping and the baggage that comes with these sorts of things in order to appeal to the progressive values, they turned a blind eye and that resulted in all the things that would naturally result from it.
[00:06:51]  It's also something that happens quite often in the United States where people go through both the criminal justice system and the mental health system repeatedly, sometimes having like 40 different contacts with authorities, only to be released and then eventually do a horrific crime.
[00:07:08]  I carry on to say within 40 minutes of being released, he forced entry into another neighbour's flat and the resident was so frightened she jumped from a first floor window, suffering severe spinal injuries that required surgery.
[00:07:21]  The woman insisted that had she not done so, he could have killed her.
[00:07:25]  So you think at this point, okay, the authorities messed up.
[00:07:28]  They're not going to let him go for another time, right?
[00:07:31]  They let him go and within 40 minutes of him being released, he did exactly the same thing again.
[00:07:36]  So you think in a sane society, had this mistake happened, they would have been like, okay, we really need to do something now.
[00:07:45]  Well.
[00:07:46]  Nothing was done.
[00:07:47]  We will see.
[00:07:48]  He was detained under the Mental Health Act for the first time, bit of foreshadowing, and hospitalised for around a month.
[00:07:54]  It was documented that Callokane's behaviour had been an episode of psychosis brought on by stress of coursework and an upcoming exam.
[00:08:02]  Believe me, I've been under a lot of stress from both of those things.
[00:08:06]  You know, including resulted in someone having to jump out of a window to escape you.
[00:08:12]  It's probably, you know, accelerated my greying hair, but other than that, you know, coupled with a lack of sleep, again, this isn't something that normally causes you to kick your neighbour's doors down.
[00:08:23]  The previous week, however, he would later be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, which makes a little bit more sense.
[00:08:30]  And then fast forwarding a little bit, in July 2020, he was admitted to hospital after forcibly entering another neighbour's flat, but was released after two weeks for some reason.
[00:08:40]  So at this point, his neighbours must be absolutely terrified of him.
[00:08:44]  Three neighbours in the same building that he lives in.
[00:08:48]  Following his discharge, he received regular visits to monitor his condition.
[00:08:51]  But of course, you can't have someone there all of the time.
[00:08:55]  So it's not in any way a perfect system here.
[00:08:59]  Then fast forwarding to May of 2021, he turned up outside the MI5 headquarters, dressed all in black, and insisted over the intercom that he be arrested.
[00:09:08]  And when police arrived, he was coherent and compliant and was already in the process of leaving willingly.
[00:09:13]  The police officer who he had interacted with, sorry, saw nothing unusual and described it as a routine stop, which is quite a condemnation of the state of policing in London, I imagine.
[00:09:25]  I think that's where the MI5 headquarters is, isn't it?
[00:09:29]  That he thought that that was normal.
[00:09:33]  So when the police arrived, he was coherent.
[00:09:36]  Right, okay, yeah.
[00:09:38]  So he went over there, basically asked them to arrest.
[00:09:41]  So even when the Met police are as overstretched as they are, crime is out of hand, even when they literally have criminals turn up on their doorstep asking them to take them in and with the least possible resistance, they won't even do that.
[00:09:54]  Apparently not.
[00:09:57]  At this point, it would be obvious that someone was undergoing a mental health episode of some kind, right?
[00:10:02]  That someone should have intervened.
[00:10:04]  And then in August of 2021, it was established that he stopped taking his medication and was refusing treatment, claiming the medication could slow the mind, which, you know, there's a debate in psychology about this.
[00:10:17]  As a result, he was placed on a waiting list for inpatient care.
[00:10:20]  By September of 2021, after refusing medication and resisting detention during a mental health assessment, the police were called.
[00:10:27]  When officers arrived, he was reportedly calm, but as soon as they entered the room, he suddenly attacked one officer by punching and head-butting him and using handcuffs from the police officer as a weapon.
[00:10:38]  And police had to use a taser and pepper spray before they were able to detain him.
[00:10:42]  So at this point, I think it's well established that this man is dangerous.
[00:10:47]  He's kicked down three neighbours' doors.
[00:10:49]  He turned up to MI5 trying to get arrested.
[00:10:51]  He assaulted a police officer.
[00:10:53]  Sorry, because you've got the dates here.
[00:10:55]  When was the first incident that they actually have been happening for over a year now?
[00:11:01]  Sorry, I'll get back to where you were.
[00:11:02]  And yet, still he's out there.
[00:11:05]  Yeah.
[00:11:05]  And there's a record of all of this happening as well, because, of course, this is coming out in the inquiry.
[00:11:10]  And so it's not that these things aren't available to the people taking care of him.
[00:11:14]  And then due to a shortage of psychiatric intensive care beds, he was transferred between several private hospitals before being discharged after about a month.
[00:11:21]  And medics later stated that they believed no risk to himself or others at the time, which is obviously very naive, given what he had already done.
[00:11:32]  By January of 2022, police were called again after he trapped two flatmates inside their flat.
[00:11:38]  I'm starting to see a bit of a pattern here.
[00:11:42]  He was assessed under the Mental Health Act, but was not detained.
[00:11:44]  Instead, it was agreed that he would receive daily visits from mental health services, which again, you know, he just needs to do these things when the mental health services are not there.
[00:11:53]  And nevertheless, he ended up spending another month in hospital care before being released once more.
[00:11:58]  By this point, care providers had been instructed never to visit his property alone due to his history of violence.
[00:12:05]  However, he began failing to attend appointments to collect his medication, and his most recent address appeared to be incorrect, meaning mental health services weren't able to account for his whereabouts.
[00:12:15]  Of course, this is the failure of this in-community care that is so popular at the minute, that severely mentally ill people aren't going to hang around to be surveyed, are they?
[00:12:27]  And that they're severely mentally ill.
[00:12:28]  And by definition, they're going to behave in unpredictable ways because that's the nature of their condition.
[00:12:33]  I assume this guy's going to go out on a limb here and say he didn't have a job given his mental instability.
[00:12:40]  I'm not entirely sure.
[00:12:42]  It's not a matter of public record.
[00:12:44]  But still, he's a foreigner living in Britain, just putting excessive amounts of effort and waste into public resources.
[00:12:51]  Absolutely.
[00:12:52]  And we also have to remember that many times when crimes are committed, the first excuse by the state is this person had mental illness issues.
[00:13:03]  And yeah, I mean, in this instance, he obviously did have some sort of mental health issues.
[00:13:08]  When he was kicking down one of the doors in his apartment building, he was hearing auditory hallucinations that his mother was being sexually assaulted.
[00:13:20]  And so I think the medical records seem to indicate that this is a case where they were mentally ill.
[00:13:26]  But the problem, of course, is why is this West African mentally ill man in our country in the first place?
[00:13:32]  It would have been much better not to have him here, and three people would be alive had he not been.
[00:13:38]  So on the 13th of June, 2023, he carried out a combined knife and vehicle attack in Nottingham that left Barnaby Weber, Grace O'Malley Kumar, both 19, and Ian Coates 65 dead, whilst also attempting to kill three other people.
[00:13:52]  And he was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in January of 2024 after admitting manslaughter by diminished responsibility and attempted murder, a sentence that received significant pushback from the victims' families because you can't really carry out a combined knife and vehicle attack without it being premeditated, in my opinion.
[00:14:10]  Of course not.
[00:14:11]  And it doesn't really matter if someone's mentally ill.
[00:14:13]  If anything, that makes them more dangerous because they're not going to behave in ways that a normal person might.
[00:14:20]  Well, and it also obviously shouldn't shine huge investigations over all of the people that you're documenting that led to this permissiveness throughout the years.
[00:14:31]  Yeah, and I wrote a little bit about this because, you know, I know quite a bit about clinical psychology being a psychologist, although my specialization was behavioural decision-making, but that doesn't mean I don't know how the system works and don't know the literature.
[00:14:45]  So I wrote here, there currently exists a convenient marriage of perspectives within Britain's institutions that result in dangerous people being allowed on the streets.
[00:14:53]  The first of which is the belief that being in the community helps those with mental health conditions.
[00:14:58]  This may be true if you have a family living with you and caring for you, but when living alone with neighbours who are rightfully terrified of you, it is doubtful that he received any support at all, which I feel like is near impossible to dispute, really, because I would be terrified if I lived in the same building as him.
[00:15:14]  Similarly, detaining and treating someone with mental health issues is rather expensive, and so efforts have been made in Britain to reduce the number of those detained in mental health facilities.
[00:15:22]  The consequence of this partnership of perspectives is that severely mentally ill people are mixed into the population without sufficient support and they are, you know, as we can see, a danger to both people around them and often themselves as well.
[00:15:35]  And this is something that I think needs to be addressed.
[00:15:38]  Think that we do need to bring back the asylums where people like him, paranoid schizophrenics that are dangerous, should be kept and never let out because they're not going to get better.
[00:15:49]  And one thing that we need to understand in particular is the nature and reality of schizophrenia, because it's not a condition where you know there's any impact on racism.
[00:16:01]  Racism doesn't change the manifestation of a deeply biologically rooted condition.
[00:16:08]  I'm going to skip to the part about that because this is really, really important.
[00:16:14]  So okay, the reality is that rates of psychosis and schizophrenia are much higher for black individuals, leading to more interactions with mental health services.
[00:16:23]  It's not that the system is racist, as these mental health professionals initially posited.
[00:16:31]  That led to his repeated release over and over again.
[00:16:35]  Afro-Caribbeans are nine times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than white British people.
[00:16:40]  Black Africans are six times more likely.
[00:16:42]  Even in the United States, black Americans are three or to four times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than white people.
[00:16:49]  So the disparity in psychosis and schizophrenia is well known and most clinicians are familiar with this.
[00:16:56]  And, in fact, large-scale studies have found that it's got heritability rate of around 79% or 80, which is very high that you that is very likely to be inherited from a parent and, oh sorry, so is this genetic?
[00:17:13]  And the narrative says that no, it isn't.
[00:17:16]  It's systemic.
[00:17:17]  Yes, it's the nature, versus nurture culture yes exactly, but the the research very much says otherwise to this is in.
[00:17:25]  It's actually quite well established that schizophrenia is largely a genetic phenomenon because, as I later say in this article, which I suppose I'll say now, you can look at neuroimaging outputs and diagnose someone with schizophrenia.
[00:17:40]  Obviously it's not a bulletproof method, but you could, at an above chance rate, look at their brain scan and see the difference between a normal brain, because of the overactivity in certain areas, and how their brain is working, and so it's got a deeply physiological, rooted cause, and so I don't think that this is something that, even if you know he was the victim of racism, would be affected by this.
[00:18:06]  Well, and also, even if he was the victim of racism, basically what we're saying is, because he was a victim of racism, that is somehow equivalent to the distress that he's put other people through and the lives that he's taken, yeah which obviously you can't quantify.
[00:18:23]  I'm of the opinion that the main priority of mental health clinicians is keeping ordinary people safe.

=== Ideologues Reinforcing Pernicious Thinking (09:08) ===

[00:18:31]  You know, you shouldn't put ordinary people in danger for the well-being of a mentally ill person.
[00:18:36]  That's the wrong way round, and I think that that's something that needs to change in many Western institutions, that there's this really quite silly idea that, oh he's, you know, just being in the world is magically going to make them better.
[00:18:50]  But if you don't have the support, like he did, what's going to happen other than you're going to degenerate and get worse because there's no one there to support him.
[00:19:00]  And then I go on to say: today the genetic basis of schizophrenia is well established within clinical psychology and psychiatry.
[00:19:07]  And I go on to point out that the brain parts of the brain, increased activity in the striatum is associated with hallucinations in the hippocampus with memory deficits and the medial frontal and parietal areas with an impaired ability to distinguish between thoughts and external reality.
[00:19:23]  We know these things.
[00:19:24]  They're quite well-established neurological areas that are implicated in schizophrenia.
[00:19:31]  And so the idea that he just needs community support.
[00:19:35]  Well, it can't change the structure of his brain.
[00:19:38]  And I go on to say that all this is to say that the condition is deeply rooted in biological causes that are largely genetic.
[00:19:45]  There is little room for racism to be a causal factor in the disorder itself unless racism somehow determines which genes are expressed in a person's DNA.
[00:19:52]  And anyone working in the field of mental health should understand this very clearly.
[00:19:56]  And I argue that it's because they placed ideology over the actual real-world evidence that this was allowed to happen in the first place.
[00:20:03]  And in a proper functioning country, his first interaction where he showed signs of violence should be, okay, we need to figure out what's specifically wrong with this guy.
[00:20:13]  You can't just say, oh, you know, it was an episode of psychosis.
[00:20:16]  Let's let him out.
[00:20:17]  No, no, no.
[00:20:18]  If someone just randomly kicks down a neighbor's door, that's a really unusual behavior to have in a normal society and should be taken seriously.
[00:20:26]  They should be detained and monitored until you can, with absolute certainty, establish what is wrong with them and what their situation is.
[00:20:35]  There's no ifs or buts about that, really.
[00:20:38]  And one thing that is quite frustrating as well is I'm not the only person to say this.
[00:20:44]  And in fact, people within the police have said the same thing that I've been saying.
[00:20:49]  The former chief constable of Nottingham Police has admitted that he should have been arrested before he carried out the deadly attacks.
[00:20:55]  Was she the constable at the time when it was going on?
[00:20:58]  I would presume so, yes.
[00:21:01]  Yes, Nottinghamshire Police.
[00:21:03]  So I would imagine that that's the case.
[00:21:06]  This is all the stuff being dug up by the Nottingham inquiry.
[00:21:08]  Right, okay.
[00:21:09]  And it's even being talked about, I believe it should be somewhere here, that the police are saying that, yeah, I believe this is, I can't remember, Sanders, I think they were a senior person in the police, that it was murder and that his manslaughter charges were not necessarily just because of the premeditated nature of the crimes.
[00:21:36]  And they were saying that at the time they were preoccupied with actually dealing with the crime itself.
[00:21:42]  And so there was perhaps some political efforts here to give it a mental health diagnosis, which we see.
[00:21:49]  They're often.
[00:21:51]  Yeah.
[00:21:51]  Which is very interesting.
[00:21:53]  And also another thing that I found very interesting as well was this ongoing narrative that's come out of the Nottingham inquiry that the police sped up charges upon him to shut down stories that the police had acted incompetently,
[00:22:11]  that they'd made mistakes, that the mental health services had made mistakes and the like, which is quite compelling given how long it takes to charge some people and he was charged relatively quickly considering the complexity of the case.
[00:22:25]  And so there's so many different layers here of errors that it's almost incomprehensible to know where to start in fixing them, right?
[00:22:35]  And this is one of those things where It's one thing to say, yes, wokeness allowed this person to come out.
[00:22:43]  But once you actually hear exactly how this happened in the institutions, you realize, wow, we've got a really long way to go to restore some sort of sensible policing and mental health service treatment of these people.
[00:22:57]  And yeah, it really shocked me.
[00:22:59]  I couldn't believe it.
[00:23:01]  It is one of those things where you hear it going on more in the United States, but less so here.
[00:23:08]  But it seems to be the case that this is happening in just the same way in the US as it is here.
[00:23:15]  And so it seems to suggest that there's some sort of ideological commonality because no sensible country would operate in this way and endanger their own citizens in this way.
[00:23:25]  Believe you, you're using the right word.
[00:23:27]  It's ideology.
[00:23:29]  And ideology makes people completely unrealistic.
[00:23:33]  And it often gives them excuses for crimes they hate other people when they're committing them.
[00:23:39]  And ideologues are very unrealistic and they don't understand practical contexts.
[00:23:47]  And what do I mean by this?
[00:23:48]  It's a fancy way of saying that they don't understand that our choices aren't always choices between absolute good and absolute evil.
[00:23:57]  Sometimes it's a mix of good and evil, of pros and cons.
[00:24:02]  And ideologues hate this and they focus only on something they don't like.
[00:24:06]  And if they don't like something, they instantly brand it as demonic.
[00:24:12]  And this is one of those issues because there is a very interesting debate when it comes to the nature and nurture aspect of discourse.
[00:24:23]  I think, basically, generally speaking, it's a mix of both when we are talking about how the… I did skip over.
[00:24:29]  Sorry.
[00:24:30]  Just ever so quickly, to sort of reinforce your point, I did skip over a little bit just for the sake of brevity, where I pointed out that the environmental factors in schizophrenia are living in urban areas, cannabis use, and parental separation, which seems like a perfect storm for this fella.
[00:24:47]  I don't know whether I'm not going for Peter Hitchens here and saying that it was necessarily, but people of his demographic are more likely to have these things in their life, you know, live in an urban area, have access to drugs and be separate from, say, their fathers.
[00:25:05]  And so these are things that basically aggravate pre-existing genetic predispositions, as I think you were saying, right?
[00:25:13]  Yeah, the issue with lots of these progressives within quotation marks is that they have an ultimately passive view of human nature.
[00:25:21]  It's always just a human being is a recipient of welfare points.
[00:25:26]  And their idea is that let's put them in conditions that are going to mechanically lead them into being, you know, just ultra happy.
[00:25:38]  Because they think that the state's duty is to make people happy, not to allow them to pursue happiness and potentially fail, but to ensure happiness for them.
[00:25:47]  And in this case, the trouble with trying to communicate with people who think this way is that if you come from a realist perspective, what you're proposing isn't ideal.
[00:26:00]  And they instantly translate this into you want to keep them being unhappy and in such bad situations.
[00:26:09]  That's actually reinforcing what you are saying about the perniciousness of this kind of ideological thinking of the matter.
[00:26:18]  So yes, I thought it was very, very important to highlight the nature of this case because it is one of the best examples of how institutions are failing in the first place.
[00:26:31]  And then you introduce ideology that is naive to the true nature of reality, in my opinion.
[00:26:37]  And you create, quite literally, a lethal concoction here.
[00:26:41]  And it was a combination of institutional failings and woke ideas that has led to these three people dying.
[00:26:47]  And I think more people need to know about this.
[00:26:51]  Yeah, I feel terrible for all the victims involved in that story.
[00:26:55]  I'm sorry to depress everyone, but I thought it was too important not to mention.
[00:26:59]  We will have a good palate cleanser.
[00:27:02]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:03]  That's true.
[00:27:04]  Sigil Stone says, I'm having a mental health episode.
[00:27:06]  I need free tickets and airfare to the Lotus Eaters Live event for proper treatment.
[00:27:10]  Research says there won't be enough Americans there, so you have to do it.
[00:27:14]  Well, I hope you get your treatment.
[00:27:17]  Ochidor says, my biggest pet peeve for US, not sure of Britain, is the not mentally fit to stand trial.
[00:27:23]  If not fit for trial, then why fit for society?
[00:27:26]  Well said.
[00:27:27]  Yes, I agree.
[00:27:28]  I think, especially with mental health conditions that are for the entirety of your life, you're not really going to get that much better.
[00:27:36]  Perhaps you get old and you're not capable of doing that much harm.

=== Anti-Constitutional Move in Democracy (16:16) ===

[00:27:40]  But at the same time, it's not good for them to be out and about in society.
[00:27:43]  They require constant monitoring.
[00:27:45]  What was the nature of it with Biden, where he was incriminated in something?
[00:27:50]  It's like, oh, he can't stand trial, but he's not mentally well enough, but he can be president.
[00:27:55]  You know, it was like, okay, great.
[00:27:58]  It's absurd, isn't it?
[00:27:59]  Yeah, I guess we're doing this.
[00:28:01]  All right.
[00:28:02]  Well, before we begin the segment, ladies and gentlemen, just to let you know that we have a live event taking place on Saturday, 11th of April.
[00:28:10]  Oh, it's all right.
[00:28:11]  We've got three now.
[00:28:12]  Oh, blimey.
[00:28:13]  Yeah.
[00:28:14]  Proper organisation.
[00:28:15]  Just to let you know, we've got a live event coming up.
[00:28:18]  Many, many of us are going to be there.
[00:28:20]  Josh will be there.
[00:28:21]  I'll be there.
[00:28:21]  Carl, everyone that you see on there.
[00:28:23]  Stelios, you may be there, may you not?
[00:28:26]  Probably not.
[00:28:27]  It's not a particularly good day for me.
[00:28:30]  Okay, well, just because of your schedule and everything.
[00:28:33]  But we're going to have a live event.
[00:28:35]  We're going to have, well, obviously it is a live event.
[00:28:38]  What I mean is we're going to have a live Radzauer.
[00:28:39]  We're going to have a debate about Star Wars, which I will win.
[00:28:44]  And we're going to have many, many drinks.
[00:28:45]  It should be a good time.
[00:28:46]  Lots of banter.
[00:28:47]  So if you'd like, tickets are on the website for you to take a look at.
[00:28:53]  All right, then.
[00:28:54]  So this actually happened last week.
[00:28:56]  But given that we, just because of the way it's been scheduled, I haven't really had time to talk about this in any great detail.
[00:29:03]  And it is something that deserves, I think, a larger discussion.
[00:29:08]  And I suppose we can start that discussion with how nonchalant the Cabinet Office's post was about this, which is that this is the biggest reform to our Parliament in the generation.
[00:29:20]  This morning, the seven-year-old system of hereditary...
[00:29:23]  700 years.
[00:29:24]  700-year-old system of hereditary membership in the House of Lords was abolished.
[00:29:29]  Membership is now earned through public service and merit, not granted by an inheritance.
[00:29:37]  Shouldn't there be a bit more of a at least melancholy, like a tinge of sadness in doing away with something that has survived for all of these generations going back, you know, since beyond the Enlightenment, beyond the Renaissance, right back into the medieval era?
[00:29:54]  I view it in terms of whether it's a good or bad institution.
[00:29:57]  Personally, if I think it's a bad institution, I don't care.
[00:30:00]  I'm happy.
[00:30:01]  But in this case, I think that it has been an institution that has a lot to speak for it.
[00:30:06]  Yeah.
[00:30:07]  And unfortunately, as well, this was in the Labour Manifesto.
[00:30:11]  I was meant to get the actual part of it, but it's in there.
[00:30:15]  They said that they were going to do this in the House.
[00:30:17]  Wanted to do this.
[00:30:18]  He's been pushing for a long time.
[00:30:20]  He did have Lords reform when he was in office, but he wasn't able to get the full way to getting rid of the hereditary peers.
[00:30:27]  Sorry.
[00:30:27]  Well, no, it was just to say that you're absolutely right.
[00:30:30]  There was a compromise that was made which allowed for 92 hereditary peers to continue on, which was a deal made with the Tories at the time.
[00:30:39]  And obviously, one of the reasons for this was that Blair identified that the House of Lords, because of the hereditary peers, they were naturally more conservative, not only in party, but in their actual temperament and in their loyalties as well.
[00:30:54]  And so, naturally, like everything else to do with Blairism, that was simply something that had to be done away with.
[00:31:00]  But because it was in the Labour Manifesto as well, it basically means that it's in alignment with the Salisbury Convention, where the House of Lords can't really block it.
[00:31:12]  So, you know, the peers can't actually block this from happening.
[00:31:15]  They just have to step back and allow the convention to take place.
[00:31:19]  But one of the things that I also wanted to talk about with all of this, actually, just to go back to the framing of it here, to talk about service and merit.
[00:31:28]  And obviously, it's all been coached more in it being a gradual step to having an entirely elected, a more democratic second chamber.
[00:31:38]  And actually, I just wanted to draw a passage from George Orwell on this, where he says in politics and the English language: the words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
[00:31:56]  In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.
[00:32:05]  It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic, we are praising it.
[00:32:13]  And I feel like this type of thinking of basically the way that the word democracy or democratic is kind of just used almost in international language at this point as a synonym of good.
[00:32:24]  If something is democratic, it is naturally good, it is naturally better than if something is undemocratic or grounded in tradition.
[00:32:33]  And this is really important because this is what we actually see, as Apostolic Majesty points out here.
[00:32:40]  That was kind of the trajectory from the very end of the Edwardian period when Asquith was Prime Minister and David Lloyd George was Chancellor.
[00:32:50]  And when they were trying to put through the people's budget, the Lords decided that they were going to block it because obviously it was counter to their own conservative landed interests, right, and their own economic interests.
[00:33:04]  And so because of this, Asquith went forward and basically changed it so that at the time before this, the Lords could actually veto legislation.
[00:33:17]  That was put to an end by the Liberals.
[00:33:20]  But sorry.
[00:33:22]  Sorry, just a question.
[00:33:23]  So does this mean that the Parliament has become a unicameral body from a bicameral one or not yet?
[00:33:30]  I'm sorry, I don't actually know what that's.
[00:33:33]  It does, yes.
[00:33:33]  So bicameral means that it has two different chambers in the legislature.
[00:33:38]  So what Stellius is saying is actually what I was going to say, which is basically it makes the House of Lords redundant because it needs to be a distinct chamber from the House of Commons.
[00:33:50]  And even though it might still have the name House of Lords, if both are elected, both are effectively operating in the same way.
[00:33:58]  So it's no longer operating in the bicameral way in which our Parliament has operated in for hundreds of years.
[00:34:08]  Right.
[00:34:08]  And so the expertise that the Lords had in refining legislation, which is the main thing that they do in today's Britain, or at least they did, is probably going to be weakened.
[00:34:23]  And it just means that you can have a greater tyranny by the Commons, as I see it.
[00:34:27]  And there have been many criticisms from the Lords of the Commons and the way our democracy works in the first place, which I find interesting, that this seems to align to a greater empowerment of the commons, because you have people like Lord Hallisham many years ago saying that our political system is basically an elective dictatorship, that as long as you get a majority in the commons, you can basically act as dictator.
[00:34:50]  And having people in the lords that are criticising your use of power isn't always the best thing.
[00:34:56]  But there have been many good and useful voices for the British public coming from the Lords.
[00:35:03]  And in fact, I think it's one of the chambers that had previously been less polluted by the corrosive nature of party politics.
[00:35:12]  It's basically an anti-constitutional move in a sense.
[00:35:16]  Not that it's necessary, that's against the Constitution, but in the sense that you have less checks on power.
[00:35:26]  You framed it wrongly, but that, in my mind, is a bad thing.
[00:35:32]  Yeah, and the other thing as well that I would just say with all of this is that I'm not going to defend the House of Lords like it's always been a perfect institution, like it's been beyond corruption.
[00:35:43]  I mean, there are so many examples, not only with the way that King George V threatened to stack it with peers if the Conservatives didn't buckle to what the Liberals wanted back in 1911.
[00:35:56]  But, you know, going right back to times that we think of now as, you know, with more vitalism, when we were truly an incredible country, I think about the Regency crisis with the madness of King George, and, you know, William Pitt the Younger was very clear about making sure that the Regent couldn't just stack the House of Lords with all of his cronies and his appointees and peers.
[00:36:18]  And, okay, fine.
[00:36:20]  So the King and all of these people can't stack the Lords with their peers now.
[00:36:25]  But now, all of a sudden, just Boris Johnson can do it, though.
[00:36:29]  That's fine.
[00:36:30]  Well, Keir Starmer can as well, right?
[00:36:32]  And Keir Starmer can, and all the rest of them.
[00:36:35]  But the problem that we run into is the fact that, according to YouGov polling, so you know, I'm not expecting them to be the most honest about anything, but most Britons would support making the House of Lords fully elected.
[00:36:49]  And I would suggest that actually, though, as I just said, I don't trust you Gov, I don't see there anything really incongruent with public mood on this, especially when the public, like the Lords, like everyone in society, have been inculcated with these more liberal ideals and feelings of democracy being the highest form of good.
[00:37:13]  I can understand why the public have been turned in this direction, especially as the Lords continued throughout decades to drift more and more into this kind of halfway house where it's not really anything in a true form.
[00:37:28]  Democracy without checks and balances or with fewer checks and balances is not particularly stable.
[00:37:34]  This is the exact opposite of what Madison was all about when they were drafting the US Constitution, where he was thinking that the states individually are too democratic.
[00:37:45]  They do need extra checks and balances.
[00:37:48]  I was just going to add that I think it's the complete opposite.
[00:37:50]  I think that the House of Lords should be entirely unelected because otherwise it's just a repetition of the House of Commons and therefore it is redundant.
[00:37:58]  It'd be better to have it in an ideal society as a chamber where you can have lots of expertise in various fields.
[00:38:06]  You have, you know, doctors, industrialists, lawyers, people who can wheedle out mistakes and errors and conflicts within legislation and just improve the quality and the intention of it.
[00:38:22]  Of course, we run into difficulties in the modern day because we know that this would be abused.
[00:38:27]  But at the same time, were we to have a restoration of British institutions?
[00:38:33]  I think that a movement in that direction would be much better because you don't want people who've just been freshly elected into politics shaping legislation necessarily because you want people with years and years of experience.
[00:38:47]  And you can have the best of both.
[00:38:48]  You can have elected representatives in the Commons representing your interests, whilst people with considerable and long careers in their respective industries in the House of Lords, and these are good counterweights to one another.
[00:39:00]  And that's how the system has worked for hundreds of years.
[00:39:04]  And it's a shame to see it end.
[00:39:06]  No, I quite agree with you.
[00:39:08]  I mean, you know, I can only think back to the segment that I did last week on abortion, of course, and the House of Lords featured quite heavily in that as well.
[00:39:16]  Because even though it went towards the most tragic possible result, the point was that that legislation was rushed through the Commons after merely 46 minutes of debate.
[00:39:27]  Now, surely something as seismic as that requires much more discussion and much more scrutiny, and frankly, shouldn't have been entertained in the first place.
[00:39:37]  But that's by the by.
[00:39:39]  The point is that also as well, it's as you say, it's good to have it, would be better to have an entirely unelected chamber because ultimately, once you, and you know, I mean, your idea of experts as well, but even if you have it being amongst those ranks, are the hereditary peers, those who are tied to the land, who have literally, their families haven't moved from their ancestral homes in all of these generations.
[00:40:08]  And in the world of globalization and nomadism, I think that that's actually quite a healthy antidote to it.
[00:40:14]  Another thing, as well, of course, is that if you are a member of parliament, it's constantly making false promises, it's constantly laying out red meat to voters, it's constantly having to appeal to these sort of short-termism that comes with general elections and democracy.
[00:40:31]  And having a more educated body above it that doesn't have to take into consideration that it gives it more chance for long-term planning, for actual more far-sightedness, I would suggest.
[00:40:45]  I mean, just look at it at the face of it.
[00:40:46]  It's the House of Lords.
[00:40:47]  It's sort of like a proxy for some of the strongest points of monarchy or, say, dictatorship is that you have a stable group of people involved in the decision-making process.
[00:40:59]  And of course, I'm not in favour of, you know, I want people to be able to choose their government.
[00:41:04]  That's not what I'm saying, but that is what the Commons is for.
[00:41:07]  And, you know, these should be complementary.
[00:41:10]  And that's how it was understood for a long time.
[00:41:12]  And I don't think anything has changed.
[00:41:14]  It's just that there's a political incentive for the left and the Labour Party to remove these people, and it has been for, you know, since 1997.
[00:41:23]  Right.
[00:41:24]  Not before.
[00:41:24]  So now what we see, just as an example, is that one of those set to leave the chamber will be the Duke of Norfolk and Earl of Arendelle.
[00:41:33]  And he can trace his peerage all the way back to 1138.
[00:41:38]  And it's like, and that's just gone.
[00:41:40]  It's just gone because the Labour Party willed it so.
[00:41:45]  And bear in mind as well that this is a party that really only won the election because its competitor collapsed after being one of the worst.
[00:41:54]  It has no mandate to do these sweeping constitutional changes in sort of objective terms.
[00:42:00]  Sure, it's got an electoral majority, but they should understand that these sorts of things they haven't really been given the permission to do it.
[00:42:09]  You know, being the least hated at the time of the election is not an achievement and it's not a mandate to enact all of the worst excesses of your manifesto.
[00:42:18]  And it certainly doesn't endear you to the more progressive vision of what the Lords can be if it has more reliant on appointees from former prime ministers.
[00:42:30]  And, you know, as Boris Johnson did when he was on his way out of office, and he appointed Charlotte Owen, 30-year-old former advisor, joined the House of Lords as a youngest peer.
[00:42:41]  According to a LinkedIn profile, Baroness Owen started a career as an intern in then-Chancellor George Osborne's constituency office.
[00:42:50]  And then she went on to intern for Johnson and as a parliamentary assistant for Alec Sharma and Sir Jake Berry before joining number 10 as a special advisor.
[00:43:00]  So she spent, look, I'm not judging her as a person, but there is nothing remarkable about her.
[00:43:07]  There is nothing extraordinary beyond where she's come from.
[00:43:12]  In fact, she's served politicians who have only made England a worse place for them being here.
[00:43:21]  So their judgment on who to appoint to this chamber is really not worth anything whatsoever.
[00:43:27]  Also, the fact that when Keir Starm has come in, sorry, it's we have Carmen Smith, a 28-year-old Plyde Cymru activist, sorry, so not Keir Starmer, appointed by Plaid Cymru to become the youngest member.
[00:43:41]  This is after Charlotte Owens.
[00:43:43]  And speaking to the BBC ahead of being formally introduced as a peer, she acknowledged she would be one of the very few members campaigning to put herself out of a job, saying, I fundamentally disagree with a non-elected chamber.

=== End of an Era for Hereditary Peers (05:27) ===

[00:43:56]  She says, Baroness Smith defends the process by which she was nominated, arguing it helps to improve the representation of women in a chamber that's 70% male.
[00:44:07]  And it points out as well that Plyde Cymru is one of only two parties, along with the Greens, who can elect their nominees for the Lord.
[00:44:15]  So again, just fine, this is what they're taking away.
[00:44:19]  But are they replacing it with anything that actually seems to be an improvement?
[00:44:23]  It's worth pointing out as well that all the hereditary peers that have been removed were men.
[00:44:28]  Yeah.
[00:44:28]  Which is something, isn't it?
[00:44:30]  Yeah, it is.
[00:44:31]  Lord Ahmed as well, obviously in jail now, disgraced peer, because he was convicted in 2022 of trying to rape a young girl and sexually assault a boy under 11 when he was a teenager in South Yorkshire.
[00:44:47]  And so, okay, these kinds of people are just being appointed into the Lords as well.
[00:44:51]  Obviously, highest profile, Peter Mandelson of late as well.
[00:44:57]  David Cameron just being made a lord so he can get back into what is it, Rishi Sunak's government and on and on.
[00:45:03]  So the entire thing is entirely incestuous.
[00:45:07]  It has become such a corrupt house of government and the entirety of it is a farce.
[00:45:16]  But I really wanted to end with this as well because there is another aspect here which I do think requires a little bit more nuance.
[00:45:27]  And it's one of the reasons why for all of my instincts, and I am a traditionalist and I do get very, I don't always kick and scream about it, but on an emotional level, the culture war stuff does really irritate me.
[00:45:41]  It's awful to see your country bastardised just day in, day out, with a little part of what made it so special, just taken away piece by piece by people who have absolutely no care for it.
[00:45:54]  But one of the things that I wanted to bring up was this article here by NPR because this was absolutely fascinating.
[00:46:02]  So you can see that this was from three days ago in light of the recent changes that are being made to the Lords.
[00:46:08]  And as it says, the end of an era.
[00:46:11]  The UK abolishes aristocrats' right to inherit parliament seats.
[00:46:15]  And the article specifically focuses in on Charles Courtenay.
[00:46:19]  Now, anyone who knows their medieval history will know that the Courtenays were a very, very powerful and influential family in medieval English politics, right?
[00:46:29]  So this is a man who has a family of deep lineage and ties to England, to our history, so much so that he is now the 19th Earl of Devon, which is obviously a pretty remarkable number of generations.
[00:46:46]  I also know Powderham Castle quite well.
[00:46:48]  Yeah, you've been there yourself.
[00:46:50]  It looks wonderful.
[00:46:51]  Yeah.
[00:46:53]  The seats of the aristocracy are always the most beautiful parts, you know, most beautiful buildings at the very least in the country.
[00:47:00]  Yeah.
[00:47:01]  And the fact that their decline has resulted in them having to sell them off and commercialize them and things like that is quite sad because many of them are in disrepair.
[00:47:10]  But this is a tangent, I'm sorry.
[00:47:11]  No, no, no, it's actually very relevant, in fact, because as it goes on to say, look, he's very aware of his whole family history and everything.
[00:47:19]  He talks about the English Civil War, he talks about sieges that the castle has been through.
[00:47:25]  And he goes on, but it goes on to say, in some ways, Courtney, and this is the article itself, in some ways, Courtney is a stereotypical lord, white, male, went to Eton College and Cambridge University and lives in a castle.
[00:47:38]  But in other ways, he's different.
[00:47:40]  He's lobbied to change rules of male primogeniture to allow women, like his sisters, to inherit titles.
[00:47:47]  In 2013, laws of succession were changed for the royal family, but the rest of the aristocracy still favours sons over daughters.
[00:47:56]  And this is now quoting him personally.
[00:47:59]  The patriarchy puts up a lot of barriers to its removal, Courtney told NPR on a tour of his castle.
[00:48:06]  After one of his ancestors, William Kitty Courtney was exiled for being gay.
[00:48:12]  Courtney has restored Kitty's portrait to prominence at Powderham Castle, and he markets the castle as a venue for LGBTQ weddings now and pop concerts.
[00:48:23]  In 2016, the castle hosted a big BBC music festival hosting Coldplay, Mumford and Sons and Stormsey, that great British patriot.
[00:48:34]  I remember that happening, yeah.
[00:48:36]  Last year, Courtney stood on the floor of the House of Lords, calling the chamber itself gendered and discriminatory.
[00:48:43]  The title Lord for a lawmaker is out of touch.
[00:48:47]  He said, urging Parliament to step away from the negative associations with nobility and high rank associated with land and power.
[00:48:56]  Courtney says he's using his privilege for social change.
[00:49:00]  And then, quote, obviously, I'm a man of a certain age with a title who lives in the castle, went to private school and Cambridge University.
[00:49:08]  But I've sought to break out of that stereotype because if you really believe in equal rights, what on earth am I doing?
[00:49:16]  And Courtney opposed the elimination of his hereditary seat, but he accepts the outcome.
[00:49:21]  He's a stain on the county of Devon.

=== Mass Consent vs. British Tradition (06:06) ===

[00:49:23]  You know, my home county.
[00:49:25]  How dare you?
[00:49:26]  You know, you have this wonderful lineage in one of the most beautiful counties in the country.
[00:49:31]  You're throwing it all away to virtue signal.
[00:49:34]  Says, I wish I could do more, but my time is up.
[00:49:37]  He says, and this is really why the reason I wanted to read this article as well is not only because I as a preb can sit here on the other side and say, gosh, isn't it destructive what's being done to the hereditary peerage?
[00:49:53]  But what does it even matter what the opinion of the majority of people, just going back to the poll, is?
[00:50:01]  Because obviously it's not everything is governed by mass consent in Britain.
[00:50:07]  We know that because we've had unnumbered decades of mass migration.
[00:50:12]  So it's not exactly as if elites can't maintain things that they want to maintain with enough power and backing.
[00:50:19]  But fundamentally, what this article draws into point of order is that the will has simply been lost to maintain the system.
[00:50:29]  The entirety of the British, I use him anecdotally, but we know it will be more pervasive than just this one man.
[00:50:36]  The entire will to maintain itself, all of the arguments, the old traditionalist arguments of hierarchy and of elitism and the lords and aristocracy and kingship, all of these things have fallen away.
[00:50:49]  And now there is no real distinction between those times back when the Liberals were trying to obviously get rid of all of those Tory lords back in 1911.
[00:51:00]  That trajectory was set right then.
[00:51:03]  And from that moment on to where we are now, this was the natural end state of where all of it was going to go.
[00:51:10]  I think it's the long shadow of the two world wars where we started to lose confidence in ourselves.
[00:51:17]  Obviously, the aristocrats, particularly in the First World War, were heavily affected by that.
[00:51:21]  And I think that...
[00:51:22]  Disproportionately died.
[00:51:24]  Yeah.
[00:51:24]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:51:25]  And so it would be nice to have people who were confident in our ability to govern ourselves and our way of governing ourselves.
[00:51:34]  This self-doubt and self-criticism is not the language of a strong country.
[00:51:39]  No.
[00:51:40]  Given the opportunity to serve his country, that this lord in particular just decided to be like everyone else, to just follow the fads and phases that were just flung at us this year and next year.
[00:51:52]  And there's no sense of solidity in it.
[00:51:56]  There's no sense of perseverance or preserving or just will to continue.
[00:52:02]  So the entirety of the thing, of course, and I just want to end with this.
[00:52:06]  The deep irony of all of this is that, well, the House of Lords is a problem because it's a hereditary peerage and it's deeply undemocratic.
[00:52:14]  It doesn't allow for enough social mobility.
[00:52:17]  We need to change all of this so we can put in our party cronies who will just yes men any legislation that we're happy to say.
[00:52:24]  And all of this naturally has to be signed off by royal assent by the king himself.
[00:52:32]  And so there is a natural end state to where all of this line of thinking goes.
[00:52:37]  And I have deep grievances with the current royal family.
[00:52:43]  And in particular, if he gives assent to the crime and policing bill that has that amendment in it about abortion.
[00:52:53]  And there's something I'd like to speak more on another time, I think.
[00:52:57]  But for now, you just get the point that, sure, it's a great act of cultural vandalism, but everyone in the country has kind of given up on the will to preserve it.
[00:53:08]  And even those who were most privileged by it don't even agree with having that privilege in the first place.
[00:53:14]  So naturally, the whole thing was going to wither and die.
[00:53:20]  Okay, I'll just go through Rumble Routes.
[00:53:24]  Thank you.
[00:53:26]  Mark Shusham says, BBC's new drama where the bad guy submitted no less than nine freedom of information requests.
[00:53:34]  How deplorable.
[00:53:35]  Yeah, I've seen some of the ads going around from that.
[00:53:38]  Yeah.
[00:53:39]  Mr. Brackpool has been having some good fun with it, though.
[00:53:42]  That's very rude of the BBC not to cast him, really.
[00:53:44]  Play himself, make it very convincing then.
[00:53:46]  I've seen some really good edits of that going around.
[00:53:51]  Bald Eagle, 1787, says, how much are we willing to bet that within the year the House of Lords will be overflowing with diversity?
[00:53:58]  Well, sorry, that is another obvious point as well, isn't it?
[00:54:01]  It's to get rid of the landed aristocracy, the actual landed, like Norman Anglo peerage and, you know, those who actually have genetic ties to the land and replace them with the new arrivals like Warsi and the rest.
[00:54:16]  Question: Do they want to abolish it completely?
[00:54:19]  Or do that?
[00:54:19]  That's what I did.
[00:54:20]  The House of Lords.
[00:54:21]  The House completely.
[00:54:22]  Or do they want?
[00:54:22]  No, they would just want to shuffle the people.
[00:54:24]  They want to get rid of the hereditary.
[00:54:26]  But I think that there's been a significant movement on the left for a very long time where they basically argue that the House of Lords is redundant, which, if you make it elected, it sort of is.
[00:54:35]  Yeah.
[00:54:36]  And it's very obvious that that is a trajectory that it's going to go.
[00:54:40]  And this is like everything, not the final part, but just the next step in the phase.
[00:54:46]  And Habsification says, Tony Blair and the Labour Party have done so much damage to the country so fast.
[00:54:53]  Yeah, they did.
[00:54:54]  And he also says the entire point of getting rid of the rid of the hereditary peers was so that meritocracy could flourish and corruption is flushed out.
[00:55:04]  The exact opposite happened and the entirety entirely predictable outcome.
[00:55:10]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:55:12]  I mean, it's not going to get rid of corruption if all the appointees are appointed by the corrupt, is it?
[00:55:17]  So cheer us up, Stellia.
[00:55:19]  Yeah, Stellios.
[00:55:20]  Right.
[00:55:20]  So I'm going to cheer you up by talking to you about the 11th of April.
[00:55:25]  There's a Lotus Citus live event.
[00:55:28]  Oh, feel better already.
[00:55:29]  Yeah.

=== Chuck Norris: Martial Arts to Movie Star (04:11) ===

[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Do get tickets and go to watch it.
[00:55:33]  It's going to be from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Mecca in Swindon.
[00:55:39]  Right?
[00:55:40]  So confirm presenters: Carl, Bo, Harry, Dan, Luca, Josh, Firas, and Nick Dixon.
[00:55:49]  VIP doors open at 6.
[00:55:52]  Show start at 7.
[00:55:53]  You can be a VIP.
[00:55:55]  Yes, you can be a VIP and you get to, you know, hang out with us.
[00:55:59]  It'll be good.
[00:55:59]  For longer.
[00:56:01]  Yeah, I'm still going to say hello to people that got the regular ticket.
[00:56:05]  I'm not that mean.
[00:56:05]  Don't worry.
[00:56:06]  I think I'm that important.
[00:56:08]  So Chuck Norris did not run out of time.
[00:56:11]  Time ran out of Chuck Norris.
[00:56:14]  We are going to say goodbye to a legend.
[00:56:18]  And the legend will definitely live on.
[00:56:20]  We are going to bid Chuck Norris farewell with the segment.
[00:56:25]  Right.
[00:56:25]  So he died about five days ago.
[00:56:30]  And I want to say that I am very sad about this because I'm also a martial arts enthusiast.
[00:56:36]  I have black belt in karate and Chuck Norris was kind of a big deal.
[00:56:40]  He won six world championships in a row way.
[00:56:45]  You're like a warrior monk, aren't you?
[00:56:46]  You like doctorate in philosophy and a black belt in karate.
[00:56:51]  You've got philosophy and I know how to fight.
[00:56:55]  Right.
[00:56:56]  But Chuck Norris knew how to fight much better than I do.
[00:56:59]  Right.
[00:57:00]  So he was a martial arts master, always also a big screen action hero.
[00:57:07]  He was very unique in that he was one of the very few people who was really big in martial arts and transitioned into a movie star.
[00:57:15]  And even though you can say that some of his movies were a bit B action movies, he definitely had a very strong cult following.
[00:57:26]  Right.
[00:57:27]  And following.
[00:57:27]  And he definitely had critics saying bad things about his movie.
[00:57:32]  But he said, it doesn't matter what the critics say.
[00:57:34]  If you have critics saying good things, but the movie makes $2, it really makes no difference.
[00:57:40]  You really want the people to like you.
[00:57:42]  He was one of the examples of one of the early internet memes, wasn't he?
[00:57:46]  Yes, Norris facts.
[00:57:48]  That's a real callback.
[00:57:50]  We will get there.
[00:57:51]  One of my favorite ones was the downfall one where it's like Hitler finds out Chuck Norris is coming.
[00:57:56]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:57:57]  We will get there.
[00:57:59]  We are going to talk about his life a bit and separate it in several phases.
[00:58:04]  We are going to talk about his early years and then the Karata Championship title that he won titles that he won, then the movie star era and then the internet meme phenomenon.
[00:58:18]  Because in some respects, they're saying that the Check Norris facts are the origin of the very interesting mix of authority and absurdity that we see in Chaddish memes.
[00:58:31]  He was also there.
[00:58:32]  He is just a legend.
[00:58:35]  Right.
[00:58:35]  So let's see.
[00:58:40]  I'll just read some things about his life.
[00:58:44]  So he says he was the oldest of three boys, Carlos Ray Norris.
[00:58:48]  He was born on March the 10th in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1940, close to the Texas border.
[00:58:55]  His father was a mechanic and a trucker, and his mother, Wilma, did odd jobs to help his poor family get by.
[00:59:01]  Genetically speaking, he said that he was half Irish, half Cherokee.
[00:59:06]  I didn't know that.
[00:59:07]  Yes.
[00:59:08]  His father had a drinking problem and often left the family for long stretches.
[00:59:12]  So Norris found his male road models in John Wayne.
[00:59:17]  Was his father the Irish or Native American side?
[00:59:19]  He'd go either way.
[00:59:21]  Here comes Josh with his genetic, the genetic test official.
[00:59:26]  Hey, I've got a decent amount of Irish heritage.
[00:59:29]  I can judge on that side.
[00:59:30]  I just need Bo to weigh it out.
[00:59:32]  So John Wayne, Jane Autry, and Roy Rogers were some of his role models.
[00:59:37]  And I'm just going to say some things here about his family life.

=== Father's Absence and Male Role Models (03:36) ===

[00:59:41]  One of the most tragic events that he experienced was that he lost his brother Willand in Vietnam.
[00:59:47]  He died in 1970.
[00:59:49]  And this was one of the things that he said was one of the most disappointing things he felt in his life.
[00:59:55]  But it was a constant motivation for him to develop his own philosophy of life that is incredibly positive looking and very much grubbed an attitude of grubbing the bull by its horns.
[01:00:11]  So what happened?
[01:00:13]  He really was interested in the military and in becoming a policeman.
[01:00:17]  He wasn't interested in being a movie star.
[01:00:19]  In fact, this came as an idea much later after he was 30 years old.
[01:00:25]  So when he was never too late.
[01:00:27]  Yeah, so when he was about 18 in 1958, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and he went to the Awesome base in Korea to become an air policeman.
[01:00:39]  And he was in Korea there until 1962.
[01:00:43]  And there he got steeped into the martial arts.
[01:00:46]  And he learned, he received a black belt in a martial art called Tang Su Do, and he developed his own Chun Kuk Do.
[01:00:59]  It sounds like Chun Kokdo or something.
[01:01:02]  Not a cockish one.
[01:01:04]  Right.
[01:01:05]  So he got married into his classmate, Diane Holczek, and in 1962, and their marriage lasted until 1988.
[01:01:15]  At some point, his wife found out that in the early stages of his relationship, of their relationship, he had an illegitimate daughter.
[01:01:24]  But they found out, but when they met, at some point, she wrote a letter to him.
[01:01:29]  They met, and he told her that we don't even have to do a genetic test.
[01:01:34]  You're my daughter.
[01:01:36]  And they had a good relationship.
[01:01:39]  Presumably, he just shook hands with the woman and she immediately fell pregnant.
[01:01:45]  Yes.
[01:01:46]  Also, he created the hospital in which he was born.
[01:01:50]  He built it.
[01:01:52]  Possibly it was the nurse, the maid who gave birth to him.
[01:01:58]  Right, okay.
[01:01:59]  Then at some point he left the Air Force in 1962 and he started learning martial arts.
[01:02:06]  He wanted to become a police officer, a policeman.
[01:02:11]  Too much hot fuzz.
[01:02:13]  Too much hot fuzz with you, Luca in the office.
[01:02:16]  And he was waiting on the, you know, in order to become, and at some point he decided that he couldn't wait anymore.
[01:02:24]  And he started teaching, he started teaching martial arts.
[01:02:27]  He taught plenty of martial arts classes in his backyard, but then he opened some martial arts studio.
[01:02:35]  And then he started fighting in tournaments.
[01:02:40]  He actually lost sometimes.
[01:02:44]  He just let other people win so they didn't leave.
[01:02:47]  Yeah, he allowed other people win.
[01:02:50]  And you'll see why he allowed them to win.
[01:02:52]  Because when he at some point got really went really best mode and he won six world championships in karate in a row, I think the students felt a bit emasculated.
[01:03:06]  And that caused a bit of a problem with his karate studios.
[01:03:09]  So you're correct, Josh.
[01:03:11]  He allowed them to win.
[01:03:13]  So the students there in his martial arts classes wouldn't be so emasculated.

=== Good Guys Kick Bad Guys' Asses (14:52) ===

[01:03:18]  He's a considerate guy.
[01:03:20]  Yeah.
[01:03:20]  But he had financial troubles at the time.
[01:03:25]  And Steve McQueen was one of the people who really helped him because he was an action movie star who was doing martial arts lessons with Chuck Norris.
[01:03:38]  And he told him...
[01:03:40]  Those must have been incredible sessions.
[01:03:42]  And he told him at some point when Chuck Norris told him that he had issues.
[01:03:47]  He faced issues with employability and money and stuff.
[01:03:51]  And he said, listen, when it comes to the movies, you either have presence or not.
[01:03:56]  I think you do have it.
[01:03:57]  So there he started trying to get into the movies.
[01:04:02]  In some respects, he went there and he said that in some auditions, almost everyone knew him.
[01:04:08]  And they started asking for autographs.
[01:04:10]  So he was kind of a star already.
[01:04:14]  He started doing some movies by himself because he wanted to be a sort of American martial arts action hero and he actually became that.
[01:04:24]  So here we have a filmography.
[01:04:26]  He has a massive filmography.
[01:04:29]  A lot of people don't know.
[01:04:30]  I'll just give you some of them.
[01:04:32]  He has The Hitman, 1991, The Delta Force, 1986, The Delta Force 2, Columbian Connection, 1990.
[01:04:41]  He had also Missing in Action, 1984, sequels Firewalker 1986, Sidekicks 1992.
[01:04:49]  And he was also starring in a TV series, Walker, Texas Ranger, which lasted from 1993 to 2001.
[01:05:01]  And I have this here.
[01:05:02]  It's just, in a way, it's very American.
[01:05:05]  It's in you because you have here Jack Norris with his nice hat here.
[01:05:11]  He's the most American image I've ever seen.
[01:05:13]  Yeah, he is basically the sheriff.
[01:05:15]  And what is interesting is this show is that it shows, in a way, what he represented.
[01:05:21]  He represented a kind of old American stoic attitude on the one hand, but also the kind of mythological aspect that we see in every culture, where you do want to see the good guys win in the end and then triumph completely over evil.
[01:05:39]  And he represents a bit more innocent times.
[01:05:43]  It's not so much when it's before cinema became very dark and tried to show you the gray aspect of life.
[01:05:53]  It's simple.
[01:05:54]  These are the good guys.
[01:05:55]  These are the bad guys.
[01:05:57]  Let's kick their asses.
[01:05:59]  It's very simple.
[01:06:00]  Chuck Norris just karate chops the gray and they're black and white.
[01:06:03]  Awesome.
[01:06:04]  Samson, watch Invasion.
[01:06:07]  Watch Invasion.
[01:06:08]  Just throw out some shit recommendations.
[01:06:10]  So let's address the elephant in the room.
[01:06:12]  Who would win in a fight between Chuck Norris and Stephen Segal?
[01:06:16]  Definitely Chuck Norris.
[01:06:17]  But thank you for actually reminding this to me because I forgot to mention.
[01:06:22]  How could I forget to mention the movie with Bruce Lee?
[01:06:25]  Yes, of course.
[01:06:26]  The Way of the Dragon in 1972.
[01:06:29]  They met in the Karate Championships.
[01:06:33]  And Bruce Lee wasn't the guy who won the championship.
[01:06:36]  It was Chuck Norris who did.
[01:06:38]  And they became friends.
[01:06:40]  And at some point, Bruce Lee told him, listen, I'm going to make a movie and I want a fight scene that is going to be ultra-iconic.
[01:06:47]  It was the movie that they started fighting in the Colosseum in Way of the Dragon.
[01:06:52]  And Chuck Norris asked him, who's going to win?
[01:06:56]  He said, I'm going to win.
[01:06:57]  I'm the movie star.
[01:06:58]  That was what Bruce Lee told him.
[01:06:59]  And he said, it's okay.
[01:07:01]  So he allowed him to win.
[01:07:02]  Sorry.
[01:07:03]  I was just drawing a tincture.
[01:07:05]  This was despite the series initially receiving mediocre critical reception with notable criticism for the amount of violence on the show.
[01:07:13]  You're literally.
[01:07:14]  Oh, no, I've got too many Chuck Norris fight scenes.
[01:07:18]  Who criticizes that?
[01:07:19]  That's the issue that he, okay, let's face it.
[01:07:22]  Okay.
[01:07:23]  He isn't a kind of, you know, Lawrence Olivier or actor.
[01:07:29]  Not everyone needs to be, right?
[01:07:31]  Not everyone.
[01:07:31]  Absolutely.
[01:07:32]  Absolutely.
[01:07:33]  Yeah, when Arnold Schwarzenegger's on screen, I'm not listening to him for his gripping emotional range.
[01:07:39]  Teleoffs.
[01:07:40]  Yeah.
[01:07:41]  Exactly.
[01:07:42]  You don't expect an Anthony Hopkins level of performance, but you want to see just an action movie, a simple code.
[01:07:50]  Good guys, bad guys, good guys, kick their asses.
[01:07:54]  I still think Arnie's best film is Jingle All The Way.
[01:07:57]  Put the cookie down.
[01:07:59]  No.
[01:08:00]  Right, okay.
[01:08:01]  So let's move forward.
[01:08:03]  He always had the critics being against him, especially later on when he started making some political comments.
[01:08:11]  He said some things about terrorists that you shouldn't give them an inch and that you should just be completely, you should go completely beast mode against them.
[01:08:22]  He was basically a Republican.
[01:08:24]  He wrote a book called Black Belt Patriots.
[01:08:28]  That's a great title.
[01:08:31]  Yes.
[01:08:32]  Joe Rogan here says, Chack Norris changed my life for real.
[01:08:36]  If it wasn't for Chuck Norris movies, who knows?
[01:08:39]  I might have never gotten into martial arts.
[01:08:42]  That gentleman will always have my respect.
[01:08:45]  That's good praise from Joe Rogan here.
[01:08:49]  He also wrote books.
[01:08:51]  He has the secret of Inner Strength, my story.
[01:08:55]  And he has this troll-ish look here.
[01:09:01]  Patriot.
[01:09:03]  I think it's a bit trollish, I actually find it.
[01:09:05]  I like it.
[01:09:06]  And I have here some of the cores of his philosophy, which I want to share with you.
[01:09:11]  So maximize potential.
[01:09:14]  You have to develop your potential.
[01:09:16]  Do you like it?
[01:09:17]  I'm all right.
[01:09:19]  That's actually really profound.
[01:09:21]  Because you're going to tell me, hey, Stellius, you're actually Captain Obvious was here.
[01:09:28]  Yeah, but you're forgetting it.
[01:09:29]  Let's be honest.
[01:09:30]  The goal is for you to remember it.
[01:09:33]  Forget past mistakes.
[01:09:35]  Well, occasionally you have to learn from them, but don't dwell on the past.
[01:09:38]  It's a forward-looking philosophy.
[01:09:41]  Maintain a positive frame of mind.
[01:09:43]  You know, it's like you have the two wolves in your soul.
[01:09:47]  One hates the state, the other hates it too.
[01:09:50]  One is very black pilling-oriented, the other is way very white pill-oriented.
[01:09:55]  This is what he says, go for the white pills.
[01:09:57]  I like being miserable, I'm very good at it.
[01:10:01]  Um, but no, it is true that you should maintain a positive attitude because you know, as Peterson later said about the lobsters, it does your positive attitude changes how you carry yourself and your serotonin levels and things.
[01:10:13]  It's obviously an important thing to do.
[01:10:15]  And it seems from all the things you're telling me as well, it's not just that Chuck Norris preached these lessons, but he also clearly lived them himself.
[01:10:22]  Yes, um, I think the next one, his first wife may have an issue with the game.
[01:10:30]  We have the Josh defense, so he says, you know, just put family first.
[01:10:36]  Like, what I'm not for infidelity, by the way, just to be clear.
[01:10:42]  Josh defense, okay, defense of Chuck Norris.
[01:10:46]  Okay, didn't say anything badly.
[01:10:49]  You said that most probably the other woman just saw was in a radius of his presence and just went pregnant.
[01:10:56]  Yeah, Chuck Norris can't actually meet other women because they'll immediately fall pregnant.
[01:11:01]  Yeah, it says, look for the good in life, give time to self-improvement, celebrate others, don't be someone like a miser who just constantly want others to harm themselves and say, hey, they have a worse life than myself.
[01:11:16]  So I feel good about myself.
[01:11:18]  Don't be like this.
[01:11:19]  Just don't.
[01:11:21]  So, and you know, it's just simple stuff, but that's the issue.
[01:11:25]  Sometimes there is some wisdom in simplicity.
[01:11:28]  And we kind of forget it.
[01:11:29]  You don't have to be, you don't have to be a Kant, an Immanuel Kant, I mean, in philosophy, in order to have profound insights.
[01:11:38]  Yeah, I was talking about philosophy, Luca and Josh.
[01:11:40]  Please that just took me by surprise is all.
[01:11:45]  So we are going to go now to the Chack Norris facts.
[01:11:51]  And we are going to talk about some of them and then explain how this internet phenomenon started.
[01:11:57]  Here we have this: death didn't take Jack Norris.
[01:11:59]  Chack Norris took death's job.
[01:12:01]  And then immediately killed the only family.
[01:12:06]  There's another meme when you know it's Chack Norris in front of the gates of heaven.
[01:12:10]  And they have this dude from OnlyFans says, no, the gates of heaven are closed for you.
[01:12:17]  We have here Chack Norris is going to do his own funeral speech.
[01:12:21]  He says, rip Jack Norris and Jack Norris is delivering his eulogy.
[01:12:27]  Here he is just of the coffin bearers.
[01:12:33]  Here we have Chack Norris 1942 when he felt like it.
[01:12:41]  Here's his last appearance in a movie that was in Expendables 2.
[01:12:46]  They say Booker Rumor had it, you were dead.
[01:12:49]  So yeah, I heard that too.
[01:12:51]  But there was also another Chack Norris fact he said in that movie.
[01:12:54]  He said, at once, King Cobra bit me.
[01:12:57]  And after three days of excruciating pain, the King Cobra died.
[01:13:03]  I remember that one.
[01:13:04]  Yeah.
[01:13:05]  Yeah.
[01:13:05]  And I think in the spirit of Chapel Norris's philosophy, I think we need to be positive and remember him in a positive mind that he would want us to remember him because he was definitely not the kind of look back in misery type of person.
[01:13:23]  He would want us to celebrate his life.
[01:13:26]  So I have here lots of Chak Norris facts.
[01:13:30]  I want to mention some of them.
[01:13:32]  We have some time.
[01:13:33]  I'll mention enough of them and let's have some fun.
[01:13:37]  Yeah, yeah, great.
[01:13:37]  Right.
[01:13:38]  Says in the beginning there was nothing, then Chai Norris run house kicked nothing and told it to get a job.
[01:13:48]  Says Chack Norris once ran house kicked someone so hard that his foot broke the speed of light.
[01:13:54]  It's more of an observation, yeah.
[01:13:57]  Says Chack Norris's Ranhouse kick is so painful it can be seen from outer space by the naked eye.
[01:14:04]  That's weird.
[01:14:07]  NASA have confirmed this.
[01:14:08]  Yeah.
[01:14:10]  Chack Norris doesn't strike gold.
[01:14:12]  Gold is the byproduct of Chape Norris's roundhouse kicking rocks.
[01:14:18]  This takes me back to the college.
[01:14:23]  We were just always cracking these sorts of jokes.
[01:14:25]  Chack Norris once shattered the space-time continuum.
[01:14:28]  He felt so bad he put it back together.
[01:14:31]  It's very considerate of him.
[01:14:33]  I really like this one, especially for wheelchair people.
[01:14:37]  Says Chau Norris plays Django with Stonehenge.
[01:14:41]  Jack Norris is able to slam a revolving door.
[01:14:46]  Those are the kinds of ones I remember.
[01:14:48]  Yeah.
[01:14:48]  Chack Norris has a diary.
[01:14:50]  It's called the Guinness Book of War Records.
[01:14:55]  But I think it's these sorts of jokes and you know, this internet humor that came with him as well that just helped him to be one of those celebrities and film stars that, you know, his fan base transcended generations.
[01:15:08]  It wasn't just the older generation who grew up with his films as well.
[01:15:12]  It's part of the reason why, you know, everyone, everyone knows who Chuck Norris is.
[01:15:17]  And then from there, you know, it's not how you learn, but you know, but once you've learned, you can just go and study him as much as you want.
[01:15:24]  Growing up in Britain, the only reason I really knew who he was was because of the memes on the internet more than anything, because we didn't really have many of his films and shows on our television.
[01:15:36]  But it's a testament to the crystallization of his fame that he can transcend these cultural barriers.
[01:15:44]  It says when Chau Norris lifts weights, the weights get in shape.
[01:15:50]  If Chau Norris were to travel to an alternative dimension in which there was another Chau Norrish and they both thought they would both win when the boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.
[01:16:03]  Yeah, it's a classic.
[01:16:05]  The flu gets a Chuck Norris shot every year.
[01:16:11]  Chack Norris is the reason that Wally's always hiding.
[01:16:16]  What did he do?
[01:16:17]  Bigfoot is still hiding because he once saw Chack Norris walking in the mountain.
[01:16:22]  Oh, Carl will be gutted.
[01:16:23]  Yeah.
[01:16:24]  Yeah.
[01:16:25]  Now, this is really relevant.
[01:16:27]  Chack Norris doesn't worry about high gas prices.
[01:16:30]  His vehicles run on fear.
[01:16:34]  I remember one that says one night he got really drunk and urinated inside a truck's gas tank.
[01:16:43]  Ever since that track is called Optimus Prime.
[01:16:50]  He says Freddy Krueger has nightmares about Chack Norris.
[01:16:55]  What happens if Chuck Norris visits you in your dreams?
[01:16:59]  Is that like a blessing?
[01:17:01]  Find out tonight.
[01:17:03]  Find out.
[01:17:03]  Chack Norris makes onions cry.
[01:17:07]  Ghosts tell Chau Norris stories at the campfire.
[01:17:12]  Anyway, just check these stories.
[01:17:15]  Check these facts about his life out.
[01:17:17]  These are real-life events.
[01:17:18]  It all happened.
[01:17:19]  I can't believe all these things happened.
[01:17:21]  One of my favorite facts is that at one point Chau Norris went to a feminist rally and came back with his shirt ironed and holding a scent.
[01:17:30]  I can believe that one.
[01:17:31]  Right.
[01:17:32]  And here we have how these facts originated.
[01:17:36]  And what happened essentially is that in 2005, there was a high school student, Ian Specter, who created an online generator for absurdist celebrity facts, initially inspired by Fast and Furious and Vin Diesel.
[01:17:51]  And following a user poll, the folks of the Varro phenomenon shifted to Chauck Norris because obviously.
[01:17:58]  Makes more sense.
[01:17:59]  Obviously.
[01:18:00]  And that led to the widespread popularity of Chaik Norris' facts.
[01:18:04]  That was 21 years ago.
[01:18:07]  21 years ago.
[01:18:08]  Thanks for making me feel old.

=== Widespread Popularity of Chuck Norris Facts (02:15) ===

[01:18:10]  I remember when this was at its height.
[01:18:12]  Yeah.
[01:18:13]  And the meme success prompted Spectre to publish The Truth About Chack Norris, a book that became a New York Times bestseller.
[01:18:20]  Despite initial legal challenges from Chax Norris's team regarding monetization, a settlement eventually was reached and there were subsequent editions being labeled as unauthorized parody.
[01:18:34]  And Chak Norris himself was reportedly flattered by the facts, never taking them too seriously.
[01:18:41]  And in some cases, he really leaned into it and said that he said at some point that they once tried to carve Jack Norris's face into Mount Rushmore, but the granite wasn't hard enough for his beard.
[01:18:57]  Anyway, so I think we should say goodbye to this legend and may he rest in peace.
[01:19:05]  And may he let us all rest in peace too.
[01:19:10]  Okay.
[01:19:10]  Oh, we've got quite a few chats through there.
[01:19:13]  Yeah.
[01:19:13]  Oh, wow.
[01:19:14]  They're all going to be just challenging.
[01:19:15]  Let's go through all these chunk Norris.
[01:19:20]  Sigil Stone 17 says they named a bridge after Chaq Norris, but had to quickly change it because no one crosses Chape Norris and lives.
[01:19:29]  That's quite a good one.
[01:19:30]  Sigil, again, Chau Norris had a staring contest with the sun.
[01:19:34]  The sun blinked.
[01:19:36]  Bald Eagle 1787, Chau Norris didn't die.
[01:19:39]  He looked at death and said, it's time.
[01:19:44]  Again, Sigil Stone.
[01:19:48]  Chai Norris took half of everything she had in the divorce.
[01:19:53]  Chai Norris used to drop his parents off at work before driving to kindergarten.
[01:20:00]  Again, Sigil Stone, Chau Norris didn't dial the wrong number.
[01:20:04]  The wrong person picked up the phone.
[01:20:08]  Ochik Dorr says this is just for that amazing save Stelios.
[01:20:13]  I think he says.
[01:20:14]  It's a reference to a certain German philosopher, I think.
[01:20:17]  Immanuel Kant.
[01:20:18]  Yes.
[01:20:18]  Okay, yeah.
[01:20:19]  The haplification to Stelius' point about Hollywood trying to be grey, nuanced, and sympathetic, especially the villains.

=== German Philosopher Reference in Memes (03:07) ===

[01:20:26]  Now them to do it for the Nazis because they did and still do it for communists.
[01:20:31]  I will say that in Fury with Brad Pitt, you do have something like this.
[01:20:37]  You do have a Nazi soldier looking down, seeing the young soldier and not notifying the Nazi officials.
[01:20:47]  So, I mean, I'm sure that maybe they have Tarantino's movie in mind.
[01:20:53]  Right, yeah.
[01:20:53]  There is a cartoonist representation of mid-century Germans, but I think that in general, people have got completely fixated on particular things and just completely blame Hollywood culture or just whatever.
[01:21:09]  The Wormacs, for example, were just German conscripts.
[01:21:13]  They were just German citizens.
[01:21:15]  They might not have necessarily even voted for the ruling part.
[01:21:19]  Ochik Dor says, Hollywood didn't start the downward trajectory until after Norris left Hollywood.
[01:21:25]  Yeah, except Expendables 2 was around that time.
[01:21:29]  Yep.
[01:21:31]  One of my favourite ones that I saw going about online was that, say, Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his dad.
[01:21:38]  Yeah.
[01:21:39]  That was just one of them.
[01:21:40]  That one really cracked me up.
[01:21:43]  He was willed into existence.
[01:21:45]  Yeah.
[01:21:46]  All right.
[01:21:47]  Go on then, Samson.
[01:21:48]  Hit play.
[01:21:53]  Please.
[01:21:57]  You must be joking.
[01:21:58]  England gave the US Monty Python, Benny Hill, and other truly funny shows.
[01:22:05]  England needs SNL like a kick in the balls.
[01:22:12]  Yeah, I would be very surprised if, I mean, actually, I know Carl did a segment on it yesterday, which I haven't seen, but I'd be very surprised if the viewing figures hold up very highly.
[01:22:25]  England needs, or Britain needs SNL, like Chuck Norris needs testosterone injections.
[01:22:31]  There you go.
[01:22:32]  There's my conversation.
[01:22:33]  Well played.
[01:22:33]  Well played.
[01:22:34]  Bit of continuity.
[01:22:36]  Any more, Samson?
[01:22:41]  Gay Lotus Eaters.
[01:22:42]  I'm doing another sale of my books at cscoopa.com.au.
[01:22:47]  And if there are any aspiring authors out there who want to get their book published, reach out to me on the contacts page and I'll help you get started.
[01:22:55]  I can do manuscript preparation for publication and I can also get cover art design for you and I'll show you the entire process from start to finish.
[01:23:05]  Or maybe not start because you need to start by writing the book.
[01:23:08]  So get to it.
[01:23:11]  Wonderful.
[01:23:12]  I swear, if I'm going to be on my deathbed and they say, do you have any final words?
[01:23:16]  It's going to be cscooper.com.au.
[01:23:21]  That's committed and burnt into my memory now forever.
[01:23:24]  Well, there you go.
[01:23:25]  You've done something right, Cooper.
[01:23:30]  Hey, Lotus Eaters.
[01:23:31]  I've just completed Route 66.

=== Destroy the World by Any Means Necessary (06:38) ===

[01:23:33]  I'm going to miss the American freedoms.
[01:23:45]  Show us the target.
[01:23:48]  That's awesome.
[01:23:49]  Well, you can't off-camera, Chuck Norris was catching the bullets.
[01:23:54]  That was very cool, though.
[01:23:55]  And yeah, I hope you enjoyed it.
[01:23:56]  Also, I like the Restore Britain picture on Route 66.
[01:24:02]  Also, that was, was that an M1 Garand?
[01:24:04]  I'm going to share my naivety.
[01:24:06]  I just heard the ping, so I presume so.
[01:24:07]  Yeah.
[01:24:08]  I'm not sure.
[01:24:09]  I don't really know my guns, but it was bloody impressive.
[01:24:12]  The recoil on that thing was, wow.
[01:24:15]  I mean, even when I fired a Soviet SVD Dragonov, the recoil wasn't as much as that.
[01:24:21]  But no, I need to do that.
[01:24:24]  I've decided.
[01:24:25]  Yeah, go to the US and shoot some guns.
[01:24:29]  Should I read some comments?
[01:24:30]  Yep, sure.
[01:24:31]  Yeah.
[01:24:31]  Someone online says the woke will never learn.
[01:24:33]  They can have a migrant terrorist throw a bomb at them and they won't change.
[01:24:38]  Well, that was certainly the case in New York, wasn't it?
[01:24:40]  And it's amazing to me, really, that even self-preservation doesn't change people's ideological commitments.
[01:24:48]  Because if I believe something about the world and then I was just like, oh, okay, actually, this could get me killed.
[01:24:54]  I'd at least reflect on it.
[01:24:56]  You know, I reflect on the fact that when minorities are causing problems, I go up to them and say, listen, stop doing that.
[01:25:04]  And I think about, well, I know this is the morally right thing to do, but I could die.
[01:25:09]  Is this maybe the wrong thing to do?
[01:25:12]  And it's just amazing the lack of reflection that they have.
[01:25:16]  It's, you know, I think about all sorts of things from what you were saying, like policy decisions or whether it's just your actual life.
[01:25:23]  And, you know, I thought that after the murder of David Amos, the elites might pivot and be like, oh, God, no, it could be us as well.
[01:25:30]  It's not just the plebs out there getting knifed at, but no, it didn't change anything.
[01:25:34]  And then when it came to policy, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I thought, okay, well, survival should dictate that we drop net zero and stuff like that now.
[01:25:43]  And it didn't.
[01:25:45]  And no, they're really stuck sticking it out to the end.
[01:25:48]  Yeah, well, I think that someone who actually reflects on what they believe is someone that you're more, you should be more inclined to listen to because, you know, every healthy person should reflect on what they believe.
[01:26:01]  And it's an important thing.
[01:26:04]  And the fact they don't do it is a testament to their lack of character.
[01:26:07]  Final one from me, I think.
[01:26:08]  Omar Awad, amazing coincidence how these mental health breaks always occur around the unarmed and vulnerable.
[01:26:14]  This phenomenon needs to be studied, hopefully, by...
[01:26:18]  I don't know whether I can say that, but I appreciate the sentiment.
[01:26:23]  Anyway.
[01:26:25]  From my segment, Kulane Sloan says, so the House of Lords is now the House of Bureaucrats.
[01:26:32]  Yeah, basically.
[01:26:34]  Steve Stevens says, I wrote to my MP before this bill was voted on, explaining to him that it was pertinent to the health of the nation and our politics that it remain as is and to vote against it.
[01:26:47]  I was effectively told to F off that a decision was already being made.
[01:26:51]  I looked up what he voted for regarding this bill.
[01:26:54]  He voted for it.
[01:26:55]  Typical Tory.
[01:26:56]  Yeah, I've only ever written to an MP once before, I think, in my entire life.
[01:27:01]  And that was back during the lockdowns when they were trying to basically have a two-tier system for those who'd had the jab and hadn't had the jab.
[01:27:08]  Got absolutely no reply.
[01:27:10]  But what Steve says there is exactly right.
[01:27:13]  So many of these, it's like, no, no, no, we don't care about your opinion.
[01:27:16]  We've already decided that this is a direction of travel.
[01:27:20]  And screw you.
[01:27:22]  From Chuck Norris wasn't killed.
[01:27:24]  He just stopped holding the air hostage.
[01:27:27]  It's worth noting, by the way, that Boris Johnson's hairdresser has a lordship.
[01:27:33]  That's og.
[01:27:34]  No.
[01:27:35]  There are some rumble chats that have come through with some Chuck Norris facts, Stelios, if you want to do the honors.
[01:27:40]  Yeah, Sigil Stone again says Chuck Norris didn't pay taxes to the IRS.
[01:27:44]  The IRS paid taxes to Chuck Norris.
[01:27:47]  Yes.
[01:27:48]  And Fic Tagius says Chuck was in a firefight with criminals.
[01:27:52]  They gave up after Chuck was empty as they know they wouldn't survive Chuck's rapid fire kicks.
[01:27:58]  Yeah.
[01:27:59]  Yeah.
[01:28:00]  And sorry, just from my segment, if I may, because that's Random Name says, I love how that traitor Courtney speaks as no believing in equal rights is just the default position.
[01:28:11]  Imagine his shock when he learns that most people don't believe equality, inequality.
[01:28:16]  Lamao.
[01:28:17]  Yeah, no, I agree with that, that it is just Tret as the default position.
[01:28:22]  And it's remarkable that for all of the access to information and all of the generations of history to fall back on as a lord, that you wouldn't feel more loyalty and sort of intellectual stimulation, I suppose, by those things than you would just modern day fads, as I'd said before in the segment.
[01:28:45]  All right, then, Stelius, you before I say the fun stuff, I have to address this, which I saw addressed to me.
[01:28:51]  Cambrian Kulak says, Stellios, your views on the pragmatics of ideology.
[01:28:55]  Agreed, but what about the ideology Firas was talking about on Friday?
[01:28:59]  Theology has very real world impacts.
[01:29:02]  Well, this is a very, in a sense, a very vague statement, but I have to address that I stand by everything I said on Friday.
[01:29:14]  And yeah, I mean, we can have an extra discussion about it.
[01:29:18]  But I stand by everything I said.
[01:29:21]  And I just don't think that if some people are trying to build a temple, are trying to destroy the world by building a temple.
[01:29:30]  So I don't feel that threatened.
[01:29:31]  Yeah, it's, sorry, I don't find you threatening.
[01:29:36]  I may be the idiot here, but I just don't genuinely, I mean, it's not destroy the world by any means necessary to destroy the world.
[01:29:46]  It's assuming it is destroy the world, which is a huge if.
[01:29:50]  If that is granted via building a temple, what happens when the temple is built and nothing happens?
[01:29:56]  We didn't try a real temple.
[01:29:58]  Let's change the feng shui.
[01:30:00]  It doesn't sound threatening.
[01:30:01]  What happens when Chuck Norris comes and knocks it down?
[01:30:06]  So, Lancelot, death did not take Chuck Norris.
[01:30:09]  It negotiated terms.

=== Hiking Plans and Temple Feng Shui (00:50) ===

[01:30:12]  George Hap, for all the joke, Chuck Norris was a legitimate martial artist and certified badass, a true American icon.
[01:30:21]  Sophie Liv, Chuck Norris didn't die.
[01:30:24]  He just outlived his body.
[01:30:27]  Kevin Fox, Chuck Norris walked into a map bar and they started the wood chipper.
[01:30:34]  And honorable mention from Kulane Sloan who says, on a six-mile hike, finally managed to catch the podcast during it.
[01:30:43]  Well, that sounds bloody wonderful.
[01:30:46]  Very jealous.
[01:30:47]  Yeah, I'd love to go on a hike soon at some point.
[01:30:50]  Yeah, I hope the scenery is beautiful wherever you are, Sloane.
[01:30:54]  All right.
[01:30:54]  Well, that's all we've got time for, Stellius.
[01:30:56]  Josh, thank you for joining me today.
[01:30:58]  And we look forward to seeing you, of course, at 1 p.m. tomorrow.
[01:31:02]  Have a good day.