Become a backer of Daniel or Jack to get exclusive access to a new bonus episode about Grant Naylor's novel Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, based on the TV series. Featuring special guest, our good friend, podcast legend, the amazing James Murphy. Plus access to all other bonus episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Content Warnings. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 James' Twitter: @JimCrop1916 https://twitter.com/JimCrop1916 James' Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jimslater/posts James podcast (with Kevin Burns), Pex Lives: https://pexlives.libsyn.com/webpage Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers https://www.amazon.com/Red-Dwarf-Infinity-Welcomes-Careful/dp/0451452011 Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers https://ebooks.darknetproxy.com/index.php?page=13&id=49448&db=0 Red Dwarf Season One Episode One https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hjsak Many other episodes also available. Red Dwarf Season One https://www.amazon.com/Red-Dwarf-Season-1/dp/B00412BX5E Red Dwarf fansite https://www.ganymede.tv/
IDSG bonus episodes are a regular extra just for Patreon backers of myself or Daniel.
Here's a preview of the new one.
So they're ordering the Scutters around, forcing them to do this work to the point to where they're literally exploding from overwork.
And in the process of trying to assemble and in their fatigue, the original Rimmer is inadvertently about to You know, essentially put the ship together backwards, which would make it impossible to lift off, etc, etc.
And the other Rimmer notices it, starts fighting with the first Rimmer, and then they end up destroying all the work they had done over the course of that, you know, three month period.
Yeah.
And there's a line in which the original Rimmer says something like, you know, they could have just stayed in bed the entire time, done nothing and be exactly where they are right now.
And that really speaks to You know, that really kind of speaks to like fascist organizing in these kind of like little internet spaces, you know, in which they're constantly fighting with one another.
I mean, they're constantly kind of splitting over, you know, it is like this bit of like, well, I found someone who thinks exactly like me.
So we're going to go spend all our time online together and we're going to create a podcast together.
And then after three months, we're going to get into an argument about who owes whom money for a computer and whether or not we've shown up to our recording schedules on time and who's really taking this project seriously.
And that's a little example from a little history of the alt-right from 2018.
And I'm just kind of looking at that now and I'm thinking like, yeah, that is kind of like the two rivers.
I think we can start calling them a Rimmer of Nazis, just as a collective noun now, if that's fair.
Oh, come on, James, you make it sound like a lavatory disinfectant.
Let's hit the rim in Rimmer.
There is something fashy in Rimmer, or there's the fashy... I mean, firstly, again, the TV series makes more of this and does it for laughs, like Rimmer reads Fascist Dictator monthly on the television, you know, whereas the novels, as I've said, are less broad than that.
But even so, there is something I mean, Rimmer specifically admires Napoleon and Caesar and these sorts of figures in the books.
He's obsessed with people like that and tries to model himself on them ludicrously.
So there is something of that compensatory macho power worship thing going on, isn't there?
I think one of the mistakes the novel makes, one of the few mistakes, comes from giving Rimmer any actual authority here because in the TV series he's literally only in charge of Lister and feels very foiled by the fact that at least he's got someone to lord it over.
by giving him a shift of people to be in charge of I'm not sure the number perhaps 20 perhaps 10 I think that there's a inflation of his sense of self-worth that doesn't quite fit I feel like it's inconsistent it's one of those parts of the novel that kind of contradicts itself because that character Obviously does fail at the fact that he's got people under him.
There's a really fun part of him being in his own head whilst he thinks about all the self-help books that he's gone through and the silences that he's used in speaking out to the room.
And he's like, that was some great silences.
Just include more silences.
That's the way you make an inspiring speech.
And there's one bit where he's like, no, this is a dumb place to have silence.
It just makes it seem like we don't know what he was going to say.
But yeah, I think it was an error of the book in giving Rimmer an actual command of a sense, because I think he would have been even more insufferable than he comes across at this stage.
He's such an insufferable twat.
He invents his own salute.
I could never picture this salute, no matter how many times I read it in the book, until I saw the TV series and went, oh, that's what that's supposed to look like.
I mean, in the book it's described, I imagine, you know, literally like the arms rotating around the cuff of the shoulder, like, like helicopter blades or something.
Like, it was that ridiculous in my head.
But yeah, no, it's just this kind of like vague, this kind of weird wrist movement where you circle five times, then do a salute.
And apparently the double rimmer you do with both arms simultaneously.
It is kind of a horizontal Nazi salute, to be honest, with the stretch from the front.
Yeah, that struck me re-reading the book this time.
The description of it starts by saying the arm comes out at a right angle from the body with the hand held out straight.
I think that's just a Nazi salute!
I mean, I guess spaceballs are around this time, but President Stroob, the spaceball salute, is kind of this similar kind of movement where they do the fascist salute and then they just do something funky with their hand.
Something in the air.
Yeah, definitely.
But yeah, I think one of the things is kind of, again, psychologically and politically acute about the novel is the way it links that authoritarian personality, because Rimmer undoubtedly has an authoritarian personality, with just this deep seated inadequacy.
