To tide you over while we prepare more new content for you, here's an old bonus episode. Once for backers only, now it's yours for free. We talk about 2009's In The Loop, satire of the political machinations leading up to the invasion of Iraq, written/directed by Armando Iannucci (et al) and starring Peter Capaldi as Not Alistair Campbell. Content Warnings, especially for embarrassing old geezer reminiscing. Originally recorded August 2021. Becoming a patron brings 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 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
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Yes, it's bonus number seven. it's bonus number seven.
You lucky people, you're listening to it.
That means you give us money.
Or you've pirated it, I don't know.
We've released it to the public at some point in the future.
We might have done.
We've done that now with one of our bonus episodes.
We released Punishment Park to the public because we've been a bit behind this month.
With one thing and another.
We've had a busy summer, both of us, I think, is the issue here.
Yeah.
So before we start recording, we go like, oh, can we push this till tomorrow?
And it's happening increasingly often these days.
But no, we finally we finally made it.
And yeah, in case that in case you are listening to this in the future months after we recorded it and released it for our wonderful Patreon backers, we are recording this on the what is it now for me?
Is it actually rolled over?
Yeah, it's the 30th where you are.
Yes, it is the 30th of July 2021.
The best year ever.
And Daniel, I think, is still stuck in the 29th of July, like a dweeb.
Yeah.
Well, not like me and way ahead in time.
And yeah, we've we have made up, I think, a little bit for our our wobbly, unproductive July by just just released episode 90 of the main show, which is a fucking banger.
I think I'm very pleased with that one.
Lots of lots of references to ivermectin and scientific studies.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, I just I just I just hate Brett and Heather so much.
I love kicking the boot in, you know, hate them.
But this isn't about them.
We're taking a break from kicking Brett and Heather.
Although they might come up, who knows?
It is, I don't speak German these days, and Brett and Heather never far from our minds.
I don't speak German increasingly now, just an IDW podcast, but there you go.
I wonder how did a podcast that started off being about Nazis turn into a podcast about the IDW?
I just can't, I can't understand this, Daniel.
It's so obscure.
Yeah.
How did this happen?
Yeah.
No.
What happened?
Almost as if there's some connection there.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Almost as if.
Almost as if.
But to finally get to the point.
Yes.
We're talking about this bonus episode is about In The Loop, which is a movie that was released in 2009, directed by Armando Iannucci.
Iannucci?
Iannucci?
I should know how to say that because I've been listening to him for a very long time.
My first exposure to Armando Iannucci was as like the third or fourth person with Stuart Lee and Richard Herring on the TV show, TV, radio comedy program, Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World, which Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World, which is also featured Tom Baker for the for the who heads who might be listening.
on Armando was like the third cast member on that in their show and I remember listening to that when I was a student.
But yeah, Total, by the way.
Forgot about it.
Written by him and Tony Roach?
Tony Rock?
Something like that.
Simon Blackwell and Jesse Armstrong.
Starring Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini and Chris Addison.
I suppose he's the nerdy aide with the glasses.
Yeah, Toby, that's right.
And well, that's funny.
Wikipedia doesn't have the the woman that plays the American politician in the all room.
Her aid, Anna, Anna Chilch, Chomsky.
I can't say anybody's name.
Mimi Kennedy.
Yeah, she's not listed.
The women aren't listed in the in the starring bit on Wikipedia.
This is rank sexism.
Definitely.
For sure.
Yeah.
Or David Rash, actually, for that matter.
Who's in it as well?
David Rash.
I don't know.
People might remember him as Sledgehammer.
I used to watch that when I was a kid.
Lots of people went on to do other stuff because like Zack Woods, the creepy Omen child, he did, I think, a season or so of the American Office down the line.
And Anna Chomsky.
Do you know what she's best known for, by the way?
Wasn't she in a, wasn't she in movies as a kid?
Wasn't she in a Macaulay Culkin film?
She was, she was in My Girl and My Girl 2.
Yeah, that's right.
The one, the one where, spoiler alert, Macaulay Culkin has his first on screen kiss.
And I think his first like real kiss ever.
He was like 12 at that point.
And he dies after being stung by a bee.
I saw that movie theatrically when I was a small child, and I have fairly fond memories of it, honestly.
It's got Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis, and it's kind of a charming slice of life kind of story.
Wow.
I've never seen it.
I've never seen it.
I just remember the poster, you know, with...
Macaulay Culkin and a girl who I recognized.
I actually recognized her when I was watching this.
I was thinking that's the girl that was in that movie with Macaulay Culkin.
The first time I saw this movie, I definitely had that moment of like, where do I know?
Where do I know you from?
And then suddenly you realize and go like, holy crap.
Yeah, no, definitely, definitely a moment.
But I was, yeah, I'd completely forgotten David Rash was in this, and I used to love Sledgehammer.
I used to stay.
I was, because I'm so old now, I remember when TV used to just stop at night.
When I was a kid, BBC, you'd just say, thank you for watching BBC, we're closing down now.
And then they'd play the national anthem at you, and then the TV would go, boo, for hours.
A joke from the young ones, people who know the young ones will remember that.
But yeah, that's the thing.
I remember that.
And ITV used to, ITV used to, ITV used to, I think, used to quit a bit earlier than the BBC, if I remember rightly.
But I remember when ITV started going all the way through the night, and that was like a big thing, especially for us kids.
TV just goes on all night now.
And of course, we'd all stay up and watch it.
I remember I used to watch stuff like, because of course they used to put El Cheapo American shit that they just imported, you know, in the middle of the night when nobody was watching.
So I used to, as a kid, 11 years old or whatever, I was staying up till 4am to watch WKRP in Cincinnati and Married with Children and Sledgehammer.
And I have very fond memories of all this.
At a certain point, you know, all the US channels would just go to what they called paid programming.
And those were infomercials.
And so, you know, after, you know, midnight, 12, 31 o'clock, I mean, if you were if you were insomniac as I was, you know, 13 year old, eventually everything just turned into like paid programming.
And so you were just watching, you know, slice and dice, you know, salad cutters or whatever yeah for four hours until like the morning routine kind of comes up again but uh yeah it's the same thing kind of repeated itself on satellite television at least in this country at least i don't know it's i i don't really have television now i don't have sky or anything like that i don't have cable so um But when I used, I did have Sky for a while, and it was the same thing.
It used the programs, the actual programs used on a lot of the channels, the actual programs would just stop.
And then you'd get endless just adverts about, oh, buy this compilation of rock anthems or buy this food blender or whatever.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Just going through the... Bunch of time-life infomercials over here.
The time-life books, you know, mysteries of the ancient world.
Yeah, and it's really the same three minutes of content.
They just repeat over and over again.
Yeah.
And it's basically they've turned that into the history channel now, haven't they?
Pretty much.
Yeah.
Well, you know, God, I mean, we could probably there's probably an episode in talking about like basic cable and the sort of incentives there.
We could definitely talk about how how that is affected as sort of the Yeah.
you know, international political culture, certainly American political culture.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, there's definitely something there, but.
- Yeah, I mean, I think I'm kind of fascinated by the degeneration of the history channel and the, or is it the discovery channel?
I don't know into all of them.
Yeah, I'll do it.
Yeah.
They they're like conspiracy theory mills now.
You know, they I mean, I remember when I had Sky, it was very satellite television is what I mean when I say Sky.
Right.
That's what we Well, again, I don't even know anymore because I'm so old and it's been so long, but it used to be like satellite television in Britain was just sky and you'd buy a sky dish and get a sky box, etc.
And you'd have the History Channel and you could watch documentaries about the Nazis all day.
Yeah, that's pretty much what they did.
Yeah, that's it.
But now now it's kind of the Nazis.
And did the did the aliens build the pyramids, isn't it?
Right.
See, this is interesting to me because over here you did have this kind of time period, I mean you can get like a satellite TV here, but it was always the sort of thing that was more like rural people out where the cable companies just wouldn't run lines, sort of thing, because we have this Giant country that's just filled with like people who want to get television and the way to do that is with a satellite dish.
And I guess there was an era in which they were like kind of advertised a little bit more aggressively, but I never, like my family never had one.
I never, you know, I never, there was never an issue.
We just, we had, we had cable most of my life growing up.
And when I was very small, it was like, I think 13 channels and it had like this little wooden box and you'd have to go and like press the little button and it would change the to one of the 13 channels you got including your your big broadcast channels and then eventually it's you know a clicker etc but um yeah yeah The Atlantic Divide.
Yeah, no, no.
But you're right.
I don't like I was realizing my wife has been watching Hulu lately because I subscribe to the I subscribe to Hulu.
I subscribe to Amazon Prime and I subscribe to Netflix.
and I don't watch, I mean, when you spend your life listening to fascist talk all the time, you don't have a lot of time for television.
It's probably better to be honest.
But, but like, I actually pay for, pay for YouTube.
The reason I do that is just so I can turn my phone off and listen to YouTube videos on my phone without the screen having to be on.
It seems like such a But that means that I never see YouTube ads.
So people complain about YouTube ads, and I haven't seen a YouTube ad in years at this point.
Do you just not get the ads then?
I just don't get the ads.
If you pay for it, you don't get the ads.
I might have to think about doing this myself.
You can listen to the soundtrack without having to have the phone on and you don't get the ads.
This is sounding pretty good.
I mean, they're literally I mean, they literally just like they made this feature.
Yes.
I'm shilling for YouTube.
But literally, they literally made the feature to where like, you can't turn the phone off.
Yeah, just listen to it unless we pay unless you pay it.
Yeah.
Solely to get people to be like, that's how annoying it is.
It is literally.
I have done YouTube's bidding by giving them money for this feature.
But at the time, Nick Fuentes was still on YouTube and I had to listen to his show for two hours a day.
The only way to do that was to either Set the phone somewhere where you could, like if I was doing dishes or something, you'd set the phone and just sort of like hope you didn't knock it off or you'd have to very gingerly like put it in my pocket and kind of like just not move around too much or else I would like click something and then it would change, you know?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
I very specifically bought one of those phone cases that's got a cover so I can have the phone in my pocket and have YouTube on and it won't constantly be pressing the screen by itself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, this is Old Men Navigate Technology.
This is what this podcast episode is devolved into or evolved into, depending on how you feel about that.
Beg YouTube for sponsorship money.
Right.
But like, no, what I was saying is like, I don't see ads like ever anymore.
And so then I was sitting and I was watching Bob's Burgers with my wife and suddenly there are ads and I'm like, oh, this is what ads look like.
And then, you know, they look the same.
They haven't changed.
Oh, no, I think they're worse.
I think.
I don't know.
This may just be me being an old man again, you know, but this is a running theme of this one, obviously.
But I feel I've had very much the same experience because, as I say, I used to buy satellite television and I stopped and I really don't watch television anymore.
I mean, I do.
I watch a lot of television, but I acquire it through the Internet.
In entirely legal means, of course.
Yeah.
In every case, never in any other than legal manner.
But yeah, I watch television, but I don't watch television, if you know what I mean.
So I've completely gotten out of the habit of putting up with adverts because, you know, I don't know.
It's our culture, isn't it?
I mean, Charlie Brooker once said that it's a bit like the lead in the pipes that used to get into the water and drove the Romans insane.
Television is like that for us.
Or was it him relaying Kurt Vonnegut?
I think it was, actually.
But it's just so much a part of our culture.
That you know the TV just burbles on all the time and you get used to adverts.
I mean TV's bad enough but adverts.
And it's like you stop seeing them for a little while and then for one reason or another you start seeing them again.
You know, and it's astounding to me.
I mean, I'm kind of horrified by the idea that this absolute toxic sludge was just being poured into my head for years, you know, particularly in my vulnerable years.
When we were children.
It's horrifying.
Yeah, no, yeah, no.
It's horrifying that we have an entire culture set up around just funneling this absolute fucking garbage porridge into people's brains.
I think maybe the Hulu ads.
I don't know.
I think it's like you get like two for every like 15 minutes of television or something like that.
And it's only like 30 seconds.
It's like a minute at a time.
And it just doesn't feel, but like in the US and maybe I know it's different.
I know it's different over there, but in the US, like if we had cable for a while, I mean, we had cable for quite a while.
And then eventually it just got to be, we were spending way too much money on cable.
Like it just got, Like we got a deal and they lock you into your contract.
And so you're paying like this kind of discounted rate.
And then eventually you just kind of get used to having it.
And then suddenly you're paying the full rate and you just kind of stick on it because, well, now we're actually kind of watching it.
You know, then I just kind of realized, you know, for the like three shows that we actually watch, I could, you know, we could just buy those.
You know, like these days, you literally can just go and like buy them, you know, on Amazon or whatever, and just have them instead of having to pay them the monthly fee.
So, but yeah, no, yeah, in the U.S., in the U.S.
commercials are, you know, you spend seven minutes watching television and then three minutes watching commercials and then seven minutes watching television and three minutes watching commercials.
And that's just like that felt like much more like Chinese water torture to me of like, you know, where you just feel in it's the same three ads over and over and over again.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
And it's very it's very similar now navigating YouTube because everything's got fucking ads all over it on YouTube.
Yeah.
It's worth the, I don't, I'm not even sure.
I think it's like 11.
I think I share one with my wife.
So neither one of us, like you can do the family thing and do it for multiple accounts.
And I don't know exactly how much that costs.
Cause it just comes out of my direct deposit and whatever it is, it's like $10 or something.
And it was absolutely like, now I never get to see a YouTube ad.
So it's been freedom.
It's been helpful.
Yeah, for sure.
No, this sounds good.
This sounds good.
No, I don't think it's quite I don't think the advert to content ratio is on British television is quite that bad yet, but it's certainly getting there.
It's certainly much worse than it used to be.
Again, old man.
I remember being a kid, you know, you'd watch a movie you'd watch.
You only live twice or whatever.
And on ITV.
And there'd be three or four ad breaks in it over the course of a two hour movie.
These days.
That sounds like heaven.
God knows.
No, the beauty, the beauty, there was actually a, there was a basic cable channel.
I mean, there still is a TBS, Turner Broadcasting System or whatever, which would air it's, it's programming was always, instead of at the hour and a half hour mark, it was always at 35 and 05.
So you would start it at 735 instead of 730.
And the thing that that meant that you could tune into that channel while the ads were playing on the other channel you were watching and watch whatever stupid Saved by the Bell rerun or whatever was playing.
Yes.
I'm so excited.
I'm so excited.
I don't I don't have to watch the damn ads anymore.
You know.
Yeah, man, the thing is, like, I'm literally sitting here and we're talking about this because we're old men, you know, we're in our 40s at this point, and I'm just thinking about, like, our 22-year-olds listening to this podcast and, like, have no context, you know?
There was this bit on the on the on the podcast, Mike Dicta, where, you know, because that was a that was a show for lawyers and they would left left leaning lawyers and they would, you know, they ranged in ages from like 50 to like 25, you know.
And at one point, you know, the Charles Starr was joking about something.
And one of the young ladies who was on the show was just like, oh, are you going to tell us about like your old man stuff?
Tell us about calling a taxi, dad.
I feel very much, I feel very, you know, we've just hit that part in our lives at this point.
Because I do actually work with a lot of younger people.
And I mean, it really is, there are things that they talk about, and I'm just like, my experience of this world has been so much different than yours.
In ways, good and bad, you know?
It's a thing, yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think this is kind of I mean, I've noticed we've been talking for a while now, haven't really even started talking about the film.
But maybe this is our podcast.
I mean, honestly, this is a bonus episode.
Let's just move.
We can do in the loop anytime.
It's fine.
We just do what we like.
You know, fuck it.
This is for the paying customers.
We can give them whatever we want.
Exactly.
I've got that the right way around, haven't I?
Yeah, no, this is kind of accidentally relevant, though, isn't it?
Because this sort of old men reminisce about things that a lot of young people listening and we do have strangely young listenership, which is great, actually.
A lot of young people listening will be going, what the fuck are these two old dicks talking about?
I think it's kind of accidentally relevant because that is now a description of the Iraq invasion.
The Iraq war.
It is a historical event.
It's an old thing.
There are people sentient now who weren't even fucking born.
You know what I mean?
It's like, well, I mean, you know, the Iraq War started in 2003 and 2009.
And then in the loop felt like it was, you know, I saw it probably a year or two after it's released.
I don't know, probably something like 2011 or something like that.
Because I actually, again, bygone era, I actually rented the disc from Netflix.
That was, like, at the time.
But yeah, no, like, this is a film that, even at the time, kind of felt like it was a little bit past its, like, Relevance in a way, you know?
Because it's released by BBC Films, and it does feel a bit like the BBC.
I mean, if you know about the ructions between the BBC and the government at the time of the invasion with Campbell and all that stuff, it does feel a bit like the BBC, you know, ages after the arguments finished, the BBC suddenly going, And another thing!
That's what it feels like to me.
I don't know that story, but that does add a shade onto it.
I was just thinking, because for a lot of people now who are politically aware and politically active, The invasion of Iraq, you know, that must feel to them the same way or something like the same way that the Vietnam War or the JFK assassination or Watergate or something felt to me when I was a young person becoming politically aware, you know.
It's this thing that happened way back when, you know, and it's significant but It still feels like something from the before times.
Well, I mean, fuck it, it's 2021.
Everything feels like it's from the before times, doesn't it?
Yeah.
I feel like even like the pre-COVID era feels like prehistoric.
Yeah.
It's February last year feels like the, you know, the first stage of Middle Earth or whatever.
Right, yeah.
Which is also something that kind of happened after 9-11 is that, you know, like 9-11 becomes this like moment in history and there's like a before and an after.
And, you know, within a week, suddenly, you know, whatever we were talking about on September 10th just felt like this complete other reality.
And like, I feel like, like March 2020 definitely has that kind of impression to it that everything that we were talking about before then just, it had, like, I look at like news articles and like opinion pieces, particularly those that are like in February, you know, like, like just as the thing was kind of starting, but before, We really hit the moment of truth on it.
And it does feel like there's this just like... Back when everybody was thinking well it'll be like SARS it won't really affect us so who gives a shit?
Well, and I feel like God, you know, the thing with God, the thing with the thing for me is like always whenever these kinds of things and this this actually might be relevant, whenever like, you know, when SARS was a thing or when the Ebola pandemic, you know, kind of the Ebola virus thing and latent Barack Obama's term.
Hey, remember when people were angry about how the Obama administration handled that?
Right?
Remember when they were criticized for not handling that very well?
Yeah, I remember.
Well, I feel, I feel like there's this, there's this thing in which I feel like the, you know, like the, the Washington Post and the New York Times and, you know, every website puts out the, put up the, like the big coronavirus and like kind of big, like with the, the, like the, you know, the, the big scary graphics and the kind of like, you know, we're going to highlight coronavirus is this giant thing that's happening.
And at that point, you know, it was, you know, A handful of people.
I'm not a handful.
I don't want to.
I don't want to diminish it.
But it was this kind of far off thing in China.
And we have this experience of our, you know, look, there are medical professionals.
There are, you know, professional people who are paid to do this.
We put a lot of money into, you know, nominally taking care of these things.
The Chinese government is just going to crack down and beat some people's heads in.
But they're going to control this thing.
Right.
And so like it all.
You capitalist shill, Daniel.
Well, I'm not saying that's a good thing.
How dare you!
How dare you criticize the People's Republic of China, you imperialist American!
I'm just saying, it's just the reality of, like, you know, like, it always, like, Very early on, I really felt like, look, this is going to kind of blow over to a certain degree, you know?
Yeah.
And, you know, it really was not, I really didn't take it as this, like, life-changing event because I trusted that there were, and not even, not even like a, like a kind of naive way or not, just like, look, there are systems in place that are basically going to take care of this one way or the other.
And it's never going to be something that's going to be hugely influential in my life because I live in the seat of empire and I don't have to deal with these things.
It's just the reality of being an American means someone else is going to take care of this.
And fundamentally, That was very mistaken.
That was a very mistaken impression, although that was built on, you know, just kind of the experience of being a working adult in America in the 21st century.
And I feel like the other I mean, again, to kind of come back to the movie a little bit in the context, you know, that's a lot of what's kind of going on in in the Iraq war, because I was in my early 20s at that point.
And I was just like, surely We are not this dumb.
Everybody knows.
Afghanistan was one thing.
I thought that was warmongering, and I hated George W. Bush for going into Afghanistan, but at least I sort of got, okay, we're there because We need to topple the Taliban because Osama bin Laden's a bad guy.
And like this is I mean, at least that's sort of like there's a sort of reciprocation there.
Like that's sort of like there's a logic to it.
Right.
But then like certain superficial plausibility, you know, immediately.
Again, I'm not justifying the war in Afghanistan.
I'm just saying, like, there is a certain, like, relentless logic to that to that occurrence.
The idea that we would then go, how about Iraq?
How about Iraq?
We need to maybe bomb that place as well.
And there was like no, I mean, obviously I think anyone listening to this will know there was no justification for it ever.
You know, it just wasn't.
But it felt like To be mercilessly clear about this, and I know you agree with me, none for the invasion of Afghanistan either.
But the point I think we were both trying to make was that, you know, the invasion of Afghanistan, as totally unjustifiable as it was, it had a kind of aesthetic logic that you can understand why some people kind of looked at it and went, okay, but Iraq just never did, did it?
Right, right.
It was just obviously complete.
Well, you know, with with Afghanistan, you can kind of feel like I'm not making this decision.
Like even like even in my 20s, I was sort of thinking like I could see like special forces units kind of going in and like specifically going after whatever Taliban encampment there was going to be or whatever.
But the war made no sense to me.
Right.
Yeah.
Like even even that kind of like liberal haze of 2003.
Right.
But Iraq, which it just felt like Not only was it completely nonsensical, not only was it just kind of batty, but it felt like everyone with any degree of sense agreed that it made no sense, and yet it was happening anyway.
Yeah, exactly.
Like it was just like even the arguments in favor of the war in Iraq were, you know, like they were just kind of like facially bad on every level if you paid attention to it for a second.
Exactly.
It didn't even have that momentary superficial aesthetic logic that Afghanistan had if you squinted at it.
It was just patently cynical and a bunch of bullshit just from the start.
Right.
And this is this is the thing.
I mean, it should have warned us.
It should have told us where we were headed, because we all knew basically everybody knew.
I mean, I remember at the time feeling that even the people do.
I mean, you kind of said this, but I felt at the time, even the people defending it knew, you know, that their arguments were so transparently atrocious.
And you looked at them sometimes.
And I mean, I just Not Tony Blair, weirdly enough, because I think Tony Blair was...
The thing about Tony Tony Blair and people like him are weird because I just I don't think believe and sincere and stuff like that mean the same thing to creatures like that that they mean to the rest of us.
But I didn't get that when I looked at Tony Blair, I didn't feel like he knew what he was saying was bullshit.
I didn't feel like he was lying as such.
But a lot of the people defending the war, I just I just did.
I'd look at them and I was thinking, you know, this is crap, you know perfectly well what you're doing.
And it's like, as you say, it's like everybody knew and it didn't make any difference.
It happened anyway, despite almost everybody knowing that it was an utterly cynical move and that the reasons and justifications had been cooked up, you know, and it should have.
I feel like it should have warned us for where we were going.
Right.
Because that's where we are now.
You know, things just don't matter.
Things are apparently not true or apparently insane or apparently obscene, just apparent to the eye.
And everybody just goes, yeah, that's terrible.
And then nothing happened.
Right, because the people who, you know, recognize those things and who are actually affected by them are not the ones who have the ability to actually make change in the world, unfortunately.
Yeah, and I feel like, I mean, that is the basic material root of the problem, but I feel like it's being exacerbated in our culture by the fact that we now live in this... Oh God, I'm going to sound like such an old fart.
I'm not doing a, oh bloody, it's social media's fault.
I'm not doing that.
But there is something about the information world we live in now and the way politics is mediated through this constant flow of information across corporate social media sites that just exacerbates this problem, I think.
Well, this gets, again, just to touch on the movie again.
I mean, I think, you know, part of the... To briefly touch on the movie we're supposed to be talking about.
Part of the issue, I mean, I think part of what the movie seeds at is, you know, and sort of, I know you were tweeting about it.
And so I think we can, I think there's a conversation... Yeah, I don't like this movie.
That's upfront about it.
I quite liked it when I saw it the first time and I have liked it upon re-watching.
I definitely see your criticisms and I liked it much less upon this re-watch.
Although I do think there are things to enjoy about it.
I spoil everything, Daniel.
It's my role.
You know, part of, you know, part of, you know, being on a podcast and talking about these things is to engage with a more critical lens, right?
You know, but I think, you know, one of the things you kind of like put your finger on in your minor tweet thread was that the movie kind of like makes these people into just kind of like the reason they do bad things is because they're just ordinary people.
And ordinary people just kind of fuck up sometimes.
And there's actually kind of a larger ideological agenda at work.
And these things if I'm if I'm not miss summarizing you or, you know, no, no, that's about right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what I what I see is watching this movie, Um, seeing the kind of like the sheer, just the kind of the human fuck ups, the kind of human collateral that's just kind of happening and just, you know, the, the, just the interpersonal conflicts that are kind of built on nothing and just kind of the, the, the bloatiness of it, I guess.
The thing that strikes me about that is that now all of our politicians and leaders and journalists are all on Twitter all the time, and we see what dipshits they actually are now.
Whereas in another era, there was a barrier between us and that realization, and I feel like that's something that feels very true to me.
You know, in the film is that like without without necessarily going all the way and saying, like, well, this is really what it is.
But like Matt Iglesias, his Twitter is just as ridiculous as anything that happens in this film.
Right.
You know, like and like he's he's encouraged to act that way by the Twitter engagement to a certain degree.
I mean, and, you know, seeing seeing just how openly venal they are and how like how their personality conflicts really do just Come to, like, create huge swaths of our political reality and seeing them, you know, just seeing them for what they are through their Twitter feed really does, like, it really, I mean, the film does feel slightly prescient in that way to me, at least in terms of that kind of minor thing.
So you can roast me now if you like.
No, I agree, actually.
I mean, my thread for people that haven't read it and, you know, what the fuck are you doing not hanging on my every Twitter utterance?
My God.
If you haven't read what I said, it boils down to this.
I think The movie kind of alibis politicians with its picture of the political process as being dominated by kind of random human folly.
The politicians and the movers and shakers are depicted as Foolish people, selfish people, petty people, clumsy, clueless, befuddled, etc.
And it's like the movie is saying that that is why these things happen.
The movie almost depicts The invasion of the... because it's never named.
It's never actually Iraq or anything specific in the movie because it's satirical and non-specific.
But it kind of it depicts the whole thing as like this just concatenation of mistakes and crossed wires and people just doing things because it's their job or because they they're ambitious for
position and power and public recognition or because they just, they just, people are working on autopilot and trying to make themselves look as good as they can in any given situation and falling over their own shoes.
And so it's very, it's very comedic.
And I think there is a degree of truth to that.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
Twitter has allowed us to an extent that wasn't really, again, the before times, 2009.
This was BT, before Twitter.
Twitter existed, but it was not what it is now.
It existed, and I joined Twitter a year after that.
2010 is when I joined Twitter.
God help me.
But it wasn't what it is now.
It hadn't had the cultural effect then that it has now.
And yeah, one of the cultural effects of Twitter has been to show us that these people are, many of them anyway, to a huge extent, just a bunch of clueless, clumsy idiots.
Incredibly, to that extent.
Falling over their own shoes constantly.
But I that is definitely part of the truth.
I just worry that the movie leaves out so much, I suppose.
And I actually I agree with that.
And let me let me let me just I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to push slightly on that and a little bit and say, we don't actually meet any people of actual power in this movie.
It depends who you think Linton Barwick is.
That's a brilliant name, by the way, Linton Barwick.
That is a wonderful, piss-take American name.
That feels very Pensionian to me, right?
It depends who you think he is.
Like, I mean, who do you think Linton Barwick is supposed to be, roughly?
I know he's not meant to be specifically any one person, but roughly, you know, who is he an analogue to?
Well, I mean, he would be I mean, he's according to Wikipedia, he is the US Assistant Secretary of State for Policy.
So he's essentially sort of like working for God, who is Secretary of State in 2000.
I mean, it's essentially working for.
John Kerry, I guess, in like 2015 would sort of be that they are working for Hillary Clinton around this time would have been because I think she was Secretary of State and the time this movie was released.
So he would be sort of like second tier version of that.
God, who was Secretary of State?
I'm looking it up.
I'm looking it up.
Oh, it's Colin Powell.
Okay, so well, and that's God, that's interesting.
Condoleezza Rice was the undersecretary of state.
Right, so he's sort of the whitewashed Americanist.
Hang on a minute.
Condoleezza Rice served as United States Secretary of State under George W. Bush, preceded by Colin Powell and followed by Hillary Clinton.
So he's either meant to be Powell or Rice.
Well, no, he's the assistant to the Secretary of State.
So he's he's kind of like what we're seeing are these kind of like undersecretaries is kind of the point that I'm making.
We're not seeing kind of like the major politicians.
And also, I would say that like Lynton Barwick is is actually one of the more powerful people, certainly in the film, and someone who is much more ideologically motivated and certain like he's not a bumbling fool, like he's the one like giving people the business.
So like, well, yeah, you know, the creepy omen child is kind of like hanging around him for career obligations and wanted to go play squash or whatever.
And, you know, like sucking his toes, you know, Barwick is certainly not like he has an agenda, like he has a very clear agenda.
We are going to war and he is using the kind of losers around him to make that happen.
Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker is like working directly for the, the prime minister and the prime minister has laid down the law.
We are going to fucking war and it's your job to execute that.
And Malcolm Tucker, you know, he has his, his kind of fuck ups from, from time to time, but he is very fully motivated and on the team of like pushing team war on There's no question there.
So I feel like you do get the sense of the larger, that there is this larger climate that is happening, that we are going to do this because the people who are actually in charge are going to make it happen.
But what we're seeing is the way that the That intersects with sort of the foibles of people's actual lives and in this sort of like comedic, you know, almost sitcom level reality, right?
Like, so, I don't know, I feel, I see your point, but I think there is a little bit more to it than that, right?
Yeah, I think you're right, actually, on reflection.
I think what the movie is doing is it's kind of leaving the ultimate cause of the events, the motivation, in a kind of black box at the centre, isn't it?
Barwick is one of the few people in the movie who's kind of been in the black box and come out again to do the, you know, he's been in the room with the Vulcans, so to speak.
That coterie around George Bush who were pushing for the war.
And Tucker as well.
He's been in that space, that space that we don't see.
Yeah, so you can look upon it as just leaving that out, leaving out the core of ideological and imperialist strategic commitment and showing us everything going on around it with only a couple of people who've been in there and heard those conversations and aren't sharing them with anybody, I suppose.
I see it more as like it's almost, I don't know, maybe you could say it's too clever for trying to do this, but I feel like it's more about the experience of being within this system and living within it and ultimately having your I mean, these people are careerists.
I mean, you know, this is, you know, literally, you know, what we see over and over again in the film.
I mean, you know, the first thing that Creepy Omen says to Eliza Weld is, like, you could not be, that paper could not have been more against the policy agenda of this government if you tried.
And I think you did try, right?
You know, like, everybody knows there are certain things you say and certain things you do for what, while the people, you know, For the administration, that they have their goals, and ultimately it's your job to toe the line and to produce the documents that they want.
And if you're not doing that, then you're a problem, right?
Yeah.
And I mean, I think we see that kind of over and over again, and that you don't need everyone involved in the system to be this sort of like, Bluntly ideological, you know, sort of malevolent force in order to create horrifying wars.
No, and I yeah, there is a there is a value in showing that.
And I mean, atrocities, government atrocities, horrific crimes, including the very worst in history.
Happen and can happen because a huge number of people just show up at the office and do their job day to day.
You know, the worst crimes in history were reliant to a huge extent upon people whose job was to, you know, plan train schedules.
And that's all they did.
And they did it because they wanted to get on and impress the boss and get a paycheck and stuff like that.
And yeah, sure.
There is an awful lot of just Petty human venality and ambition and just short-sighted selfish careerism that goes into every system.
That's fine.
But I feel like, you know, the choice to show us that, I suppose that has a value to show you that these things happen as a result of systems running that way, just through people being not actively malevolent and not even ideological, but just Just doing their job, so to speak.
I suppose that does have a value, but I feel like the fact that it leaves that black box there and it's always going to run the risk of people not noticing the black box and taking the part for the whole, I think.
And I think where we do run into problems is with the character of Malcolm Tucker, the Peter Capaldi character.
And I mean, the statement, Malcolm Tucker is based on Alistair Campbell is a controversial one.
Various people have claimed that and denied it and etc, etc.
Alistair Campbell is the closest analogue.
There's just no doubt about that.
Although I don't think Alistair Campbell actually really behaved the way Malcolm Tucker does.
Is it like a meme over there that Scottish people are routinely that horrifying to everyone around them?
Well, no, no, not really.
Not that I'm aware of, no.
Sorry, go ahead.
Alistair Campbell was known as being, you know, Tony Blair's fixer, hatchet man, get it done guy, you know.
And Alistair Campbell was, I mean, you said you didn't know about this, but it's a big thing in this country.
About the the dossiers, you know, that British intelligence, British government supplied to the Americans.
Intel that Britain supplied to the Americans that was used very prominently by the by the American government to justify the invasion of Iraq.
I remembered that after you said it.
I mean, it is one of those things where all this just kind of disappears into like kind of brain fog.
But right.
I mean, the yellow cake uranium stuff was all British intelligence, right?
Yeah, and Mohamed Atta traveling to meet representative of Saddam's.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, if you got I knew so much about all this back in the day, you know, at the time, I would have been able to rattle this off in detail.
I had so many fucking books about all this.
And yeah, I was just I was reading all the magazines, all the left wing magazines, which is, you know, I could have I could have gone into details about all this.
But now it really has faded.
Right.
No, I read, I read a bunch of those books too.
And I used to like follow the news every day and every, you know, all the, all the, you know, every atrocity that, uh, that was being committed in my name, et cetera, et cetera.
And then, you know, at a certain point it does, I mean, like, and I, and this isn't good, right.
This isn't like a good thing that I'm about to say, but at a certain point you just stop.
Right.
Like at a certain point it just becomes, well, we're there.
Um, Yeah.
And I mean, and again, this does not speak well for me and I'm not like, I'm not justifying this, but I will absolutely admit to the fact that in 2008, you know, Barack Obama came into office and suddenly I'm like, well, I don't have to think too hard about that anymore.
Yep.
That's what happened.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
You know, and that's, you know, that's, that's why, you know, that's libbrain for you, right?
You know, but... Well, I think it's very human.
It's very human.
But, yeah, what was I saying?
Yeah, there's, The British government, via British intelligence services, supplied lots of intelligence, quote-unquote intelligence, about supposed links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden.
9-11 and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's intentions and capabilities to have weapons of mass destruction and deploy them terroristically and in war, etc, and attack his neighbors and so on and so forth.
And it was all it would mean to be very technical and use the terms that we would, you know, academics would use in political science.
It was all bollocks.
Yes, but.
It was personified.
That is personified in the British imagination to the extent that anybody fucking remembers any of this in the phrase dodgy dossier.
And I think, I think, God, there were actually two dossiers.
And the one that was called the dodgy dossier, I think, was the first one, which had a section that was actually just plagiarized verbatim from somebody's undergraduate thesis or something, which is actually now.
This is all coming back to me now.
Yes.
That is directly parodied in this movie.
And then the second dossier is the one that contained the Saddam can deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes claim, which was the one which led to the suicide of Dr. David Kelly.
David Kelly was the foremost weapons inspector in the world, and he was responsible for finding Saddam's WMD program when Saddam did in fact have one.
And David Kelly briefed BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan about, I mean it's disputed, it's disputed what he said and you can't really believe much Andrew Gilligan says, but he had a conversation with Andrew Gilligan which led Andrew Gilligan to say on the BBC that the government included information in the second dossier, I believe it was the second dossier, which they knew to be based on bad intel.
And this dossier, which came from the JIC, the Joint Intelligence Committee, via I think several other agencies, via the government, Alistair Campbell, who was Tony Blair's chief of staff or something or other, he just went absolutely fucking bonkers about this.
It's incredibly mild, to be honest with you.
It's an incredibly mild claim, but at the time it was dynamite.
And it led to this gigantic feud between the government and the BBC.
I mean, in all fairness, the BBC did very badly.
The report is bad.
It's not well sourced.
David Kelly's remarks are probably misrepresented, etc, etc.
And then Andrew Gilligan goes to save his own skin in the midst of all this.
He goes and reveals his source, which the government did as well, actually.
Everybody, the government and Andrew Gilligan, both basically revealed to the to the press that David Kelly was the source of this of this claim, to the extent that he was throwing him completely under the bus for their own, you know, mutual but opposed
Selfish purposes, which led to him thinking, because he was asked to testify to a committee or something, and in fear of losing his career, he told a very white lie under enormous pressure about whether or not he'd spoken to another journalist.
And this led the poor man to have such a crisis, thinking he'd lost his career, that he committed suicide.
And so it was a huge thing.
It was a huge deal in Britain.
And What I was getting around to is that Malcolm Tucker in the movie and indeed in the TV series in the thick of it, the nearest analogue in the real world to him is Alastair Campbell and the interesting thing is that Alistair Campbell, I think, was a true believer.
I really do.
I don't think Alistair Campbell thought he was lying.
I don't think Alistair Campbell thought of himself as just this cynical political operator whose job is to sort of be the Prime Minister's blunt instrument and just kick ass until he gets it done.
I think Alistair Campbell was And again, I was talking about Tony Blair.
I think for people like that, words like believe and sincere, et cetera, they mean something different.
But I think to the extent that they can be, these people are sincere.
And when it comes down to, it ultimately does come down to material interests.
In my opinion, the invasion of Iraq ultimately comes down to imperialism, the logic of imperialism.
But the people doing it aren't conscious of that.
They're not thinking, right, we shall go to work today and further the interests of capitalist imperialism.
They think they're doing all sorts of other things.
Well, I mean, in the US, the Project for a New American Century, the PNAC crowd, the neoconservatives, very clearly ideologically motivated in terms of, you know, they didn't believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, whether they did or didn't is kind of immaterial.
The point was, we're using this as an excuse to go in and kind of exert Uh, American power through geopolitics.
We want to, you know, take this region of the world and then we're going to mouth up some, some fine words about democracy and freedom, et cetera, et cetera.
And, you know, point to, you know, beheadings, which are obviously terrible.
We're not standing for, you know, for, uh, what became the Islamic state or, you know, the Taliban or anything like that.
You know, they point to kind of terrible barbarities that are happening in certain places of the world, and then use that to justify like cluster bombing those people, and all the people who are victims of those people, etc, etc, you know?
Yeah.
Like, there's a very clear kind of ideological through line there, which was not even hidden.
I mean, you know, like, I don't think we have to bend over backwards and, you know, kind of, you know, say, you know, well, they were they were saying one thing or they believe one thing.
I mean, they were they're pretty obviously actors on the stage who were intentionally spouting bullshit.
Right.
Yeah.
They may not have believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they didn't believe that Iraq was involved in 9-11.
They knew that was crap.
But they believed that what they were doing was right.
They believed that taking Iraq via American power, projecting American power across the world, And then, you know, basically violently privatizing the Iraqi economy and selling off on the cheap to Western companies and controlling the oil, etc.
They believed that was the right thing to do.
They believed ideologically that it was the right thing to do, because these are people who were convinced of the rightness of American power and the correctness of the domination of the globe by American economic and military power.
These were, in that sense, idealists.
And I think that is a very chilling truth that I think doesn't find any place in the worldview that In The Loop represents.
I think I definitely hear you on that.
I definitely, I definitely get that.
I agree.
You know, I was just actually happened to be rereading this bit in Current Affairs from Nathan Robinson.
I know everybody hates Nathan Robinson.
I hate Nathan Robinson about 35% of the time as well.
It's fine.
Anyway, he was writing about... The poor guy should probably just change his name to, you know, I don't like Nathan Robinson.
Like, I think current affairs is a fine, you know, is a fine product.
Like if you're going to kind of get your social democracy somewhere, then current affairs is a fine place to get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've got no problem with it.
Like, you know, I, I'm not one of these people that refuses for ideological reasons to read Jacobin, you know, it's fine.
Jacobin published good articles.
Yeah.
I would probably, I would probably rather read current affairs than Jacobin at this point, but you know, that's, With no disrespect to you, I actually know people who've written for Tribune.
Tribune, we'll make it Tribune.
Whatever.
Anyway, I was reading the piece that Nathan Robinson wrote about Matthew Iglesias' most recent, I guess it's first I don't know, did he have a previous book?
Anyway, his book, One Billion Americans, which is very openly saying, well, we all agree that America, that America should be the unquestioned superpower of the world.
And the only way we're going to do that is by building up our economy.
And the only way we do that is by building up the number of people in the country.
And so we need to just open up immigration and just allow and bring in 600 million more people so that we can compete with the The kind of population powerhouses of India and China, or else we're going to be kind of left behind as they sort of like take their place in the world stage in the coming century.
Now, A, I actually agree that an open borders policy is good.
Yes, congratulations.
One point of agreement between me and Iggy there.
But the logic...
Just the unquestioned assumption that, well, of course, America should just be the unquestioned superpower of the world.
Like, we have to maintain our dominance because, well, we're the good people, you see, as opposed to those, like, other people, you know, who believe in different kinds of things and who don't, you know, like, like that basic logic, like, that's, That's kind of what's going on in the war in Iraq, right?
That's kind of what's happening there is like, yes, Whether they have weapons of mass destruction or not, the world is a better place if America exerts its position in the world stage, right?
And therefore, if we go in... It's the cops framing the guy because they genuinely believe he's guilty.
Right.
And if we kill a few, you know, look, this is how empires are made.
This is how this world works.
It's like a realist You know, political realist position is to say, look, people died because this is an empire we got here.
And if we're going to make the world a better place and, you know, make the world safer the American way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is just something that just kind of has to happen.
And we'll hand wring about it and we'll feel bad about it and we'll put out, you know, humanitarian aid here and there.
But ultimately, the world is a better place because we did this.
And that's Just hit, you know?
And that's a logic you can get a whole lot of liberals behind as well, just to be clear here, right?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Because, I mean, and if you remember, I mean, certainly in the U.S., the main objections to going to war in Iraq was like, well, You know, we need to do this with international, you know, accord.
We need to do this as a, you know, the UN should be the one directing the troops.
Like there was never, there's very rarely a, you know, a kind of principled, we'll actually know like murdering a whole bunch of brown people in the Middle East is bad.
And actually we've been doing that for a long time and we should also stop doing all of that stuff.
Um, and into this void just to kind of make it slightly more relevant to the IDSG kind of remit into this void actually stepped a whole lot of paleocons and a whole lot of people who kind of Adjacent to or right along the edge of white nationalism in 2003-2004.
There are a ton of people like Mike Enoch personally says he got into this kind of politics.
He got into white nationalist politics in part because the only people who are actually making a principled stand against the Iraq war were The White Nationalists and the Paleocons.
Of course, their version was that, as we've said in other places, we should put a border, we should militarize like the US border as opposed to kind of going off and fighting wars for Israel or wars for Zag, etc, etc, etc.
There's at least, you know, that when the left is not able to kind of, or not visibly able to make the principled case, when what you get is this kind of liberal hand wringing, into that vacuum steps the worst people imaginable.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think I think we should at least mention James Gandolfini, whom I this is when when he died.
This was the movie I watched to remember him, frankly.
I think I think we should.
I think Before we get there, I think I should say, like, there's way more homophobic shit in this movie than I remembered there being.
And rewatching it was definitely a thing of like, wow, 2009 was a different era, my friend.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of homophobic shit in this.
So if you have not seen the movie and that's triggering for you, Probably set this aside, there's a whole lot of anti-gay bullshit here.
But I quite like, you know, I don't know how, you know, you and I often have very different opinions about what good acting looks like.
But everyone who ever, everyone who ever works with James Gandolfini or met him had positive memories of him.
Like apparently at one of the press junkets for one of his movies, he literally like got behind the counter and tended bar because the bartender was busy.
And he had come up as a bartender back in his days.
You see a lot of stories like that about Gandolfini, and I think he's pretty phenomenal here.
So, you know, again, burn me if you like.
No, I think he's great.
I think the acting is pretty uniformly good.
Right.
I don't like this style.
I just don't like this style of humor, to be honest.
Sure.
And I think maybe that's a difference because I actually do quite like, you know, a lot of the I like this the sort of, you know, the single camera, you know, comedy.
I do kind of I do find this amusing.
So maybe that's another stylistic difference between you and I.
It may just be that, you know, because I know I've seen this before.
So when I watched it for this, it would have been the second time I'd seen it.
I didn't laugh once.
I didn't think it was remotely funny.
Not once.
No, no, that's a lie.
That's a lie.
There was one line.
I can't even remember what it was, but there was one line that made me laugh.
Yeah, this is just not my style of comedy.
This sort of comedy based on embarrassment and cruelty and humiliation.
It just puts my back up, I'm afraid.
So maybe all my deep political problems with it are just rationalizations for the fact that it just puts my back up on that primal level.
I don't know.
I think it's pretty clever.
I think the writing is often, like, even if we set aside the sort of political realities of it, I think the writing is often clever and there are some really nice turns of phrase kind of over and over again.
And what I've seen described the most creative swearing you've ever seen in a movie.
And so much of that is like Peter Capaldi himself, I find, you know, I think again you kind of approach it now and I approach it as is something that I'm doing for like for the podcast and, you know, like, have to take a more critical eye towards it.
It's a lot harder to, to, To get into it in the same way, but I do find this pleasurable to watch, at least.
And I think maybe the issue is that you just don't, and that definitely colors how we feel about it overall, for sure.
Yeah, but I will say, I mean, I think that is a big part of it, but I do just fundamentally dislike Inuchi's worldview.
You know, he is very much the centrist, the, if we could all just get around the table, you know, and that sort of thing, and put our ideological differences aside.
I think I have the advantage also of this being the only property of his I've ever really taken time with.
I know he did Veep, which I know Anna Chomsky is also in that.
Apparently she got nominated for a bunch of awards for her performance there.
And I'm tempted now to go and watch Veep just to see what he did with her and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
I've never seen it and I didn't even know he was involved in it.
Yeah, no, no, that was that was he came to America.
He went to HBO after this and started making Veep.
And that's his that's his kind of big thing.
And apparently, I mean, I've I have like read enough kind of political journalists kind of talking off the record and, you know, kind of in places where they're not being published in their day job, who will basically say, like, yeah, there's there's a lot in this that feels very, very apt, you know, like there's a Yeah, particularly around like the kind of the abusive behavior of some of the characters in the show got very unfavorably compared to Amy Klobuchar.
You know, the bit like the thing that we all heard where, you know, she had to eat a salad with a comb because the staffer didn't get her a fork.
And then she forced the staffer to go clean the comb afterwards.
That feels very much like it could have come out of this movie.
Yeah, I heard something about Amy Klobuchar chucking staplers at people or something.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it was another one, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Amy Klobuchar is one of those people who, you know, like being a being a sitting US senator is one of those things that, you know, it is enormously, it is an enormously powerful position.
And People who were, as the film kind of shows you, people who work under incredibly powerful people tend to not talk about that precisely because they're careerists or because they, you know, whatever, right?
Amy Klobuchar, the fact that we get any kind of coverage out of her, any kind of stories like that out of her, implies she is an absolute fucking monster.
Like imagine the worst boss you've ever had and then like multiply by 10.
That's kind of what that's kind of the impression I get about what working for Amy Klobuchar is like.
But people do it because it's good for your career.
Yeah.
I mean, you know.
Yeah.
The other thing I associate with Amy Klobuchar is during the, you know, the the Democratic primary race, you know, to get the nomination is Bill Maher.
Saying, oh I'm looking very seriously at Amy Klobuchar and then sort of looking at the camera with this look on his face like, aren't I clever?
You weren't expecting that, were you everybody?
Because I know politics, I'm really clever.
And just watching that and thinking, you absolute fucking dick.
That's one of my main.
I don't think I don't think I don't think I paid enough attention to Bill Maher to know whether or not what his feelings about Amy Klobuchar were.
And I feel like that was a good choice on my part.
Instead, I was tracking Nazis at that time.
No, I'm just I'm too online.
I'm too on Twitter.
These things come past me.
Right.
Yeah, no, it's fine.
I miss Snake Emoji Day.
Like, apparently, you know, and I am very on Twitter, and this was very much like a thing I should have noticed.
And apparently, I was just busy on Snake Emoji Day, and just completely went past me.
And apparently, a bunch of people sending snake emojis on Twitter is enough to completely change the direction of US politics for the next 30 years.
Apparently, that's the world we live in now.
So Twitter, it's good, actually.
Anyway, I feel like, I mean, you know, like, if you're, I don't know, if you listen to this conversation, you haven't seen the movie, if you like kind of the cringe comedy, if you like, if you like Arrested Development, you like, you know, The Office, the U.S.
Office at least, you know, give it a shot.
I think it's, I think it's worth watching.
There's a lot of good stuff in it.
It is a kind of a time capsule of an era, and I'm not even talking about 2003.
I'm kind of talking about 2009 here.
It very much is a, A time capsule to that particular moment in in comedy.
And I think comedy is one of those things.
I mean, this is kind of a cliche.
I mean, it is a cliche that, you know, nothing ages faster than comedy does.
Right.
And I think that's you know, that's something that like, again, rewatching it now, you definitely I could definitely see the seams that I didn't see when I saw it, you know, in my early 30s.
Right.
So but I do think I do think it's probably worth, you know, An hour and 45 minutes of your time, if you choose to if you choose to view it.
There's a lot of good stuff in it, but it has its problems.
So that's where I land.
It's pretty bleak.
And yeah, it is.
It is very much of that era and that style of comedy that I personally don't like.
And which does.
Yeah, it's very much of that moment.
And I think It's of its moment in another way, which is that it's years removed from the political events that it's obsessed with.
And yet it still it still feels like kind of, you know, centrism, picking at the scab, you know, it can't leave it alone, it has to keep going back and kind of worrying at it, you know, and that's that's a very 2009 thing, you know, just after Obama gets Just after Obama gets in, this simultaneous feeling of, right, Bush is gone, Obama is here now, everything's fine.
And then sort of underneath that, kind of this, yeah, but it didn't quite, it still happened, didn't it?
You know, it's got that anxiety about it, that it's all over, except that it's not, and it never will be.
That's what it feels like to me.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that was a bonus episode.
That was a bonus episode.
We talked about this a lot more than we talked about the third man.
We did the third man episode.
So, you know, there is that.
Yeah, I remember the third man, like we talked for, you know, an hour and a half and kind of we did the, oh, yeah, Orson Welles is quite good, isn't he?
In the last five minutes, didn't we?
That's pretty much it.
I think we referenced the cuckoo clock a bit.
And, you know, we mostly just talked about vaccines at that point.
So.
Vaccines, what could that be?
What will the satirical response to our current moment be, do you think?
I mean, how do you even begin to encompass?
I feel like a lot of the... I was going to, you know, we went in a different direction, which is fine, but I was going to reference, you know, all the kind of, like, Fumbling around at the CDC and Fauci and masks and not masks and, you know, should we, you know, because like my country, my nation, CDC in May said, no, if you're vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask anymore.
Things are fine now.
And then everybody stopped wearing a mask.
Although I'm still wearing it in public places because of the Delta variant, which is now like 83% of all cases in the U.S.
that have been sequenced by PCR are Delta variant.
And it's much more infectious than previous versions.
And so now the CDC has come out again.
We are encouraging people strongly to mask again.
And again, because of the political realities, the governor of my state, Gretchen Whitmer, who there's a complicated thing going on with the The case against the people who were kidnapping her, which we could do a whole IDSG on, there's not so much bullshit, but that's been covered elsewhere better than I can cover it here.
But literally the day after the CDC put that out there, she went public and was like, No, we're not going to enforce a mask mandate.
I encourage you to wear one if you choose to, but we're just going to rely on vaccinations at this point.
The liberals are broken completely on this at this point because she has been so boxed in by the Republicans.
In the state government, where she really doesn't have an option anymore.
They are, I want to say figuratively, but almost literally out for her blood at this point.
And she sees the writing on the wall.
Like, there's nothing, even if I enforced it, there's nothing I can do about it at this point.
Like, they have literally stripped her of emergency powers to prevent her from being able to enforce a mask mandate.
So that's what living in Michigan is like right now, by the way.
And so again, I see a lot of parallels between the sort of like the the fumbling around and sort of the people obeying the politics of the moment as opposed to the large longer term politics that's in in the loop in sort of like the local COVID response in a lot of ways.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's interesting.
I said, you know, how will the satire of a few years down the line even begin to encompass what we're currently going through?
through what is currently, I mean, how do you satirize this?
The response to the question of masking in public and social distancing in the midst of a pandemic and the way people have responded to it.
It's just, I don't know.
I don't know that it's possible.
I feel like I feel like we're just I feel like we're just never going to get like the real like the COVID movie.
Right.
I feel like it's just such a thing that we've all gone through.
And that, you know, it's kind of like, you know, after World War Two, I mean, you did get sort of like some traumas and you got like a bunch of kind of Rara war movies.
But, you know, it was it was fairly non-ideological.
It was fairly just sort of You know, not really confronting the enormity of what actually happened and more just kind of like,
Entertainment, but I feel like COVID is just kind of one of those things, like I was saying to my to my wife, you know, a few, a few, I mean, a few months ago, actually, is that, you know, this is going to be the era in which we just kind of look back to like SNL performances and go like, oh, this is the era in which everybody in the background is wearing a mask, you know, and that'll be the that'll be the thing.
All right.
The pandemic was happening.
But I also think the pandemic, this is going to be something we're kind of living with.
For years.
I mean, it's just sort of the reality of it is we didn't hit it hard enough when we had the chance.
And now it's just kind of here with us.
And I was kind of reading some stuff about, look, this ends when, you know, 80% of the population is seropositive.
is blood positive for this spike protein.
And you either get that by, you either get the vaccine or you get the virus.
That's it.
Those are the two ways you get it.
And so when 80% of the population worldwide is seropositive, this becomes something that's, this kind of goes away.
And maybe it kind of pops up here and there.
Maybe it becomes, you get your yearly COVID shot alongside your flu shot or whatever.
But the chance of this, like just going away completely, we completely botched that idea.
Like, you know, just as a society, we failed at that, you know?
And maybe there was no way to actually do that properly, you know, in March of 2020.
Maybe just based on the systems at large in the world, there was just no possible way of really kind of making it happen.
I mean, I would be very sympathetic to that idea, is that this was just kind of beyond us at that level of knowledge.
But at this point, we do have the ability to do it now.
We know enough now to know how to fix it.
But it's just something we get to live with for the rest of our lives.
Yay, COVID!
Joy, pure joy.
Sorry, I'm very, you know, like, I don't want to, like, feel like, you know, this is a downer podcast or anything, but I have been, I have been very much, like, I had somebody, because I mentioned the existential despair I feel about, like, any article about climate change, you know, that's another issue that, you know, we just, Everyone with any level of sense has known for 30 years that climate change was going to come and kill us all.
And we have done jack shit about it.
Like as a planet, we have done virtually nothing.
And even like the Green New Deal, that is the like moderate centrist position thing that we should have done in 1991.
If we're going to take this seriously, right?
Like we are multiple decades into completely not doing anything meaningful about this and getting into like the Paris Climate Accords is not like a thing that's going to make any kind of real difference to the world, right?
It's just, it's just not like we should do it.
We should do the little bit as opposed to nothing.
It would be nice, but like fundamentally this problem is just beyond us.
Everyone with any level of knowledge about the way the world works sees how terrible this is.
The scientists who are like, Who have been researching this stuff for years.
Their very sourced, evidence-based pronouncements of the stark reality, the bare bones reality of what they say about this, sound like the rantings of a madman.
Because that's how far gone this is.
And this is the world.
This is where we are.
Right?
And so, I don't know.
I'm not trying to depress everybody, but this is where my head space is these days.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
And I feel, I feel, you know, we're, we're, we're winding up now, but I feel like you can see the whole thing playing out kind of in miniature in microcosm in the story of the, the invasion of Iraq, you know?
Everybody knows and the powers that be push ahead with their, I mean in that case it's an action rather than inaction, but it still kind of works, pushed by this
mixture of self-interest and just utterly deluded ideological commitment to empire and capital and so on that they just can't that you know the self-interest and the ideology can't be pulled apart they're essentially the same thing and everybody knows it's wrong and it's just coming and the fact of it coming just becomes this inescapable thing this inescapable rolling boulder and you can have essentially the biggest protest movement in human history you know
And the system just kind of goes, and then people go home and it happens anyway.
And it leads to absolute carnage.
And as people are suffering and dying in staggering numbers, there's this corporate feeding frenzy going on.
This is one of the things people forget about this.
You know, Iraq after the invasion, when the country was basically broken up and sold off like a corporation had been taken over, you know.
Naomi Klein wrote a book about this quite soon after the invasion, which obviously, you know, it's probably been superseded, but it's a good little book.
And it's just absolutely outrageous what they did.
They basically treated this This country full of human beings.
Firstly they smash their way in, having tortured and prostrated the country for a very long time previously, smash their way in, kill Many, many people, you know, the numbers are debated, but it's probably it's probably at least at least half a million, at least half a million, at least half a million.
Yeah.
And, you know, the British public, when polled, persistently estimate Iraqi dead at like, you know, 4000 or something like that, which is a statistic that just makes me want to kill myself in shame and horror and rage.
But they and they do this for As I say, you can't pull apart the ideology and the venal self-interest, because essentially they're the same thing looked at from different angles.
And I just feel like it's this little cameo of the horror we're facing now.
This system that rolls on, completely unstoppable, despite the fact that, apart from this tiny layer of people whose job is to make it function, and this even tinier layer above them who have this uh ideological commitment to it everybody is funny well no that's it's not that everybody's against it because uh huge numbers of you know americans are massing in their millions to not get the vaccine and not get their uh
Because what we've done now is we've got, it's like the invasion of Iraq as a metaphor, except that now we've got millions of people marching saying, no, I want to go to Iraq and be underneath the white phosphorus.
Right.
I mean, that's not even like, it's even more cynical than that, because what really happened, at least as I, again, the before times, April 2020, right?
What really happened was there were some outbreaks in like Detroit and in New York City and in a couple of other places that were like really, really bad.
Um, I mean, you know, like, I know people, I know people who were living in New York at the time, who would say, like, it was, you would hear ambulance sirens all day and all night, just constant, you know, it was just that, that's just what life was like, you know, bodies being like, stacked into like, freezer vans in Detroit.
Staggeringly brutal, wasn't it?
Daggering.
Yeah.
But like, And all so many of those bodies were of a particular skin color, right?
Yeah.
So many of those people.
That's it.
Right.
That is, of course, a huge factor that I haven't even, you know, we haven't even mentioned that.
Right.
Yeah.
But but so many so much of this was if you were and I think I mentioned this on the podcast at some point, I think we're repeating ourselves a little bit here, but like, it's fine to repeat ourselves slightly.
If you're living in the state of Michigan and you're in the Upper Peninsula and you live in a cabin somewhere far away from anyone else, Detroit feels like this very distant, it might as well be Mars from your opinion.
COVID doesn't feel like a thing that's going to come and get you.
And If you don't know anybody who got it, and you don't know anybody who's really dealt with that, then you just kind of look at it and go, this is something happening far away that I don't have to deal with.
Which, I said it earlier, when it was happening in China, part of my emotional response was, this is a thing that's happening in China that I don't have to deal with.
Again, very human response, right?
Like, it's a very, like, there are people who are going to take care of this.
There are, you know, like, this is something that, and I feel like that, in addition to the way it was politicized by Trump, and the way it was used as this kind of political tool, and then suddenly, like, the mask mandates, and, you know, like, kind of forcing people to do this simple thing that actually, like, helps transmission, but all again, or helps to prevent transmission of this virus, but
That feels like kind of an obligation and an annoyance in this kind of like nanny state, you're not allowed to have a soda larger than a certain size, or you know, you gotta wear your seatbelt, kind of like the stuff that like people, the impositions into their personal lives that people just feel, you know, ugly about.
People just feel like it's just like, I just don't want to do it.
And I don't want to do it mostly because I'm being told I have to by Some lady kind of haranguing me on the TV or whatever, right?
That response is kind of irrational as it is.
You sort of get how people get there, right?
You sort of get that kind of basic logic of, I'm not seeing it, it's not something that's affecting me, This is overblown.
It's only killing a tiny percentage of the people that it affects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And there's lots of people queuing up to take their money in return for telling them that their worst instincts are completely right as well.
Exactly, exactly.
And that's what makes I mean, again, we've been kind of on the Brett and Heather kick and the ivermectin stuff, you know, that's part of what makes that so dangerous.
And so, you know, is that, you know, regardless, I mean, I think Brett and Heather do believe in what they're saying about ivermectin.
I don't know.
I have my, I have my, I do have my personal opinion about whether or not they actually did go surreptitious to get the vaccine for themselves.
But, you know, we'll, we'll, you know, yeah, I can't make it can't make a can't make an informed statement about that.
But like, you know, it's a thing, you know.
I don't know.
I'm rambling here, but I don't know.
I think you see kind of the point of kind of where I'm going with the way the COVID and the way the kind of interaction of it has, you know, it definitely affects our kind of political culture.
Like there's a big, like there is, I think, a satire to be made, but I think that either it has to be like completely on the nose or it has to be like so abstract that it's not even like connected specifically to the COVID moment, you know?
And maybe it takes us 10 years to really get there.
Maybe.
And satire is kind of useless anyway.
This is the problem.
That's unfortunate.
You feel like it should be.
It feels so good to get a good satire.
You feel like it should be.
It should be.
Like protest music, you feel like it makes you feel good, and feeling good is its own reward.
You feel like that should be effective in itself.
But the Vietnam War still happened, and there was a ton of great protest music in the 60s.
So, yeah.
But yeah, what was that depressing Vonnegut quote, you know, every great, every good artist in the 60s was against the war and the collective effect of their opposition was, I can't remember what the thing was.
It was about the effect of a wet fart or something to that effect.
Yeah, it's something like that.
Yeah.
Which I don't think is quite true, but even so.
Well, and I mean, if we want to end on a positive note, I mean, you know, one of the things that the kind of the anti-war movement did was kind of build a was to build a kind of culture, this kind of counterculture moment, which did have long term effects, even if it couldn't stop the war, it did change things.
I mean, you know, the gay rights era certainly kind of comes out of that kind of stuff.
I mean, a lot of the I mean, there were tons of positive downstream impacts, even if they couldn't stop the war.
And so organizing and kind of using these things and doing these things is important.
I mean, we do this podcast because I think it actually does make a difference if we do it versus if we don't.
Yeah.
You know, satire maybe has that same kind of longer term effect.
And look, the massive anti-war movement of that era, of the 2003 era, that has had its effects, very beneficial effects.
I mean, it failed to achieve its actual immediate objective, but there's been a lot of building on that global organization of a mass movement against what By any reasonable standards, I think was a horrific atrocity against against humanity.
And, you know, I was part of it at the time.
I don't call myself anti-war.
I definitely anti-imperialist.
I'm not a pacifist, but I but yeah, that's that's kind of by the by.
But yeah, it it did build, you know, and it itself was built upon previous movements against Vietnam War, etc, etc.
And to kind of bring this background and tie a little bow on it, we started talking earlier about, very trivially and irrelevantly, about how when I was a kid, I remember TV starting to go through the night.
And I was staying up to watch stuff that they just used to put on in the wee small hours.
And one of the things they used to do on ITV was they had this thing where a guy would present like a phone-in-choice thing.
Between movies.
He would say, right, what movie do you want us to show?
Do you want us to show this movie, or do you want us to show that movie?
And you'd phone in, and the one with the most number of votes would be the one that they'd show.
And that is how I, at the age of, I don't know, 12, saw Lindsay Anderson's movie If, Oh, which is an amazing film.
And that is a that is a it is a satire in many respects of both the the English public school system, the English class system and just English society generally.
And it's also a revolutionary film.
It's a film that that basically advocates revolutionary violence, you know, revolution.
And that film had an enormous effect on me.
So The you know, these things do.
These things do have their effects.
I think it's an immeasurably better film than in the loop, in my opinion.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think I would agree.
Yes.
All right.
I think we said we were going to do this in about an hour, and we've got going on almost two.
So I think we should wrap up.
Have we?
Really?
I didn't feel that long.
I mean, it was like, yeah, I wouldn't have guessed.
We had to spend 30 minutes talking about cable TV before we could really get into it.
We had to do that.
We were forced to by the systems that work above us.
Like capitalism.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, the cable TV diversion was a very important part of the overall thesis.
I insist upon that.
OK, well, that was bonus episode number seven on In The Loop, amongst other things.
And yeah, we'll be back with another bonus episode next month.
We just made it for July.
We just squeaked a bonus in.
If you just got to get it up within the next, you know, 18 hours or so.
I'm going to.
I'm going to.
Don't worry.
All right.
All right.
Great.
And we'll be back.
This was my choice, wasn't it?
So you get to choose.
No, I think this originally came about because Donald Rumsfeld died.
And I said, we need to do something about the Iraq War so I could really dig into Donald Rumsfeld.
And we didn't do that at all.
So I didn't even know.
Yeah, I guess I guess this is technically your choice.
But, you know, what do you what do you want to do?
We should do known unknowns and we should do Rumsfeld properly next time.
Oh, maybe.
Well, we've already done one Errol Morris.
And yeah, I don't know.
We'll think about it.
We'll think about it.
We'll think up to you.
Yeah.
OK, well, the listener will just have to wait and see.
And in the meantime, bye bye.
Bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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