Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 319: Krill Kings

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

The latest news about shrimp, climate summits, Henry Kissinger, Democratic politics, and Israel/Palestine Sign up for our Patreon for more great content: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

i just read your tweet about red lobster losing 11 million dollars on endless oh dude the the red lobster corporation it's dude how much shrimp did people eat for them to lose oh that's just in one quarter they lost 11 million dollars in just one quarter so hold up they got all this shrimp but apparently like people just aren't eating shrimp like what's going on yo they they they offer they should got the shrimp too no they offered an all you can eat shrimp deal at red lobster and so many people took advantage of it. It ate into their profits, and they lost $11 million in three months.

So people literally ate into their profits. Yes. Imagine if Pimp C were still alive. The echoes of, we eat so many shrimp, I got iodine poisoning. $11 million worth of iodine poisoning. Dude, Americans are so insane. I want you to think about how much shrimp that is.

I mean, like, I think you could, if you could compare, like, you know, how many shrimp there are in the ocean, you know. I mean, I'm not comparing it to a sizable amount, but that might be, like, damn near 1% or near one percent or something well i think that the story was interesting because it was basically like the corporation that owns red lobster is based in i think thailand or something and it's like they clearly don't know the american appetite they it's uh underestimated the thai union group which owns a large stake in the chain said in a third quarter earnings call this month that the deal was in part to blame for an 11 million dollar operating loss jesus man it's like you can't you can never underestimate you can't like that that should be

a an economics 101 like textbooks like if you're in america you can never offer an all-you-can-eat deal like nationwide no people will people will eat themselves sick yeah listen we're carried out on stretchers you know those animals that that have just no impulse control like that? You know what I mean? I am that way. I say that. I'm not to belittle anybody. I'm that way.

The amount of mindless eating I do when I'm bored, depressed, or any number of negative emotions. Before you know it, you're like, God damn, I just consumed four days worth of calories in one fell swoop. You know what? This is absolutely true. This is a coping mechanism for Americans, right? It's either shopping. I mean, it's consumption, right? It's either shopping or eating.

And it's almost like, you know when some animals, right, like dogs, right? Dogs will eat, and they'll eat very quickly and very rapidly as if they'll never have another meal. I would say the American consumer has that built into their psyche when it comes to consumption. I would say the American consumer has that built into their psyche when it comes to consumption. Well, it's just like I imagine a whale opening its like baleen fucking whatever filters to like take in krill. Like that's basically the same principle here. It's shrimp, but it's the same thing. What's the most gluttonous thing y'all have ever done? Oh, man. For Terrence, it's going to be, same thing. What's the most gluttonous thing y'all have ever done? Oh, man.

For Terrence, it's going to be foraging for spelt. What is the most you just sat down and just consumed in a sitting that you recall? Man, just many, many a night of me being very high and thinking that, like, Krispy Kreme donuts would be really good, like a whole dozen. Or maybe like a big ass bag of hot fries and then immediately puking after that. Just sitting there, just stuffing my face. Well, the thing that's really tough about that is that if you're going to eat something that's going to make you you throw up you don't want it to be

shrimp because the taste of it coming up is so much worse than the taste of it going down just rancid and raw yeah truly fishy truly a marine like like salty like seafaring but not in a nice way cockroach of the sea the sea. Literally. Exactly. Your fucking vomit. There's little shit strips in it, but they're so good with the tangy sauce, you know. Yeah, just your vomit, just having eyes in it and like antenna. Yeah, little eyes that are antennas floating around. Also, too, I've made this joke before, and I'm not an expert on apocalyptic ecology, but I have to assume that's funny i consider you

exactly that i look into it often you know so it's like when i think about like like red lobster and the fact that their their whole thing is seafood you know and as the oceans warm as phytoplankton die off as marine food chains break down are we gonna see red lobster like you know fall for bankruptcy because there's just no more fucking that's well that's what i was wondering like i will i want to know the ecological impact of americans eating 11 million dollars worth of shrimp like what how negative 11 million yeah you're right negative they're operating in a deficit you're right it's a negative amount. I need to know the ecological impact.

Like, what kind of chunk that took out of the biosphere? You know what I'm saying? What's our carbon footprint just on the people that cashed in on that deal? It's like a butterfly effect, but it's like a crustacean effect. It, like, collapses the marine food chain in, like, Thailand or some shit like that. Unbeknownst, you know. Listen, man. They just closed the last Long John Silver's location in Lexington, Kentucky,

which is funny because Lexington, Kentucky was home of the first Long John Silver's. Not exactly a hotbed of seafood in a landlocked state. Yeah, like what was he thinking there? Not even a land... Lexington isn't even on water. There's not even a river. Maybe that's why they had it. They were like, you know what? They're far away enough from the ocean

into dry land that maybe people have a hankering for seafood. Well, you got, like, Town Branch, you know, and Hickman Creek, I guess. But other than that, that's about it. That was the first location. And, you know, now it's gone. It's a moment, man. It comes the same week that all the world's nations are meeting for a climate summit.

The COP28. Oh, another one of these? Another one of these situations where yet another summit where we're told that this has been the hottest year on record uh since blah blah blah and then no one does anything well i've read a new york times article and about about it and it was just basically all these scientists and even bureaucrats were like what is even the point in going to these anymore like one is quoted as saying like we could have done something after cop 1 cop 2 cop 15 but it's now cop 28 they're not copping the franchise just won't die

yeah it's like keeping up with the numbers of the iphones man yeah all they're copping is carbon credits. That's it, man. There's no nothing. That is such an exercise in, like, not even just futility, but, like, this level of just, like, delusion, you know, that you can continue to have, like, these sorts of diplomatic events where everybody's going to sit down and talk about it and then not hold, you know, the fossil fuel industry or governments to account. It's just very bold in your sense of delusion. You know what I mean? People are flying and going to this thing and attending it.

Well, what's controversial about it is that it's hosted by the United Arab Emirates, and they have been accused of using this conference as a way to basically strike new oil and gas deals oh my fucking god oh my god yo i'm gonna see you at the cop 27 this year we're gonna fucking hash out let's build link at cop 27 i'm gonna hasten the the destruction of the environment yeah yeah the destruction of the environment. Yeah. I mean... Oh, man.

But it's not a true cop summit if there's not any talk of the 11 million plus hole in the ocean ecosystem. You could have a delegate from Red Lobster that has to apologize and speak for themselves. Let's just do a little math here. Take it to the Hague.

Let's just do a little math here's just do a little math here okay uh all you can eat shrimp what's the going price for this for this deal so the price was 20 and to recoup their losses they raised it to 25 but it didn't make a difference people just thought okay so let's just say let's just say let's say 25 let's say 25 for a good like kind of number to work with. Okay. The minimum amount of shrimp you would eat at an all-you-can-eat shrimp, let's call it what it is. Nobody's pussyfooting all-you-can-eat and eating like three to five shrimp. Let's say 10.

I was going to say a dozen. Let's be conservative and say eight. Everybody's going to eat eight shrimp. Nobody that's going to all you can eat shrimps go in single digits though i'll go ahead and tell you no you're right so that that that puts the shrimp at about three dollars a shrimp right three dollars a shrimp okay now what's 11 million divided by three okay we could kind of get a rough estimate of how many crustaceans i also want to know like how much shrimp can one individual eat before they get sick you know what i mean like like how much crustacean can you stuff into

your body before you feel like you want to vomit like i don't know this this i've got a rough estimate of 3 3,666,666 shrimp. If that's the most conservative estimate, which we know it's not. That's probably, to be perfectly honest, probably five times that amount, at least. At least. We're probably talking around

20 million shrimp have been eaten. No, we have to put it in terms of weight. To me, what is it? Is it like the weight of an Empire State Building or something like that in shrimp? Like a mountain of soupy bits or something? Let's do this. How much does a shrimp weigh? Okay.

How much does a shrimp weigh? Probably like a gram or something. shrimp wet like probably like a gram or something uh medium shrimp run anywhere from uh six 41 to 60 shrimp per one pound bag this is about okay so they're about 0.25 ounces per shrimp okay we're talking about tens of millions of shrimp. You could just round up to say, like, I don't even know how many ounces are in a pound. Is it 16? 16 ounces in a pound, yeah. But we said 15 million shrimp. And that's a conservative estimate.

Okay, all right. Oh, my God. Americans consume 15 million. No, no, no, no, no no no no that's not counting all that's just one chain that's one chain it's it's important to keep in mind like i'm gonna i'm just gonna pinpoint it at 20 million because that seems about right let's say 20 million because also we're just assuming 11 it's 11 million dollar loss so tom is right like there is more shrimp being eaten here so like let's just like back you know back of the napkin we're just talking about what they ate in the negative like not what they had accounted for like let's just

assume it's probably somewhere around like 30 million shrimp just by red lobster just in one quarter just in three months that's insane eating as many shrimp as the weight of new york city man okay all right so divided by 0.3 um that's that's 100 million ounces so how do you get how do you get to pounds from there? 16 ounces makes a pound. Divided by 16. I don't know if that's right. If that's right though, it's like

6.5 million pounds. We eat so many shrimp you know trump's whole thing about like how the toilets don't flush good enough it's like dude it's because people were eating six million pounds of shrimp body weight yeah now i need to know uh so we did we did weight when we did uh you know how many 9-11s this trip is let's just keep going down the line and we'll just see it yeah how many 9-11s what was the average weight of the 9-11 hijack? Oh, my God, dude. Oh, fuck. Oh, my God.

How many people died? 3,000. Oh, boy. Oh, dude. Yeah, that's like the shrimp in the sea. You're talking about how the Red Lobster deal was their 9-11. They try to make a kids movie out of it, like Finding Nemo. Everybody remembers life before the All You Can Eat at Red Lobster and after.

It's like they designated it as their time errors errors you get the event well that's the fall they call the fall do orcas eat shrimp remember when they were popping off like three months ago was this why they're like our entire way of life it has been upended listen we're we're we're we're a simple mammal we uh you know we fish our waters we make noises back and forth to each other we like to have a little shrimp with dinner and they've taken it from us oh man we have to fight man we have to wage war against mankind oh dude that is crazy i have to do, seriously, like, one last thing I'll say. I have to believe, though, that, like, I mean, I guess there are laws for overfishing. You know, I don't know, like, how many.

I don't know if they've, like, exceeded. I mean, probably. Who knows? But, like, I have to believe that would have some, like, ecological impact. No, no, like some butterfly effect shit. You know what I mean? Oh, dude, it's just, yeah, like, working overtime on, like, a fishing schooner or something off the coast of fucking Delaware Bay or something.

Just like working fucking 15 hours a day just because the average American is eating like 20,000 pounds of shrimp. Yeah, it's like we have to. I'm getting all kinds of overtime these days, boys. I don't vote. It's all you can. It just goes to show you, man, the nature of capitalism. Somebody has to lose, in this case, the crustaceans in order for other people to have to gain. In this case, the fishermen. And then in turn, Red Lobster loses because they overshot it.

Because of greed, man. Uh-huhhuh not even greed for money greed for food that's crazy one of the seven deadly sins brother well that that's something i've thought about a lot like um you know in archaeology one of our like main archaeological methods of understanding the past is feces samples like we go find shit and we say like oh this person ate like bones and bananas and shit like that apple seeds this dumbass ate 23 apple seeds and died from cyanide look at this fucking dumb ass just roasting prehistoric mercury poison yeah just roasting bog bodies like uh but that's what people in the future will do to us they'll be like holy shit we have six million pounds of human shit from the from the month september to december

2023 and it's only shrimp it's like a fossil record it's only shrimp. It's like a fossil record. It's only shrimp. They'll be able to reconstitute extinct shrimp species. Yeah, it's a layer in like the fecal scale. The strata. The fecal sediment. Yeah, the sediment's like a

primordial lasagna. You know what I mean? Different layers of grotesque. That's the thing, though, like centralized water treatment and sewage treatment, though, doesn't that, this is a tangent, but doesn't that make it hard for future anthropologists to study our shit? Okay, this is another question I was wondering.

Where does our shit actually go? Like, I know... Ah, glad you asked, Terrence. Brother, it goes to a wastewater treatment facility where it's ran through a machine that sort of... Well, let's just say this. You don't want to fall into this machine yourself. Are the turds...

What happens to the turds? Do they put them somewhere? Do they vaporize them when it goes through the the machine i forget what it's called but basically it the shit terror turns you into nothing and then like the waste that comes out at least this is the whitesburg wastewater treatment plant where i ran and where i worked and it's also like man being in there was so weird because like you just literally felt shitty. You just always didn't want to eat in there because there was a faint smell of shit constantly.

And it's clinging in the air. And everything you touch you knew was just fecal particles and everything. So you constantly had to put hands in it. One of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Did it. One of the shittiest jobs I ever had. Did it. And then after it comes out of that, it all goes down like a little drain.

Yeah. Where it runs under a UV light to kind of take all the bacteria and stuff, kill all the bacteria and stuff. Where it then goes, yeah, you guessed it, folks, right back into the river. Okay. That's what I was thinking, yeah. That's what I suspected, right. back into the river okay well that's that's what i was thinking yeah that's what i suspected right i suspected that but like what i'm worried about is that future historians and anthropologists will not have a way to know what we were eating like this their only metric they'll have is the 11 million dollar hole in the red lobster ledger they have economic records that is funny to think about you know how like uh sometimes you'll see

like a funny tweet from one of those like uh i don't know uh bank ledgers of history accounts and it's like this man paid six dollars for four turnips three water whatever it is for us it's just gonna be just a laundry list of drugs and shrimp subscription services dude i hate fucking pedants someone's in my mention says that 11 million dollars that sounds like not really a lot it doesn't seem like sarcasm either fuck you 11 million dollars could like i don't know dog you could put that towards like student loan debt you could like put that towards like a health care i know it's not a lot of money for that but for a shrimp that's a lot of fucking money dog well to me it's it's like yeah okay it's not a lot of money if you're talking about like that's the amount of food

stamp fraud we have in the united states but when you're talking about raw shrimps eaten by at one uh you know food chain that's kind of a lot it is oh man that tickled me that really got me and i'm i'm sick. I've been sick for two days. It's good to laugh, you know? I don't know. It really is. As Cash Sunstein pointed out on the liberal manifesto from the Patreon episode this weekend, we're anti-anti-laughter. We are. Liberals like to laugh.

They do. They got real funny bones. Yeah, they do. got real funny bones yeah they do also not being funny somebody pointed out that he's married to samantha powers i saw that i can't believe we missed that yeah what a whiff their betty kissinger died last night or yesterday i know i know that you know man i uh i wasn't feeling too well yesterday i'm still not feeling so well today. So I was in bed all day yesterday and had my phone off and everything. And for some reason, man, not in the sense where people say, oh, he died surrounded by family and comfortable. And there's no schnodden Freud, I guess, right, to be drawn out of this.

It's not that. But I don't know, man. For some reason, it just didn't hit me the way I thought it would. Maybe because I haven't checked out the tweets yet. But it just didn't hit me the way I'm kind of upset about that. It's probably because he's 100 years old. I had to guess. When a 100-year-old person dies, it's just like, what are you supposed to say to that?

It's like the sun rising, you know what I mean? Or like fucking, you know, sunny. that it's like the sun rising you know what i mean or like fucking you know sunny honestly i did i did the math this man was 30 years old in 1950 i dude he when he was my age eisenhower was president that's insane that's a when was he bored when was he bored 1923 when he was bored i mean like there were still places i mean there are still places now that don't have like electricity and running water but i'm just saying like when he was bored like this was i mean just like just the topography you know of the cities this country looked just look entirely fucking different a lot more shrimp jeremy jeremy jeremy germany would have been the weimar republic yeah yeah god man yeah man there were like guys who fought in the civil war who were alive

yes exactly we're probably only like 80 years old when he was born exactly there were still people who were slaves that were still alive by then yo he was bored when the last few slaves were still alive well that's the thing it's like i i don't want to be a party pooper right i'm not gonna get online and try to like ruin people's good time but like to me there really is nothing more depressing than celebrating a hundred year old person dying it's like dude that's crazy it's like what what what is there to 100 actually i don't want to live to 100 actually i do not but like i mean yeah that's like i don't know man like yeah another old person died i mean a piece of shit an evil piece of shit don't get me wrong but uh i don't know there was just no joy to be be taken out of this and if anything was more

angering that people like this get to live that long and not see justice you know right yeah it's like the the headline on the rolling stone said, Henry Kissinger, war criminal, dies dead at 100. And it's like, there's just no justice in that. Yeah, yeah. Like he's, you know, was sitting on like a literal, like, you know, mountain of bones. Like a charnel house, yeah. You know, and now he just gets to just pass away into the,

and I mean, I guess if you believe in hell, because I mean, he was a literal demon, you know, so if you believe in hell, because I mean, he was a little demon. So if you believe in hell, I guess like he's going back to from whence he came. But or there's some eternal punishment there. But I don't believe in hell. This is hell. The fact that he was able to live this long, you know, is pretty healthy. He visited hell on many people.

He did. many people uh it is um yeah yeah it's just there's no fucking justice in somebody that did what he did live until 100 i have to say though i saw i did see a one tweet though right before we got on um because again i haven't really been online but uh i think you might have retweeted tom it said it's like gore of it all i guess observing Henry Kissinger, I think, looking at hell in the Sistine Chapel. And I think he's, look, he's a part of the hunting. Yeah. We don't have any wits like that anymore. You don't.

Everyone has to. And this is the thing, I guess, that's also angering is that, and I haven't even seen the libs and the conservatives i mean it's the same thing when any any evil piece of shit dies and both sides like both of these lunatics um feel the need to um honor this person you know what i mean but like i mean you had people like gorb et al who would just straight up be like no this guy was a fucking demon you know we need public intellectuals who uh have the to have the temerity the cojones to say shit like that again. Yeah, I read an article in the New York Times today from David Sanger who interviewed Henry Kissinger six years ago for Henry Kissinger's obituary. So you're interviewing a 94-year-old man at that point.

What does he have to say? Or his own obituary. Oh, God. Basically, it was just like Henry Kissingeringer was full of nuance he was fascinating he had wit he had he had rapier's wit when people attach nuance to your name you can rest assured that you're a piece of shit it's like when there's a movement to free something, you know how if it's free something, you know those people are in trouble. You know how that is.

If somebody says that you're complicated or nuanced, you can bet your ass you were a piece of shit. You absolutely were a serial killer. You were a monster. Absolutely. 100%. Yep. War criminal.

Rape here is wit. What does that mean? i never understood that or like what is it what is it like a rapier is like a sword right yeah sword he'd be like a killing wit well you know the way he killed people sharp a sharp sharp wit they're obsessed with that shit like weirdly enough i think hen Henry Kissinger probably would not be on the radar, on the left's radar as much without Christopher Hitchens. Like, I think that he, him and Chomsky are kind of responsible for making Henry Kissinger the, uh, bête noire, basically. Yeah, like the demon, like the demonic hagiography.

Well, and Anthony Bourdain, too. I mean, to some degree. Yeah, but it's interesting with Hitchens because Hitchens was presumably at one point in time an anti-imperialist who then came to embrace America's genocidal militaristic pretensions around the globe. And I have often found myself wondering

what he would be saying right now. But, like, I don't know. I just went to Hitchens' Wikipedia page a few weeks ago, and just out of randomness, I was just like, this is interesting, because I've always wondered, like, how history will view Hitchens' Wikipedia page a few weeks ago, and just out of randomness, I was just like, this is interesting, because I've always wondered how history will view Hitchens. And this motherfucker's got an entire rhetorical move named after him.

It's called Hitchens Razor or some dumb shit. Oh, that's some nerd shit, dog. It's kind of like me on the basketball court. Y'all sextxton crab dribble. It's not a carry in Slovenia. Hitchens razor. An epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed

without evidence. Boom, motherfuckers! You can't make some shit like that sound cool, man. Epistemological razor. That's not cool, man. This is like... So let's give us an example of the move. Okay. How's he

juking people rhetorically? Oh, dude, this is just fucking... This is just an old version of the Latin proverb, what is freely asserted can be freely deserted. Also rendered as what is asserted without proof may be denied without proof. So no investigation, no right to speak? What the fuck?

Yeah, you can't name this shit. It's because he died and people felt bad. They were like, oh, Christopher Hitchens died. Let's name a little dumb thing about him. Let's name a little razor. Not a bridge. Not a school. Not a school.

Let's give him a little epistemological razor. Here you go, itchy boy. Damn. Could have named a fucking rocket asteroid asteroid after that motherfucker do you think it's better when you're gone to have something immaterial or something material named after you like do you want like a rhetorical move named after you or do you want like a bridge named after you or like an art style or something like that uh like it's immaterial well you want you want your literature to be referred to as like thorpian or would you

or or would you rather somebody erect or name a a dorm after you like a space station space station yeah hell yeah i would take it depends on what it depends on you see the thing about is that you don't have any control over the naming convention using your namesake you don't have any controls over how that movement or ideology or art style shapes out because if motherfuckers are calling shit thorpean and they turn out to be assholes and pieces of shit i want to run away from that as far as possible but if they're cool then yeah yeah yeah one of the funnier examples of this is when they named the pedestrian bridge in Whitesburg the James W. Bates Memorial Pedestrian Bridge about 15 years before he died.

So they were just getting out in front of it so they didn't have to, you know, go rename it after he died. It's like Kissinger being interviewed for his own obituary. Right. China pays tribute to Kissinger. Old friend of the Chinese people. What, dude?

I mean, come on, man. I mean, there is that video of Mao meeting Kissinger and his wife. Yeah. You know. What did Mao have to say about old Heinz Kissinger and his wife. What did Mal have to say about old Heinz Kissinger? He just said his wife was really tall. Like, his wife was really tall.

That was his takeaway. You know, your wife is pretty tall, right? Yeah, your wife is tall. He's just throwing all this out. Hey, Mal is just like, tall woman all right well thanks for dropping by um well has anyone didn't i mean has anyone besides the rolling stones anyone of any

significant import um or status who has a platform has anyone denounced this demon for who he actually was you know the New York Times actually had a op-ed I was very surprised to see this but that's the thing about him dying at 100 it's so low stakes it's so low stakes

even the New York Times can lead their opinion page with an op-ed. By Ben Rhodes. I didn't see who wrote it. That's hilarious. Ben Rhodes said Henry Kissinger, the hypocrite. Ben Rhodes used to work for Obama, right? Yeah, he's the army dude, right?

Yeah. One of the national security advisors. Defense dudes, yeah. Oh, my God. Damn. Talk about what you don't want to be remembered as a hypocrite hypocrite imagine carpet bombing like most of southeast asia and then like the worst thing somebody says about you is you're talking about your hypocrisy it's like a norm mcdonald bit about

bill cosby they said uh he said that uh the worst thing about bill cosby was the hypocrisy i thought it was the rapes. It's like calling him like Henry Kissinger was a naughty boy. He's a naughty boy with lots of issues. Man, those foreign policy freaks. How do you get in on that racket? You just go to the Harvard Kennedy School with bloodlust like now you get to like tell people who lives and dies in the world it seems like yeah there's there's labs you go to you there you go when you go to the

harvard kennedy school for bloodlust you go to your lecture and then you go to lab and in your lab they hand you various blood samples from various peoples around the world and you drink it up you develop an appetite and a hunger for those bloods you know what I'm saying no it's like you know how you dissect frogs and said they dissect live human beings is what they do because they have to personally learn

the blood loss for themselves so then they can confer that on to other people right if you think about it it's like the most, but if you think about it, it's like the most bullshit job in the world. You know what I mean? Like, it's right up there with like, you know, my job,

and like our job, and everything I'm connected to. Bullshit needless jobs, yeah. Well, yeah, it is. Like, being a foreign policy ghoul is the most like horse shit job, made up shit in the worldless jobs. Well, yeah. Being a foreign policy ghoul is the most horseshit, made-up shit in the world. It truly is, yeah. I went to college with

someone who in college was ostensibly a lefty. Like, she would go with us to the Palestine marches and stuff like that. But then as we got closer to graduating,

she started talking about interning at the State Department and going to work from there. Oh, no. And I believe – Beginning of the end. Yeah. Eventually she moved to D.C. And I believe to this day she's – Still works.

Let me just say that like i just like this is my only real experience with someone who's entered that world and i can i can honestly say that the work you do in that job is a moral evacuation it's got nothing to do like yes you go and you have to like learn about like all the various different sides of like the balkan crisis but like and i guess you could call that work but the actual work is learning how to void out your morality how chipping away at your soul you yourself doing so it's like it's like that's when you put the blinders you know we were talking about um how is it that um you know these uh these these dogs that are fucking engineering this genocide in Palestine,

and we were talking about how is it that these people sleep at night doing this? And it's like there are these blinders, and maybe their souls are tinted. So they themselves can't self-reflect. You have to create sort of mental blocks, like literal blocks that you can't think about the work that you do. Or I guess you believe in it that it genuinely does do some good in the world you know yeah you can drink the kool-aid and force it down or you you know i think it's i wonder how i could got kissinger squares that though well i mean the thing is it's like we have this we have kissinger dying literally a week after a former State Department employee was caught on film just saying the most racist David Duke-level shit against a halal vendor. It's no secret that the people that work in those fields, I guarantee you probably Steven Sedlowitz or whatever his name name was the guy that was harassing the halal

vendor when he got into the state department he was probably like my friend who like had vague progressive convictions and beliefs in college and was able to retain certain knowledge about the world like the cia fact book does or whatever over time like the thing that's like really striking about like that steven sedlowitz guy it's like he and i put a clip of it in the episode i think either last week or two weeks ago there was a zoom call he was on with somebody in the few days after october 7th and he was talking about like the running joke at the state department is like uh the middle east is um the middle east is 400 years in the past.

They're just entering the world history 400 years ago. That's insane. They work in those... This is the weird thing about American Empire. It's the narrative industry, really. Yeah. I've thought this a few times when I've tried to understand 9-11.

Sometimes I do genuinely think, because I go back when i've tried to understand 9-11 sometimes i do genuinely think because i go back and forth all the time on 9-11 but sometimes i genuinely think good thing bad thing net positive net negative who's to say no no i mean again what happened and why like i genuinely think sometimes that all these state department employees unconsciously created all the conditions and characters and and set into motion all the forces that created it to happen didn't even realize they were doing it and then once that happened that just verified all their work they had been doing over the previous 20 or 30 years. And then it just sets everything up on new terms in which they have to, like, dig in and become even more convicted about, like, the inherent backwardness of Middle Easterners and all this.

You know, does that make sense? No, no, that makes perfect sense. purposefully so but by their actions which you know they're they're psychopathic or sociopathic sort of undergirding their their ideology right yeah and creating the conditions that necessitate them to prove and point and say hey we want the i guess we were right you know to begin with this is what we should be doing you know what i mean echoes of biden's if we didn't have an israel we would have had to create an israel right not. Exactly. And what they, when really and truly what they should have done is treated that bitch like guns and roves has treated Chinese democracy

or Dr. Dre created detox and just, you know, stick it back in the oven or just never put it out. Never release it, yeah. Never release it. Yeah, just as a file on folder somewhere in the State Department yeah i i even think

sometimes that was a wild thing we did one time glad that didn't get out yeah it's like when you write a novel when you're like 21 years old and you go back and you read it you're like oh my god this was really racist i'm glad i didn't publish this i should use that word yeah i don't know like i do genuinely think sometimes that they even perhaps i literally think that they even perhaps bought all the passports and flying lessons for all the terrorists and didn't even realize that they were going through the motions of carrying out 9-11 and then when 9-11 happened they were like oh my god oh my god it's just as we feared like they don't even realize it because because y'all it would take it would if they if they had to acknowledge i mean it'd be like staring into the abyss right if they had to acknowledge that they had an active role in making

this happen and actually this is the enemy that they wanted then they're behind the break they'd have a psychic break you know what i mean yeah they'd be they'd be sent to the rubber room you know yep because they'd be screaming for hours out end you know i think that honestly i kind of think that this logic also perhaps applies to democrats in general right now like i don't know like i was in lexington earlier this week and tom and i were talking about this like the the line that you're seeing obviously you're going to hear it more and Like, I don't know. Like, I was in Lexington earlier this week, and Tom and I were talking about this. Like, the line that you're seeing, obviously you're going to hear it more and more over the next 11 months. But the line that you're seeing that not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, that this election is way too dangerous, that, like, you know what I'm saying? Can't trick me.

Can't fool me again, motherfucker. Not again. that like you know you know what i'm saying can't trick me can't fool me again why is the election like danger why is it more dangerous to sit it out and somehow less dangerous to just run somebody else uh well you know what i mean like you know your guy's dead in the water like the smart thing to do would be like well let's try something different let's correct course here i know but you're the onus has to be on the you're not gonna lose any of these mythical conservatives that you thought you were gonna peel off from the trump caucus you know what i mean like if you run somebody else rather than you know scranton joe it's that the reality is is joe biden is the best they have yeah yeah and that's disturbing yeah that and the onus is

on us right because instead of it being like like you're saying tom like why don't you just switch him out with another candidate when there's a better chance of winning i say that besides like you know maybe like well bernie before his ceasefire uh refusals and then you know members of the squad and stuff but let's call it what it is they're not going to run any of those people no no and they're going to blame it on, it's up to voters then, you know. It's up to Arab Americans and Muslims, right, to vote for him, you know what I mean?

To suck it up and vote for him, you know. And young people to suck it up and vote for him. Speaking of Bernie, I'm going to stick a pin in that, but did you see that there was a story in the New York Times today about Bernie? He wrote a tribute to his boy Kissinger. Is that what he did? No, after he got roundly roasted for his op-ed last week in opposition to a ceasefire,

he, like the New York Times did a story about how the left has sort of turned on him. And there's a quote in here from Fez Shakir. Remember him? I think he used to work for Bernie's campaign. Yeah, he worked for Sanders. He ran the campaign for a while. I think so. He said, the easiest thing for Bernie Sanders to do would be to just say something to make activists happy. And the fact that he's not is indicative of how

sincerely he approaches this issue in particular. It's an affirmation that Bernie Sanders doesn't come to these things with political positioning in mind. He's actually struggling with the moral dimensions of this. No, he's not. Because if he was, he wouldn't fucking come out there and be so stringently against the ceasefire. If this is something he had to mull over in his mind and turn over in his mind,

which I don't know why he would, then he would just keep his fucking mouth shut, you know, until he made a decision, you know what I mean? The thing is, is it is a primary example of how liberal zionism is just this sort of like ethereal ghost like we talked about this on the last on last week's episode like the history of liberal zionism and the ideology of it bernie sanders is like a classic example of it because like he even went and worked on a kibbutz yeah he believes firmly in the leftist potential of israel and it's fascinating because aaron something you had asked me is like we're talking about like the pal zion

movement and like liberal zionism and about like you had asked me like i said they were socialists and you said like well um like nominally socialists or like what do you mean and i said like socialists in the context of eastern europe in the 1920s 30s and 40s and i finally finished reading the book that i was referencing um called revolutionary yiddish land and something that's very fascinating that they point out is that liberal zionism now was built on a social base that no longer exists by that they're talking about the working the jewish working class of eastern europe and you have to kind of think about that like what it means to have an active living breathing politic that is based off of a social base and political economy and demographic that just quite simply does not exist any longer you're like kind of holding up these ghosts you know yeah and i think that like how we did with

coal miners in 2016 i mean america itself i feel like is sort of haunted by that like like last week i saw a story about a high school somewhere using like a himmler quote in its like jesus christ and then like you got the michigan state spartans projecting hitler on a massive jumbotron screen what the fuck was that what the fuck when was this that was a couple months ago i guess yeah it was there during the michigan game so it's like a month ago. Why? We're saying the Michigan Wolverines are literally Hitler. They are cheaters.

I don't know. I guess what I mean is that like we are kind of surrounded by these just ghosts of the past because we're unable to really grapple with the past. You know what I'm saying? Like we don't, it's hauntology. It is. Yeah.

It's where we're haunted by these specters, you know, whether it's the specter or the disappearance of the specter of communism, you know, not even be haunted by communism itself, but by the fact it's gone. So you have no, you,

you have to create these ghosts in order to put up, uh, to put yourself against opposition to something, know yeah even though you know you know what i mean there's no there is no opposition to the current world order in the way that communism presented a challenge to it or an alternative to it rather you know what i mean it's just sort of this like sort of just um i'm not even talking about the left explicitly. I mean, just like everything else that could challenge this is just sort of in the wind.

You know what I mean? And I don't say that to denigrate anybody that's doing any kind of work, but it's like we all have our different tendencies and all this stuff, and we can't seem to exactly coalesce that into sort of a I hate to say alternative vision in the future

because we say it too much but yeah it's a loss it's a lost future is what it is because i mean hauntology is about what may have been but what can still be you know what i mean so it's because we're in this you know i mean we call it the e-crisis but you could call it like what do we do about the future you know it's it is so up in the air that like we're either haunted by these ghosts of the past that we think will lead us forward or, you know, haunted by them and this is how we perform our ideology or our politics. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, and it's interesting in this book, they interview multiple people. like they've teased out several strands of Jewish radicalism, like communism being one, the Bund being another one,

which would have set up like a Jewish nation state somewhere other than the Levant in Palestine. And then communism being the Soviet Union. And then Pal-Zion, which was, you know, like the liberal Zionist movement in Palestine. And it's interesting because they talk about like, they use this term like a field of ideological ruins that like israel in itself is a example of a failed utopia like and in many ways

germany too germany and israel are both sort of like haunted by like the stillbirth of revolution you know what i'm saying like yeah they were never like that that leftist that revolution was never able to arise um and or go ahead no okay could i just ask a question would you say that too i know this may be a little bit of a tangent but would you say that about the american south too you know because i especially think of post-reconstruction you know i mean and the failure of reconstruction the fail of creating a a multiracial social democracy. And that, like, you know, despite the fact that, I mean, the South has contained some of the poorest people in the country, regionally speaking. And, I mean, some of the most intense labor movements and battles were in Appalachia, were in the South. You know, the Civil Rights Movement, right?

Birthplace in the land of Georgia. So, yeah, I feel like, I don't know, I was just thinking, was just thinking yeah i feel like i mean i guess you could say america itself is a fail i mean america is that's a false kind of definition though america's a failed utopia because it never was really meant to be utopia for everyone anyway you know right um i think the south is kind of like yeah you know no you're right i mean because the civil war was the completion of the bourgeois revolution exactly Exactly. And you're right. Like it was never allowed to be carried fully out. Reconstruction was ended.

We did not expropriate the lands and redistribute them to the former slaves. Sherman didn't go from the river to the sea. He didn't continue. Well, he did actually, but he did. Right, right. We didn't hang Nathan Bedford for us. Right. Yeah, actually. He did. Right, right. We didn't hang Nathan Bedford for us. Right. Exactly.

But I think that the point is that they describe in this book every person they talk to who was present for the creation of the state of Israel who left Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. They describe this process of abandoning these utopian dreams of a better world and enter and converting to realism like they i think multiple people say that like conversions to realism yeah and like what's what is meant by that phrase just that like they all eventually accepted the fact that international proletarian socialist revolution was a pipe dream yeah a pipe dream

which again the soviet union blames or holds a lot of the blame for this socialism in one country etc like this isn't like just the fault of uh the united states marshall plan and everything else after world war ii like this also has a lot to do with soviet common term policy the United States Marshall Plan and everything else after World War II. Like, this also has a lot to do with Soviet common-term policy previous to, like, 1942 and everything else. And I think that, like, in that void of unrealized hopes and dreams, that's when you get these sort of, like, behemoths, obviously like Israel itself,

these sort of like behemoths uh obviously like like israel itself which is like is a product of the sort of like violent uh eth you know ethno-supremacist tendencies of its time that has never been able to shed that and um in the same way that like liberal zionists are able to use like the hardcore right wing like pro-settler settler faction in israel as a excuse for why israel can't live up to its full potential the liberals do that here in america and it's why like i just don't fucking buy it every time they get out on the timeline and try to scold people like oh oh, you must want Trump to be. Oh, my God. Like, you're not voting for Biden. Is it vote for Trump?

You're committing moral sepuku. Like, you're going to put us all in danger. And it's just like, hey. You're committing moral sepuku. That's my own. But, you know, it's like, A, you need Trump because it gives you a plausible denied ability to not do jack shit. And also something to fundraise off of. Yeah.

But B, as I pointed out to Tom earlier this week, and I said it online, like, I truly believe that a big part of what's going on here is like, Aaron, are you familiar with the term called loss chasing? No, what's loss chasing? I like the way that sounds, though. So loss chasing is a term we use to describe certain forms of gambling addiction or like disordered gambling. And what it means is that after a certain point, after you have been gambling for so long in this disordered way, you eventually start actively hoping you lose. And the reason why...

You become almost addicted to losing. You become addicted to losing because it gives you a further justification for continuing to gamble. For your gambling addiction. Exactly. So, like, you're chasing loss. You've passed the point of even trying to recoup your losses and doubling down you actively want to lose yeah you want to i was telling tess this is the whole reason monday night football was created by the way yeah right because you want to materialize your loss to justify your addiction, you know? Yeah, exactly.

And I do think a similar psychological phenomenon is occurring with the stancel types and the people. Because, like, it is a question, like, do they really care? Do they really not? I mean, do they hate Trump that much? Like, what is sincere here? What's cynical? And I do think that that's a big part of it. Like, they genuinely want to lose they don't really care whether biden wins or not they just need to keep fucking pushing the dopamine

button hoping that hoping that next time things are a little bit different but knowing deep down that it won't be and also knowing that the decision that the crooks of it isn't even hoping that things are different, right? Yeah. It's to continue to push a narrative, you know what I mean? Yeah. You know, because, I mean, we've said this about liberals before, is that, like, you know, they don't know how to govern. You know, I mean, we haven't said this.

I mean, this is like The Simpsons has even made a joke out of this, right? Like, we hate ourselves, we can't govern. And, you know, I was thinking when you were talking, Terrence, about sort of the way that liberal or even socialist Zionists, right, who were inspired by and bringing socialism out of Eastern Europe, right, to Israel, how these kinds of hopes and dreams of utopia were dashed once the reality of what was needed, right, to create like a Jewish state, once they realized that it would be an occupation, right? to create like a Jewish state once they realize that would be an occupation right um and I was thinking the same way that you now have these liberals that are not just scolding the left but they're scolding like Muslims and Arab Americans yeah that's the same these are the same fucking people group of people that they were they were so against the airport ban you know yeah so against the they were a lot they were allying themselves with the progressives and the left when they were the airport um protests right people like doing flash protests at the airport same i mean tom you've said it right all screaming about kids in cages and now

it's not even just that state department guy because that guy's like a bloodthirsty psycho right who is actually within the apparatus of you know um foreign policy right of course these people are ghouls but we're just talking about like the foot soldiers, the ideological foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. These people now who are saying, well, I know to like, you know, Muslim people and Arabs, I know, well, things are bad now. But can you imagine under Trump and literally throwing them under the bus as well? It's like, it's so easy for these people. But you know, I don't know, man, because I just have to say, though, it's one thing to do it in pursuit of a project if you're working in foreign policy it's another thing to do it in service of this party that has no future you know what i mean that's much more pathetic

i'm sorry equally pathetic but that's something about the latter is just so much more soul evacuated you know what i mean yeah because there's no there's no there's no consequence to it you know yeah yeah it it is wild that the line that you've seen repeated several times over the last week week and a half is i hope you enjoy the camps all right what what what there was like a tweet tom that there was a where was one tweet that i was talking to that i read out loud to tom that made me bust out fucking laughing. The first line was, go for it, Muslims. Go for it, Muslims. Go ahead and vote.

Vote in your detention centers and all this. It's like, dude, what the fuck are you guys talking about? They want it to happen. It's almost like they want it to happen to justify their existence because they'll be like, we told you so. We told you we were better than the fascists and you didn't vote for us. So see what happens? Like, no, dude. Well, but it's also just like, like, I mean, there's a rhetorical reality.

And then there's like, there's like an actual concrete reality of like what happened. And I'm not saying the prospect of Trump, too, does terrify me in a lot of ways, particularly like when he's talking about seeking vigilante justice on all of us it which could be funny in some ways we're terrifying and others we're probably where there are people that he's like justifying and sanctioning militias that are going to hunt down leftists that it gets yeah yeah that is not communities that's very scary that does that does make me nervous you know what i mean but like what I want to say is, and I don't say this in a, you know, like that Dr. Seuss cartoon of Hitler when they were talking about Neville Chamberlain says, if he starts goose-stepping, then we'll step in and stop him.

Like, I don't want to, like, come off like I'm doing that, like, R.E. Trump. Uh-huh. But, like, a lot of the stuff they were saying could have easily been true in trump's one term and and rhetorically it was i mean he called mexicans rapists and all this stuff murders whatever whatever but in actual concrete practice you could argue reasonably if we just cut through the rhetorical bullshit of like joe biden's the goody trump's the baddie that the biden administration was way worse on some of these things you know there was like there was an article i read in the new york times today or maybe it was the washington post because the washington post

had an opinion an op-ed that was just like we are about to have a dictatorship and no one cares i think that was literally like basically the gist of the headline um and okay a trump dictatorship is inevitable is increasingly inevitable we should stop pretending and there was a line in there about how one of the things biden has going against him and they again they didn't really see the uh they didn't really see the the irony here um trump enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency namely the lack of any responsibility biden must carry the world's problems like an albatross around his neck like any incumbent but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises biden cannot this is funny on trump's watch

there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump's unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it. It's like they can't really— I mean, all that makes the case for why he was exactly fit for the presidency. That's exactly what I'm saying. The reason for that is because this guy really just wanted to play golf all the time and like fuck off and not really do like what like didn't he leave office having not even hired like many

cabinet members and stuff like that you know what i mean like i mean it could have just been a consequence of like the laziness of like their project overall and how like he was sort of like was this like you know enfant terrible with regards to like, you know, what's his name? Steve Bannon and all these different people, you know. But the effect, you have to be honest and candid about, is that in many ways, Biden has been way worse, way more bloodthirsty, etc. Well, I think the thing is... Hey, hold on a second, guys. I got somebody at the door.

Can we hold that thought for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coitus interruptus. Coitus interruptus. Oh, man. Pulling out and busting. Early. Busting early, right.

Yeah, we're down one tom has maintenance issues technical difficulties technical difficulties yeah but i guess something i was gonna say is that um i don't know i mean i get this at this point like the the fact of the matter is is their weapon for wanting to stop trump is simply not up to the task and that's really what the issue is it's not about like this like left case for for trump or left case for biden or any of this stuff it's just that like objectively on the terms that you've set your weapon for stopping trump will not cut it i mean i guess it could under certain circumstances and just certain flukes and maybe just fatigue maybe like yeah it's a fucking 10 voter turnout and like something miraculous happens but like otherwise all of the obstacles and things that

you put in place to make sure this wouldn't happen again simply aren't going to cut it and so that's why like the scolding and the brow beating just isn't going to work this time and i think that like another big thing here is something that i've been really been thinking a lot about is just like the there's such a massive disjuncture between like the ideals and ambitions of this administration and what it's actually been able to achieve so for example like i'm signing up for health care right now trying to anyways yeah i'm getting the emails now and i'm like well maybe i'll do it this year i need health care i need to fucking get this shit well but but like health premiums are going up because health costs have skyrocketed over the last year they've been unable to rein it back in in uh uh rein in the that inflation like they have on some other goods but like health costs rents and premiums are going through the fucking roof and you've got this situation where like

i mean like i said on twitter like it's kind's kind of like Herbert Hoover levels of hubris. I mean, it's crazy. Like, they have been so hubristic and so arrogant. About Bidenomics and Bidenomics is working. Yes. Despite the fact that the reality for millions of people, you know what I mean? It's like the 60-something people are living paycheck to paycheck. I mean, it just doesn't reflect reality, you know?

Yeah. And it's the thing is, it's like, you're right. It doesn't reflect the reality and it's i guess what's so fascinating about it is that also student loans it's just like i mean how many fucking op-eds do we see and tweets did we see since october 7th about the the youth playing when with fire like we have to get biden back in there it's like well well i hate to sound cynical about this or like uh underestimate the convictions of the youth but you probably could have fucking peeled off a substantial amount of them if you hadn't fucking dangled student loans out in front of them and then pulled it fucking back like yeah i mean people voted young people voted i mean they had no illusions that biden was a sanders right

and that he supported like free tuition or whatever but there was this idea that the same way that Hillary's campaign, even rhetorically, absorbed, or the Democratic Party actually generally, sort of absorbed some of these ideas that were demands of the left in 2016. I'm not saying that they carried any of them out, right? But there were rhetorical promises made. You thought that they would have done this in 2020, you you know and i think that's why young people voted for biden because it was uh climate change yeah it was student loans you know these were two big issues and what did they do you know they dangled it like a carrot like you said yeah and i know people will say well it got tied up in court and it's not just his fault he tried

but dude i don't fucking buy that you know i don't fucking buy that that's the thing i don't buy it either it's like there are things that you can do the fucking supreme court does not make fucking rules i'm sorry that's not the way it works they're fucking judges they weigh in on things and give their stupid ass opinions but you can ignore their stupid ass opinions yes it says i just i don't know man i just they're hubris and and not only that it's just obviously their arrogant completely belligerent posture on palestine was just insane just the fact that like they didn't even do anything to halfway earn that belligerence you know what i'm saying like they didn't even explain themselves no they were just lashing out and lashing out of people demanding a ceasefire

yeah genocide and this is the thing i am i anticipate i imagine this is a much more viscerally important issue for a lot of people and i'm just basing this on the fact that we had a patreon subscriber unsubscribe for us boasting about not voting it's just like they i guess like they were chill with um me basically saying like i'm not going to denounce hamas until i know for a fact what happened on october 7th that was fine but then like saying like i'm not gonna vote that's a line too far i i guess that means this is a very charged subject i guess for the most number of years that we've been doing this show and we talk about like you know joke uh my in minecraft about uh black bagging billionaires in the middle of the night and like executing them i guess like that's i guess or fascist i guess that's fine but when it

comes to the real meat of the issue of are you gonna vote to come next year that's a little bit too far listen i just want to say something real quick dog look bro i mean like every time this shit happens i always want to post this fucking meme of the Charlie Brown and the football shit. Like, what is it going to take for people like that? I'm not lashing out at this one person specifically, but these people who think for some reason they believe this bullshit about this is the most important election of our lifetimes ever, which they say every fucking year. of our lifetimes ever which they say every fucking year at what point do you start to maybe consider that if this country is always on a knife's edge of of uh slipping into outright fascism why don't you ever think if maybe the democratic party has some culpability right yeah in that rightward shift you know what i mean yeah i think the thing is is that like what we're getting at here is there's not a viable option in any route.

It's like if you decide not to vote, if you decide to vote, if you decide that Biden is the last chance, you know, the last bulwark we have against dictatorship. If you decide weirdly that Trump is the only fuck. None of these options are going to cut it. Even if you decide not to vote and sit it out, that's not going to cut it either. It's like, there's not an option that fully gets at the sclerotic, just rot at the nature of this thing. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. And so I just, I don't know. I mean, I just, and again, you're right. I'm not trying to pick on this one person.

I'm just using this as an example to show that this is a very visceral, you're right i'm not trying to pick on this one person i'm just using this as an example to show that this is a very visceral charged issue that will only become more and more visceral and charged over the next year and i don't really fully have an answer other than to say like none of the things that the democrats have done since 2020 have have done anything towards avoiding trump right actually they're in can i just say real quick their inaction has led to all right i want to be careful about saying this because again i don't want to make it sound as if um as if trump i mean look everything that we thought was going to happen under trump is happening under biden and it's because of inaction from the democrats and roe v wade is a perfect example they couldn't even fucking protect roe v wade you know what i mean yeah

like come on man so what makes you think that any of the other things that they promised that they were going to fulfill you know well and that's the that's the thing it's just that there's not an adequate position here because like i guess gun to my head like i mean it does seem it almost does seem kind of like a no-brainer like gun to your head you have to pick one trump or biden it's like well this is a no-brainer but i think the thing is is that when it comes to our society there are all kinds of forms of opting out there are plenty of people who decide to opt out of various familial forms, who decide to opt out of various life paths like college or high school. And then there are people who decide to opt out of the electoral process. And I think that all of those choices are inherently sort of radical in a way doesn't mean

a left radicalism a right radicalism it is just a rejection of all of the things placed in front of us and it's like Bartleby the Scrivener you know um that short story by uh Herman Melville where the guy says I don't think I will yeah yeah I yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what the exact quote is, but he's like, I'd rather not. I think that's what it is. I'd rather not. And I think that there's just something there that more and more people should be interrogating.

And granted, can you interrogate it and solve it within less than a year? No. And I was informed today on Twitter that it is too late to actually replace biden like the primary deadlines for most of the most important states have already passed like primary what if he died what if he died he'd have to run his corpse what they're doing now basically there is still the convention like there could be like a

convention coup like in july or august or whenever like yo all right could i imagine the republicans doing something like that as desperate like that like being militant about i mean not really because i guess they made trump sound like he was going to be like you know uh just staying on their party and they fell in line but i mean these are the motherfuckers okay i'm not talking again about the elected officials but i'm just talking about the party in the base i mean these are the motherfuckers who charged it to the capitol january 6th right right could you imagine democrats holding a coup like who would they're even like thompson they don't have anybody i think you had since earlier they don't have anybody left so who would even who would even be leading the coup against Biden?

I mean, it's hard to say because there's no way to know the future. But if you read that liberal manifesto thing we read over the weekend, there's no substance there. There's nothing in it. There's no gleaning of an ideological project. You're right. There's not even an ideological project. ideological project you know there's you're right there's not even you're right there's not even an ideological project like even if they're if they if they did come out and say like we believe in revamping america's infrastructure which by the way the biden administration did announce a plan

to like revamp wasn't that built back better i thought that was you're right i thought that was built back better but i guess that they're they're built back better too go back better better better build back better uh but like i guess you would expect to read a manifesto like that and see them saying like well we're gonna pack the court i mean like uh liberals believe in because like that's the thing like one of the things he says in there in that manifesto is like liberals don't believe in the static nature or of the original frame of the original constitution in the framework they're not like fundamental they're not fundamentalist when it comes to like the original interpretation of the originalist i guess is the

right but at the same time like it's, okay, so having laid out that premise, you would then expect them to say, like, well, ergo, that's why we believe packing the courts and doing X, Y, Zs. All of which I think is just like window dressing and reformist whatever. But sure, I think that would be

an actual liberal vision, something that you could actually sink your teeth into. they don't even have that all they have is illusion they have these minute economical mechanisms that they can like pull and tug on here and there to make the economy because like yes the economy has grown apparently four percent in the last several years which is a apparently like an unprecedented amount of growth but what does that mean though but you're right exactly the cost of that economy has exceeded our ability to participate in it yeah and so

people are caught in a bind and because the liberals don't have any other message any other vision outside of look the number's going up you're crazy look israel has a right to defend itself you're crazy you know other than that that's going to produce some disastrous results and that's why i say it doesn't matter because I'm not the only motherfucker voting. Exactly. You aren't either. There are plenty of other people who don't listen to fucking brain disease podcasts like this

and spend all their day on Twitter who also experience those things. They see what they're saying and they say there is a fundamental disjuncture between my life and what they are saying yep and it's an insult this is provable because i feel this is within my own fucking exactly it is provable and it is a fucking insult to me that they are not that that instead of meeting me where i'm at they're asking me to meet them where they're at exactly an illusion

and that is not how you get people to turn out to vote for you and that's why i'm saying that's why i'm just saying that's that that is a disaster that is not a winning message that's why i'm saying it doesn't matter that's why it doesn't matter to berate people and scold into it because because you're gonna lose anyway if that's your fucking message they're just not gonna show up listen man it's just like this idea that you can berate and scold people into voting for you and that completely won't validate the reasons why they don't want to vote in the first place and i think part of that is because like the liberals are very sanctimonious

you know they are very holier than thou very while touting touting these smug accomplishments which are not accomplishments at all while berating and shaming anyone else who does not recognize they're like god-given glory you know what i mean and it's just like i think that's why i think that's why that guy is harassing fucking halal vendors yeah because he feels like they're like they feel as if we said this before. Liberals fucking hate. They hate themselves and they hate everybody, especially themselves. But it's almost like this idea of like, don't you recognize my genius and that I'm trying to help you? You ungrateful ingrate that you don't recognize that I'm trying to help you.

You know what? Then you deserve your ill-gotten gain. You deserve it then. It's just like. You're ill-gotten gain. You deserve it then. It's just like, so I mean, this is again why I think we were talking about like, you know, these jackals within the party. And it really does seem that, all right, I guess the way to put it is sort of that it seems, the right is at least scared of their base if not if not very aware that the power i guess the the ideological power in their party lies with the

base you know so they're i would say amenable even if they don't carry out this this uh this dystopic vision of the future i mean trump did said he was going to build a fucking wall and that was the fucking that was the main got right but it seems more that liberals are better at at persuading their voters more controlling them rather or shaping an argument that they then reside in you know which is why you'll have like the most diehard liberals will defend the most bashing insane shit you know what i mean yeah like i don't know if any of that makes sense but it's like you know they're shocked because people are turning away from that and actually have the temerity to be like actually no fuck you you know no you're right i think that they're better crafters

of reality they are better crafters of delusion and i genuinely think that's why you've got a liberal out there because like right-wingers already believe all that racist stuff yeah i mean that's probably why they don't go around like harassing whole all vendors with the same fervor and insistence and regularity as this guy this guy's doing it remember they do ambient background noise in which they live that's exactly right this guy had the passion of a convert you could tell that his entire his illusions have been caved in and so and like and that becomes the cynical is the cynicism that they operate on and uh i don't and i don't know i just think that like there's that there is something to be said for that i think that they uh you know what's fascinating to me is that you have an open fucking lane if you could just take it like in the sense that you could solve a lot of these problems,

in the sense that, in my opinion, the right wing has never been weaker. As we pointed out, all you gotta do is just buck up to these assholes just with a little bit of military might or something, and they're gonna fucking just cower, tuck tail between their legs, and get in their doomsday bunkers.

Get in their bunkers, exactly. They're fucking terrified. They're little bitches. They have no, they're all bark, no bite. And that's why, like, all this stuff from, like, the state level, all the things they're doing at the state level, the Democrats could do shit about all this. But instead, what they do is they go out there

and they just say, oh, look, either our hands are tied, we have to listen to the Supreme Court on this, and if you don't fucking continue voting for us then that's on you that you didn't vote for us to put in supreme court justices who uh who were going to let bully us anyways exactly exactly exactly so it's just like it doesn't i don't know i just i just i guess i just am at this point where it's just like, people really need to start, like, I'm addressing this to people. I'm addressing this to anyone who comes at me and says, like, well, you can't be saying we shouldn't vote. You can't be saying that it's not important, all this. That's not what I'm saying. pretend like these like like this is not just an illusion meant to patch together

every you know couple of years a very tenuous in my opinion insulting and condescending approach to all of our lives that are on the lines every time you know we are involved in some conflict halfway around the world where there's nuclear power you know nuclear weapons involved like i'm i'm just fucking tired of having to pretend like this is just some short-term gain game for gains we're not even getting exactly when our own fucking lives are on the line constantly it's like what you were saying i think last uh we were talking about um israel specifically but just like kind of being fed up with this like oh you have to condemn hamas or you have to like sort of like acknowledge that um i don't know just this idea that again

they want you to like walk around nodding along with genocide and i think with the you see the same sort of project within the democratic party and within the liberal establishment to kind of like pull the wool over people's eyes i guess right or keep the wool over their eyes and tell people that like once again we are on the verge of fascism and this is the most important election of our lifetimes yet i don't know man i just have to say like people think about elections in terms of like not not what's going to happen next year or four years from now but they're thinking about what's happening right now and if what's happening what's happening right now is so bad that they wanted like check out, then you, then how are you going to,

how are you going to chastise them for that? You know? Right, right, right, right. I don't know. Yeah,

no, I, I agree. Um, well I had, I, you know, wanted to talk a little bit about like what actually transpired this week in

terms of like Hamas, you know, the, the hostage deal and everything else, but perhaps we'll save that for the Patreon because I believe that this this week in terms of Hamas, the hostage deal and everything else. But perhaps we'll save that for the Patreon. Because I believe that this ceasefire was extended until Friday. And if the ceasefire does end on Friday,

I suspect that Israel will go right back to bombing. We will see, of course. You never know. Nothing is inevitable. But I don't have a lot of optimism about it and so i mean didn't they didn't they say didn't um didn't they say that i don't know if it's some israeli defense minister or some shit but that or idf uh spokesperson but that they were going to continue the bombing after the bullshit false ceasefire. They were going to continue at least for a couple months. I saw that, yeah, two months.

Which is just, I mean, it's not, I mean, if the death toll now is like what, like... I mean, 14,000. 14, you know... 15. 15, you know, I mean, just two more, I mean, Jesus, man.

Yeah. That's... So we'll see we'll see how how it shakes out um because i think that the biden administration probably wants to get this wrapped up however they are in a bind they're they are in a contradictory position because on one hand they do probably understand that this needs to get wrapped up before we really start entering into primary season not that biden's got any challengers but i do think that that like some of the momentum from that will carry over on the other hand their policy has been to let israel do whatever the fuck it wants under the guidance that hey they have the right to defend themselves and yeah so how are they gonna how they're gonna thread that needle the needle with the defending israel supporting

israel's continuing support israel's right to exist versus we have an election year coming up and actually if the opponent our opponent isn't actually another candidate but it is this ungodly war that we feel where we were locked into supporting because again we're haunted by these these uh these these past you know these these past histories you know and these just more modes of of i don't even i don't even know because we've talked about this before like what is the gain that the united states i mean what having a foothold in the middle east like this you know well it's you know yeah what is it game right it's it's weird it's like they have demonstrated to all of us that they would rather lose the election

than do any fucking thing about this. And so that's why all these op-eds and the scolds and everything ring so hollow. It's like they don't even fucking want to win, obviously. They don't fucking care what they're doing. Exactly. They'll fucking let Israel bomb the whole fucking place until no one's left.

And just like, I mean, I don't know. It's just, but at the same time i do think there are probably people in the administration that realize how those two postures are in tension with one another they are in a contradictory position and so we'll have to see you know we'll just have to see how they try to thread that needle i don't imagine they can because like look at the leadership you think biden is going to be able to craftily thread thread that needle absolutely not his brain is so calcified now that the the the aperture of like the political window right the possibility in his mind is just it's just precluded by just the calcification the hardening of his mind you know the grooves in his brain already set

that he's just chilling in there yeah there's no dynamism yeah right there's no dynamism there's no flexibility you know yeah we're dealing with fossils is what i'm saying and the thing is is you have to expect that that's widespread because if if a lot of people in that administration would just sign off on that and let it allow it to be they are also probably just as like fog foggy headed fogbrained, and completely addled. And so I don't know. We will see how that posture, that position, starts to unravel them. Unless, like I said, unless they can figure something out and hammer out a permanent ceasefire

and actually get this to a place where it's presentable to the American public. But I don't think they will be able to do that um no but i have been wrong many times since this true true and i and i know we're about to just want to say though just as a kind of closing thought is like you know we're talking about like the uh the american uh you know biden's administration um but i mean you could look at like the israelis you know what i mean what what what what would the i mean even the most moderate quote moderate right of their uh knesset i guess i mean i think it was this woman this most member of this most moderate party i think she was i saw a couple of weeks ago she was just talking about like yes and the children too we're gonna have to

kill the children too she's talking about like palestinian children this is so it's like even if the united and again i think this is what we're talking about right we're talking about like again these haunted these these these these these these these specters right that are haunting the specter of settler colonialism i don't know if they'll be able i mean and i could be wrong too man i don't know like i have to believe this has to give at some point but i'm just saying with the israelis leadership right now they're insanely rabid right-wing leadership i don't you know what i mean what what deals the u.s gonna hammer out you know what i mean yeah i think that the fact of the matter is is this has shown that the only viable position the only viable option is a one-state

pluralistic multicultural multi-ethnic democracy i do think that there and there has actually been polling that shows this there is a i don't i don't know if it's widespread but it is majority support of palestinians support that one state pluralistic vision majority of israelis do not over not even over a majority but we're talking about an overwhelming 90 percent of this shit like that like you could have a poll that was more kind of complete and universal like 90 almost like 80 90 that's insane yeah for that to actually stop for for this process of apartheid and occupation and constant like just mass slaughter palestinians for it to stop you have to have that project that that that like pluralistic democratic

truth and reconciliation process but that means both sides have to be willing to do it and israel israel is not and they have nuclear weapons and they have nuclear weapons and that's why that is why it is not just a fucking minute throwaway matter like who you vote for next year in the election it's like maybe trump gets in there and eggs on bb to use nukes i don't fucking know but at the same time this is why i kind of feel like it's out of our hands because because like if biden is trying to like thread this needle in this situation where it does seem to be a sort of like death lock you know it's sort of death spiral on one side the israeli side then like there's no way to reconcile any of those contradictions

and so biden himself might wind up triggering some sort of nuclear conflagration well what's what's biden talking about fucking offering gaza's natural gas what's the yeah they flattened gaza that's like it's just like you know what i mean so the other as you were saying before on either side it's just untenable and unconscionable you know it is you have disaster capitalism and biden gets it again or you have straight up world war three or you might have world war three if biden gets reelected i don't fucking know i think that in any scenario you've probably got some sort of like nuclear world war three scenario so fucking bleak oh my god because like in any scenario you've

also got the climate catastrophe which is basically like a nuclear type event you know what you know what i don't hope this is not a biblical kind of uh or like a i'm not hope i'm not as a marxist or materialist i should say a historical materialist and a marxist i hope i'm not um lending this to uh these these athers of history or nature these forces but it's like the existential crisis that we face are almost too grand to be i mean they are too grand to be solved by the current economic mode of production in our political economy they're just we're dealing with climate change and we're dealing

like the unleashing of the means to destroy ourselves in terms of nuclear war this this octogenarian who is fading away in his in his waking hours is and this tv reality guy or just not voting none of these options are adequate right now. Yeah. That's why it requires an entire rethinking of how we conceive of the world and of history. And ourselves, as humans, our potential to transcend these things, to actually build worlds. these things to actually like build worlds and i think that like again it's just so inadequate and insulting to just with all of that in mind with all those various dynamics and things at play it is just inadequate doesn't make any sense to just uh say that like well one option next year will avert any of these various catastrophic millenarian disasters

and i don't know i just i just need to stress that it's i just need to stress that like what the stakes are here is that like you have an ethnostate that has dug in and entrenched an ethnostate with nuclear weapons is dug in and entrenched and as we pointed out on the episode last week the thing about supremacist projects is that they are death cults by design because like the population that they lord over that they are supreme over if they ever manage to liquidate them entirely which they never do i don't think that's ever actually happened in human history there have been many attempts but like doing so requires the subsequent death of the culture trying to carry out that mass

eradication yeah because it's premised on the other you know it's a dialectical thing you can't knock out one that not without doing is it has no existence or significance unless they have this eternal enemy that they have to wage war against right that's why israel really is fascinating because it really does kind of like blay bear all the various dialect like there is that solomon what is it called like the solomon doctrine or something like that like the um the um h Hannibal doctrine the no well there's the there is the Hannibal doctrine but there is also the so many doctrines I don't know there's too many there's like the Solomon what is it the Solomon plan or something like that it's like uh so insidious yo it's like the concept will be nuked the whole country if Israel is under threat of like being annihilated or something like that we nuke ourselves i think basically that's it like if it looks like they

are uh in a situation where they're being invaded by all sides they would rather like solomon did tear down the the temple pillars on themselves i was joking are you serious yeah but that is also basically the premise of the third reich and nazism and everything it's just like an ethno-supremacist project of any kind automatically requires a death principle a death and this is why ultimately i think the best definition of fascism is the worship of death because like at a certain point that just cuts straight to the core which is that like supremacism requires the eventual you know it's like it's sublimated right like they they know that like if they actually succeeded in wiping out the oppressed population that they themselves would have to be wiped out too but they can't actually go on out

and it becomes yes a worship of death as a virtue death becomes a virtue and a value to be upheld yes dude i know i brought this example oh god i always bring up this example which means people should read the story but i keep thinking man about that story i told you guys about the pretenders where there's a genocide of black people and so written by black science fiction right it's really good and there's a genocide of black people and white people create these these robots in order, out of almost guilt, you know what I mean? And out of like almost you denied black people humanity. And in order to absolve yourself of any responsibility, you recreate these robots or these androids that are caricatures of black people. And it essentially is sort of the destruction of this white culture, essentially, and really apocalyptic.

Even though these race war architects got what they wanted but what would they have nothing else to live for right they have nothing else to live for because their ultimate enemy has been vanquished so they need to recreate the enemy they need to create battles again you know i know that you're right that is the thing about the creation of race in racial ideology it's like you can create a black race but in doing so you also create whiteness exactly and like these are these are social categories this is social technology that like if you carry them to their full logical terminal endpoint gets into some really bling shit and so like that's that's all that's all what's at stake here this is all what's on the table this is the needle that like the biden administration

is trying to thread i want you to seriously sit there and tell me that like do by voting or participating in that in any way will like you know what it negates any of those i'll say i know what you're going on but i would say this way because i keep thinking about this israel is like it's like a vestigial, I've said this before, the vestigial Cronenberg-like aberration. Not even aberration, really, because it is the way that the Western society,

you know, was built on settler colonialism, right? You know, the whole world entirely, you know, leading by, led by the example of Western civilization, right? And like, if you think that, like, it's like having a tail being born with a tail you know what i mean if you think that just like actually you know no hate to anyone out there that's born with a tail but if you just think that cutting yeah the tail having listers if you

think that like like just cutting off this this uh if you think you could just cut off this vestige or you you don't instead of cutting the vestige off and completely just excising it if you think that you can just like i don't know man just wear some pants that are gonna hide up the tail or some shit like that yeah or just tape it to your body or just do any of these like band-aid solutions like if you think that's what's gonna no dude you have to excise this it does demon dude well it does make you ask the question why does fascism keep arising in Western society? Is it a rot, a cancerous rot at the fundamental roots, the basis of Western society? I think that, like, that's a question that we should all try to answer. I think that, like, it's not a coincidence

that this just keeps resurfacing over and over. It's just, like, maybe it's a part of Western, you know, Eurocentric, white Western society. And I'm not letting off any, I'm a part of Western, you know, Eurocentric white Western society. And I'm not letting off any, I'm not trying to do, you know, some like exceptionalism thing. I'm sure it arises. White people are evil type of shit like that. Right, right, right. No, no, no.

Yeah, I'm just saying that like maybe the tenets, the very foundations of this society is rotten. It's rotten to the core, man. Yeah. I don't know. Anyways, we've gone way longer and i have to hop off i have to get on a call but um sorry we lost tom in the process he had to go get maintenance done yeah the show the maintenance got around yeah so uh we we just want to encourage you all to please go to our patreon we got good shit over there uh yeah a lot of people like the

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