It Could Happen Here Weekly 139

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
every episode of the week that just happened is here
in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to Krapan here, but you know, very few things
actually happen. I'm adre Siege of the Ju Channel Anthraism. Now,
indigenousity is a contentious topic, no more than ever, not
when it comes to flora and fauna. Of course, as
far as I know, it's a pretty simple amount of
being considered indigenous to an ecosystem when they haven't been

(00:47):
introduced through human intervention or manipulated by human cultivation. As
over millions of the years, these living things have become
well suited to their habitats carefully adopts the region's soil,
climate and food web. When it comes to to people
who're talking politics, they quick some confusion about what it
means to be indigenous, especially when questions of land rights,

(01:08):
autonomy and reparations, and the equation. Most people understand that
Native American nations and Aboriginal Australians are indigenous, but they
don't really know what that means. Some might then ask, well,
if indigenous just means originating from a place they're on
all Homo sapiens indigenous to Africa, why should one group's
claim of indigenity take precedence over any other. Others may

(01:30):
ask the question, if a group occupies a region for
several generations, does that then make them indigenous? A White
Americans indigenous if their family has been there since the
founding of the US. A French fupial indigenous to France,
and if so, does that somehow justify there's enophobia towards
refugees When generations of martialized groups have been struggling to

(01:51):
retain their social, cultural, economic, and political sovereignty and achieve justice, reparations,
and liberation after centuries of oppression and attempting annihilation, we
to stand in informed solidarity. Thus, it is vital for
us to understand what it means to be indigenous from
what I gather through my research, which was focused on

(02:12):
the work of just a few North American indigenous scholars
Taiyaki Alfred, Jeff cord to Cell, and Robin wild Chimera.
Additionity can be interpreted as a matter of colonial relationship
and or as a matter of a land relationship, a
relationship to place. These two definitions are, of course, highly overlappened.
You really can't get away from how colonization informed the

(02:35):
land and vice versa. Let's start with the first interpretation
of indignity. According to Taiyaki Alfred and Jeff Gordicell, indigenousness
is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized
context of contemporary colonialism. It is an existence oppositional to
colonial societies and states, and a consciousness of struggle against

(02:57):
such forces of colonization. No two indigenous groups are exactly alike.
Of course, there are significant diversity in their cultures, contexts,
and relationships with colonial forces, but they do share that
struggle to survive as distinct peoples in an environment hostile
to their existence. Efforts to marginalize and eradicate indigenous peoples

(03:19):
may not always be as avoid as they once will,
with some noticeably overt exceptions, but the historic and ongoing
dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the erasure of Indigenous histories, geographies,
and languages, and the current situation of deprivation persist. Nonetheless,
even so called reconciliation efforts are tainted by the reality

(03:40):
that Indigenous peoples remain, as in earlier colonial eras fundamentally
occupied and disempowered peoples, stripped of autonomy in their own
homelands and pressured into surrender and cooperation with an inherently
unjust colonial order just to ensure their basic physical survival.
By this understanding of indigenoity, it can be set up

(04:01):
without a colonizer, without systems in place and actions being
taken to marginalize, disempower and destroy their societies in favor
of a colonial replacement. There's no need for the concept
of indigenous. Without colonialism, there will be no status of
indigenous to be imposed upon the groups of people whose
very existence and claim to the land is an obstacle.

(04:22):
It is that colonial endeavor. The un work in group
of Indigenous issues, drew partially from this understanding when attempting
to define indigenous peoples in nineteen eighty six, quote Indigenous communities, peoples,
and nations are those which have in a historical continuity
with pre invasion and pre colonial societies that developed in
their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors the societies

(04:45):
now prevailing on those territories or parts of them. They
form at present non dominant sectors of society and are
determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations the
ancestral territories and the ethnic identity as the basis of
their continued existems as peoples in accordance with their own
cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems. By this definition,

(05:09):
Amerindians in the Caribbean, Aboriginal Australians, Adivasis in India, Native
North and South Americans, Siberians, Ainu, Goods, Syrians, Yazidi, Palestinians,
amasaf Sami, Basque, Samei Basques, Hawaiians, Mari, san Guti, Papuans, Chams,
and many more are all indigenous peoples. There are layers

(05:34):
of nuance yet to be highlighted. The colonial situation is
not a simple binary of indigenous and colonists. For example,
in much of the Americas, Africans who were indigenous to
their own homelands were displaced and enslaved under the colonial regime.
They may not be indigenous to the Americas, but they
weren't trivants attla colonial society either. In fact, someone slaved

(05:58):
for inditionous people as well. At the same time, some
members of the African diaspora would join existing indigenous societies
and later create their own, such as the Garifuna of
Saint Vincent, Honduras and Belize. Meanwhile, in modern day Africa,
so all African ethnic groups can technically be considered indigenous
to the continent. The concept of specific indigenous peoples within

(06:20):
Africa refers to those groups whose traditional practices and land
claims have been placed outside of the dominant state systems
and exist in the conflict with the objectives and policies
implemented by post colonial governments, companies, and the surrounding dominant societies.
Such a definition can similarly be applied to modern day Asia,

(06:41):
where governments like Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh have
infamously refused to recognize the existence of indigenous peoples within
their territories. These countries, like most countries in the world,
did not ratify the International Labe Organization Convention one sixty
nine in nineteen eighty nine, known as the Indigenous and

(07:01):
Tribal People's Convention concerning the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The
UN's Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed in
two thousand and seven, would however, be voted on approvingly
by most of the world, including the same countries that
haven't recognized the Indigenous peoples within their borders. All four
of the countries have rejected that particular resolution. Canada, America,

(07:23):
Australia and New Zealand would later change their vote in
favor of the declaration, of course, with their own tact
on interpretations an emphasis on the declarations legally non binding nature,
as is to be expected from settler colonial societies. There
are approximately two hundred and fifty to six hundred million
Indigenous peoples around the world today, each facing the reality

(07:47):
of having their lands, cultures, and forms of organization attacked,
co opted, commodified, and reconstructed by various states, regardless of
their legal recognition. Inditionous peoples themselves have long understood that
the endurances of people will continue to depend on their
connection to land, culture, and community, which brings us to

(08:08):
the second interpretation of indigenity, closely related to the first
as an identity rooted in a relationship to place, whether
that be physical as with land, social as with community,
or cultural as with culture and justus. Relationship to land
must be reciprocal, with give and take, based on a
view of the land and water as a gift that

(08:30):
must be cared for over generations. According to Hodenosuni mythology,
as recounted by Robin waal Chimura in Breadain Sweet Grass,
the mother goddess Skywoman came to the land as an
immigrant from the heavens, but became indigenous by listening to
the land, learn from other species to understand how to
live on it, given as she received, and caring for

(08:53):
the earth and its keepers for the sake of those
who would inherit it when she passed on. In their view,
the land is identity, It is ancestral connection, It is pharmacy.
It is a library, and it is home, the source
of all that sustains, and the sacred ground upon which
those would observe their responsibility to the world. By this understanding,

(09:14):
it can be said that indigenity is born out of
land connection, established through observation and relationship. Indigenous peoples have
historically been mobile, either by choice or by force, but
regardless of where they might find themselves home land or not,
even if there were other indigenous peoples in their new environments,
as long as they observed the processes and ceremonies of

(09:37):
generational relationship building based on mutual respect, understanding, and love
for the land in common, they remained indigenous. So then
the question might arise, why aren't settlers to place if

(10:01):
their family has lived in land for generations. The answer
lies in relationship. Settler society as a whole is based
on an extractivist capitalist relationship with the land, focus on
exploiting the land and its resources. Without a relationship with
the land that extends reverence to a deeper understanding of
its complex interdependence, settler society can never become indigenous to place.

(10:26):
Of course, it goes without saying that every indigenous group
or indigenous practice is perfectly sustainable. Some have been rather
destructive and even speciocidal. But if we are to work
with this definition, to conceive of being indigenous is something
based on cultivating a long term relationship to place. That
indigenity must be contingent on maintaining the health and longevity

(10:49):
of that relationship. Without community, there cannot be indigenity, much
like the trees in a forest are interconnected by subterranean
networks of my curacy which enable them to share resources
and survive as a whole. In order to be indigenous
to place, community must exist to sustain that web of
reciprocitude the land so that it all may flourish. Inditionity

(11:11):
to place extends to culture as well, which is deeply
tied to the land. It develops on cultural ceremonies. According
to Chimera, focus attention, attention becomes intention. If you stand
together and profess a thing before your community, it holds
you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and

(11:32):
resonate beyond the human realm. Such practices should be reciprocal,
as ceremonies create communities, and communities create ceremonies as well
as organic, not appropriate and existing cultural celebrations or attending
toward the commercial. Our social fabric has become withered and
fragmented by the pace of modern life, leaving little room

(11:55):
for ceremonies outside of religion or rights of personal transitions
such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. But ceremonies and the
shared emotions they generate are part of what builds community.
When we gather for graduations, for example, a sense of pride, relief, nostalgia,
and excitement build in the social atmosphere, hopefully fuel in

(12:17):
the conference and strength of those who are going on
to pursue their passions. But Kimura wants us to imagine
standing by a river flooded with those same feelings as
the salmon margins the auditorium of their estuary. Being indigenous
to place means cultivating cultural ceremonies that honor the land
and all the cycles and seasons of life within it.

(12:39):
Now that we have a clearer understanding of these two
distinct yet related understandings of indigenity as both an identity
formed as part of a cluar relationship and an identity
rooted in a relationship to place, I believe that we
should explore how this understanding can be applied to decolonization
and social revolution. Decolonization is the process of unsettling clonial

(13:01):
power structures, whether that be through overturning acts of inclosure
by building new commons, overturning acts of possession by reclaiming
our spaces and identities, or overturning acts of administration through
social revolution. Social revolution is a complete transformation of our society, economy, culture, philosophy, technology,
relationships and politics, an ongoing and heterogenous change in people's powers, tribes,

(13:27):
and consciousness through practical education, as well as a progressive
breakdown and transformation of existence, systems and institutions, punctuated by
major ruptures and advances or with the aim of self liberation.
It takes confrontation with the powers that be, non cooperation
with the established order of things, and prefiguration of new

(13:48):
social relations, institutions, and infrastructure and practices in the here
and now. If we maintain the interpretation of additionality as
based on one's position and including relationship, then the deco
organization process will entail the abolition of that relationship as
the premise of identity and therefore the abolition of indigeneity

(14:08):
as a status. Colonial legacies have effectively left indigenous communities
legally and politically compartmentalized and culturally, socially and spiritually weakened
within the narrow parameters of the state, where they end
up diverting the crucial energy necessary to confront state power
and develop the process of the econization toward mimicking the

(14:29):
practices the dominant non indigenous legal political institutions through for example,
land claims and self government processes. What the deconalization movement needs,
according to Maya Yucateco poet Fliciano Sanchez Chan, are zones
of refuge, places where intitionous knowledge can be guarded, exercised,

(14:49):
and sustained. In Mesoamerica, these zones of refuge represent safe
spaces where the diverse cultural expressions of the region can
persist in spite of state for us to create a
homogenized Mexican national identity. The concept of zones of refuge
is consistent of the traditional objectives of cultural preservation and
autonomy or the social revolutionary aims of prefiguration, which seeks

(15:13):
to sow the seeds of future relationships, institutions and practices
in the here and now. To the expansion of zones
of refuge and other institutions of resistance and autonomy, we
can realize declonization in reality. But again, this idea of
addigenerative econization is just one understanding of the term, waiting

(15:33):
to explore another approach to the declonization one that recognizes
the power and potential of indigenous relationships with the land. Globally,
the UN recognizes that ADDITIONALUS people to protect eighty percent
of the world's remaining in biodiversity, and scientists have shown
that indigenous management practices in Brazil, Canada, and Australia provides

(15:53):
the same level of ecosystem support and protection as any
imposed protected area, which makes it abundantly. Theclonal approach of
conservation via dispossession removes the very people who take care
of our most important ecosystems. Over the course of Braid
and Sweet Grass, Robin wall Chimer highlights the reciprocal relationship

(16:15):
with the earth that many indigenous groups, including her Potwatomi culture,
have cultivated over generations. The principles of the gift economy
is an essential aspect of this relationship, which forms the
basis of indigenity to place. The gift economy is a
system of exchange where resources and services are shared without
expectation of remuneration or quit broquo. The gift economy extends

(16:39):
not just the people, but also our non human can
caring and being cared for. In turn, if we want
to restore that relationship, we can start by planting a garden.
A garden could be a heathen for native flora, arrested
in place for varius fauna, a feast for dangered pollinators,
a sustainer of local water table, and a hub of

(17:00):
thriving soil. Not only does it benefit both our health
and the health of the planet, but is also anurstry
for nurture in a connection that extends beyond that small
patch of dute. I don't believe that merely building a
connection of the land can make someone indigenous, but not
being indigenous doesn't exclude us from aiding the renewal of
the world. Kimer uses the example of the broad leaf

(17:22):
planting or son as the white man's footprint. Despite not
being indigenous to the Americas, it has become an honored
member of the plant community because it thrives as a
good neighbor instead of as a destructive invader, while other
invasive species poison the soil or overrun the land. The
white man's footprint to call a strategy of helpful co existence,

(17:43):
even sharing some of its healing properties with those who
ask of it. It is not indigenous, but it has
become naturalized. Quote being naturalized to a place means to
live as if this is the land that feeds you,
as if these are the strains from which you to
build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized

(18:04):
is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Hey,
you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To
become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters,
To take care of the land as if our lives
and the lives of all our relatives depend on it,
because they do. Decononization requires to uproot invasive, irreverent and

(18:25):
destructive individuals, capitalist settlers, societies in order to rebuild in
a way that treats the land like the home that
we share and are responsible for. It will require us to
receive an honor the knowledge in the land, to care
for its keepers and pass on that knowledge to the next generation.
And it is crucial that we elevate indigenous voices, knowledges,

(18:45):
and pedagogical approaches in pursuit of this aim or power
to all the people. This has been a graper peace.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Hello, welcome, this is it could happen here and I
am shreen And today is another silly little episode. Well
it's not silly well, it is silly, but I think
it's actually also interesting, so maybe you will too. If not. Oops.
But the point of this is I do not like
being on my phone. I hate being on my phone.
I've always hated being on my phone. I waited until

(19:30):
the last possible moment I could, until I even got
a smartphone, but I just hate it. I hate texting.
I hate it all. And so especially the last several years,
I've been trying to read more and it's been great,
but sometimes my brain just needs a task for me
to do, like with my hands. So I can trick

(19:52):
myself to thinking I'm being productive just because I'm physically
doing something, and recently that's something puzzles. And look, I
like all puzzles. You can't show me a puzzle that
I won't at least try physical jigsaw puzzles that can
take hours or days to complete, like sign me Up.
But ever since getting a cat, it feels a little

(20:14):
too precarious to commit to one of these jigsaw puzzles
for the fear of her prancing around on the pieces
or knocking them over under furniture to ever be found again,
or chewing on them or eating them, and so the
puzzles I have been increasingly turning to recently, which I
have always loved are word and number puzzles, Sudoku, can
can classics, incredible crosswords, cryptograms, code breakers. I can do

(20:39):
those for hours. I will say, though I do find
word searches pretty tedious and boring, But if I was
completely out of options, I would probably do those two.
There's just something really satisfying about physically putting pen to
paper and solving something. And yes, I always use pen
because I live on the edge, and as I said,

(21:01):
I do not like being on my phone. So I've
been buying puzzle books so I can have a physical
thing to write on. I've had puzzle books for years,
but recently it's become a bit of a problem. I
bought four different puzzle books in the span of like
two weeks, and not because I completed all the puzzles
in them per se, but because I just completed the

(21:21):
ones I wanted to do, usually skipping the word searches
or long riddles or whatever. And honestly, a much better
use of my fricking time could go to something like
learning literally anything else, like picking up a new skill,
learning a new language. But no my smooth brain wants
to do a fucking puzzle, so I do a puzzle,

(21:45):
multiple puzzles.

Speaker 4 (21:46):
Usually.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Maybe you have noticed a trend, dear listener, in my
episodes that are not about Palestine or the so called
Middle East. Most likely you haven't noticed, only because I
think about myself far more than anybody else does. But
in order to not want to jump off a cliff
every day, I've realized I need to write and learn
about things that I like. Wow, incredible discovery, But for real,

(22:11):
I think we all need a balance of making sure
we're informed about the world and connecting with our humanity,
as well as doing things as human beings that allow
us to continue to want to be informed about the
world and connect with our humanity. So one day I
won't need this big preamble before every episode that's not
about Palestine. But today is not the day anyways, Because

(22:34):
I love puzzles. I wanted to learn about puzzles. How
long have humans been putting together word and number games
for the sole purpose of exercising our minds or dare
I say, have fun? I needed to know it's truly
one of the most wholesome things this species has ever done.
So I did some research. This episode is going to

(22:56):
be about the crossword. That's where I wanted to start.
Most of us would agree that the crossword is the
most popular or well known word game or word puzzle.
I will admit that every time I see a random
newspaper in a cafe or hotel, lobby or something, I
always steal the crossword and I ignore everything else because

(23:16):
now is simply not the time. But how did the
crossword come to be as this ubiquitous, normal thing. The
crossword is a fairly recent invention, born out of desperation.
Arthur Wynn is regarded as the inventor of the modern
crossword puzzle. He was born in eighteen seventy one in Liverpool, England,

(23:37):
and his father was the editor of the local newspaper,
the Liverpool Mercury. When Arthur was nineteen, he immigrated to
the United States, settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
While in Pittsburgh, Winn worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper,
and he played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
We Love a Well Rounded chap He later moved to

(24:00):
New York City, where he worked as an editor for
the New York World newspaper, and then in nineteen thirteen,
he invented the crossword puzzle. While working at the New
York World, he needed something to fill up the space
in the Christmas edition of the paper's fun supplement Fun
in all caps, so he took advantage of the new

(24:22):
technology at the time that could print blank grids cheaply,
and he created a diamond shaped set of boxes with
clues to fill in the blanks smack in the center
of the Fun supplement. So for the December twenty first,
nineteen thirteen edition of The New York World, he introduced
this puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center,

(24:43):
with the letters f un already being filled in. He
called it a word cross puzzle, and nearly overnight the
word cross puzzle went from a space filling ploy to
the most popular feature of the page. A few weeks
after the first word cross appeared, the name of the
puzzle was actually changed to crossword, but this was only

(25:06):
a result of a typesetting error. However, these puzzles have
been known as crosswords ever since. Arthur Wynn didn't necessarily
invent word puzzles, though ever since we've had language, we've
played games with words. Crosswords are basically where two long
standing strands of word puzzles interconnect, the first being word squares,

(25:29):
which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren't
necessarily using deliberate deception, and the second being riddles, which
use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don't necessarily have
any kind of graphic component to work through. Maybe you're
wondering what's a word square. Maybe you're not wondering that,
but I'm going to tell you anyway. The word square

(25:51):
is the direct precursor of the crossword grid. It's a
special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words
can be read across and down. The number of letters
in the square is called its order. While two squares
and three squares are easy to create in English, by
the time you reach order six, you're very likely to

(26:12):
get stuck. An order ten square is a holy grail
for those who are regarded as logologists, that is, wordplay experts.
So a word square is a puzzle requiring the discovery
of a set of words of equal length, written one
under another to read the same down as a cross Apparently,

(26:35):
the ancient Romans loved word puzzles. The first known word square,
the so called Sadder square, was found on a slab
in the ruins of POMPEII. The sadder square, which I
don't know if I'm saying that right, but it's spelled
sat r. It's also known as the rotess square, depending
on which way you read it, because rotess is satur backwards.

(26:56):
And I say this because word order apparently doesn't matter
in Latin. But this square that was found is a
five x five five word Latin palindrome. I'm gonna say
it in Latin, but I'll tell you what it means,
so apologies on this pronunciation. But satoor a repo, tenant
opera rotus the farmer, a repo works, a plow a palindrome.

(27:17):
Just a reminder that it's something spelled the same way
forwards and deck. So that's not necessarily the English translation,
but in Latin that's what it is. Author Adrian Raffel
described the Sadder square as the quote Kilroy was here
of the Roman Empire for those who don't know or
need a refresher. Not going to pretend I neew this either,
but kil Roy was Here was a popular American graffiti

(27:39):
that was seen overseas throughout World War II. The words
Kilroy was here were accompanied by a cartoon drawing of
a man looking over a wall, and this became a
popular piece of graffiti that was drawn by American troops
in the Atlantic theater and then later in the Pacific theater.
It eventually came to be a universal sign that American

(28:00):
soldiers had come through an area and left their mark,
and then during the Second World War, Kilroy became so
popular that this graffiti could be found everywhere. It was
on shipholds, bathrooms, bridges, and it was painted on the
shells of Air Force missiles. Its origins most likely come
from a British cartoon and the name of an American

(28:22):
shipyard inspector. The myths surrounding it are numerous, and they
often center on a German belief that Kilroy was some
kind of superspy who could go anywhere he pleased. Apparently,
there are two Kilroy inscriptions hidden in the World War
II Memorial in Washington, d c. And these were found
tucked in the corners of both the Atlantic and Pacific

(28:44):
sides of the memorial, and so the Satter Square was
essentially the Kilroy was here of the Roman Empire. The
square was found scrawled from Rome to Corinium, which is
in modern England, to Dura Europos, which is modern Syria.
It's unclear why this ancient meme was such a thing.

(29:05):
Maybe it was the first meme ever. I guess it
depends on what your definition of a meme is. To
repeat what the square says. The words in the square
are sator arepo, tenant, opera rotas the farmer arepo works
on a plow. A repo is what's known as a
haypax legomenon, which means it is a term of which

(29:25):
only one instance of its use is recorded or can
be found. This means that the Satter Square is the
only place where the word arepo shows up in the
entire corpus of Latin literature. The best working theory as
to why this is is that it's a proper name,
invented only to make the square work. But the Satar

(29:47):
square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle
the letters around the central end, which was in the
word tenant, you can make a Greek cross that reads
pator noster in both the and This means our father
I mean, come on, so clever, and then the four
leftover letters, the two a's and two o's. Those stand

(30:11):
for alpha and omega. Early Christians might have used the
square as a discreete way to signal their presence to
one another, and the Satar square stuck around for a
very very long time. In the Middle Ages, it was
regarded as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a
talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil apparently gets

(30:34):
confused by palindromes, so with the devil not knowing which
way to read, a five x five two dimensional palindrome
is an extra powerful devil repellent. The Satar square also
appears etched into tablets as a prevention against mad dogs,
a snake bite cure, and a charm to protect cattle

(30:54):
from witchcraft. While word squares have maintained their quasi mail
magic reputation for hundreds of years to come. Other visual
word games also became popular during the nineteenth century. In
the Victorian era, visual word games became extremely popular. These
visual word games include double acrostics, which paved the way

(31:16):
pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria I guess was
regarded as a crucioverbialist, which apparently means a person skillful
in creating or solving crossword puzzles. In researching all of this,
I have learned many English words. I had no idea
or even words to begin with. So crucioverbalist Queen Victoria

(31:38):
constructed what's known as the Windsor Enigma to teach her
subject how to bring coals to Newcastle. In her eighteen
sixty one book Victorian Enigmas, author Charlotte Eliza Cappell a
tribute to the Windsor Enigma puzzle to Queen Victoria. The
Queen was known to be fond of riddles and enigmas.
One hoax apparently kept her occupied for half a week.

(32:00):
From a passage from the Private Life of the Queen
by quote one of Her Majesty's servants, written in eighteen
ninety seven, quote, her Majesty, Queen Victoria takes delight in
a clever riddle or rebus, but on one occasion she
was very angry at having been hoaxed over a riddle
which was sent to her with a letter to the

(32:21):
effect that it had been made by the Bishop of Salisbury.
For four days, the Queen and Prince Albert sought for
the reply. When Charles Murray, controller of the household, was
directed to write to the bishop and ask for the solution.
The answer received was that the bishop had not made
the riddle nor could he solve it.

Speaker 4 (32:42):
End quote.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
Okay, Queen, we love feminism anyway. The Windsor enigma was
basically like a riddle. And this is what it said
the Windsor enigma. The initials of the following places formed
the name of a town in England, and the finals
read up words what that town is famous for. And
these are the nine clues in this enigma. A city

(33:06):
in Italy, a river in Germany, a town in the
United States, a town in North America, a town in Holland,
the Turkish name for Constantinople, a town in Bosnia. I
wasn't saying that with the list. It's not Bosnia. It's
spelled Bothnia, just fy. A city in Greece, a circle

(33:30):
on the globe. So when you solve these nine clues,
the nine letters which are on the left hand side
of these answers, it spells out Newcastle, and then on
the right side it says coal mines. When you read
it from the bottom to the top, as the riddle
says to do so, Newcastle's famous for its coal mines.

(33:51):
You know what else is famous for its coal mines?
I can't actually answer that question. I have no idea,
but here's some ads. Okay, we're back. So. Another old

(34:11):
word game, which was a precursor to the crossword, is
a game called doublets. It was invented by Oxford mathematician
Charles Dogson, who was better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
In this game, you transform one word into another of
equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using
as few moves as possible. All the linking steps also

(34:35):
have to be legitimate words. A lot of modern puzzle
books have doublets in them, including a bunch of the
ones that I have, and they're pretty fun. As in
a crossword, the process of moving stepwise letter to letter
forces you to think about all the possible word combinations,
and each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini
alchemy that keeps the words all somehow related to each other.

(34:58):
And Charles Doxon's are Lewis Carroll's eighteen eighty book Doublets
a word Puzzle. There are examples of this where he
says to quote, drive pig into sty raise four to five,
make wheat into bread. So the idea is that those
words become the other one with a couple of changes.

(35:20):
A classic classic word puzzle. And we're inching closer and
closer to how the crossword came to be, and the
crossword came about when riddles entered the grid. Crossword clues
trace their origins to riddles. Riddles have been around since
the dawn of time and can be found in basically
every religious book, in ar scene, in mythology, in literature

(35:41):
for centuries and centuries. The Exeter Book is an eleventh
century Old English manuscript and it's the largest and perhaps
oldest known manuscript of old English literature, containing about a
sixth of all the Old English poetry that has survived
until today. That's a lot. And it has about one
hundred riddles of all types. They say there are quote

(36:05):
unquote about one hundred because these riddles still to this
day drive people crazy. In the ten centuries since their composition,
scholars haven't conclusively solved every riddle. There are four basic
ways that quote riddle logic operates. One true riddles, two wordplay,
three neck riddles and four anti riddles. The enigma, which

(36:31):
is a metaphorical statement that's designed to feel like it
has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different
than this. The word enigma comes from a Greek word
that means quote to speak in riddles. It applies to
things as well as people that puzzle one's mind. Examples
of enigmas can be Egypt's ancient pyramids and how the

(36:52):
hell they were built, Amelia Earhart going poof, or the
Bermuda Triangle being weird. Plenty of enigma occur in modern
times too. One example that people point to of this
is the twenty fourteen disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Flight
three seventy. On March eighth, twenty fourteen, the airplane departed

(37:12):
Kuala Lumpur. It was bound for Beijing, China, but thirty
nine minutes after takeoff, the plane disappeared. It quite literally
vanished without a trace, becoming one of aviation's greatest mysteries,
and over a decade later, investigators still do not know
exactly what happened to the plane and its two hundred

(37:33):
and thirty nine passengers. But just a few months ago
In March of twenty twenty four, Malaysia's government said it
may renew the hunt for MH three seventy after an
American marine robotics company that tried to find the plane
in twenty eighteen proposed a fresh search. A massive multinational
search at the time in the southern Indian Ocean where

(37:53):
the jet is believed to have crashed, found nothing apart
from some small fragments that later won. Nobodies or wregage
have ever been found spooky, so that's an enigma. Examples
of enigmas with word puzzles could be something like what
is the sound of one hand clapping? These are logic

(38:15):
knots that want to stay knotted or not solved. Uh huh,
there's another little pun for you or riddle anyway. Riddles,
on the other hand, do want to be solved. A
true riddle one of these four basic ways that riddle
logic operates transforms think a into solution B. True riddles

(38:37):
rely on a logical connection that's not obvious on the surface,
so you need to think more deeply about it and
maybe a non conventional or non literal way in order
to reach the solution. When riddles become baked into culture,
they can turn into like inside jokes. Riddles have been
around for millennia, and the best riddles have been repeated

(38:59):
for just as long. One quote unquote famous riddle, if
you will, is the sphinx's riddle in Greek mythology. Just
some background on the Greek sphinx, because I personally found
it fascinating and very interesting. But the Greek sphinx was
clearly inspired by the Egyptian sphinx, but the Greeks modified
the sphinx and made it their own. The Greek sphinx

(39:21):
had a woman's face and breasts and a lion's body
with bird's wings, while the Egyptian sphinx had a male
head which could be either human or animal. The word
sphinx is Greek and it means quote strangler, perhaps stemming
from the fact that lionesses usually kill their prey by
strangling it. Since sphinxes were seen as very intimidating, the

(39:43):
Greeks frequently put them on gravestones to frighten a way
would be grave robbers. This use is called apotropaeic, meaning
causing someone to turn away. Most of the examples of
ancient Greek sphinxes that we have today are from ancient
Great Gavestones. So in Greek mythology, there was one famous

(40:03):
sphinx who turned up in Thebes shortly after its king
Lias had been killed. While on his way to consult
the Delphic oracle. This sphinx flew on top of the
city walls and asked all the theban youths a riddle.
When they could not answer it, she ate them. Feminism
strikes again. At the time, Creon was the region in

(40:27):
Thebes since Lias had died, and he was so desperate
to get rid of the sphinx that he promised the
kingship and the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta, who
also happened to be his sister in marriage to anyone
who could solve the sphinx's riddle. This was the sphinx's riddle,
which you may have heard before, which is why I
said it was quote unquote famous. What goes on four

(40:50):
feet in the morning, two feet in midday, and three
feet in the evening In the myth around this time,
Oedipus came into Thebes and he solved the riddle. Oedipus said,
the answer is man, because a man crawls on all
fours in the mornings of his life, he walks on
two feet in the mid day of his life, and

(41:10):
then he uses a cane for extra support when he
is old. The sphinx was so upset that Oedipus had
answered the riddle correctly that she threw herself down from
the walls of thieves and she died. You know what, else,
died my soul when I realized we need ads to
make money. So here you go. Okay, we're back. We

(41:43):
were talking about types of riddles again. There are four
basic ways that riddle logic operates, true riddles, wordplay, neck riddles,
and anti riddles. And we talked about the true riddles
before the break, and so now let's talk about word
play riddles. A word play riddle does this same thing
as a true riddle, but it adds an extra layer
of trickiness to it. So it's thing A turning into

(42:07):
solution B. But there is a slight catch in between
that has to interrupt the pathway between those things. First,
wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics
to take the anticipated answer to the next step. A
ribis is an example of a wordplay riddle which uses
letters as part of the clue. A ribis is a

(42:28):
puzzle device in which words are represented by combinations of
letters and pictures. A neck riddle gives a solution that
would be impossible for the solve to arrive at without context,
so question mark equals b. The term neck riddle comes
from stories in which the hero of the story uses

(42:48):
an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge or a monster
and save himself from being hanged. So a neck riddle
saves your neck.

Speaker 5 (42:58):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (43:00):
This is one typical folk tale example. As I walked
out and in again from the dead the living came,
six there is, and seven there'll be. So tell me
this riddle or set me free. You're probably never gonna
get this answer unless you've heard it before. But the
answer is a horse's skull that contains a bird hatching eggs.

(43:20):
Six have hatched, but one is still to come. What.
So a neck riddle has an answer that's so specific
it's deeply unsatisfying, because that's precisely the point. After all,
it's not meant to actually be solvable. It has to
stump the other person or in this case a judge
or a monster to ensure that you or the hero

(43:43):
gets off scot free. Often that's achieved through over precision,
but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick.
In the Hobbit, our hero Bilbo Baggins best Scullum in
a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable what's in
my pocket? And then there's the anti riddle. An anti
riddle is one that tricks the reader because it looks

(44:05):
like a riddle, but it's actually not a riddle at all.
It's basically a equals a For example, why did the
chicken cross the road? Seems like a riddle, but the
answer to get to the other side is just the
literal answer. So, in conclusion, a word grid and a
bunch of riddles. Those two things are what evolved over

(44:28):
time and over the centuries to bring us what we
know today as the crossword puzzle. Authorn Adrian Raffel, who
wrote the book Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords
of the puzzling people who can't live without them, wrote
in The Paris Review in twenty twenty quote, if you're
a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a

(44:49):
hard time solving a crossword, you'd have to separate the
puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the
issue how to figure out what a clue was saying,
or rather what it's precisely not saying, and how to
fill the letters in the grid in the way that
makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross

(45:10):
wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the
visual spatial part of the brain with the logic run
part of the brain. This is part of the reason
why even the best crossword solving AI in the world
isn't yet better than the best human. The AI can
fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of

(45:30):
resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a
step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that,
through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do,
it created an itch we didn't know we had, and
yet we've always been primed to solve them. End quote.

(45:52):
And that is just a beautiful way to end this episode.
So that's it. That's the crossword. I'm going to go
do a cross word right now, because why not. I
told you I needed things to do in the beginning
of this episode, and this is my thing to do
that does not include scrolling on my phone and wanting
to die. So will that bye?

Speaker 1 (46:29):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about it
happening here. It being the slow crumbling of the old
world and the painful birth of the new. And here
to talk about the painful birth of the new world
is someone who was compared to me very recently born,
Garrison Davis. How are you doing, gare good?

Speaker 4 (46:49):
Good?

Speaker 6 (46:50):
As a new member of the KHive nation, I have
a new life under me now.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, you've embraced the kamala of it all and are
now just a are now just vibing? Yeah, it's a
beautiful place to be.

Speaker 5 (47:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (47:03):
Unfortunately it might be just as a delusional as Biden's
own insistence that he should be the one to run.
And that's kind of what we're talking about here today.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
Oh good, I love delusion and its impact on American
political life.

Speaker 6 (47:18):
So our initial post debate comments were a little bit frenzied,
a little bit chaotic, as was the debate, I suppose,
and post debate polls were also just kind of a
mess initially, with wildly differing results from source to source,
but over time they have since stabilized and kind of

(47:38):
synced up to like seccifically put it, essentially, the debate
undid most of the pro Biden shifts that had happened
in the wake of Trump's felony conviction.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, and I've seen some polls have shown it tightening
up a little bit again, but it's very I mean,
I always wonder, like how much you've got kind of
two camps, broadly speaking in terms of the people who
seem like they're not completely insane. One of them is
kind of the Nate Silver side of things, which shows

(48:12):
Biden as having fallen fairly far behind and having you know,
he's got Biden about a thirty percent chance, which is
where Trump was in twenty sixteen, so that doesn't mean zero.
Whereas the new five thirty eight polling average, and I
kind of have been following their new head of statistics
for a while, has it still close to a dead heat.

(48:35):
And then obviously, you know, there's arguments that people will
make that trumpet or that Biden is actually very far behind,
which have more to it than the arguments that Biden
that Biden is going to win in a landslide the
kind of democratic like the polls are wrong entirely. I
don't think that's likely, but I think we're looking at
somewhere between Biden as a definite like underdog, or more

(48:59):
or less tied. I guess that's where it seems to me.
Like the evidence still is yep.

Speaker 6 (49:05):
A USA Today Suffolk University poll conducted immediately after the
debate gave Trump a four point boost. The week after
the debate, a New York Times Siena poll found Trump's
lead had increased by three percent, now leading by six
points with lately voters. Other questions were pulled in the
wake of the debate. A CNN poll found that seventy
five percent of Democrats believe the party would have a

(49:26):
better chance at defeating Trump with a candidate to other
than Biden. And overall, yes, his number dropped or kind
of coasted with what it had been in like, you know, April,
March February, and according to Politico, other than Trump in
twenty twenty, no incumbent has trailed this far behind in
horse race polling since Jimmy Carter's reelection bid forty four

(49:49):
years ago, which does not make me feel super optimistic.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
It's not great, and man, it would be. I suspect
the polls are still over emphasizing it to a degree
because if if Biden losing by six percent would be
like the big the worst performance of a Democrat totally,
like a generation, like in a long, long time, and
I just don't believe it's going to be that far off.
But like it is. Definitely things are a lot uglier

(50:15):
than they were when we recorded our last horse race episode, right,
Like the debate was somewhere between pretty bad and catastrophe
in terms of its impact on the polls.

Speaker 6 (50:26):
Absolutely, but Trump, what Trump actually gained himself as a
candidate is not very much. It's mostly it's mostly, it's
mostly decreases on Biden. And five pollsters did pre and
post debate polls, and Trump is gaining on the margin,
but in none of the polls did he gain anything
more than a four point swing. So they're all pretty

(50:46):
consistent and it's not all the end of the world
here either. A poll released last Saturday by Bloomberg and
Morning Console showed Biden narrowing Trump's post debate lead, specifically
in swing states, with only a two percent difference between
all seven in swing states, with Biden being ahead in
Michigan and Wisconsin. Yeah, two percent is within that margin

(51:06):
of error, So things are also starting to level up
over time.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah, And I think some of this may have to
do We're going to talk a bit about Project twenty
twenty five, which I tend to think, and we've been
chatting about this online all week in our work chat.
People are overemphasizing as opposed to what Trump is because
Agenda Project twenty twenty five is basically a blueprint for

(51:32):
a Christian fascist takeover of the US, published by the
Heritage Foundation, and a lot of people who have been
affiliated with Trump, who were in his administration last time,
have are on board with it, have talked about it,
have boosted it, So people are obviously scared of it.
I think what Trump is actually promised to do in office,

(51:53):
which is the Agenda forty seven, we did a whole
week of stuff on it, is a more realistic thing
to be afraid of. But either way, I think that
some of that tightening is probably a mix of you've
got everywhere, you had a bunch of kind of on
the fence, voters swing away from Biden because he performed
so badly in the debate, and then it has dims

(52:14):
have done a pretty intensive job of spreading out a
lot of you know, what you might call fear porn
over a fascist takeover of the country, and I think
that's part of why things might be tightening back up.

Speaker 6 (52:27):
I mean, it would be nice to eventually, one year
vote vote for something instead of just be voting against something.
But again, I'm not sure if we'll ever get to
that point to get yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Hasn't happened yet. Well no, no, no, I mean I was.
I remember I got to vote for Obama the first
time he ran, and it was hard not to be optimistic.

Speaker 6 (52:47):
So immediately after the debate, we had a whole bunch
of like friends of Biden, kind of upper level democrat,
not like online influencers, but like actual like influential, like
like pundits and people you know, call for perhaps Biden
should step down, perhaps we should find somebody else. And
this has kind of been the ongoing post debate ever
since the debate has been this question and we'll we'll

(53:11):
kind of get to this a little bit more later. Honestly,
I think we had a stronger chance at this possibility
a week or two ago. I think by now Democrats
have largely kind of closed ranks around Biden, but this
is definitely still developing. And I've been keeping up with
all of Biden's appearances in the media since the debate
just because I've been interested to see how he will
handle this kind of universal flub. I watched his ABC

(53:34):
interview and his recent phone calls into various morning news shows.
In all of those, he did not perform especially well
as expected. They were slow and sometimes kind of like mumbly,
But neither have they been like the death blow to
his campaign needed to finalize the shift to an alternative candidate. Instead,
we're just kind of coasting along with this general uncertainty

(53:56):
regarding the Democratic candidacy, and meanwhile, Biden is just continuing
to affirm that he will be the one to lead
the ticket. I'm gonna quote from Washington Post here.

Speaker 5 (54:05):
Quote.

Speaker 6 (54:06):
As of Sunday, nine House Democrats, four privately and five publicly,
had called for Biden to exit the race. In addition,
at least to eighteen current and former top Democrats as
of Saturday had publicly raised concerns about Biden's fitness for
office and his ability to defeat Trump. Unquote, and it
has remained the same since then. There's gonna be meetings

(54:26):
in the next few days, including the day after we
record this. We're recording this on Monday, so there's gonna
be meetings in the Senate and in the House about
kind of this issue. So this is definitely still developing,
but you're starting to see more and more politicians fall
into rank. AOC just put out a statement saying, no,
we're gonna We're gonna all support Biden. So like there
was this uncertainty for a while, and now I think
people are kind of being told to, like, come on,

(54:47):
get on the platform. Yeah, but Biden hasn't been handling
this well like personally either. He's come across like very angry.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
No, the emails I've been getting from the Biden campaign
have been he's been blaving podcasters.

Speaker 6 (55:02):
He's been blaming.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Yeah, the media, and I'm kind of bummed that it's
the pods.

Speaker 5 (55:06):
Save guys.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
He got angry. Yet we've been shitty to Joe Biden
for so much longer than those assholes.

Speaker 6 (55:13):
Yeah, he's been treating it very weirdly. He's been doing
a lot of like a denial of the polling he's
been doing revisionist.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
History, very magical thinking.

Speaker 6 (55:22):
Regarding like twenty twenty polling. I think, I think kind
of referencing the Democratic primary, but still the way that
he's talking about it, it's making it sound like he,
you know, like he was behind in the polls in
twenty twenty. That was that Democrats were behind in the
poles in twenty twenty two, which just wasn't true. The
red wave comment was was certain pundits and Republicans trying
to conjure a red wave, but the actual polls were

(55:44):
very accurate in twenty twenty two. And he's also crediting
himself for that red wave not happening in twenty twenty two.
So he's been having a lot of weird statements, like
blaming media and blaming the elites for trying to replace
him on the ticket. I'll include one clip here from
Morning Joe, come on, give me a break.

Speaker 5 (56:03):
I'm getting so frustrated, but by the Leaf.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the
Leaf in the party, who.

Speaker 6 (56:10):
They know so much more.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
With any of these guys, I don't think I should
run against me.

Speaker 6 (56:16):
Announced for president.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
Challenge man the convention.

Speaker 6 (56:20):
Kind of his continuous line to justify his own candidacy
is has been him claiming that he won the primary,
which is a ridiculous thing to say as an incumbent,
because like, come on, come on, and he has repeatedly
said that that Democratic voters in the primaries have quote
spoken clearly and decisively. They've chosen me to be the

(56:42):
nominee of the party. That is not how it worked.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Quote.

Speaker 6 (56:46):
Do we now just say that process didn't matter, that
the voters don't have a say I declined to do that.

Speaker 5 (56:52):
How could we stand.

Speaker 6 (56:53):
For democracy in our nation if we ignore it in
our own party. I cannot do that. I will not
do that, unquote, which is just absurd, right because especially
there was many people who actually voted in the Yeah,
like a false primary for like the like other option.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
Yeah, I mean, but like poles, just like them. Seventy
five percent of Americans would prefer to vote for someone
besides Biden.

Speaker 5 (57:15):
Like it's it's.

Speaker 6 (57:16):
Absurd, especially when you're running like an uncontested as an incumbent.
If you want people to challenge you, you could have
said so, like it's come on, like this is there
was there was no pretty goofy.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
No real primary for the dims, and there usually isn't.
That's not abnormal with an incumbent, but in this case,
people have severe questions about the incumbent's fitness to do
the job in a physical way. Like I hate to
say it, but like Trump might physically be better able
to survive a four year term than Biden. Is you know,
not that I think he's mentally a better president. Sure,

(57:51):
I don't think honestly. Part of what we are accepting
here is that, like that's so that doesn't really matter, right,
Like we're all kind of acknowledging if you're on team
anything but Trump because he might end the concept of
democracy in this country, then you're accepting that, like, yeah,
I am not. I am voting for a guy who
probably can't really do the job anymore, and just assuming

(58:14):
that the people around him will not be as evil
like you do. Kind of have to accept that otherwise
you're just lying to yourself about the state that Joe
is in because he's not all there. He's not all
there the way he was in twenty twenty.

Speaker 6 (58:26):
No, but do you know what still is here just
like it was back in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (58:29):
Capitalism, Baby, We didn't manage to take it out even
though we elected this our communist leader, Joseph Biden, chairman Joe.

Speaker 6 (58:39):
Enjoy these capitalism sponsored ads.

Speaker 5 (58:52):
All right, we are back.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
Yeah. So there was a report that came out from
CHIP fifty, which is like an analytic project. It's like
the Civic Health and Institution Project, So it's like a
survey of all fifty US states, And they did a
survey on like opinions of voters before and after the debate,

(59:15):
and there showed like fairly small movement, like very little
was changed at all in terms of like and primarily
what was changed wasn't people going from Biden to Trump,
but from people preferring from preferring Biden to preferring other right,
like that someone else someone else right. And so that
does kind of go back to what we're like, people

(59:36):
are not making their minds up about Trump, like, and
I think what the dims can do if Biden stays
in and he doesn't seem like he's leaving. It seems
like the primary thing that will make progress for them
is hitting on how dangerous Trump having a second term
will be. That seems to be what moves the needle, which.

Speaker 5 (59:54):
Is part of their current strategy.

Speaker 6 (59:55):
But the strategy is kind of all influx right now
because of the poor performance the debate. They're trying to
save face on Biden's part, as well as emphasizing that
Trump is like a dangerous possibility. And again, like, even
if Biden does decide to drop out or step down,
He's going to keep saying he's running until literally the
day that happens, right, because that is that is what
you do as a politician. You were gonna you were

(01:00:17):
gonna keep insisting it until one day you are no
longer doing that, And that's just kind of how politics goes.
But he has made continuous, continuous gestures towards the fact
that he is he is going to stay. He has
no plans on stepping down. He wants to win in November.
This Monday, he personally made twenty calls to congressional members
trying to convince them that he is going to be

(01:00:38):
the one on the ticket.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
No, really, guys, it's going to be me again.

Speaker 6 (01:00:42):
Really, And I think part of what he's doing here
is like he does not have to demonstrate at the
moment that he will like survive until like November. All
he has to do right now is run out the
clock until the convention, and then it'll be too late
to swap him for anyone else. There's a few other
people kind of saying this, and I believe that is

(01:01:04):
kind of what is what is happening, that all they
need to do is just keep delaying this question, keep this,
keep this uncertainty until the convention, and then it's going
to get locked in there. And that's all he needs
to do. He doesn't need to demonstrate his viability come November.
He just needs to make sure that he gets that
he gets the official nomination this August. And I don't
know biden supporters reactions to this have been really weird,

(01:01:27):
including we've kind of had like a new upgrowth of
a pro Biden personality cult among liberals. Wcause I feel
like largely like a culmination of like MSNBC Russia Gates,
like bluing on type stuff that people are just now
convinced there's like a secret conspiracy to take down Biden
and any attempts to question Biden's legibility as a candidate

(01:01:50):
could only be rooted in some secret agenda to get
Trump elected. So I think this is why they're so
volatile about this is that they think like the only
one who would ever propagate questions over Iden's like legibility
would be someone who secretly wants Trump to be in
office again, and that is such a threat to them
that they they're lashing out very very oddly and very
conspiratorially against anyone raising questions about maybe Biden's not the

(01:02:14):
best guy actually, and they're spinning this into like actually
being secret Trumpers. It's odd because even the way Biden
talks about his own drive to beat Trump is kind
of wishy washy, certain like more polished statements will be like, yes,
this is like a threat to democracy. We have to
we have to do this to keep Trump out of office.
This is an existential threat. But in that ABC interview,

(01:02:37):
he gave a really kind of soft answer to this question,
saying that all that he needs to do is just
give it his all.

Speaker 7 (01:02:42):
And if you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
Comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

Speaker 7 (01:02:50):
I feel as long as I gave it my all
and I did the goodest jobs I know I can do,
That's what this is about.

Speaker 5 (01:03:00):
It was that's not convincing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
That's such like a like ninth like cartoons for a
ninth grader's way of saying it, like, well, what matters
is that I tried put all my best work board. No, man,
that doesn't matter at all.

Speaker 6 (01:03:14):
Yeah it is. It's not great, it's it's it's not
it's not reassuring because it doesn't matter if you give
it your all. People's lives are are on the right
and you're just like.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
Eh, I'll give it the old college try.

Speaker 6 (01:03:27):
You're like okay.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
It means one of two things. He's either he either
is completely delusional to the point where he doesn't realize
how nonsensical that is, or he doesn't really think that
Trump is a threat to democracy in people's lives. And
I guess the third option would be he doesn't care,
like if he loses re election, fuck everybody, if he
doesn't get to keep being president. Like maybe he is

(01:03:49):
just that kind of person. I do have a feeling
that only that kind of person can become president of
the United States.

Speaker 6 (01:03:56):
Yeah, I mean, like that was kind of my read
after the ABC interviews that he seemed just kind of
like delusional and narcissistic, like he really believes after twenty
twenty that he's the only one that can beat Trump.
And this feels like like a very genuine view of
himself that he's the only one strong enough to beat Trump.

Speaker 5 (01:04:14):
Yeah, And the more and more.

Speaker 6 (01:04:15):
That there's been pushback against his legibility, the more he's
been digging his heels in. And I think if things
continue like this, I don't think the Democratic Party will
be able to organize and unite enough to do like
a soft coup and convince Biden to step down. And
without a complete united front against Biden, he himself would
need some kind of like excuse to allow himself to
step down without sacrificing his pride and showing weakness both

(01:04:38):
in himself and the party. This could be like a
convenient medical diagnosis, right, although the increasing number of calls
for him to undergo thorough neurological examination will probably have
the same backfire effect of Biden attempting as much as
he can to avoid any in depth medical and neurological testing.
He's been making these comments like every day I take

(01:04:59):
an rological test by doing my job, and like, come on, man,
we we're watching you do your job. It's not that's
part of.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
The problem, bro, Like you got up in front of
the like again, refer to the last episode you and
I did on the horse race. Our attitude was like, yeah,
things have really improved for Biden. I think he's probably
the smart money bet. And like sitting down and watching
that it was horrifying, Like, yeah, there's no dinner. That's
part of why this. You have to if you're still

(01:05:31):
on team, Like, I don't think it's fair what people
are saying to Joe if you're on team. This was
bad strategy from the beginning expressing any kind of doubt. Well,
maybe that's right, but I don't know what else people
are supposed to do if you don't if you really
think that this is he has not demonstrated, Like it's
seriously concerning incapacity for the work. Think about how unprecedented

(01:05:53):
having this degree of open challenging of him as the
candidate this close to an elections. I've never seen anything like.

Speaker 6 (01:05:59):
That, especially especially on like an incumbent, yes, the president, yeah,
and an incumbent who's served two times as vice Like
that's ridiculous. And like the last real neurological medical examination
that he undertook was last February, which for an eighty
one year old is a very long time, especially if

(01:06:21):
you can bear like news clips of him from like
the debate, two clips of him from last February or
last year. There actually is like a decent difference, And
I don't know, it seems it seems kind of absurd
that he that he keeps harping on this line. For
his ABC interview, he declined to take a cognitive test
and make the results public in order to reassure voters
that he was fit to serve another term, saying that

(01:06:43):
I have a cognitive test every single day doing this job.
Everything I do is a test.

Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
No, not great. No.

Speaker 6 (01:06:52):
He also said that only the Lord Almighty could persuade
him to change his mind and drop out of the race.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
What the fuck? What the fuck is show?

Speaker 5 (01:07:01):
There we go?

Speaker 6 (01:07:02):
Seriously, man, So that's again not super reassuring. But do
you know what I can be reassured by Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
The fact that sweet lady capitalism is always there for us.

Speaker 6 (01:07:16):
It's always there, like a good uncle or something.

Speaker 1 (01:07:19):
I don't know, Yeah, yeah, yeah, something something that state
farm mad.

Speaker 6 (01:07:23):
I agree, all right, we are back. It is certainly
feeling like nineteen sixty eight all over again, isn't it?

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
Yeah, uh yeah, I mean, and that's obviously having an
open convention in sixty eight. The chaos around that did
not help the Democrats. They did not know in that election. No,
we got fucking Dick Nixon. So that's not good.

Speaker 6 (01:07:57):
No, it's not granted with with campus protests and everything,
it all is starting to feel like sixty eight over here.
So yeah, a lot of people are saying, if Biden
does step down before the DNC in Chicago this August,
we could have ourselves an open convention to nominate a
new candidate. The last time this method was used by
Democrats was in sixty eight at the also Chicago DNC,

(01:08:18):
after the leading candidate, Senendate Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated
weeks before the convention by twenty four year old Palestinian
man for his support of Israel during the Six Day War.
So again, there is a lot of parallels here. And
if it's not going to be Biden, then who is
it going to be? Right, This was a bigger question
last week and it still is kind of a lingering
question in a lot of people's minds. Who's it going

(01:08:40):
to be? Probably Kamala I don't know, Yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
Mean, there's really for a lot of reasons in terms
of including like I think, what would have to happen
with like the donations, like if it would to be
a totally new group of people, that would cause insurmountable bullshit.
And also like if you're talking about from a war
gaming this out perspective, you know, Kamala does not look

(01:09:05):
bad in the polling and might might in fact be
just for a variety of reasons, one of the better choices,
Like I can in my head think, wow, I sure
wish it was you know, Pritzker and Whitmer maybe, but
like I think that a lot of what I've seen
in the polls has kind of convinced me that Kamal
is probably our best all around bet and if you

(01:09:26):
include practicality and actually like beating Trump.

Speaker 6 (01:09:29):
Yes, in the polls, she is consistently higher than any
other potential Democratic replacements and doing, if not as well,
often better than Biden against Trump, usually closing that race out.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
I think.

Speaker 6 (01:09:41):
A CNN poll from last Wednesday showed that she's in
the margin of error against Trump nationally with forty five
to his forty seven, which is much better than Biden
is doing nationally. And she's projected to do much better
in an electoral college race than Biden specifically.

Speaker 5 (01:09:57):
So there we go.

Speaker 6 (01:09:58):
I'm gonna quote from CNN here quote An anonymously written
Google doc titled Unburdened by What has been the Case
for Kamala, written by self described senior operatives within democratic
political institutions, has been popping up in group chats of
Democratic donors and leading coalition groups. It lays out a
detailed argument and plan for a campaign. So this doc

(01:10:21):
I was able to get a hold of a copy,
and parts of it definitely read like an aaronsor counscript
like that is that is the closest thing I can
I can describe this thing as But I think it
is worth digging into here for our last section. So
I'm gonna I'm gonna read some small parts of this
doc and Robert, I'm curious to hear what your thoughts

(01:10:42):
are on this. It starts by saying, we are currently losing.
We need to do something different to win. The number
one most important priority above all others is defeating Donald Trump.
Nothing is more important, and we need to be very
real that we are currently losing. So off to a
good start, that is I would I would argue accurate quote.

(01:11:04):
Biden's debate performance, the campaign's defensive response, and the total
lack of plan to reassure his base and the voters
about his about his capability should shake everyone's confidence that
he can win this election. Now we have three possible options.
Biden can take the necessary step to demonstrate that he
is up to the job, he can step aside for
another candidate, or Trump will win. The discourse around potential

(01:11:25):
alternative candidates in the event that Biden does step down
is increasingly detached from reality. Donors, pundits, and democratic elites
are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets. This
chaos is used as a shield by stay the Course
advocates who frame the choice as Biden or chaos. The
swirl over different possible candidates is obscuring the fact that

(01:11:45):
there's a single clear path forward. There's one path out
of this mess, and it's Kamala unquote. And this is
one of the interesting things I found about this doc
is that the way that they view this kind of
current chaos as we win just as a deliberate strategy
and as an as a deliberate tactics just to continue
this uncertainty all the way to the convention, and a

(01:12:05):
lot of the what this dock advocates for is that
we need to call this as soon as possible to
give whatever option we're going to go forward with the
most amount of success, whether that's Biden, whether that's Kamala,
it needs to we need to decide what it is
so we don't spend the next few months doing weird
like democratic party infighting and instead actually like lock down

(01:12:27):
what's happening, so there's a cohesive strategy. And they argue
that Kamala has the strongest claim to democratic legibility among
all other alternative candidates. Quote, she's the only candidate that
can take the reins right now instead of in late
August with less than three months ago. To be clear,
this isn't an argument about deservedness or why should personally
love Kamala. It's about strategy and winning in the face
of unimaginable electoral stakes.

Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:12:50):
Now, the doctors point out that only Biden himself has
the power to drop out and choose to head off
chaos by anointing Harris. But Biden does listen to people,
and the people that he listens to listens to other people,
and that is the audience for the people reading this doc.
That's what this is circulating among. That was like the intention,

(01:13:10):
and they argue that if Biden does drop out, Democrats
have to unite quickly behind the elected successor, as opposed
to inviting this extended period of chaos. And although Kamala
has limitations in polls regarding her name recognition, she currently
wins any poll of alternative Democratic candidates by a very
wide margin. This doc dos pointed out that Kamala is

(01:13:32):
by no means a perfect candidate. She does have real deficits,
but they are mostly addressable. The doc mentions her Biden
level approval, rating her involvement with Biden's immigration shortcomings, and
her kind of awkward camera moments reminiscent of a drunk
aunt and quote. After years of a relatively low profile,
voters don't see her as a strong leader for the country,

(01:13:52):
but running as a presidential candidate will allow Harris to
present herself in a more commanding light. She'll be a
prosecutor going up against a convicted felon, a woman fighting
against the man who ended Roe v. Wade unquote, and
that is a lot of the tight sort of messaging
that they are promoting if Kamala does end up being
the option. A Morning consoled political poll on the vice

(01:14:13):
president from June reflects a number of advantages she would
have over Trump in a head to head match based
on his greatest vulnerabilities. A majority of voters ci Kamala
is mentally fit, level headed, and prepared contrast to Trump
and even Biden, and a majority of voters trust Kamala
on jobs, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ rights. Public opinion
is already moving towards Harris over Biden. Forty three percent

(01:14:35):
of voters indicate Harris is fit to run, compared to
Biden's thirty five and while the issue is complex and
the distance here is relative, she's broadly considered to be
on Biden's left on Israel Palestine, an issue where he
has major vulnerabilities. Kamala also has advantages with the younger
and POC voters that the Democrats are currently bleeding in
the dock. Here they contain some stats on this, saying

(01:14:57):
Biden won the twenty twenty election by just forty four
one thousand votes, and most of those are votes that
he is bleeding. A New York Times cenpol in February
found that Harris is nearly ten points ahead of Biden
with black voters, and fifteen points up with Latino voters,
twenty points up with young voters. These are massive advantages.
Now that is older data, but it's probably worth some consideration.

(01:15:20):
Part of the reason why she's also favored among other
Democratic contenders is that she has direct access to the
Biden Harris campaign war chest of over ninety one million
dollars in cash, which would create a smoother transition.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
Yeah, and is probably I mean again, just given the
amount of chaos that would be inherent in a totally
open convention, it just seems like the only feasible option.

Speaker 6 (01:15:44):
And what they're advocating for is that if Kamla takes
a position now or soon to now, she'll have an
extra month and massive structural advantages. Quote, if we can
unite behind Harris in July, we have an extra month
of party unity and message unity. That's a month where
we can and keep the media focused on Donald Trump,
Project twenty twenty five and mega extremism instead of waiting

(01:16:05):
in dread for the next Biden misstep or talking about
democrats fighting it out to win delicate count fear of
racism and sexism is playing an outsized role not supported
by data. The impact of sexism and racism on the
vote is marginal compared to the potential to make gains
in the crucial block that will decide the election.

Speaker 5 (01:16:23):
Right now.

Speaker 6 (01:16:23):
This race hinges on alienated and unenthusiastic double haters who
dislike both Biden and Trump and want an alternative choice.
Some polls put the size of this group at twenty
five percent nationally, or even higher nearly thirty percent amongst.

Speaker 1 (01:16:37):
Basically for every one I know well.

Speaker 6 (01:16:39):
Especially among inconsistent voters who are who are likely to
decide the election in key battleground states. For these double haters,
vote choices being driven not by prejudice but by anti
enthusiasm for the two currently eighty year old white men
presented here as the only options.

Speaker 4 (01:16:55):
Yeahs more likely.

Speaker 6 (01:16:57):
These voters are also more likely to be young, Hispanic,
black back and women in urban or suburban areas, the
exact kind of voter profile that Kamala is gaining appeal with.

Speaker 5 (01:17:07):
Yeah, and I find.

Speaker 6 (01:17:08):
This little bit to be the most compelling statement in
this entire document. Because that lays out an actual map
towards how Kamala would have a better election viability than Biden,
especially in the voters that he's been bleeding dramatically in
the past six seven months.

Speaker 5 (01:17:23):
Now.

Speaker 6 (01:17:23):
The doc does close by saying, if Biden stays the course,
we need Kamala to be strong. The most likely outcome
is that President Biden declines to step back. In that case,
Kamala's role is more crucial than ever. She will be
the strong communicator on the ticket, especially on our most
important issue abortion. Second, many voters will understand her to
be Biden's near guaranteed successor, and we will need to

(01:17:46):
feel comfortable with her potential assent to the presidency to
vote for the Biden Harris ticket. For anyone in the
Biden's nominee, we must rally around him camp. It's essential
that we project confidence in his selection of a running
mate by one pushing the administration to stop sideline and Kamala.
By two promoting Kamala as the leader of the party
and country. Three be prepared to align with political and

(01:18:08):
financial support, and three debate over and ultimately organize around
a new running mate. Consolidation around Vice President Harris will
not guarantee victory in November. No option is free of
risk at this point. But this is our clearest path
to win. We should take it. And that's how the
document ends. And I like some of the arguments they
make here. I don't like Kamala as a person. I
think she is many many issues both the person and

(01:18:31):
I don't like cops, but absolutely, especially if their messaging
will be like Kamala the prosecutor against Trump the felon,
which I personally don't like.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
But that could work.

Speaker 6 (01:18:41):
That's not going to lose her important voters. That's not
going to lose her all of the anarchists who already
aren't going to vote.

Speaker 1 (01:18:47):
That might be a really good strategy because Americans do
not feel the same way about prosecutors as I do,
and these you who do right like we have to
accept that at a certain point. I think so I
I and I think that's most frustrated to me about
the fact that it doesn't look like Biden's going to
step down, is that like the smartest thing they could

(01:19:09):
do strategy wise would be to drop that announcement on
like Monday of next week and utterly like cut the
wind out of the sales of the rnc ye, Like
suddenly the biggest story is that and not you know,
everything that the Republicans are putting out, like you could
actually really do some damage to them, because there's there's
not really anything that they could do in response.

Speaker 6 (01:19:32):
And so much media attention right now is being focused
on Biden very clearly not being fit for office, and
all of that would go away if Kamala gets put
into the spot, then then then everyone will start focusing
once again on how bad Trump is. And I can
understand some of like the Biden camps like upsetedness at
at like the fact that currently there is just so

(01:19:54):
much attention on Biden and everyone kind of is ignoring Trump,
but that just is due to how poorly he himself
has been behaving like that, Like that is ultimately the
Biden campaign's fault that they didn't plan for this contingency,
And if they want all of that like discourse to stop,
they have a very easy option to And it's just
reliant on Biden not being too personally prideful and acknowledging

(01:20:15):
that he's just too old for office and there are
better candidates out there. So yeah, that is that is
the current, that is the current situation on the rise
of the k Hive, something I at this point am
very skeptical to think will actually happen. But it may
be actually a viable strategy for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 (01:20:34):
Yep. I mean, we'll see what they actually do. Probably
keep running Joe Biden and hope that Americans panic enough
about Trump to but you know, we can all dream.

Speaker 6 (01:20:47):
Now, I'd agree to that point. We could also dream
that like that, that like the delegates will just like
rebel against their like polite duty. Yeah, by by not
committing to their to their no'm binding promises. Although that
would be extremely unprecedented and it would make the DNC
a lot more fun.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
Oh, we would have a great DNC if that were
to go down. Yep.

Speaker 6 (01:21:10):
Anyway, well, we're gonna have fun at the RNC instead.

Speaker 1 (01:21:13):
Yeah, we sure will. Garrison, You and I are going
to be on the ground in the exclusion zone and
at the convention itself where we cannot have backpacks or gas.

Speaker 6 (01:21:24):
Masks or canned food.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
But I might be able to carry a gun. Let
me see if they do reciprocity. What is this is Minnesota?

Speaker 5 (01:21:34):
No, this is not Minnesota.

Speaker 4 (01:21:36):
This is Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 (01:21:37):
Oh, Wisconsin, this.

Speaker 6 (01:21:39):
Is Milwaukee, Milwaukee.

Speaker 1 (01:21:41):
We're gonna see how well prepared I am. Let me see.
That could make a fun episode all its own.

Speaker 6 (01:21:51):
I do have an idea for an episode that I
will mention to you off air that I really want
to do for the rn C.

Speaker 1 (01:22:00):
Wait, it looks like yes with restrictions.

Speaker 6 (01:22:05):
Yeah, I love I love restrictions.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
That's great, we'll see what those are.

Speaker 4 (01:22:10):
Stay tuned to the restriction.

Speaker 7 (01:22:11):
Stay tuned everybody e sports.

Speaker 8 (01:22:31):
Oh god, Okay, that was not a great intro. They
conpen here. The podcast that we do I be a
log with me is James. We're doing it another be
a James episode.

Speaker 4 (01:22:42):
Yep, we're back. We would have a theme for our episodes.
I feel like, yeah, maybe it is Petro dollars.

Speaker 5 (01:22:48):
I guess it is.

Speaker 4 (01:22:49):
Yeah, yeah, we vote to you today by Big fossil Fuel.

Speaker 8 (01:22:52):
You know, this entire episode is is the what do
you do with your fossil fuel muddy episode? So we
did an episode like a year ago about sports washing,
and it has gotten much worse since then, you know. So,
so the big kind of sports washing thing that's happening
right now is this thing called the Esports World Cup
that the Saudi government is putting on. It is going

(01:23:15):
on right now. Barring unfathomable disaster, it will still be
going on by the time this episode comes out. We
kind of talked about in the last episode how the
Saudis have been getting into sports. I mean it sort
of starts with soccer, they said, they start to WWE,
they get into tennis, they're in golf, they're in boxing,
they're in Formula one, and in the last like two
years specifically, they've gotten really really deep into esports. In

(01:23:38):
twenty twenty two, they spent one point five billion dollars
wow to acquire face It in EESL Gaming, which were
two organizations that ran esports leagues. Esports, by the way,
are professional video game competition. Yeah, the people who didn't
spend their youth waking up at five in the morning
to watch Korean StarCraft tournaments like I did.

Speaker 4 (01:23:58):
Yeah, that's me, I thought to that category.

Speaker 7 (01:24:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:24:01):
I feel like on this episode we have both the
sports washing angles covered, because you have the sports washing
like regular sports angle, and I've had.

Speaker 5 (01:24:09):
To do the sportswa washing e sports angle.

Speaker 4 (01:24:12):
Yeah, I don't know what you call them. P sports
like physical sports, meat space sports. Yeah, I've been privy
to a decent amount of sports washing. Like I raced
a lot against Iranian teams when I was cycling those
dudes one. So much sports washing has just straight up
like national state sponsored doping programs. But then the UAE, Bahrain, Dubai,

(01:24:37):
all these different Petro states and emirates will sponsor cycling teams,
very very common. Ry, Brunei another one. Yeah, I raced
for Quebec once, which is not not a Petro state.

Speaker 5 (01:24:49):
Well it's not I guess it's not a petro state.

Speaker 4 (01:24:50):
Yeah, yeah, they got big maple syrup behind them. Yeah,
in Catalonia, which again not a Petro state. But yeah,
it's very common in all kinds of professionals sports. Right,
because as sports has become more like an entertainment industry,
it's become unfathomably expensive to own a sponsor a team
for like enthusiasts, and the value proposition isn't really there

(01:25:15):
for brand I don't think the amount that it costs
now to even a sport like cycling, which is not
a massive sporting global terms, right, it's not football soccer
for the Americans out there, it's not worth it for
many brands to sponsoring entire cycling team millions and millions
of euros. But like, if you can use that cycling
team to launder and normalize your state's reputation, if that

(01:25:38):
cycling team can be what people think of when they
hear about your country, then maybe that is worth it, right,
And when you have a bottomless pot of oil money,
you don't have to worry so much about whether it's
worth it.

Speaker 8 (01:25:49):
Yeah, So the thing I want to do with this
episode is to get into why specifically the Salus are
doing this right now, because again, like most countries do
sort of versions of this, right, but again, you know,
that is one point two billion dollars they've thrown into
two StarCraft leagues that I primarily known them for StarCraft.
They do a bunch of stuff, but those things were
not worth one point five billion dollars, Like, there's no way.

(01:26:10):
But most of the money that had been sponsoring this
stuff was crypto money, right, Okay, you know, but I
wanted to get into why this is sort of happening.
Something I think is very important to note going into
this is that the sort of league thing that's being
run right now is being run directly out of the
Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is called Public Investment Fund,
So this is directly state money. So the Esports World

(01:26:32):
Cup that's happening right now has sixty million dollars in prizes,
which is unreal is an extraordinary amount of money split
around twenty one esports. There are thirty sports teams involved,
and I am going to read the names of every
single fucking one of them, because fuck you.

Speaker 4 (01:26:48):
Okay, let's do it.

Speaker 8 (01:26:49):
Fanatic, G two Sports Guildy, Sports, car Mine Corp, Movie
Star KOI.

Speaker 4 (01:26:54):
Actually I've never heard of those ones, uh og not
as muviy stides. I'm guessing it's Spanish Spanish telephone network.

Speaker 5 (01:27:01):
Yeah, probably, you know, there's a couple I don't know.
But like, these are like the largest esports teams in
the world.

Speaker 8 (01:27:06):
Okay, Nija's and Pajamas or NIP Team Liquor, which I'm
really sad about because I was a Team Liquid fan
for a fucking decade and I'm no longer one now
because fuck this shit. Team Secret Team, Vitality, tuns of Esports,
Vertus Pro one hundred Thieves, Cloud nine, Phase Clan Game
in Gladiators, Energy Esports space Station Gaming, TSM Blacklist, International,

(01:27:28):
LGD Gaming, Jenny Sports, t One Talent Esports, Webo Gaming,
for Real Esports, Loud Team, Falcons, Twist and Minds. Fuck
all of you for fucking doing this and doing the
super pr thing. There's been a backlash, and the backlash
is largely focused on you know, Saudi's institutionalized state homophobia

(01:27:49):
and you know, I mean the fact that women are
not full citizens. Yeah, like miss such Yeah, I mean
just are just straight up owned by their husbands, right
like that. That's that's how the sort of legal conservativeship works.

Speaker 4 (01:28:00):
I'm not very familiar with esports, so I can be
there the podcast Grimace. Here are competitions in esports, like
gender segregated? Do people all compete together?

Speaker 8 (01:28:12):
Basically No, there are like women's leagues, but like if
you just if you want to compete, you can just
compete assumeing you gift, you don't get forced out by
sexist And this is actually a kind of big deal
for StarCraft because you talked about this be four, but
like probably the number two or number three best StarCraft
player in the US is Scarlett, who's a trans woman,
and I mean she's just in the regular league, right, like.

Speaker 4 (01:28:32):
Right, yeah, other turfs mad about it.

Speaker 8 (01:28:35):
You know, It's funny inside the StarCraft community, this was
a huge thing for a long time, and eventually the
tides just turned against them because everyone likes her because
she's really good and she's also just like a good person,
and so they kind of I got a watch over
the years as they just kind of got obliterated. Weirdly,
the like regular turfs haven't really found out about this,
probably because StarCraft is, I don't know, too good of

(01:28:57):
a game for them to be fucking dealing with.

Speaker 4 (01:29:00):
Not understanding things has not stopped this.

Speaker 5 (01:29:02):
That's true. That's true.

Speaker 8 (01:29:03):
It's kind of too obscure by this point. But you know,
like there's been a lot of real concern for sort
of queer players. There are a lot of these teams,
like right as they were announcing they were going to
the fucking Esports, well kup, we're doing all of these
fucking Pride posts and talking about how they're gonna let
their players wear Pride jerseys, and it's like, are you
fucking kidding me?

Speaker 9 (01:29:21):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:29:22):
You know, so are they physically pressed in Saudi Ara
able to play?

Speaker 5 (01:29:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (01:29:24):
Yeah, These these tournaments are happening physically in Riod. Okay, yeah,
you know this is this isn't the first one they've had.
They've had some other events before this too there, but
you know, like yeah and yeah, things are very very bad.

Speaker 5 (01:29:36):
There was a well, a story that was.

Speaker 8 (01:29:38):
Famous among trans people, but I don't ever think broke containment.
Was there's a Saudi trans woman named Eden who was
tricked into going back to like see her family, and
her family just kidnapped her and locked her up and
she killed herself Jesus.

Speaker 5 (01:29:51):
And this is not an uncommon thing.

Speaker 8 (01:29:54):
It happens to sist women too sometimes when they try
to like get out of the country, sure is, they'll
be kidnapped and like renditioned back.

Speaker 4 (01:30:01):
Yeah, there have been some pretty good reports on that. Yeah,
well linked amost something because it's too it'll be too
lankly to go and do here.

Speaker 5 (01:30:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:30:08):
But I think I think kind of the weakness of
the backlash is that it doesn't it doesn't really quite
understand exactly why the Saudis are doing this. You know,
they understand that the Saudi government is incredibly repressive and
that it's you know, institutionally homophobic, and it's institutionally sexist.
It does not understand like just exactly how fucking bad

(01:30:30):
these people are. Like this is like the most feted
up state in the entire world.

Speaker 5 (01:30:34):
It is like it is. It is the fucking CIA state.

Speaker 8 (01:30:37):
And the rest of this episode is going to be
us running through the exact sequence of stuff that caused
the Saudis to need to do all of this fucking
PR bullshit and how the sort of structural economic cycle
of funneling petro dollars around has led to genocide and
then also the stupid fucking esports tournament for PR.

Speaker 4 (01:30:58):
Two things which I'm not to say.

Speaker 8 (01:30:59):
But first, do you know who's probably not a large
enough company to have sponsored this tournament? Although I can't
promise that it's not KitKat or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:31:07):
The fuck, hopefully it's kit Kat. I would like some
cake cats, if that is any they're one of the
sponsors of this fucking Esports World Cup. You keep your
way for a biscuit cake cat, you'll hate cookie. I
don't want you to hate Jocobar anymore.

Speaker 8 (01:31:20):
Yeah, it's the products and services of this podcast, which
hopefully are not supporting a genocide. But good god, we
copy show YEP, so we are back and we are
going to talk petro dollars. So Saudi wealth takes a

(01:31:44):
form of what are called petro dollars. Petro dollars are
in some sense, they're very very simple, right, It's dollars
that you get from selling oil. This is important for
a number of reasons. Though technically speaking you can sort
of sell oil in other currencies now, but like most
oil in the world is sold specifically in dollars, and
so around the world, dollars are one of the things

(01:32:05):
that if you are an economy, you need dollars in
order to get oil from people. So huge sinks of
American dollars from all across the world, you know, from
the US of the US imporce, a lot of oil
flow into these sort of oil producing countries.

Speaker 5 (01:32:18):
These are called petro dollars.

Speaker 8 (01:32:20):
The most obvious manifestation of this in Saudi Arabia is
the country's solving Wealth Fund, which has nine hundred billion
dollars of assets. Right, this is an unfathomable amount of money.
It is so much money that it is a structural
problem for the global economy trying to figure out what
the fuck you do with this money. This is a
problem that has caused disaster around the world. Is something

(01:32:43):
where I'm fond of talking about on this show, but
we're going to talk about again because it's important here.
In the seventies and eighties, as sort of Opek realized
that it could, you know, use its sort of political
power to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power and
gain enormous amounts of petro dollars by controlling the price
of oil. Suddenly they had, you know, that you have
hundreds of billions of dollars floating around and because this

(01:33:03):
is capitalism, you can't just sit on that money. You
have to find a way to turn that money into
more money. But again, you know, I mean just a
sovereign wealth fund is almost a trillion dollars, right, and
so this is extremely hard, and it means that this
money is constantly flowing around the world trying to find
a way to get returns on it, you know. And
in the modern era, these are things like people remember

(01:33:24):
we work, oh yeah, but incredibly stupid dune. From the
beginning office space rental scheme that went under that that
was a lot of that was funded by Saudi money
because Tuddy's had put an enormous amount of money in
this Japanese bank called soft Bank, and soft Bank was
trying to figure out what to do with this unfathol
amount of money, and they were like, Okay, what if
we fund the dumbest project of all time?

Speaker 4 (01:33:45):
Yeah, And it became a thing where they could fund
it and like just buy them funding it. Its stock
price would go up even if it was like we
work a really shit idea.

Speaker 5 (01:33:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:33:55):
And this is something about global capital that I don't
think has been fully processed really. But the sheer, the
sheer extent of capital concentration, right, the amount of money
that the richest people in the world and the riches
sort of families in the world in the sort of
Saudi case, right, you know, the Saudi Arabia is a
country where a family has access to the resources of

(01:34:15):
extremely wealthy nation state. Right, And that being true has
structural effects on the entire rest of the economy because
you know, we've been seeing the consequences of this for
a long time in the tech sector, right, where you
don't have to fucking make money, like your revenue stream
can just be investor money and you can coast for
a decade off of just taking money from the Saudis

(01:34:37):
who are like trying to find some way to turn
this money.

Speaker 5 (01:34:39):
And the more money.

Speaker 8 (01:34:40):
I think this has downstream effects that we don't we
haven't even begun to really understand yet, right, But very famously,
in the seventies and eighties, there was all this money
floating around and what it was poured into was the
Third Book debt crisis. People bought state debt with it,
and then these loans were on it were on adjustable rates.

(01:35:00):
So when the vulgar shock hit and the US like
massively increased interest rates, the interest rates on these loans
like skyrocketed and suddenly you know, you're paying like fifty
percent interest on a loan of like cephal billion dollars.
And all of these countries are just systematically looted. Their
economies are destroyed. I mean, David Grab rememorably talks about
this thing in Madagascar where Madagascar had eliminated malaria. You know,

(01:35:23):
but the way you eliminate malaria is through mosquito extermination.
Like programs are not that expensive, but they are a
little bit expensive. And when the fucking government of Madagascar
had to like pay off this IMF debt, they had
to get.

Speaker 5 (01:35:34):
Rid of the they.

Speaker 8 (01:35:36):
Got rid of this mosquito programs, and there was a
malaria outpick and it killed unfathomable numbers of people, and
stuff like this happened all over the world. And the
source of all of this, right, partially the source of
this is these loans. And partially the source of this
is this these enormous piles of petro dollars that you
have to find some way to sort of turn into
more capital, right, and you know, so there are sort

(01:35:57):
of trademark things you can do with this money. Of
them is buying a bunch of a military equipment. Mostly
what you're doing with that is sort of buying American patronage.
If you spend enormous amount of money buying American tanks,
and this is you know, something the Saudi has been
doing for ages, right, you spend a bunch of money
on American defense contracts. You know, you can sort of
buy us protection and guarantees that you know, for example,
as it is gonna happen later in this episode, you

(01:36:18):
can buy a guarantee that an invading army won't sack
your capital. But the thing with the Saudis is that
they have a lot of equipment but Saudi Arabia cannot
maintain a strong functional army, right if they were, if
they had an actual serious army, there would be a
coup tomorrow. So their army is extremely well equipped kind of,
but it's trained like shit and it's run by like

(01:36:41):
just dipshits intentionally so that it sucks. But you know,
so that's like sort of one thing you can do
with this money. A lot of this money ended up
going into real estate, and there are sort of cycles
of this happening. The one that ain't that's of concern
to us is what happens after two thousand and eight,
in the sort of aftermath of two thousand and eight.
There are bill places in the world where, you know,

(01:37:04):
you can park an extremely large amount of money in
real estate and have it be a relatively liquid asset.
If you have like property in a market that is,
you know, where the housing market is really hot and
prices are increasing rapidly, you can pretty quickly get rid
of it. And you can also there's liquidity. There's sort
of financial instruments you can do based off of your
ownership of real estate, and this is something that drives

(01:37:26):
the Saudis into a bunch of very very I don't
know if risky is exactly the right word, but a
bunch of moves in ye Many real estate that really,
truly we're about to not pay off.

Speaker 5 (01:37:39):
There's a very good book about this.

Speaker 8 (01:37:41):
It's by Lisa Bloomy called Destroying Yemen, which is about
like a lot of the factors that start the war
in Yemen, and this is one of them.

Speaker 5 (01:37:49):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:37:50):
We can't really do a full recap of the Many
Civil War because that's its own seven hundred episode podcast, Like,
oh god it is. Yeah, it's on a surface level,
it's not that complicated, but the moment you get any
granular detail on it, it's like the most complicated conflict
I've ever studied.

Speaker 4 (01:38:09):
Yeah, I mean there's so many conflicts like this, right, Like, yeah,
civil war appreciates us. When I was studying Yemen in college,
I longed for the simplicity of the Spanish Civil War,
Like this conflict is nuts, Yeah, but for simplicity's sake.
There's roughly ish two factions. There are the sort of
forces allied with what's called the Coalition government, which is

(01:38:29):
the government backed by the Saudis, and then there are
what's sort of in the West become called the Huthis.
I mean it's more complicated. It's all of this is
enormously more complicated than that. These are all alliances. A
lot of these alliances are extremely tenuous. But one of
the things that happens is that when a government that
is hostile to the Saudis, which is like you know,
the sort of like unterer a law like that whole

(01:38:52):
coalition is very awso to the saudiast because the Saudis
sucks shit. You know, Suddenly the Saudis are looking at
an enormous amount of capital they've sunk in real estate
that they are you know, based on these like incredibly
corrupt land deals with the previous administration, which have been
friendly to them, they are looking at suddenly losing all
this land. The Saudis weren't the first people to come
into sort of the m many real estate market right

(01:39:13):
on the uae Omah and a bunch of other states
has sort of been in there before. And so part
of what a big part of what this sort of
this like what was called the coalition is is this
like basically a bunch of these assholes trying to protect
their housing assets. Look, that's a lot of what a
lot of wars are. If we're on it, it's people
trying to protect xoy assets, right like unfortunately.

Speaker 8 (01:39:34):
Yeah, and it's not really seen in these terms in
the way that's covered. But that's that's a lot of
what's going on. And this produces one of the worst
wars of the twenty first century, which is saying something
because the twenty for centuries had a lot.

Speaker 5 (01:39:50):
Of really really terrible wars.

Speaker 4 (01:39:51):
Yeah, we've had some reference.

Speaker 8 (01:39:53):
Yeah, and we're going to get into what the Saudis
were doing during this war. After these products and services
you have returned and.

Speaker 5 (01:40:10):
The thing we're returning.

Speaker 4 (01:40:10):
Into is a really really bleak war.

Speaker 8 (01:40:13):
So we said this kind of from the beginning, right,
the Saudi military is not very good. The Saudi's attempt
to sort of end the war by like rolling a
tank column over the border. It's like, I think it's
twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, in like the early period of
the war, they try to end up by just rolling tanks,
and tanks get obliterated because the Saudi army isn't worth shit, right.

(01:40:34):
All of their ground forces are a joke, but their
air force is very very well equipped with a bunch
of like incredibly modern US warplanes that we sell them
all the fucking time, and so you know, they don't
really have good infantry. What they have the ability to
do is just obliterate people with air strikes. The kind
of like terror air campaign that they're waging is something
that I think we're all familiar with from Palestine. But

(01:40:57):
they're doing air strikes on school buses full of children,
and they're taking the American thing. They're doing double tap
drone strikes on weddings where they're they're hitting a wedding
and then when rescue workers come up, they hit they hit.

Speaker 5 (01:41:08):
The rescue workers with their strikes.

Speaker 4 (01:41:09):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:41:09):
I'm pretty sure it was young when they had the
triple tap fucking airstrike where they did an airstrike on
someone's funeral. They didn't airstrike on the rescue workers, and
then when they had a funeral for those people, they
did air strike on fucking that.

Speaker 4 (01:41:19):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:41:19):
This is a just.

Speaker 8 (01:41:21):
Unbelievably brutal war. And you know, I want to get
which we talked about, right, like there are some there
are some parts of the Saudi coalition that can you know,
field ground forces, right, that stuff's mostly the sort of
southern secessionist groups and those people are not really that loyal,

(01:41:42):
so you know, so they have to start importing infantry
to try to fight the who thies, and so they're
importing a bunch of Columbian mercenaries. So these are guys
who've been like desk squad guys in Columbia.

Speaker 4 (01:41:51):
The Columbian guys, the new I was going to say,
the new Rhodesians that it's a dog shadowt to cost
and a group of human beings. Yeah, it used to
be that when you were running into private military contractors abroad,
it would be people white folks from Africa, right, Like
they call themselves Rhodesion South Africans, what have you. Now

(01:42:14):
you'll see a lot of like a lot of private
military contractors, like at the boots on the ground, you know,
infantry level of Colombians.

Speaker 8 (01:42:22):
Yeah, and so so that that's one of the sources
they went to. But then you know, part of the
Saudi coalition is the UAE, and the UAE has a
lot of very very close ties to militant groups in Sudance,
specifically a group of militias that's now known the West
of the Rapid Response Forces but these are the people
who did the genocide and are for yeah, and they

(01:42:43):
are like right now like doing a genocide in like
in Sudan as they attempt to sort of seize control
of the country. And because the UAE is very very
well connected to these one of the ways that the
coalition tries to get ground troops is by using troops
were you know, kidnapped by these militias. And when I
say troops, I mean child soldiers. What the forces that

(01:43:05):
they are deploying in Yemen in an attempt to use
as cannon fodder are Sudanese child soldiers. It is unbelievably believe,
I mean kind of funnily. A lot of these people
end up not fighting because they you know, they get
handed a rifle, will get thrown into Yemen and they
just immediately sell their guns and I to fight. But like,
you know, but like that, that's the kind of shit.

(01:43:26):
Like again, the kind of pure evil we are dealing
with is we are having the guys who did the dart,
who did the fucking Darfur genocide, kidnap fucking villagers from Sudan,
like child soldiers from Sudan and attempting to use them
as cannon father in their fucking war in Yemen, so
they can like defend their fucking real estate assets.

Speaker 4 (01:43:44):
Yeah right, I think Friend of the Show Eric Prince
makes a uh makes an appearance in Yemen as well
his Triumvira of companies, which are the same company, right,
Black Quota Z.

Speaker 5 (01:43:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:43:55):
Probably, I quite frankly don't remember that part, but probably also, Yeah, you.

Speaker 4 (01:44:01):
Can rely on EP to show up in a situation
I is.

Speaker 5 (01:44:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:44:05):
I mean the part of this we haven't gotten to
yet is the worst part of it, which is so
this the Saudis and the sort of coalition government they
you know, they do okay in the sort of southwest
of the country because the Southern Yemen secessionst groups are
well organized and are good soldiers, even if they eventually
sort of rebel. There's this whole it's it's a whole mess.

(01:44:26):
But in the west of the country everything is completely different,
and you know, they're basically getting their shit kicked in
and in that theater, the Saudi's plan is we are
going to starve the country, so, you know, and the Saudi,
the Saudis have naval assets nobody else really in this
war does, right, and they just set up a blockade

(01:44:48):
on like all of the ports on that side of
the country. We do not know how many people get
starved as a result of this. The last good mortality
figures I could I could find, this war is still
going on, by the way. I mean, fighting has gotten
a lot less intense since of twenty twenty one, twenty
twenty two, but I mean it's it's still going The
last good numbers that I can find suggest three hundred

(01:45:09):
and seventy seven thousand dead, and it's probably way way
worse than that, because again, we just don't know how
many people died in the famines that you know that
that the Saudi set off, and this was you know,
this was explicitly there. Their plan here was was to
just kill off the population of this part of Yemen
by starving them to death. You know, this is the genocide, right,

(01:45:29):
they were trying to do genocide. It doesn't work, and
it doesn't work because, I mean there's a number of
reasons why it doesn't work. They basically they get defeated militarily.
Kuthi troops like take several cities like inside of Saudi Rabia,
and like they like they march across the border and
take them. And you know, I mean, it's it's bad
enough for the Saudis that like the there's a moment
where it like it looks like they're going to lose

(01:45:51):
ri Odd and the US has to step in and
be like no, like okay, you guys need to fucking.

Speaker 5 (01:45:55):
Pull out of this shit.

Speaker 8 (01:45:56):
But that you know that, and that that makes the
war less bad, you know, like the blockades not still
in place. But this is the situation in twenty twenty
two that we walk into when when suddenly there's they're
buying all these esports companies that they have just attempted
to commit a genocide, right, they have just attempted to
exterminate a vast part of the population of Yemen. That's

(01:46:19):
I think, like really the true sort of heart of darkness,
evil shit, right, Like I don't know, it's like US
and Cambodia is shit.

Speaker 5 (01:46:26):
But you know, there's stuff that got.

Speaker 8 (01:46:28):
More media attention too, which was like in a lot
of ways more harmful to them because that the pr
from it. But one of the things I think people
have forgotten now because this was six years ago, is
that in twenty eighteen they kidnapped and then killed a
Washington Post columnist named Jamal ka Shogi by tricking him
into going into a consulate, killing him, carving his body

(01:46:49):
up with a bone saw.

Speaker 5 (01:46:51):
And we're pretty sure the way.

Speaker 8 (01:46:53):
That they got the body out of the consulate was
by stuffing the fucking again bone saled parts of his
body into see bags in a diplomatic community and walking
them out of the embassy.

Speaker 4 (01:47:03):
Yeah, this is one of those things that I should
never be forgotten, right, Like, yeah, he was a citizen, right,
was he a green cod hode?

Speaker 8 (01:47:11):
I'm not one hundred percent sure, but this is obviously
like a fucking unbelievable crime. I think I wish that
you know, the fact that they were doing fucking airstrikes
on school buses had gotten as much attention as this did.
But you know, for for a long time, right, like
in the late twenty tens and the early twenty twenties,

(01:47:32):
and this this was an issue in the twenty twenty
presidential campaigns because you know, I mean, Trump fucking went
and touched the orb with Muhammed bin Salman, who's the
Crown Prince of now Well at the time, was known
as Mohammad Been bone saw because she just straight up
ordered this guy to be fucking bone salved, you know,
but like that it was. It was a real sort

(01:47:53):
of issue. And this is the reputation that the Satuda
government has that causes them to kind of go really
really hard into the into this esports angle. And there
there's one last kind of angle to this, which is
like the worst kept secret in the of the oil
market is that the Saudis are running out of oil.
It's like it's it's technically a secret, but it's like
everyone knows this, Like every everyone knows that a lot

(01:48:16):
of sort of oil that's technically sold by Saudi Ramco
is not their oil, it's their labels and other people's oil.
And people have known this for a long time, and
the Saudis obviously know it. And so the trick they
have to pull right in order to continue to be
this fucking like nightmare dictatorship state propped up by the CIA,

(01:48:37):
is to find something else to base their economy on.
And their plan has been a lot of like they're
trying to do just tech bullshit we're not going to
get into because that's its own thing.

Speaker 4 (01:48:48):
I'm so sad. I'm so sad to be talking about
the line.

Speaker 5 (01:48:52):
Sorry, the lines.

Speaker 4 (01:48:53):
Yet they're trying to build a city that is a
lot of that is also a city, a really really
long city is a line that's to be their tech thing.
You may sound like we're ever simplifying this, We are not. No,
it is that they are trying to build a city
that is aligned.

Speaker 5 (01:49:06):
It's not going to get built.

Speaker 8 (01:49:06):
What it has done is they've absolutely destroyed the lives
of a bunch of sort of people who are just
like farmers and cattle like herders, like some of the
metic cattle herders, and people who've been there for a
really long time have had their land taken away from
them and their lives have been.

Speaker 5 (01:49:21):
Destroyed by it. So you know.

Speaker 8 (01:49:23):
But the thing is that in order for them to
try to do their tech pivot, they have to fix
the reputation people. They cannot be the state that is
you remembered for like bone sawing a journalist and attempting
to start of an entire population and doing air strikes
and school buses. Right, this can't be the reputation they have.

Speaker 4 (01:49:39):
This is it Vision twenty thirty or Planned twenty thirty
or some big yeah yeah, for their like rehabilitation and
diversification of their income. But like posts Jamal Kashogi, a
lot of big companies like we can't be like like
companies like Google, right, and like big big tech companies, Yeah,
kind of took a noticeable step back.

Speaker 8 (01:49:59):
And so this has been why they've been going into
sports because they can throw around, like we're talking nine
hundred billion dollars of assets, right, they can just swamp
a sport, right, especially something like esports where people are
not very well paid, there's not that much money, sources
of income are tenuis. They could just sort of buy
off these entire industries and it's kind of and it's working.
And part of the reason that it's working is that,

(01:50:21):
you know, the focus is on and like, I understand
why people are doing this, but the focus has been
on the fact that set like the Saudi government is,
you know, is sexist and homophobic.

Speaker 5 (01:50:32):
And that's true.

Speaker 8 (01:50:34):
But if that's the reputation that the Saudis have, that
is a win for them because A they'll be able
to find people who agree with those views, and B
nobody's talking about again the fact that they they they
fucky they did an airstrike on a school bus, like
like the bodies of children and their fucking school bags
were flying over like they they've been able to sort
of avoid any kind of more reckoning with this because

(01:50:58):
people are off talking about other stuff, and if this
keeps working like it's going to work, there going to
be a country that killed three hundred and seventy thousand
people and probably more.

Speaker 4 (01:51:09):
I think also like one of the reasons they've been
able to get away with this is that ah media
has normalized massive amounts of death and dying of Muslim
people in the Middle East. Yeah, for twenty plus years, right,
so a lot of people's entire life of media consumption.
Every day, we've dropped bombs and killed hundreds of people

(01:51:29):
in the Middle East, and it's just, yeah, it's the
background noise in US media.

Speaker 8 (01:51:33):
Yeah, I want to watch one more thing they did
that wasn't the script, but I need to fucking talk
about because it's one of my formative political experiences. Was
So when the Arab Spring started, one of the biggest
uprisings was in Bahrain. This is one of the earliest
up rising in twenty eleven. There's an attempt to knock
off the monarchy of Bahrain, and they probably could have won.
The kids in the streets in Bahrain are probably the

(01:51:53):
bravest on of the bravest people I've ever seen. And
the Saudis rolled tanks into Bahrain to crush the protests
and fucking keep the government intact. And for I mean
years for you, I mean like a decade afterwards. Every
once in a while, you'd get a video coming like
that came out of like the of these kids dressed
in all black chasing down an armored vehicle that's shooting
at them with molotovs. Right, I've never seen anything. I've

(01:52:15):
never seen anything like it. Like, they're some of the
bravest people in the world, and the Saudis fucking rolled
tanks into their country to fucking crush them. The fucking
esports companies, sure, those are the people whose money you're taking,
right you you were, you were taking the money of
a bunch of people who rolled tanks into the country,
whose people wanted fucking democracy.

Speaker 5 (01:52:34):
And yeah, that's that. That's all I got about this.

Speaker 8 (01:52:36):
I'm extremely angry about all of this, and.

Speaker 5 (01:52:43):
Yeah, fuck them.

Speaker 4 (01:52:45):
Yeah, if I can say from a perspective of someone
who's been paid to do sports for a decent amount
of my life. Yeah, you make shit money, but like
it's so much better to not make shit choices as well,
And like that goes way beyond like not cheing in
the manifest ways of people cheating in in sports, but
also just like you don't compromising to the way more

(01:53:06):
important than like playing right, Like sports is supposed to
be fun, and if you allow yourself to be a
vehicle for things that are terrible, like you're gonna be
miserable in your fucking forties anyway, because your body will
fall apart. Like, don't make yourself feel guilty for this
as well.

Speaker 8 (01:53:20):
Yeah, and one last thing I want to address because
one of the defenses that Saudi people have been rolling
out is this like, oh, you guys don't respect Muslim culture,
like because because the main line of complaint has been
about sort of about homophobia and sexism, and it's like, yeah, man,
those fucking children in their school bosses were Muslim to
like fuck you.

Speaker 4 (01:53:38):
Yeah, the people in Bahrain are Muslim too. Regularly the
people who yeah, bodies are all over the streets because
they asked for a chance to have some say and
how the country was run like that, there's just you
don't get to do that.

Speaker 5 (01:53:49):
Yeah, so this has been nic could happen here?

Speaker 8 (01:53:51):
Fuck every single one of the scenes that's fucking doing
this shit fucking call.

Speaker 9 (01:53:55):
Yeah all right, hello, welcome to the podcast It could
happen here.

Speaker 4 (01:54:12):
Podcasts for me and Cheren talk about vegetables or terrible things,
depending on the week. It's me, it's uine and today
it's a terrible thing. It's not a vegetable or a
cea animal. How are you Cherene, how are you doing?

Speaker 3 (01:54:26):
I'm good. That's honestly a great premise just for a
show in general, Like we talk about either food or
something terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:54:34):
Yeah, like and you never know, you know, Yeah, it's
just in your playlist. And then is it a fucking artichoke?
Is it genocide? You don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:54:41):
You have to find out.

Speaker 4 (01:54:43):
Yeah, the only way is by listening.

Speaker 3 (01:54:45):
Yeah, but Hi, I'm good, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 (01:54:48):
Good. I'm glad to hear it. Sreen. So, what I
wanted to talk about today is what is happening in Turkey?
Why are they like this? What is going on? Specifically?
I want to talk about some these attacks on Syrian
refugees in Turkey. The people may have seen, they may
not have seen. I see them in my timeline, but

(01:55:08):
maybe that's because of the people I follow. I think.
To start off with, to understand what's happening in Turkey,
you have to understand the relations between Turkey and Syria.
Since the Civil War began in Syria, which is more
than a decade ago now, thirteen odd years ago. So
from the start of the war, Turkey has backed anti

(01:55:29):
a SAD factions, right, so those are the rebels in Syria.
This is a big change. In two thousand and eight,
A Sadden Herdigan's family went on holiday together really Yeah. Yeah,
they went into southern Turkey and a little little beach
holiday together.

Speaker 3 (01:55:45):
Disturbing.

Speaker 4 (01:55:46):
Yeah, yeah, what a time. Yeah, just to do to
rarking by the beach. But unfortunately they're no longer holiday together.
They might be holding again soon, as we'll see.

Speaker 3 (01:55:57):
Yeah that's what it sounds like.

Speaker 4 (01:55:59):
Yeah, they are becoming tight again, and again referenced their
family holiday in his most recent comments on really yeah,
it's like our relations have been familial.

Speaker 5 (01:56:10):
I like that at all.

Speaker 4 (01:56:12):
Yeah, yeah, you know what'd be going on holiday with
Marshal Lasad. Just as a moral principle, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:56:19):
It's just crazy to be because you're right they I
feel like we're very open about supporting the anti Assad forces,
and so to be like suddenly, why can't we have
diplomatic friendliness, Like come on, it's just like the weirdest
plot to us to be.

Speaker 4 (01:56:34):
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it comes
from anti migrant sentiment in Turkey, which I want to
get into. I think it's so like we are witnessing
this global crackdown on migration on refugees. We see it
in Europe, we see it here at southern border, we
see it here in Turkey, We're seeing it in North Africa.
We're seeing it all over. So this is hasn't always

(01:56:55):
been a case like at the start of the war,
Turkey Thrope and it's bordereds to s Syrian refugees, right,
They built camps to house them. They were strong backers
of the revolution. They spent forty million dollars carrying for
their refugees. The Nationally Intelligence Organization, the MIT, actually trained
parts of the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, and then

(01:57:15):
later they brought together the SNA. There will be many acronyms, right,
like every civil war loves a three letter acronym. And
the Syrian War is no different.

Speaker 3 (01:57:24):
But they were really open. They were really public about
being like we welcomed the refugees. I remember that was like,
I don't know, as a Syrian, I was like, oh,
that's nice.

Speaker 4 (01:57:38):
It was nice, nice thing to do.

Speaker 3 (01:57:40):
Like I mean, like at the time, no one gave
a shit for the most part. So to have like
a country out loud be like we welcome the refugees,
come over here will help. And now they have the
largest population of Syrian refugees like in the world. I
don't know if you're gonna mention this coming up, but
I feel like the only thing that changed, not the
only I think one of the only things. The main

(01:58:01):
thing that changed is that no one in Turkey thought
it would last as long.

Speaker 4 (01:58:04):
Yeah no, yeah, absolutely not.

Speaker 9 (01:58:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:58:06):
Yeah, we'll get into that because the nature of their
legal residence there is very temporary. Yeah, okay. So Turkey
has used the SNA as Syrian National Army right, which
is it's more explicitly Turkish backed faction, as a directly
linked proxy force. They've used it in their operations against
the STF. So the Syrian Democratic Forces another acronym for you,

(01:58:27):
the organization which includes the Yepige right their YPG, the
YPG the other elements of the military forces of the
Autonomous Areas North and East Syria, sometimes called RISHABA. They
have also used the SNA outside of Syria, right in Azerbaijan,
Libya and Nizier like just as a private military right

(01:58:47):
as a mercenary army more or less, and you'll you'll
hear them refer to sometimes as mercenaries, certainly like when
they're being used outside of Syria, it's hard to argue
that they're not, and other times, like when they're being
used in Syria. A lot of these folks were previously
parts of other groups that have kind of been repackaged
and bundled up together by Turkey, and there are still
many factions within these broadly speaking Turkish supported Arab rebel

(01:59:12):
forces in Syria. There are some Kurdish groups as well,
but not so many, and there are some Turkic groups
that are not Arab. So these property forces are really
vital to the Turkey strategy in Syria. I wanted to
get a sense of how numerous the redirected or re
recruited Jahadis were from other groups, so I reached out
to Zagros Hiwa. People are not familiar with Zagros. He

(01:59:35):
is a spokesperson of the Kurdistan Communities Union's Foreign Relations Commission.
If you're not familiar with the Kurdistan Communities Union, it's
the umbrella organization for the several democratic confederalist political parties North, South,
East and West Kurdistan which are inspired by the ideology
of Abdullah Asient. So we're going to hear more from
Zagoros next week. I have a number of questions about

(01:59:56):
the ongoing Turkish bombing there in the in the Kandil
Mountains in the in the north of the Kurdistan Autonomous
Region of Iraq. But we're going to drop a little
quote here where he talks about the interactions at the
SDF and the EPIGAY and the other other units Right
hPG have had with the Turkish Army's Arab Syrian elements.

(02:00:16):
When you hear Zagros here talking about DASH, what he's
talking about is the so called Islamic State, the Islamic
State of Iraq and the levant Right. It's just the
Arabic acronym of the same organization. So if you went
aware that's what he's talking.

Speaker 10 (02:00:30):
About, invading Turkish Army is that many Jajaradists have been
incorporated into the Turkish Army. They are acting as units
with the Turkish or separate units with the Turkish Army.
They have been embedded with with the with natal second

(02:00:52):
largest army. I can say these Jajadists are x DAJ members,
ex Nostra Front members, x Alpaider members. They are from
many nationalities, according to pu K officials Patriotic Union of
Kdistan officials, they say that they have learned the names
of three hundreds of these DASH members in the Turkish

(02:01:15):
Army ranks.

Speaker 5 (02:01:18):
So also.

Speaker 10 (02:01:21):
Underground Kedystan Freedom guerrillas themselves have observations about the inclusion
of jihadist members in the ranks of the Turkish Army
and many of the close range classes blanket point classes

(02:01:42):
with the Turkish Army. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas here some of
the soldiers speaking Arabic, shouting.

Speaker 1 (02:01:52):
Yearning in Arabic.

Speaker 4 (02:01:55):
To understand further what's going on in Turkey, I think
you need to understand the phenomenon of Turkish ultra nationalism
and social Darwinism. This is not just endemic in Turkey,
but also in European countries. With a large Turkish diaspora.
The most extreme and concerning example of this is a
group called the Gray Wolves. The Gray Wolves are the

(02:02:16):
military street wing of the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey
and they've been involved in political violence there since the
nineteen sixties, with their primary target being curved Greeks, Alavis, Arabs, Christians,
Jews and Armenians. These are all minority ethnic groups, I guess.
To understand this further, you have to be able to
differentiate between race, state, and nation. Right, which is getting

(02:02:41):
into things that I lecture about. But the idea of
a race is effective biological link, right, This isn't born
out necessarily, but the idea of a shared biology. The
idea of a nation. A nation is an imagined community, right,
which are can have many races. It could have a
state aligned to it or not. Right, So the Turkish

(02:03:04):
nation doesn't necessarily align with the Turkish state. There are
like other groups within the Turkish state. You have Turkish citizenship,
but do not see themselves as nationally or ethnically Turkish.
For what the gray Wolves believe is the superiority of
a Turkish race, and they strive for a monoethnic Sunni
Islamic Turkish nation. They're pan Turkic organizations, so they want

(02:03:26):
to join together all the Turkic peoples in one kind
of renewed Turkish empire. Right after clap to the Soviet Union,
they called for this revived empire that would unite Turkic people.
They like many of these extremely right wing violent organizations
have their roots in anti communism right in the Cold
War and specifically and something called Operation Gladio, which was

(02:03:48):
a sort of anti communist guerrilla training supported by the
CIA and other groups. They began as government condoned and
a sort of sort of deny government forced to use
against the left right. I'm not going to be able,
like I can't detil every think the Gray Wolves are down,
and this isn't what that episode it's about. I do
want to explain one incident. It's maybe one of the

(02:04:12):
most heenous things that they're known for, and it's called
the Marush massacre. Are you familiar with this? Sharene?

Speaker 3 (02:04:17):
No, I'm not.

Speaker 4 (02:04:18):
Actually, Okay, a little little history for you. So in
December nineteen seventy eight in Karaman Mirash Karaman Marash in Mirash,
you'll hear those two terms used both right, like Karaman
I think means hero in Turkish. There was a battle
there in the early part of twentieth century. I think
it was in the First World War, and so they
added like hero to the start of the town. But

(02:04:39):
Alavi people don't tend to use that when they talk
about the massacre because it seems a little weird to
be like a great town where this horrible massare occurred.
So you're here both it's mrs, but s has a
little diacritical mark, so it's ah noise. The massacre starts
in seven ninety seventy eight, when an anti Soviet movie

(02:04:59):
is being shown in a movie theater in town and
someone throws a bomb into the theater. Right Communist brouts
were blamed for this. It's a little unclear if it
really was them or someone who who wanted to start
some drama by pretending to be them, if that makes sense, right,
So many Alavi's Alavis are a group of kurd Are
you familiar, Sharen?

Speaker 3 (02:05:19):
I was actually just trying to rhy myself because I'm
really not familiar with this sect because I know it's
completely separate from Sunni Islam. Is shea Islam? Is it
more like Sufiism. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I thought.

Speaker 4 (02:05:31):
They're like a twelve Sufiist with syncretic elements from like
uh like veneration of nature, and they have this sort
of idea of sainthood. Right. I probably used a lot
of words that people aren't super familiar with. So can
you explain to Sufism and then Sunni and Shia maybe.

Speaker 3 (02:05:48):
So maybe you're familiar with the two different main sects
of Islam, which are Sunni and Shira. The main difference
between the two, if you want to really boil it down,
is who they believe these cessor should have been to
the prophet Muhammadu. The shi has believe that his cousin
and his son in law Aidi should have been the successor,

(02:06:10):
versus the Sunnis don't believe he needed a successor at all,
and it was more just like passing down his teachings.
There's a lot of history behind that, and there's a
lot of drama and violence, but that's like the most
simple way to put it, and it kind of grew
from there. The Sufism sect, on the other hand, is
a little different. It's described as a contemplative school of Islam.

(02:06:32):
That aims to develop an individual's consciousness of God through chanting,
recitation of litanies, music, and physical movement. Maybe you know
or you've seen the Sufi like whirling dervishes. It's basically
a form of like physical active meditation for them. So
it definitely differs from both Sunni and Sushia Islam. It's

(02:06:53):
more in a way spiritual. Is that is that a
decent summary?

Speaker 4 (02:06:57):
Not for me? Yeah, I think I think you've done
a great job. And Sufi's are like broadly Sunny, I guess,
and Alavites are like there are twelves and seven is
which is like to do with the amount of people
you think are the the imam's successes to Ali, which
we don't need to go into I don't think a
very great depth, but I guess Alavites would would fall

(02:07:17):
into the twelve a camp in not traditional twelve Shia.

Speaker 3 (02:07:22):
That's what the V you're saying, the V al yes.

Speaker 4 (02:07:25):
As opposed to Ala whites, right, another ship al whites
is very different?

Speaker 3 (02:07:30):
Yeah, yes, Like I feel like it's very confusing because
they sound so similar. But Ala whites they're they're considered
disbelievers by the classical like Sunny and Shia theologies. They're
their own separate group. It's like a religious sect that
like kind of splintered off from early Shi'ahism in the
ninth century.

Speaker 4 (02:07:50):
And they are the sector which the Asad family yes belongs,
and many other military families in Bathistsiria belonged, right.

Speaker 3 (02:08:00):
Yeah, when the Bathist party like led by half said
Bashar's dad, when he took power, the Alo Whites in
the military sect or the Alo white sect in the
military were really supportive of that regime. And I feel
like it's a big reason why he gained popularity and
was able to like overthrow the government.

Speaker 4 (02:08:21):
Yeah. But yeah, Okay, so that's a little breakdown of Islam.
I know, it's good.

Speaker 3 (02:08:27):
There's just so much like like little details that I
know I will miss, and it's just it's so much
more complicated. But yeah, there's just many sects that stem
all from the one religious book of the Quran, and
then just shit happens. I don't know what else is.

Speaker 4 (02:08:46):
Well, maybe we'll explain it in another day for people
because they do think like I went to school at
a very woke time in the United Kingdom's history where
you could do Islam as your like religious studies. Wait
really yeah, yeah, it's because Tony Blair in the wokness crazy. Yeah, No,
it's cool, it's really good. I land a lot.

Speaker 3 (02:09:03):
Well, so what did what did I miss? You tell me?

Speaker 4 (02:09:05):
No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not here to fucking
I'm serious. I am absolutely not here to tell you
what you go right around. I think you did an
excellent job. Shia comes from like the party of Ali, right,
That's what the word means.

Speaker 3 (02:09:20):
And I think that's the main reason why Sufism is
more associated with Sunni Islam. F I'm being honest, because
that's like the main tenet of being Shia is that
you believe that Ali was the successor. And so I
think anything that is not that usually is more under
the Sunni umbrella.

Speaker 4 (02:09:36):
Yeah. I think sometimes you'll see it like as a
third like Sufism is his own thing. Yeah, Germany, like
more Muslims in the world are Sunni than Shiah. I'm
not going to do a thing that people do where
they go around naming the governments which are one or another,
and like, I don't think that's very useful. So let's
go back to nineteen seventy eight in Marash right these

(02:09:56):
Alavis for reasons that we have just explained up as received.
A they are Kurdish right, so they're not Turkic, and
B they are perceived to be heretical by people with
a more conventional Sunni Islam or some people, I should
say so. The day after this bomb, guys of a
left wing cafe in town is bombed and two leftist

(02:10:19):
teachers are murdered on their way home from school. Later,
at their funeral it's attacked by a mob of Turkish nationalists.
Right later that week, exes start appearing on the doors
of the Alavi homes in this area of town, which
is predominantly Alavi right. They made announcements to the mosques

(02:10:39):
saying that communists and Alavis are burning your mosques. You
should attack them and kill them well. And on the
twenty thirty December, crowd stoked buying comprised of the gray
Wolves rampaid through all the neighborhoods. Children, women and men
were murdered in their homes and their bodies were thrown
in the street. Women were raped, an injured people removed
from the hospital beds and murdered were burned alive in

(02:11:01):
the furnaces of their own homes. Estimates of the amount
of people who were murdered vary from like one hundred
and eleven, which is the official government number, to one
hundred and fifty which is sort on the British Alaviu society.
Five hundred and fifty something houses were burned to destroy
nearly three hundred businesses were looted. Writer as is Tunk

(02:11:22):
my oppointing, I got that wrong. I'll try my best,
who's written a book about the massacre, believes that the
Alavis were killed for refusing to assimilate to the Turkish
language and culture, and he adds occurs to not the
only victims of the attack, progressive and leftist Turks who
had opposed the official policies of Ancro Wolves included. The
trials for this massacre actually continued until nineteen ninety one.

(02:11:46):
So it happened in nineteen seventy eight, right now, it's
a long time. A total of eight hundred and four
people were put on trial, which kind of shows you
the scale of the mob that you have.

Speaker 3 (02:11:56):
Was it mostly the gray Wolves?

Speaker 4 (02:11:58):
Yeah, So it comes out of the HP, which is
this Turkish nationalist party, right and it's generally attributed to
the Gray Wolves as like causality. And when you get
these massive crowd violence things, it's not like everyone's a
card carrying member necessarily. You'll hear people say that they
consider there to be like state or organizational complicity beyond it.
It wasn't a spontaneous thing, right, and that that's an

(02:12:20):
allegation that's sometimes made. Twenty nine people were sentenced to
life in prison for this by nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 3 (02:12:27):
Out of eight hundred and four or twenty nine percent.

Speaker 4 (02:12:29):
Yeah, and all of them were released in nineteen ninety two. Okay,
it's part of an anti terrorism law. Now it's a
good time shream. Do you know who will not commute
your life sentence? Oh my god, they won't do it.

Speaker 3 (02:12:43):
Well, whatever it is.

Speaker 11 (02:12:44):
Yeah, all right, we're back.

Speaker 4 (02:12:57):
We're moving on from massacres thankfully. So we're talking about
the Gray Wolves, right, that's where they come from. Today,
the party that they were sort of founded by their
MHP is allied with Erligan's party, and they've continued their violence,
and particularly they've begun to focus on Kurdish people. Right
last year, groups of them in that Diaspa could be
found in Belgium attacking Kurds who they found to be

(02:13:19):
celebrating the Kurdish New Year right, celebrating the year often
with fire outside. It's pretty fucking easy to see who's
doing it right, and they were attacked. You could see
videos of this if you scroll far enough back on
my Twitter timeline you'll see I've shared some of them.
Twenty fifteen, they protested and burned Chinese flags and attacked
people who looked Asian, to include Korean folks and folks

(02:13:40):
who certainly were not Chinese, in response to the Chinese
government span on Turkic wigas fasting during the month of Ramadan.
They also opposed Russia due to its collaboration with a
SAD and its attacks on Syrian Turkmen. Some Gray Wolves
have gone over to Syria to fight. They're fighting against
a SAD right with Turkmen units. I guess perhaps their

(02:14:01):
most famous incident in the war was in twenty fifteen
when they shut down a Russian plane was shut down
and the pirate parachute out and then they machine gunned
him while he was parachuting down. WHOA yeah. So they
pretty strongly opposed to the Russian support of the assad rasion.

Speaker 3 (02:14:20):
Yeah, I mean there are one of the many reasons
why I really get frustrated with all these different sects
that are like anti Assad, and I am also anti Sad.
But then they make it so complicated because they're terrible people,
and so it's not just the rebels and these citizens
of their own country trying to stand up against their government.
It becomes this larger political clusterfuck that gets hard to

(02:14:45):
keep track of, and I think that's why it's gone
on for this long. It's not simple. It's not just
like government versus people anymore. It's just too many elements.

Speaker 4 (02:14:54):
Right that you have people fighting within their revolution and
the government constantly exploit those divisions, right. Yeah. So yeah,
as I said, the Wolves have significant support in the
Turkis Jasper, and they represent the largest right wing movement
in Germany, which is pretty impressive when you consider like Germany. Yeah,
like Germany is not known for not having much right

(02:15:15):
wing Go ahead, Green, you're looking.

Speaker 3 (02:15:17):
I can see there's a question inside you. I'm just okay,
because so the Gray Wolves believe in the superiority of
the Turkish race, correct, that's correct, And you're saying that
they are also big in Germany. I feel like Germany
for a time also considered themselves to be the.

Speaker 4 (02:15:38):
True Sine. There are some things that they share. Yeah,
it does feel a little bit on the nose, doesn't it.
Yeah it does, Yeah, it does if it makes a difference.
In Austria, the gray wolf salute is banned. Oh whoa,
we're going to get into the gray wolf salute. Imagine
making a little wolf with your hands. Right, you're right,
that's they took that. That's like a shadow puppet. Yes, yeah,

(02:15:59):
really that's not fair. Yeah no, yeah, you're no longer
you do. We're gonna learn about the solution. So far,
if not familiar, your big finger and your a little
pinky finger up in the air. Your other two fingers
are touching your thumb.

Speaker 3 (02:16:12):
It's almost like the six six to six rocker sign,
like yeah, but yeah, it's not it's such a shadow puppet.
I feel like I've done that as a kid. That's
not fair. They can't take a shadow puppet. Whatever they've
done worse.

Speaker 4 (02:16:25):
Sharene's hard right youth that is coming out. So if
you weren't familiar with the Grabels before and their salute,
you might have become familiar with them this week when
a Turkish footballer received a two day band for flashing
the salute after scoring when the team beat Austria in
Euro twenty twenty four. Turkish fans responded to the band
by giving the salute on mass at the quarterfinals. So

(02:16:47):
that was the next game, right, Yeah, yeah it was.
It was a scene. Like people have obviously drawn the
comparison to the previous German movement, which thought one race
was better than the other races. Right, but seeing a
whole crowd of people doing that disturbing. Yeah, it's concerning.
They did it in a game in Germany, so the
salute's not banned in Germany, but right. And then the

(02:17:08):
Turkish president Rep. Type Herd Gun postponed his plans to
visit asba Jahan and attended the game after the suspension
to show his support for the team. Right. He defended
the player, saying he'd merely expressed his excitement after scoring.
Germany was big mad about this. In the defense, they
summoned the Turkish ambassadors to Foreign Ministry to explain what

(02:17:28):
the fuck was going on? And it has resulted in
considerable amounts of violence across Europe. Right, we saw in Austria,
we saw in Germany, we saw in Belgium where there
is a large Turkish and often a large Kurdish yeaspora. Right,
because of the tensions between these two groups, which the
football has increased, then we saw like street fighting between
these two groups in predominantly migrant neighborhoods. Right. But I

(02:17:52):
don't want it's episode to just be about the football
or the Turkish participation in the Syrian civil War. I
want it to be about what's happening to Syrian refugees
in Turkey today. So many Turkish people have come to
recent the Syrian refugees who relocated there since the started
the war. Estimates range from three point one to three

(02:18:12):
point five. I've seen four million, evidently, Like they have
a land border, right, Turkey and Syria. So some of
the people crossing will have come without being documented, whereas
others will have come in the more formal process and
be documented. Right. So whatever, it's millions of refugees, I
think that's what matters. They are largely baselessly and evidently

(02:18:33):
baselessly in some cases accused of causing the economic troubles
and include low wages and inflation inflation exceeded seventy five
percent in Turkey in May. They have also been blamed
for the earthquake that happened if every twenty twenty three,
which I'm not quite sure how like who or what
the process exactly that they're postulating is there.

Speaker 3 (02:18:54):
That's crazy.

Speaker 4 (02:18:55):
Yeah, yeah, you just clear things that people generally can't make,
earthquakes happen. So across the political spectrum, we've seen support
grow for sending these refugees home. In twenty sixteen, Turkey
began to accuse the SDF of ethnically cleansing Arab areas
in Syria, and the UN refuted these accusations. Right, But

(02:19:17):
in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, and in twenty nineteen,
with the explicit approval of President Trump, the Turkish military
and its proxies attacked the SDF and seized territory inside Syria. Right,
Operation Peace Spring and Olive Branch. In these areas, Turkey
has attempted to resettle Arab refugees.

Speaker 9 (02:19:38):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:19:38):
This is why we can't understand anti Syrian sentiment in
Turkey without understanding Turkey's involvement in the Syrian Civil war. Right,
it's trying to create what it calls a safe zone,
and in this safe zone, it's trying to take the
refugees that it's people have decided they don't want and
relocate them back into a country which is at war.

(02:19:58):
Turkey has already resettled Syrian rec Fujis in this safe zone.
But obviously some of them have been in Turkey for
more than a decade. Their children have gone to school
in Turkey, they speak Turkish, they've learned a new language,
they've learned a new alphabet. Right, they have lives there.
So not all of them are just taking the chance
to Yeah, let me get straight back to Aleppo. For
very obvious reasons, people don't want to go back. Since

(02:20:20):
twenty eighteen, a cost of living crisis in Turkey has
been leveraged by the right to stoke anti Syrian sentiment.
Research found that in twenty twenty, only twenty three percent
of Turkey citizens would accept a Syrian bride or groom
into their family or consider having a Syrian as a
business partner, and only thirty one percent would want to
have the child educated in a class with a Syrian
in it.

Speaker 3 (02:20:40):
That is yeah, that makes me so fucking mad.

Speaker 4 (02:20:44):
One of the things I've come across with is doesn't
by any means apply to all Turkish people. I've met
some very cool Turkish people who I like very much
that people who are ultranationalists in Turkey. America has its
fair share of bigots, right generally, they know that it's wrong.
They're like, say it with your whole chest of the
certainly the anti Syrian sentiment that I've heard expressed online

(02:21:07):
from Turkish people, it's not something that like it's considered shameful.
They'll just they'll just fucking say it, which is kind
of wild. No, it's scary, Like, yeah, it's very scary.

Speaker 3 (02:21:20):
Like if you've raised your child in Turkey and that's
the only that's their first language essentially, or that's the
only thing they know, that's just one of the most
unsafe places for them to be there. Yeah, that's scary
and not fair.

Speaker 4 (02:21:32):
Yeah, And like I know, I've met lots of Kurdish
people who, like, you know, they come in and to
the United States right where I'm helping out the border,
and I'll greet them in Kurdish. And like I was
talking to a guy the other day and mc Curdish
is by no means great, but it took a little
class and can say some words. And then also a
dude walked around the market with me every morning in
Cambichelow and just pointed at vegetables and shouted. So I'm

(02:21:55):
pretty pretty good when it comes to like the eggplant spectrum.
So I'll greet them in command gee and they will.
They only speak Turkish, right, Like, it's not that they
could just drop back. And I'm sure that's true for
kids who would have grown up speaking Arabic in Syria
if they went to school in Turkey.

Speaker 3 (02:22:11):
So that's a language, and it's also like not necessarily
something they wanted to happen. I think that's something that
really frustrates me. It's like Bashar started attacking as people
and they needed somewhere to go. Turkey welcome them. Yeah,
And when you resettle and you make a home somewhere,
it really feels like, especially now in this world, like
if you're a refugee, it feels like you're always going

(02:22:32):
to be kind of displaced in one way or another. Heartbreaking.

Speaker 4 (02:22:37):
Yeah, best you're like temporary.

Speaker 5 (02:22:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:22:40):
After the earthquake in twenty twenty three, which folks will remember,
we did a little fundraiser for World Central Kitchen. Syrian
refugees were accused of fluting a lot on social media.
Turkish Twitter had trending slogans like immigrants should be deported,
just straight up saying it. Syrian refugees were kicked out
of like tent camps and left homeless. They faced verbal abuse,

(02:23:01):
which trying to act as services. Separate shelters were set
up for Syrian refugees, like literally like they couldn't be together, right,
Resentment simmered amongst the groups. Yeah, I read some NGO reports.
One of the things they say is that like women
who were refugees, especially women who run their own preferred
not to drink water because they didn't want to go
to the bathroom, like they were afraid and they wanted

(02:23:23):
to stay in their tents. And like, well, yeah, that's
something I've seen in other settings too, but like it,
it's obviously that's a pretty fuck situation to be in, right, Yeah,
in a hard place and you're choosing to dehydrate yourself.
MNGOS later reported that refugees did not receive mobile container
homes until displaced Turkish residents received them, and that refugee

(02:23:44):
women in particular experience violence in these container camps, right,
that's when they're they're dropping like chipping containers for people
to live in because all the how they's filed down
because of the earthquake. Many Turkish refugees have a sort
of temporary protected status, so that temporary protected status only
allows them to live in the provinces that they arrived in,
and many of those provinces are obviously border provinces.

Speaker 5 (02:24:07):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:24:07):
Initially, many folks had come Syrian folks that come to
Turkey hoping that they could then continue right. Turkey kind
of bridges between Asia and Europe, right, so they had
hoped that they could go through Turkey right from east
to west and then and then continue into the European
Union preps and you live there. But that didn't work, right,
Many of them found themselves stuck in Turkey and not

(02:24:28):
even able to leave the province that they lived in.
After the earthquake, Turkey lifted those those restrictions on movement,
and you saw tons of Syrian folks traveling around Turkey
and being like, whoa like is Stumbul, How cool is
this like? Having lived there for ten years? Right, But
they couldn't leave their province before for this generation of
Syrian some of them, like I was reading some of
their like social media, Like some folks I think meaningfully

(02:24:50):
became felt more Turkish when they were able to access
so things. But other folks they went back to Syria
to visit family, they were briefly allowed to do that.
They weren't allowed to do that before. But it also
broadened the resentment against them. I think it's fair to say.
And in the twenty twenty three presidential election, there wasn't
really an option that wasn't hostile to refugees. At Agam

(02:25:11):
was probably the least hostile, but still hostile. Neither did
the TURKEYEU deals to prevent further migration westward help right,
So all of this just continues to turn up the temperature.
Between January and December twenty twenty three, over fifty seven
thousand Syrians were deported. According to Human Rights Watch, these

(02:25:32):
deportations took place with the authorities quote pressuring the border
authorities to list the majority of border crossings as returnees
or voluntary. Turkey's voluntary returns are often coerced returns to
quote unquote safe zones that are pits of danger and
despair that's quote from Adam Kogle, who's a deputy Mid
East North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

Speaker 3 (02:25:54):
It's weak.

Speaker 4 (02:25:54):
Yeah, that's pretty bleak, right, like, oh, look, we're going
to volunteer you to go back to Aleppo or a
free do you know who'll not force you to return
to a country that is well decade long siver to
be bes surprised.

Speaker 3 (02:26:07):
I'm not gonna lie.

Speaker 4 (02:26:07):
Yeah, that's what I strike to do. Shrine. Just when
you think it couldn't get any worse, to hit you
with a terrible ad pivot. We're back and I want
to talk about the most recent outburst of tension. There

(02:26:30):
have been outburst of attension, outbursts of violence against Syrian
refugees before in Turkey and twenty twenty one springs to mind,
but recently this all came to a head in early
July when a Syrian man was accused of molesting his
seven year old cousin in a public toilet in central Turkey,
which is a pretty fuck thing to do. The guy
was arrested, the young girl was taken into protective custody

(02:26:53):
I think, along with her mother, but it didn't stop
violence exploding. Then the town whard has happened. That night,
cars were destroyed, Syrian shops were attacked, and homes were
set on fire. The next night, the violence spread in
the border city of Gaziantep, which has like a twenty
five percent Syrian population. A man was stabbed. I've seen

(02:27:13):
the videos of like teenage boys, like I don't know
if they're dead or unconscious, but they're certainly not capable
of responding, and mobs of people are stamping on them,
kicking them, and it's pretty horrible stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:27:26):
Yeah, the videos I've seen of the the riots and
the moms are really terrifying.

Speaker 4 (02:27:31):
Yeah, Like it's petrifying to think of like a mob
of people coming for you because of who you are,
where your parents came from, with nothing you can do
to defend yourself. Right. Turkey's Interior minister said that four
hundred and seventy four arrests have been made, and Urdigan
did condemn the violence, but also blamed the opposition rhetoric,
which like the opposition to him, Yes, the opposite to him. Yeah,

(02:27:54):
when he himself has said it is they're going to
try and send a million more people back to Syria. Right. Unsurprised,
several nights of these programs have led to anti Turkish
sentiment in areas of Syria that are controlled by Turkey
and its proxy forces. Right. Indeed, there's very proxy forces
in some cases turned on their Turkish backers, and you
could see on social media. Again I shared some of them,

(02:28:15):
like numerous videos last week of SNA so that Syrian
National Army fighters firing on Turkish positions, tearing down and
burning Turkish flags, and even like mobs attacking Turkish civilians
in a Frien right, which is one of the cities
that Turkey captured from the SDF. You can say in
another Turkish occupied areas too, demonstrators tried to storm the

(02:28:38):
headquarters or Turkish backed administration. SNA fighters withdrew from their
frontline positions to set up roadeblocks and tack Turkish bass.
Dozens of people stayed to sit in in the Al
Hayya Square in Afrene. Again, these are not tensions have
popped up overnight, right, This just happened because mobs in

(02:28:59):
Turkey attacked Syrian refugees. But this was kind of the
cork popping, if you like, and one of the things
that has caused tensions to increase in recent weeks is
this sort of detente between Asad and Turkey, Right, So,
in response to these protests, Turkey shut off the internet,
closed border crossings, and it sent more troops into the area.

(02:29:20):
Masses of people were arrested and people were charged with
things like desecrating national symbols of Turkey, which like again
that this is not in Turkey, right, this is in Syria. Yeah,
but in the area occupied by Turkey.

Speaker 3 (02:29:32):
I think anytime a government or an occupying power like
shuts off Internet, that is terrifying to me. Yeah, because
you know, they're trying to do something they don't want
you to see.

Speaker 4 (02:29:44):
Yeah, totally. Fortunately, it's twenty twenty four and like there's
only so far that they can go. Like I've seen
lots of videos from those protests, but yeah, they're trying
to stop people organizing. They're trying to stop them and
the world seeing.

Speaker 3 (02:29:55):
It's more so the act that that power like choosing
to do so purposeful and that's like a choice.

Speaker 4 (02:30:03):
Yeah, totally, Like, yeah, everyone knows what you're going for there. Yeah.
On the fifth of July, detainees who arrested during protests
in northern Aleppo, including a child, were forced to film
themselves with a Turkey flag behind them and apologized to
the Turkish government and people for burning the Turkish flag.
One of the videos obtained by the Syrian Observatory for

(02:30:23):
Human Rights showed a child under pressure admitting to quote
burning the turkeysh flag and apologizing to the Turkish people
before kissing the flags. Chris, Yeah, again, when people kiss
the flags on TV, it's not a great sign. I
did see videos of some of the SNA who appear
to have captured some Turkish soldiers making them kiss their
flag as well, like the Syrian Revolution flag. So I

(02:30:47):
want to talk about these Turkish safe zones, right, so
called safe zones, I guess they're anything but safe. They've
been seized through military incursions and their rife with corruption
in human rights abuse. It is both by Turkish back
forces and Turkish forces directly. And you'll be familiar with
some of this stuff from what Israel does in Palestine,

(02:31:08):
specifically the destruction and theft of ancient olive orchids. You
can see it like listed on the Syrian Observatory of
Human Rights if you go to like they organize the
areas by the name of the Turkish Mission, so like
Operation Peace Spring Area or Euphrates Shield or Operation Olive
Branch is a real fucking on the nose name. And
you can see like ten olive trees were cut down

(02:31:30):
and sold for firewood, or like people reselling homes that
were sees from civilians. Right wow. And I've spoken to
people who have left a free in my time in
KURDISTWN and Syrian Kurdistan and in the United States, and
I've spoken to people who were there as part of
the SDF and flat backwards, and like a lot of

(02:31:53):
them have confirmed the same stuff, right, destruction and property
theft of homes and houses, and then like there's evidence
of there's evidence of corruption in these areas today, right,
sexual violence, even torture. So it's pretty bad. There are
a ton of links that will be on our sources
page if you want to read more. I don't want
to sort of traumatize you all on your way to

(02:32:15):
work here. I'll just traumatize Serene. Yeah you're working, that's.

Speaker 3 (02:32:20):
Another day at work.

Speaker 4 (02:32:21):
Yeah, it's a normal day. Most of the protests seem
to have died down now, but the situation doesn't really
seem to have become any more stable in Turkey, just
Like many other countries, politicians have rented a right response
to an economic crisis and blame refugees for problems caused
by capitalism. Reports abuse of Syrian refugees caught crossing the
border of Rife and some of their data appears to

(02:32:42):
be leaked in the last few days. I can't confirm this,
but I've seen this from a few places right that
data from a registry of refugees has been leaked, which
would obviously be very concerning, like if we look at
things like the Marash massacre, we look at like the
totality of this sentiment and the people doing it. Tensions
in the Turkish occupied areas of Syria remain high, with

(02:33:02):
people there strongly opposed to the Turkish oppression, seizure and
sale of their landed homes, and the potential of at
a time between the two countries. This weekd Agan said,
we will extend our invitation to a sad With this invitation,
we want to restore Turkey Syria relations to the same
level as in the past. Our invitation may be extended
at any time. That's a readout of an interview by

(02:33:25):
Turkish media that's obviously translated.

Speaker 3 (02:33:28):
That's some vague. It's like, at what point in the past.

Speaker 4 (02:33:31):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, I think it's the correct
number of relations to have with the side is non yeah,
and so like any more than that is bad. There
are also reports that Turkey is going to open crossings
between the territory it is controlling and regime territory, right.
There are protests about that. I saw in a lepo.
Syria has said that normalization can only happen after Turkey

(02:33:53):
agrees to pull out the troops that it has. Turkey
is opposed to this because it doesn't want the SDA,
which it believes to be an extension of the p
k K, which it considers to be a terrorist group,
to have territory along its border, right, And the FDF
still does already have territory along its border. Right, Like
Cami Shlow where I was, you can go on top

(02:34:13):
of a torp building and look across the border. But
that does seem to be kind of a red line
for Turkey. So I don't know where that leaves us, but.

Speaker 3 (02:34:20):
Yeah, that does seem something that they would never want
to do. So but shar really called their bluff there, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:34:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is which is kind of funny,
given that he's not exactly in a strong position to negotiate. No,
but maybe Turkey has given up on the revolution in
Syria and it just wants to join with US at
and as long as they can both say fuck the Kurds,
and that's enough for both of them, right, But like

(02:34:48):
if they can both get together on a state level
and be like, fuck these cords, and therefore, I guess
the cost of that would be sending these refugees home
for Turkey, which is I guess not because it's to
be a cost by some of them. And that's millions
of people, right, millions of people who like something. In
some cases, people are worried about having a citizenship removed,

(02:35:09):
like they went there to be safe. And of course
it's a violation of international law, and of course that
doesn't matter because international law is as real as unicorns.
But it leaves millions of people in limbo, right. Urdigan
said he's promised to send another million refugees back, but
that's not possible without the cooperation of the regime. Really,

(02:35:30):
I guess he could just pump them all into like
a free or whatever. But he's pumping people into a
situation where people are already actively opposed to the Turkish
occupation there. Right, if he pulls out his troops, he's
going to have to accept that there will be Kurdish
forces on his border, which he hates. So it's a
question of, like what value does he assigned to the
safety of these three million refugees, And it doesn't seem

(02:35:52):
to be very high. And like every time when we
talk about migration, that people are eaving terrible things, right,
that that's why people tend to end up as refugees.
But there's never been a I don't think a more
pronounced global crackdown than I've seen right now. It's not
like these Syrian refugees, they can't leave their province, right.

(02:36:13):
I've spoken to hundreds of people who have left Turkey
in the last six months year. It's very hard, it's
very expensive, and lots of the people who have fled
from Turkey only went there for a few months, right,
and then kept moving. Every country has made it harder
than it ever was to immigrate. Like even you know
that we talk about the Syrian refugee crisis in twenty fourteen,

(02:36:34):
twenty sixteen, unleashing three million people, right that they need
a safe place to go. If you try and force
them back to Syria, it's either going to be an
absolutely terrible humanitarian disaster or we're going to have more
refugees entering the refugee system at a time when governments
all around the world are indifferent at best to the

(02:36:57):
survival of refugees, right, including the fucking buying government in
this country. Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's pretty big.

Speaker 3 (02:37:07):
Yeah, but uh, that fucking sucks.

Speaker 4 (02:37:09):
Dreams it does, fucking sucker. I will be back in
two weeks to talk to you about what Turkey is
doing in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of a ruck where
they are bombing Curtis Dan freedom gorillas, they're setting up
roadblocks and again like making massive incursions into another country.
So that'd be great, we can you can all look

(02:37:30):
forward to that over the weekend. Yeah, I guess I
guarantee that there are refugees, probably refugees from Turkeyosyria in
the town where you live, or in the nearest big
town to where you live, and you can do something
nice for them this weekend if you want to.

Speaker 3 (02:37:45):
Especially if you live somewhere where it's hot as shit,
you can I don't know, help out, drop off water
somewhere or something.

Speaker 4 (02:37:54):
Yeah, Like and I've just been talking to Kurtis refugees
who are in like the Northeast, you know, I spoke
to and they're not Kurdish or or Turkish, but talk
about to Some refugees are in Scranton, famous for Joe
Biden always talking about it. But yeah, there are folks
everywhere who need your help. You can make a difference.
I guess the fucking government isn't going to Joe Biden,
isn't going to Kamala Harris isn't going to either, and

(02:38:15):
neither is fucking Hillary Clinton. I'm damn sure of that.
So it is only you, and that doesn't need to
make you desperate. You can do something. I spoke to
so many, Like another of our podcast listeners was at
the border on Monday and I met them and they
were lovely and we drove around and help people, and like,
you just need to take that yourself, and like, you

(02:38:38):
can do something. But the first step is, you know,
lugging off Twitter and getting out there. And like I
promise you you will feel less hopeless if you start helping.
Even though it's only one person, it makes a difference.

Speaker 3 (02:38:52):
Yeah, that is something that James did tell me that
I think about is because I get really overwhelmed with
the idea of how many people need help in this world.
And I'm just like a big softie and I really
just overwhelms me, like what can I what can me
little me do to help anything? But Dreams is right.
If you change even one person's life, that's one person's

(02:39:14):
whole life. That's a big deal. And so I think
it has to start there. And if there are many
more of you doing the same thing, then that's how
actual change happens. Because yeah, our government is useless. But yeah,
listen to Dreams. Dreams is wise and.

Speaker 4 (02:39:28):
British, please, I listen to because I'm British, because that
will lead you down some dark paths in terms of
gender ideology.

Speaker 3 (02:39:36):
I mean maybe I meant that you sound wise because
you're British.

Speaker 4 (02:39:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's what I got get for me. But
just be nice to people and they take by someone
fucking lunch this weekend if you have the money, if not,
make them lunch, you know, make some rice. It's cheap.
And yeah, you can make a difference. No one fucking
else will if you want to talk about being a leftist.
That's great, But like I have so much more respect
for people who want to do stuff, So do stuff

(02:40:00):
and the rest will sort itself out. Like you don't
have to argue with people about the mind you share
of ideology. It doesn't matter. Like help helping people matters.
Making the world better matters. Say do that. It's Friday.
Hopefully you can use your weekend to do something nice
for someone.

Speaker 1 (02:40:15):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 5 (02:40:21):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 3 (02:40:24):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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