The Absolute State of the World

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Dock your bollocks in the doctor's galoshes, you landlocked cocklands.

Welcome to the Blind By Podcast.

If this is your first episode, please consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

Thank you to everybody for the kind words regarding last week's podcast.

Where I interviewed the wonderful Sean Ronan,

who is an expert on bird sound.

I haven't smoked a vape in nearly 30 days now.

I stopped for a few days while I was feeling unwell a couple of weeks back.

And then I just stuck with it.

Let's see how long I can go without smoking my vape.

I don't particularly crave it.

I only ever had a tiny bit of nicotine in my vape.

And I don't really notice any health benefits.

Now that I'm not vaping.

Like I used to smoke cigarettes years ago.

When you give up cigarettes, you fucking know about it.

Your sense of smell comes back.

Your perpetual cough disappears.

But there isn't really any of that with vapes.

But something I am noticing, which is quite nice to bring into my self-awareness.

I used to reach for my vape and take a pull out of it as a type of soothing.

Whenever I'd experience

the feeling of frustration.

A frustrating thought.

Maybe thinking about a job I had to to do, or the frustration of being worried about something, or the feeling of frustration I'd get when I'd think of something frustrating that's outside of my control.

I would reach for my vape and take a pull whenever a feeling of internal frustration would come up in me for the little nicotine hit and also as a soother.

Just like a baby uses its soother.

Me as an adult, experiencing a mild feeling of internal discomfort, a frustrating emotion, and then temporarily distracting myself from that frustration by reaching for my vape and taking a pull.

And now that my vape isn't there, I'm noticing and sitting with feelings of frustration instead.

Fuck, I better respond to that email that I got yesterday.

If I don't respond to it today, I'll have missed the window of response and now I'm being rude.

I hope I don't upset the person I need to respond to.

That's a frustrating thought that then brings in

slight feelings of anxiety, worry, insecurity, powerlessness and a desire to procrastinate.

All very very low level, slightly unpleasant emotions that can be very easily quenched.

very quickly quenched by reaching for my vape and soothing myself by taking a pull.

Now I don't have that anymore and I'm sitting with these feelings.

I notice the feeling of frustration.

I accept it and then I go, I don't like this feeling.

I better write that email.

I better respond to that email.

So I go and do it.

Tiny little task and then I feel fantastic afterwards.

So that's a strange little thing I've noticed.

since I've stopped vaping.

It's one less distraction from the hundreds of moments of slightly uncomfortable emotions that I experience throughout my day, that we all experience.

And something I work on and strive for every day is to

have the self-awareness to notice, observe, and accept uncomfortable emotions rather than mindlessly reacting to them or

avoiding them by using self-soothing behaviors as a type of defense mechanism and I do that for for a feeling of meaning if you want your day to be filled with meaning you actively practice noticing and observing all your emotions when I can do that with a feeling of calmness and safety then I'm not an autopilot I've lost entire days, weeks, fucking months

to being an autopilot.

An autopilot is when a lot of us go through periods of being an autopilot.

It's when you're functioning, you're getting on with your day.

But while getting on with your day,

your thoughts are generally

worrying about the future or worrying about the past.

Consistent loop of negative thinking while going about your day,

while managing to do your daily tasks.

And if you're in autopilot long enough,

you can feel kind of numb,

disconnected from your emotions,

disconnected, not rooted in a sense of self, not having a strong sense of who you are or what you even like or what you don't like.

an erosion of a sense of self and a distorted experience of time

and an entire day can go and you might not remember it or remember what happened or you'll get today confused for yesterday and being in autopilot there's not a hell of a lot of meaning you don't derive a sense of meaning from being an autopilot so I find that practicing deliberately

deliberately practicing to notice and observe and accept and sometimes question

my emotions as they pop up.

Practicing that like exercise that takes me out of autopilot.

But my my fucking vape that wasn't helping any of this.

Nothing to do with nicotine.

Nothing to do with my lungs.

The physical act of having this thing, this soother, that was that was my go-to.

That was my autopilot.

Whenever a mildly uncomfortable emotion or

frustration would pop up, I'd reach for that vape and miss an opportunity to observe my emotions.

I was struggling to find a hot take

or a topic for this week's podcast because I find myself

stifled,

intellectually and emotionally stifled, by the actions of Israel in Lebanon.

Last Wednesday, Israel targeted Hezbollah in Lebanon by covertly fitting a load of pagers with explosives.

Thousands of pagers with explosives.

These were apparently only delivered to Hezbollah fighters.

Then they all exploded at once.

Nearly 3,000 people were wounded and injured.

42 people died, 12 of those people were civilians, including an 11-year-old child, a nine-year-old year old girl called Fatima Abdullah dead what we all witnessed is an unprecedented terrorist attack it's an act of terrorism it's not a surgical precise attack on Hezbollah fighters

Israel turned several thousand people into unwitting suicide bombers and let them go about their lives.

I understand a lot of the pagers were apparently only being used by Hezbollah fighters.

But these these

people who are also Hezbollah fighters, if you look at the footage,

they're just wandering around markets, they're at home, some of them were driving cars on public roads and then thousands of pagers blew up and a bunch of civilians were killed.

indiscriminately.

There's nothing surgical, there's nothing precise about turning thousands of people into unwitting suicide bombers.

So we all witnessed an act of terror and war crimes.

And again, I'm not pulling this stuff out of my arse.

This isn't my opinion.

The attacks were war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

The Nazis were so evil and so brutal and so cruel during World War II that after World War II,

a lot of countries and experts and legal experts got together to work on an international humanitarian laws for how human beings should be treated even during war.

International law that everyone could agree upon and that if anyone would be to to violate these laws then they're held to account in the International Criminal Court.

So the Geneva Conventions that were set up in 1949, which were hu a

internationally agreed upon humanitarian laws and standards for war.

As mad as that sounds, that's what the Geneva Conventions are.

So Article 51 in the Geneva Conventions, it strictly prohibits indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

That's specifically considered a war crime.

Fitting thousands of pagers with bombs and having no idea where those bombs are going to go off is an indiscriminate indiscriminate attack on civilians.

And that's what happened.

That's exactly what happened.

That's why there's dead civilians.

Because it was an indiscriminate attack in a civilian area.

So that's a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Very clear.

Now on top of the Geneva Conventions, what you also have is

the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings.

Now that's much later than the Geneva Conventions.

This is 1997.

But it's a United Nations treaty for identifying acts of terrorism, knowing what they are, what they look like, how to classify them, so that the people who are doing terrorism can be brought to justice.

That's

a United Nations treaty.

Israel is in the UN.

So in this International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, it's very clear, very clear, the use of civilian devices like a pager in a non-military zone with the intent to spread fear falls under the definition of terrorism.

That's a terrorist act.

And the thing is with terrorism, and again this is, I'm going to go with the UN General Assembly definition from 1994.

It's an act that's aimed at causing death.

but also for the purpose of intimidating or frightening a civilian population.

Now, I'm not a legal expert.

I know fuck all about the law.

When you start getting into the nitty-gritty of law, there's very, very specific, like multiple specific definitions for words.

And you really need to be initiated into that language and process to understand it.

But not this shit.

Things like the Geneva Conventions...

This is quite democratized information.

The Geneva Conventions are designed for anybody to understand.

They're very, very clear.

You don't need to be a legal expert to understand the Geneva Conventions or the UN Treaty on Terrorist Bombings.

Now Hezbollah also, they launched rockets at the Golan Heights in July and killed many civilians, including children.

And if that was targeted at a residential area at civilians, then that's an act of terrorism.

That's awful, that's heartbreaking.

But that still doesn't give Israel the right to collectively punish the civilians of Lebanon and to murder a nine-year-old girl in an act of terrorism.

And are Hezbollah terrorists?

It depends on who you ask and when.

Because around 2017, Hezbollah were fighting ISIS on the Lebanon and Syria border.

And they successfully beat ISIS.

They protected Lebanese Christians from ISIS in 2017.

So if you wait if you read

Western news reports about Hezbollah from 2017,

you'll see them being referred to as armed resistance, an armed group victorious against ISIS.

And now if you read Western media about Hezbollah, they're called terrorists.

So the definition of who gets to be called a terrorist can be quite flexible.

depending on who it benefits.

Israel are not called terrorists

in the media ever, even though they commit acts of terrorism.

Now it's worth noting too, Israel haven't officially confirmed or denied that they were responsible for the Pager attacks and the Walkie-Talkie attacks.

The reason they haven't officially confirmed or denied is because it's an act of terror.

But it's also, it's an unprecedented act of terror.

As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of an act of terror is to terrify, to terrify and frighten a civilian population.

Now everybody in the world,

now we all have to be worried about our electronic devices.

Pagers were targeted.

Our communication devices.

Devices that we have with us all the time.

Devices.

Our phones are

now practically intimate objects.

That attack sends a message to the world.

A very covert, unconscious, anxious fear that if you use your phone to criticize Israel, who knows it might blow up.

We can do that now.

That specific threat was used multiple times online to anyone who criticized the attacks.

I watched footage of a US politician, I can't remember her fucking name, but

somebody was following this politician, filming them on the street trying to get them to hold them to account to say what what's your opinion do you condemn Israel's attack on Lebanon do you condemn this attack and the politician turned around to the person and said have you got your pager on you right now which is that's a violent threat that's a threat so that the terror of these attacks wasn't just collective punishment on the people of Lebanon as an indiscriminate attack.

It was a message to the world, a frightening message to the world that if you criticize Israel, your phone might blow up while your family are around you.

And if any, if any other group had done this, if ISIS,

imagine fucking ISIS

blew up a thousand pagers in America or England or mobile phones.

It would cause global economic shutdown.

New laws, new safety standards would be brought in about how to make electronic devices, new security checks and supply chains would be brought in.

Why when you go to the airport anywhere in the world can you not carry liquids or gels over 100 milliliters in your bag?

The greatest, most annoying

inconvenience of going to the airport.

For fuck's sake.

It's just it's just a big tube of tote paste.

Let me have it.

There's nothing more time-consuming, inefficient, idiotic and annoying than the 100ml liquid roll at the airport.

But why does that exist?

Because in 2006, Al-Qaeda had a plot to make bombs out of like 2 liter bottles of Coke.

They were going to get liquid chemicals and disguise them as soft drinks.

and they would be able to make bombs out of these things and bring them on transatlantic flights and this was a plan and it never happened because it was thwarted.

Now why were fucking why we're al-Qaeda doing that?

Not just to kill people on airplanes but for terror.

To destabilize the West, to destabilize capitalism.

To make people go I don't want to get on an airplane because someone might blow it up with a bottle of Coke.

This was unprecedented.

It had never been heard of before.

It was very creative.

And now 18 years later

you're buying a small tube of toothpaste and a tiny deodorant and you're putting it in a little plastic bag.

18 years later still.

Well Israel are after putting plastic explosives into pagers and and deploying them along civilian supply lines into a civilian population and they all blew up at once.

That's insane.

That's mad.

That's unprecedented.

The world has been successfully terrorized into

having the reasonable fear that our laptops, our phones, anything that has a battery, can now explode in a very targeted way if you upset the wrong people.

In the United Nations Protocol on mines,

booby-trapping civilian devices is illegal.

You can't turn...

You can't turn like like a grave or a place of worship into a bomb.

You can't turn children's toys into a bomb.

Kitchen utensils, you can't...

Sick or wounded people like bodies, you can't turn those things into a bomb.

And everyday household civilian objects like a pager or a mobile phone or a laptop.

International law exists in the UN that These things are illegal and the reason these things are illegal is so that a a civilian population, even when there's a war, understands with confidence that certain shit is off limits.

If I pick up this telephone, this isn't gonna blow up because this army here, they're a member of the UN and the UN does not turn telephones or pagers into bombs.

It's the law, it's international law.

Israel violated that in an act of terror.

And if you're saying, what about Hamas?

What about Hezbollah?

They're not UN states.

They're not United Nations states.

They're not countries that are supposedly democracies.

They're not nation states that have signed treaties, agreements, that are members of the United Nations, that have agreed to abide by international law under the condition that they be held accountable if they breach international law.

That is supposedly what Israel is.

So they have to be held to a higher degree of account.

As I'm recording this now,

so last week last week was the the the Pager attacks and the walkie-talkie attacks today

Israel have been bombing the shit out of Lebanon they're bombing a different country supposedly targeting Hezbollah rockets but they're doing exactly as they've done in Gaza they're bombing civilian areas 569 people have died today 569 human beings are dead today

in Lebanon mostly civilians around 30 children, a UN aid worker and her three-year-old child were killed.

We're seeing collective punishment, collective punishment on a civilian population.

And Israel are saying, well, Hezbollah are using human shields.

We've seen that argument in Gaza.

We know it's bullshit.

It's mass casualties.

It's collective punishment of a civilian population.

It's war crimes.

But did the what did the media widely condemn the fucking pager attacks last week?

Did they fuck?

The pager attacks were portrayed by mainstream media, by a lot of mainstream media as precision attacks.

One, a Sky News article opened with

it was like something out of a James Bond film.

Like today, today regarding the fucking 500 people dead today in Lebanon with all the airstrikes, BBC, BBC headline, Cold Military Logic Takes Over in Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

And what that's known as is that's called passive voice.

It's passive voice in the media.

Like active voice is the chef cooked the meal.

Passive voice would be the meal was cooked by the chef.

That's a simple example.

But headlines about Israel, it's

Palestinians killed during explosion.

Palestinians die during airstrike.

As if their deaths just happened and weren't caused by the airstrike and doesn't mention who did the airstrike.

And if you want to see the if you want to see the media use passive versus active voice, if you want to see it happen right now, contrast,

you just look at a headline about Russia and Ukraine and you look at a headline about Israel and Palestine.

I'm just going to pull up a BBC headline from eight hours ago about Ukraine.

Three killed in Russian airstrike on Kharkiv apartment.

Terrible, awful, incredibly sad.

The headline has let me know: three people have been killed.

They're killed, they didn't die, they were killed in a Russian strike on a Kharkiv apartment.

A bad thing has just happened to innocent people, and it was done to them by someone who was doing something bad.

Now,

let's find a Lebanon headline on PPC.

UN Refugee Agency says staff among those who died.

So some UN refugee staff were murdered by Israel.

A woman by the name of Dina Darwich and her three-year-old son were killed, were killed while in their apartment by an Israeli bomb.

So if you want to hear the media use passive voice,

Anything to do with the reporting of Israel, no matter how horrendous, they'll use passive voice.

And when they report on Ukraine, they'll use active voice.

Very clear, very concise.

Here's Russia, they're doing war crimes, they're murdering people.

And that's what Russia are doing.

That's what Russia are doing.

And Russia have committed war crimes.

But Russia have also

received that the harshest possible economic sanctions from the entire Western world.

Russia has effectively been shot out.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, fuckloads of businesses pulled out of Russia.

McDonald's, Starbucks, the lot.

Everyone got the fuck out of Russia.

Russian banks were cut off from the swift international payment system.

Makes it very difficult for Russian banks to do international business.

The wealthiest individuals in Russia had their assets frozen.

Energy sanctions, bans on importing Russian oil, coal, gas, travel restrictions for Russian citizens.

I remember that there was...

I think there was a soccer match that didn't happen because the team wouldn't play Russia.

What happened to Russia is what's supposed to happen when a country commits war crimes.

That's the international order doing what it's supposed to do.

Adhering to Geneva Conventions, adhering to UN charters.

Where are the sanctions on Israel?

There's none.

There's fucking none.

There's the opposite of sanctions.

There's billions in financial aid.

Why?

Why is that happening?

There's no ridiculous conspiracy theory or anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish people controlling the media or controlling the world.

Israel is just, it's like a big aircraft carrier in SmackBang in the middle of the Middle East.

Israel being safe and powerful upholds Western power, Western dominance, the global north.

Russia threatens this.

Russia threatens the global order.

Russia threatens the West.

It threatens the global north.

None of this has anything to do with human rights, our civilians, or little toddlers being killed.

Nothing.

It has to do with propping up Western power, Western dominance, and capitalism.

That's what it has to do with.

Otherwise, Israel would be treated the same way that Russia is getting treated.

That's simple.

Why is the media, why is the vast majority of our journalism towing this line?

But to look at that,

you have to critique, you have to critique what a capitalist state is

using

Marxist theory, like the theory of Louis Althuser, who was a Marxist philosopher.

So Althuser, who I've mentioned before, because it's a very helpful analysis, Althuser says that a state under capitalism maintains control by the economic apparatus, the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus.

So the first is economic apparatus within a state.

What does that mean?

It's the system of production and the economy, work, wages, capital, consumerism.

It's also the factories and corporations that are making billions by selling weapons to Ukraine and Israel.

All of this supports the dominance of a ruling class in a capitalist state.

Then after that you've got the repressive state apparatus.

So that's your police, military, legal system.

And then finally you have your ideological state apparatus.

That's schools, religion and media.

So the media's role under capitalism is to promote the ideology of capitalism and promote the health of the state under capitalism.

We all live in the global north.

The West

led by America.

The Western sphere that's led by America is the only superpower.

The wealth of the West depends upon the exploitation of the Global South.

And what I mean by that is, our phones, our laptops, our claws, the consumerism that we live under, our cheap access to goods and foods, can only exist in our society when people in the global south are completely exploited.

When the raw materials for our phones are made in mines in the Congo, or where your claws are made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh.

All that shit exists, so we can have too much choice.

That's why that exists.

It exists for consumerism, not our needs, but our wants.

This massive Western dominance depends upon access to natural resources and the free flow of goods.

It just so happens that the Middle East is very, very important for that specifically.

You've got oil.

and you've got the Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal is just underneath Israel.

It's how goods flow from east to west.

Without the Suez Canal, ships coming from Asia would have to go around Africa to reach Europe and America.

The Suez Canal, it's just underneath Israel.

It goes through Egypt.

Hugely important.

Everything flows through the Suez Canal.

From natural resources, goods, products, food, whatever the fuck you want, electronics, it all flows through the Suez Canal.

Remember the ship got stuck in the Suez Canal over the pandemic?

And it took about two years before we could all get microchips.

That's the reason the Houthis in Yemen are attacking all the ships, attacking oil tankers that are trying to get through the Suez Canal.

The Houthis are attacking ships near the Suez Canal and then forcing them to go around Africa to get to Europe and America.

If anything happened to the Suez Canal, it would potentially cause the collapse of Western capitalism.

It would stop the flow of goods and natural resources.

But guess who guards the Suez Canal?

Israel.

Think of Israel as a gigantic aircraft carrier for America.

America and every country under the American sphere of influence benefits from Israel being highly aggressive, unpredictable, pro-Western, attack dog, smack bang in the middle of the Middle East.

And that's why Israel can do what it wants.

And it won't receive Western sanctions.

It can violate Geneva conventions with impunity.

And most of the ideological state apparatus of Western media will speak about it in a passive voice.

And the other thing too, just off the coast of Gaza, a couple of years ago, they found a bunch of natural gas.

So there's a lot of natural gas off the coast of Gaza that Israel and the West are going to want to get their hands on.

And also there's a very strong possibility that Israel is going to build the David Ben-Gordian Canal off the coast of Gaza, which would compete with the Suez Canal.

The other thing to

the other really dark thing that you have to consider with fucking Israel and Ukraine too,

war is very, very good for business, especially in the neoliberal age where everything is pushed towards private interests.

Put it this way:

America has given Israel, I think, $40 billion, $40 billion dollars in aid this year where does that money come from that money comes from the American taxpayer so the American taxpayer

the US government gives forty billion to Israel of American taxpayers money what does Israel do with that forty billion it takes that forty billion and then it buys

weapons from private US companies.

So what you have there is a transfer of wealth.

You have a transfer of public tax money, billions, into the private interests of

private fucking defense contractors in America, who also provide a lot of employment.

This isn't conspiracy theory, it's out in the open.

Similar with Ukraine.

Like, you know where President Zelensky is today?

President Zelensky right now, well yesterday when this goes out, he's in a town called Scranton, Pennsylvania in America.

So President Zelensky of Ukraine is in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Scranton is in what's known as the Rust Belt of America.

Used to have a lot of coal mines in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

A lot of Irish people, Irish people moved to the coal mines of Pennsylvania in the 1800s.

The coal mines of Pennsylvania in the 1800s were very unequal places.

Workers were exploited.

I've done full podcasts on this, but Irish people went, emigrated there in the 1800s and worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and formed violent groups like the Molly Malones.

And Irish people fought the mining companies, physically fought the mining companies to get modern workers' rights and unions and things like that in the 1800s.

So this led to a large working class.

In towns like Scranton, Pennsylvania, throughout the 20th century, a large working class of people who worked in the mines and had jobs and had unions and had healthcare.

And then this was all dismantled.

Under Reagan, under neoliberalism, 1970s onwards.

But under Reagan, the the Western exploitation of the global south went into fucking sixth gear.

And American jobs and industry, they disappeared.

Because those jobs where they had unions and rights, that was too expensive.

So under Reagan and deregulation and union busting, those jobs disappeared.

They went to countries in the global south, like parts of South America, Central America, where workers could be exploited.

And now Americans get cheaper goods because workers are being exploited in the global south.

But now there's no jobs in a place like Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And Scranton, Pennsylvania becomes the Rust Belt.

The huge area.

of America around the Great Lakes where there was once an industrial heartland and now it's gone and you've got massive unemployment.

Well what started to creep into the Rust Belt was the military-industrial complex.

So, now you don't have coal mines anymore, but you've got companies like Lockheed Martin, fucking Northrop Gunman.

These huge private military companies are now providing employment in the Rust Belt areas.

So, that's why you've got President fucking Zelensky from Ukraine.

He's in Scrantville, Pennsylvania today, touring a munitions factory.

So, fucking Zelensky and the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro,

they're in a factory that makes bombs in Scranton, Pennsylvania and they're signing the bombs and they're doing a big press conference.

It's a media thing.

But what does that tell you?

It tells you that

Scranton, Pennsylvania,

this Rust Belt area, this working class area, now a lot of these people have jobs.

They have jobs and they're getting paid in America working for defense contractors who are making billions and billions of dollars worth of ammunition to give to Ukraine to fight Russia.

Now what Russia is doing is horrendous.

Russia is invading Ukraine.

Ukraine deserves international help.

The point that I'm trying to make is that this is the world we're living in.

It's very good for business.

It's very good for Western power.

You have billions of taxpayers' money, American taxpayers' money, being funneled to Ukraine.

Then Ukraine are spending that money back in America in private military companies.

They're probably not paying tax.

Maybe they have corporate headquarters in Dublin.

I don't know.

But ultimately, you have this massive transfer of public wealth into private hands, which is a cornerstone of neoliberalism.

But then on top of that, on top of that, you've got somewhere like Scranton, Pennsylvania now, a lot of people are in employment.

Like I've mentioned before, like this is this is why the American police became so militarized.

It was to keep ammunitions factories in business in America so there'd be employment.

So America just kept making tanks and guns, too many, way more than they needed.

And then they were just giving them to police forces for fuck all.

And then the police became militarized.

I think a theme I'm poking at this week, there's something called the Overton window.

It's a way of looking at public policy, right?

The Overton window is what's considered in a society to be acceptable or unacceptable and how that changes over time.

So do you see what I've just described there?

There's a lot of private military companies.

And wealth is being transferred from the taxpayer to countries like Israel and Ukraine.

And then that money is being funneled back into private interests and what's being sold is weaponry.

What I'm describing there is a situation where war and death and destruction is financially incentivized.

Billions can be made from war and death and destruction.

That's happening.

That's what's happening.

That's now within the Overton window.

That's considered

not only acceptable but normal.

You don't question it.

That's the way the world is right now.

What I've described there is called the military industrial complex.

Now within the Overton window, this way of analyzing policy to see what's acceptable and what's unacceptable, there's different stages in the Overton window.

There's unthinkable, radical, acceptable, sensible, popular, and then policy.

The military industrial complex.

The idea that you have these huge private defense contractors that make bombs bombs and guns and tanks for money as part of capitalism to profit from war.

That is now policy.

That's way through the Overton window.

Before World War Two that was unthinkable.

It was disgusting.

It was absurd.

Weapons were made by the government when needed during war as an emergency.

Then during World War Two it went from an unthinkable absurd idea to a radical idea.

The US was in a massive war, World War II.

So you started to see cooperation between the government military and some private corporations and their factories to make arms.

And then you get to 1961 in the Cold War.

The president of America, Ike Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was not only a Republican American president, so he was conservative.

He'd also been a military officer, so he was in the military.

When Eisenhower left office, when he stopped being president in 1961, do you know what he dedicated his final speech to the American people to?

He gave a speech warning the American public about the military-industrial complex.

It was the first time that that phrase had been used publicly.

Eisenhower basically said,

I was a fucking five-star general, supreme Allied commander.

of the military in World War II.

Since the Cold War started, we don't know whether we're going to be fighting Russia or not.

We're continually making weapons.

He warned the American public in 1961.

He said, you must not allow a situation happen where consistently building weaponry and bombs becomes a private for profit industry.

You can't have an economy that relies upon continually building weapons because then that incentivizes war.

and it risks peace.

No one listened to him.

As the Cold War developed, he started to see the rise of private military companies.

It went from being sensible.

By the 1980s it was a popular idea.

And now, right now, it's policy.

It's within the Overton window.

It's completely normal that billions can be made from war and death.

Completely normal.

America could stop Israel tomorrow.

if it just stopped giving them weapons.

Same with England.

Israel can't commit genocide in Gaza if it's not being armed to the teeth by America and by the West.

But now you have to ask yourself where is the incentive to stop

when billions and billions are being funneled from tax money into private interests.

Sure, that's perfect.

That's money for nothing.

The reason I'm speaking about the Overton window too is

The Overton window is

how policy

changes and shifts over over time.

How something starts off being unacceptable and radical to becoming policy.

And the media plays a huge part

in an idea going from being unacceptable to becoming policy.

The media does this by manufacturing consent.

Taking a phrase from Noan Chomsky there.

Manufacturing consent.

Our consent is manufactured through the media.

And from what I can see, when the media reports about what's happening in Lebanon or reports about what's happening in Gaza

and it reports it with a passive voice, then they're manufacturing consent.

They are shifting the Overton window from unacceptable to acceptable to policy.

This week, the UN, the UN warned that they're concerned that international order is going to break down.

And what they mean by that is the conventions, the conventions and rules that were established after World War II, such as obeying the International Criminal Court, not committing war crimes, holding war criminals to justice, not violating the Geneva Conventions, not performing acts of terrorism.

If you're a supposedly democratic state and a member of the UN.

After the Pedra attacks in Lebanon, the UN gave this warning that they're afraid that this international order is currently breaking down.

And

I don't really know what this week's podcast is about because I'm working through so many ideas.

But I'm using things like the Overton window

or Altuser's theories to try and understand what's going on.

When Israel

turns a couple of thousand people into unwitting suicide bombers and commits what's considered a terrorist attack under an international law, When Israel does that,

and then the media

reports it as if it's a precise, incredibly clever James Bond style spy move, when the media does that en masse, then they're manufacturing consent for that behavior to be acceptable.

Or when they use passive voice to describe what the International Criminal Court is calling genocide and war crimes.

They're manufacturing consent.

They're trying to shift the Overton window.

In 1899, and then again in 1907,

there was the Hague Conferences.

So this is 1899 and 1907.

So this is before World War I.

But the Hague Conference was set up.

It would have been...

It's similar enough to the United Nations.

It was a bunch of nations getting together and deciding what's acceptable in warfare.

Now this is is 1899.

In 1899

it was considered internationally unacceptable to drop a bomb from a hot air balloon during war.

In 1907 after airplanes had been invented the Hague Conference came together again and they considered it utterly unthinkable, unthinkable.

that you you could use these new things called planes, that these things could be used in warfare to potentially drop bombs on people from the sky.

In 1907 there was a conference to outlaw this, to ban it.

Whatever happens with war, you cannot drop a bomb from a plane.

That is insanity.

That's unthinkable.

And then the Overton window slowly shifts and consent is manufactured.

and the media plays its part in propaganda.

In 1907, it's illegal to drop a bomb from a plane.

And then in 1945,

Hiroshima gets obliterated with an atomic bomb that's dropped from a plane.

The first machine gun was invented in 1884.

It was called the Maxim gun.

The Brits invented it.

They'd only use it in Africa.

The Brits would only use the first machine gun on indigenous people in Africa because they didn't consider those people to be humans.

But the Brits considered it unacceptable and ungentlemanly in war to use use machine guns and fellow Europeans or white people.

That's a shift of the Overton window as racist as it is.

Things that are now policy that we consider normal were once wildly unacceptable, wildly disgusting and unacceptable and would have caused outrage and repulsion.

And now we're getting used to the sight of butchered toddlers on our phones every day.

Forty years ago you could live your life without ever needing to see a dead body.

Since last October, I've seen gorgeous little beautiful toddlers ripped to pieces every week on my phone.

And I'm working very, very hard, very hard to not allow myself to become desensitized to it.

To make sure that every time I see that,

that I take the time to pause and reflect.

and consider the horror and the humanity of it every single fucking time and to use it to inform my values.

Similarly with that the fucking pager situation in Lebanon.

It's a great story.

It's a great story.

At the end of the day the meet the media is a form of entertainment and the story of

the Mossad or whoever fitting bombs into pagers and like Trojan horsing them into a country and then these these pagers blowing off people's testicles.

That's a brilliant movie.

That is a fantastic film.

It's going to be made into a film.

I promise you, in five years' time, they're making that film.

But I refuse to allow myself to be drawn into that narrative.

I won't do it.

I need to think of the innocent people who didn't consent to exploding fucking phones.

It's time for an ocarina pause, I think.

47 minutes of me talking about that.

I need to publicly digest things this week.

Because I'm not I'm not seeing I'm not seeing the things that I'm speaking about being represented in media.

And I'm left just really fucking disappointed and outraged.

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so support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast if this podcast brings you solace entertainment distraction mart whatever the fuck has you listened to this podcast please consider supporting this podcast directly via the Patreon page all i'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

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I adore making this podcast.

We're coming up to seven years now.

At the end of

we're October, are we September?

The end of October, we're going to be coming up to seven years of this podcast.

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A couple of gigs to promote.

Vicar Street.

Do you know what?

Vicker Street in November on the 19th.

You know, that's selling pretty quick, actually.

That's selling pretty quick.

Vicar Street.

I love my Vicker Street gigs.

My Vicker Street.

What is that?

A fucking Tuesday.

It's a Chuesday in Vicker Street.

I know you might be thinking, I'm not going to see a gig on a Tuesday.

Trust me, I have my gigs, I have my Vicker Street gigs and the nights that no one else wants.

So I'll put them on on a Tuesday or a Wednesday because you don't need to have pints.

You don't need to have a night out.

Like it doesn't need to be a Friday or a Saturday.

When you come to my podcast on a Tuesday,

it's really relaxed.

It's much more like going to the cinema or going to the theatre.

So I deliberately put my my Dublin podcasts on the nights nights that nobody else wants so that we can have a really fucking relaxed

beautiful chilled out evening I love my Vicar Streets so the next one there is on the the 19th of November um just announcing a Galway gig

and in 2025 on on the the 9th of February I'm playing leisureland

I know that sounds mentally insane.

I'm gigging in a place called Leisureland.

In Galway.

I've never gigged Leisureland before.

I don't know what the fuck Leisureland.

My only context for Leisureland is going there on a school tour when I was about nine and I think there's a swimming pool there but obviously they do gigs.

They must do gigs if I'm gigging in Leisureland.

It's not gonna I don't know what the fuck I'm sure that's a it's I'm sure they have a theatre in there or something.

It's not gonna be in a swimming pool.

But anyway, look, Galway.

I don't do enough gigs in Galway.

I don't do enough gigs in Galway.

So, Galway, I'm in Leisureland on the fucking 9th of February.

Then, I'm up in Belfast on the 21st of February.

No, I'm in Drada in Crescent Hall on the 21st of February 25.

Then, on the 28th, fuck it, I have three gigs in February.

On the 28th, I'm in Belfast up in Waterfront Theatre on the 28th of February.

Then,

fucking

Australia, New Zealand tour.

That's nearly sold out, right?

That's nearly sold out.

The only place that has tickets left is Sydney and Melbourne, the Enmore Theatre and the Palais Theatre, because I've released some extra tickets for those.

So that's all that's left there.

So this week's podcast,

it's it's I consider it slightly scattered.

I don't have answers.

I'm trying to analyse and

I'm trying to understand

the pain that I'm seeing around me in the world.

I'm trying to arrive at an analysis and an understanding that informs my values, my opinions and my arguments so that I can be of some use in some way, even though it can feel futile at times.

Something I want to address just

in my critique of the media.

and what I'm seeing all around me is I'm seeing a general failure.

A failure.

I don't want to use the term mainstream media because when you say mainstream media, you sound like a right-winger.

But I'm seeing a failure the past year in established media, media that I expect a lot better from, to correctly, not even critique, to fucking report,

to report on what is happening and to not be using passive voice.

Especially when what makes this so fucking insulting,

We can see

what you're writing about Ukraine and we can see what you're writing about Israel because it's both happening at the same time and we can all see how you're using two different fucking tones and that helps nobody

especially at a time where you have distrust in the media and distrust in journalism.

Journalism is a cornerstone of democracy.

Journalism is so fucking important.

Accurate, impartial reporting is deeply important, and I'm not seeing enough of it.

What I'm seeing is

the ideological state apparatus doing its thing.

And I stumbled across something this week.

It's more of a curiosity, but

this thing that I stumbled across and my subsequent analysis of it,

it gave me a bit of a feeling of clarity

about the media and why you see so much media towing the line.

It was a clip that kept popping up on my Twitter.

Now Twitter or X as it's known now, the algorithm is insane.

The algorithm is nuts.

So it's a bit more like TikTok now.

So videos just pop up.

I don't know why they pop up.

But there was one video that kept popping up for me.

And it's not relevant to my interests at all.

It's about fashion.

I don't know why it kept popping up.

It's a 20-second clip of a woman in 1999 and she's working in

the Vogue, Vogue fashion offices, and she's talking about fashion.

I'll play a small clip just so you can hear it.

The clothes that people wear here in the day are probably clothes that normal people would wear on their most glamorous night out of the year.

Do you know what I mean?

Who's gonna go wear a chiff-on Dolt Shake Gavana skirt like this to the office?

Only me or any someone who works at vogue so i i i'm not too interested in in what that person is saying i don't know why the algorithm recommended it to me i don't give a shit about fashion one of the gifts one of the gifts that i have as an autistic person is

sometimes i can have a sense of pattern recognition that borders on the supernatural i'll just get tingles i'll get tingles and I'll follow a thread and arrive at an answer that feels kind of supernatural.

It feels like I could time travel.

It's like I already know the answer.

I'd be like,

how the fuck did I arrive at that from this?

How did I know that?

And that happened with this clip, right?

So

that woman's name is Plum Sykes.

She's an assistant working in the Vogue offices.

Vogue is a big fashion magazine.

It's in 1999.

And all it says on the clip is Plum Sykes,

Assistant to Anna Wintor at Vogue.

That's all it is.

So something about her accent

and her name.

It just made me want to go, I need to find out who this person is.

There is a very specific posh twang, a very specific posh twang, and the fact that her name is Plum that made me go,

I bet you she's related to someone.

So lo and behold, her great-grandfather was a British civil servant by the name of Mark Sykes.

And Mark Sykes drafted what was known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916.

One of the most

destructive and damaging documents and decisions

of the 20th century.

We're dealing with it right now.

I've mentioned the Sykes-Picott Agreement before.

So basically, so before World War I, I'm going to make this as simple as possible because this is fucking huge and really complex.

Before World War I,

the area of the Middle East, it was all under the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

So the Middle East was one empire, the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

When World War I kicked off, the Ottoman Empire allied with the Germans.

Then they lost.

So Britain and France got together, right?

So Mark Sykes, this woman in the fashion clip, her grandda, Mark Sykes and a French fella called Peacot, right?

They drafted the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

What it did is

it invented the modern Middle East as we know it.

The Middle East was a big area.

Countries such as Iraq, Jordan,

Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, these countries didn't exist.

These These countries did not exist.

You've got this giant desert area,

right?

With multiple different people.

You've got Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, you've got Kurds, you've got Turks, you've got Jews, you've got Arabs, you've got Persians, you've got the Middle East, you've got a lot of separate people and separate cultures.

So what the Sykes-Picot Agreement was, is it was a secret agreement between France and Britain where they went to the Middle East and said, we're going to carve this up.

We're going to invent some countries here.

We're going to create the boundaries of all these new countries only to benefit France and Britain because there's this new shit called oil.

There's this new stuff called oil.

And oil is going to be a pretty big deal in the 20th century because this is fucking 1916.

So they went and invented countries.

They invented Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, a fucking Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait.

They invented all these countries.

They pulled them out of their arse, right?

Without consulting the indigenous people.

They made these countries and the boundaries deliberately to destabilize the region and to create conflict.

We're going to carve up.

They did the same shit in fucking Africa.

We're going to carve up this area in such a way that it will piss everyone off and then there will be perpetual conflict and fighting between all these different groups of people in the Middle East.

And while there's perpetual fighting, we can just take all the resources.

It will never be stable.

It will never be a democracy.

There will always be fighting and we're going to take all the resources.

It also very much solidified oil.

oil and petrol as being the fuel for the 20th century.

Electric cars existed in 1910.

We didn't necessarily have to go the route of fossil fuels.

So it's a massive oversimplifation, but it is fair to say that

the current state of the fucking Middle East, right?

The Brits and the French did that with Sykes-Picot.

They set it up so that the Middle East

would never really have peace.

Like that's 1916.

What happens in 1917?

The Balfour Balfour Declaration.

The establishment of mandatory Palestine.

The British creating

a homeland for Jewish people.

What is now Israel?

That happens a year afterwards.

And again, to use a quote at the time from

the British military governor of Palestine, and he said this in 1919.

The intention of mandatory Palestine is to create a little loyal Jewish ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.

So you have there from the start, 1916-1917, the Brits and the French basically going, here's the Middle East, first off let's carve it up for the natural resources to benefit us as colonizers, then let's carve it up in such a way that everyone is always fighting.

But then right smack bang in the middle, we're going to create this country called Mandatory Palestine.

The Zionist Jewish people are going to move to this area.

They'll be pure loyal to us in Britain because we did this for them.

And now we've got our loyal area in the middle of the Middle East that can work as an attack dog.

So I go back to looking at this fucking fashion clip and this lady called Plum Sykes talking and I'm going, holy fuck, your granda, your grandda.

carved up the Middle East.

Have you any idea how much misery your fucking grandda is responsible for?

Holy fuck.

And this isn't her fault.

You know, this video clip is from 1999.

She's working as an assistant in vogue, very high-up job in the media.

And then she's there as an assistant to a woman called Anna Wintor.

So then I'll decide, let's look up Anna Wintor for the crack.

Let's see, is Anna Wintor posh?

Oh, she is.

Right.

Let's go looking through her or her ancestors here.

Who's this?

Major General Fitzgerald Wintor.

What did your grandfather do, Anna?

So Anna Wintor's grandfather was a very very high-ranking British Army officer in the late 1800s

and he basically helped Britain to colonize Egypt.

Right?

So do you remember earlier I mentioned the Suez Canal?

Right?

The Suez Canal there in Egypt.

This canal that if you don't have this canal in Egypt, then goods that pass by ship from east to west have to go all the way around Africa.

Well in the 1880s Egypt was like the Suez Canal is in Egypt.

We want this for ourselves.

We want the Suez Canal.

So the Brits came in and says fuck you Egypt.

So the Brits went to war with Egypt and then Britain basically gained control of Egypt.

Egypt became a British colony.

so that Britain could control the Suez Canal.

Well, Anna Winter's

Anna Winter's grandda was a military officer who was hugely, hugely influential in that.

So I'm basically just watching a clip on my phone between two posh British women in 1999 in a fashion office.

And I've managed to look at their family history and I am looking at

both your grandfathers.

Both your fucking grandfathers are responsible for destroying the Middle East.

You've got Sykes Pickott Agreement carving the fucking place up and then you've got Anna Winter's grandda who colonized Egypt to get the Suez Canal.

Are ye fucking for real?

What's going on here?

And then I look more into Anna Winter.

Her fucking brother is the political editor of The Guardian, and Anna Winter is the editor of Vogue.

And then it just starts to emerge.

It's like this is who you have.

This is who you have in very, very

high-powered jobs in the media.

The Guardian is the media.

Vogue is the media.

The direct descendants

of colonizers who literally carved up the Middle East,

their grandchildren are running media.

And that's not conspiracy.

It's not conspiracy theory.

It's class solidarity amongst a very wealthy elite.

That's what that is.

Class solidarity amongst the very wealthy elite.

Like just as an aside, the Sykes-Picot agreement, like I said, Plum Sykes grandda, Mark Sykes, what about the Pico fella?

What about the French fella who was involved?

His grandson ends up as president, president of the Suez Canal Company in the 1960s.

So it's all sewn up.

It's all sewn up.

Generational wealth.

class solidarity amongst the wealthy elite.

That's not a conspiracy, it's class solidarity.

In that one little room in the Vogue office,

both your granddads fucking destroyed the world.

Imagine being so posh that your granddad invented Lebanon, that he just pulled it out of his arse and drew it on a map and gave it a name.

And 500 people are killed today because of tensions.

tensions that you can trace all the way back to the Sykes-Picot agreement.

And then you've Anna Wintor,

whose fucking grandda helped to colonize Egypt.

And Anna Wintor is editor of Vogue and her brother is political editor of The Guardian.

And this isn't unique.

You look at all the media in Britain

and

it's people who you can...

their grandparents were colonists.

Their grandparents had titles after their names.

a very wealthy, posh elite, expressing class solidarity with each other capitalists the very top of the system their grandchildren end up in media sure of course you're gonna get

an ideological state apparatus there that doesn't critique power or critique inequality

you're gonna get something that maintains the fucking status quo and i'm not i'm not blaming plum sykes or anna wintor there or saying that them specifically have anything to do with headlines I'm reading this week.

but it was just a little shocking revelation.

It's like, what are the chances?

What are the two of you in the same room working and publishing?

Look at what your grandparents did.

Holy fuck.

And then I started thinking, what did my granddad do?

He was in the IRA and he used to shoot English soldiers.

And here I am at my

Guerrilla podcast

critiquing imperial power.

Alright, Dog Bliss.

Dog bless.

That was that.

There was no structure to this week's episode.

I'm figuring things out.

I'm figuring too much shit out.

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