4163: WAP (Who Appoints Presidents?)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4163 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world with me Andy Zoltzmann live from London.

I have some bad news.

The introduction to this week's show has been cancelled due to a general sense of existential unease.

As soon as this is rectified on a global level, I will re-record a backdated intro to this show.

Instead, I've got to go straight into introducing the guests for this week's show to help bring me up to date with everything in the world that I've been essentially missing whilst locked away in the cricket bubble.

Joining me from a distinctly non-crickety part of the world, San Francisco, it's NATO Green.

Hello, NATO.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

How's California?

Well,

I had a few drinks last night, and I'm not sure what happened, but I think I might be the president of Belarus now.

Well, that is at last something,

a positive sign for the world.

I think that is

maybe just one little glimmer of hope.

NATO Green as the new Belarusian leader.

You know, I think I'm as qualified as all the other bastards doing it.

Yeah, it will just be quite interesting, NATO, because as

listeners to this show will know, you're

very committed politically and on the left-hand side of the political seesaw.

It'll be really interesting to see, as president of Belarus, how long it is before those principles go out of the window, as history suggests they inevitably will.

I'm committed to organizing protests against myself in my new capacity.

Is it possible to you lock your head to your own desk desk in protest?

Also joining us from London, it's Tiffany Stevenson.

Tiffany, have you

appointed yourself president of any countries this week?

What have I been doing?

I don't know what I'm fit to be a president of, to be honest.

I was late for this podcast and like by two only by two minutes, which is not bad for me.

And Paul said, I cannot believe you're going to be late for something in your own house.

And I was like, you misunderstand.

Chronic tardiness is a state of mind, not a destination.

I don't have to be going anywhere to be late.

That's, you know, that's in many ways a metaphor for all humanity as well.

We are recording on the 18th of August, 2020.

And on the subject of things being late, it's the 100th anniversary.

of Tennessee becoming the last of the 36 needed states to ratify the 19th amendment to give to give women the votes.

As an overwhelming 50 out of 99 members of the Tennessee House of Representatives voted yes to women voting.

That's the 19th amendment.

So clearly America found 18 other things that needed amending before remembering to let half of the population have a say in stuff.

Bearing in mind, I mean clearly there were quite a lot of amendments that needed to be doing

pressingly before that.

But bearing in mind the 18th was about banning alcohol.

It does slightly suggest that women were not entirely top of the American priority list.

And of course, famously, the Second Amendment was to safeguard the right of all Americans to fire machine guns at innocent bystanders.

And that had to be sorted out long before issues such as not enslaving people or acknowledging that women are probably the same species as men.

But still, better late than never.

This day, 100 years ago, of course, it's not unique to the USA.

It's a bit of a speciality of our supposedly sensational species.

But still, America gave f ⁇ its psychopaths and racists the vote before women.

On the 20th of August 1858, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection in a smash hit, a big-selling issue of the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London.

Who can forget that classic issue back in this week in 1858?

Of course, the theory of evolution by Darwin, a theory since debunked by both the Bible and the internet.

So it's 2-1 against Darwin there.

Darwin himself did concede in an interview with the 19th century gossip magazine Bodice that natural selection is, and I quote, a bit shit when you look at it objectively.

It takes ages and most species have still got design flaws you could drive a fucking horse and cart through.

Darwin added that free market economics would, quotes, probably work much more efficiently than natural selection and concluded, if I could buy a dog with wheels that could bark me a half-decent song, I'd fing buy it.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, a free algorithm.

Now,

algorithms have been very much in the news of late.

For those of you who don't know what algorithms are, they do the kind of mysterious unseen shit that used to be correctly attributed to the devil himself in wiser, simpler times.

But we have a free algorithm, an algorithm to help you confirm that you are cool or hot or simply awesome.

Also, a free algorithm to help you work out if you're the kind of person who should be listening to this bugle.

And the algorithm basically goes like this.

Are you currently listening to the bugle?

If no, then no, you're probably a loser.

We want nothing to do with.

If yes, you are listening to the bugle, then you may be the kind of person who should be listening to the bugle.

Next question: Are you enjoying listening to the bugle?

If no, then we don't want anything to do with you.

If yes, you may be the kind of person who should be listening to the bugle.

And finally, are you currently naked in a motorway service station?

If yes, welcome to the show.

Top story this week: American election news, and it's all bubbling up towards a truly terrifying moment in November when the world will open its eyes to find out which nearly octogenarian white man will be in charge of the free world for the next four years.

And this is in many ways, NATO, as our American politics correspondent.

Donald Trump's greatest achievement, he has managed to turn a bumbling, nearly eighty-year-old white guy into a savior of 21st century humanity figure.

I mean, that is essentially the way that Trump has transformed Biden into

a kind of a modern-day messiah.

Is that what he will be most remembered for, do you think?

Yes, I think it'll be on the list.

I mean, you know, Biden has run for president a number of times before and was

always seen as

too inarticulate to be actually statesmanlike.

But, you know, if you low, success is about lowering your expectations, Andy.

Success to fight.

That's what this show has been all about since day one.

That's why I got rid of John Oliver.

He was dead weight, I tell you.

So, are you saying the parameters for what's statesmanlike, are you saying those parameters have now dramatically kind of dipped after Trump's presidency?

You see this now in political debates where somebody will say, like, this person's thinking about running for office, and other people will go, like, they're not qualified.

And then you're like well hang on the president of the United States is talking about injecting people with bleach so

so essentially Biden is very much the overcooked cabbage yeah following the still twitching plague infested rat and fox shit empanada that uh that the Trump regime has been you'd take the cabbage any day wouldn't you

yeah I mean you know I'm a Jew I fancy a cabbage

sprinkle some caraway in sure the Democratic Party virtual convention has been going on this week.

How have you found that, Nate?

Is that a step up to avoid it?

It's considerably less Nuremberg-y than a

traditional convention.

Oh, it's been thrilling.

The Democratic Convention has all the production value of a high school student film project doing an infomercial for a high-fiber diet.

It's been like a greatest hits of political clichés.

I just want to run down the list.

I was keeping a tally of the clichés used.

This is about unity versus division.

The moment has come to deal with systemic racism.

Battle for the soul.

Most cops are good.

This great nation.

Look at these old-ass white people.

When we work together, we can accomplish anything.

The soul of America, shared values, old white people, children's future.

The best is yet to come.

Work with both sides.

Here are some Republicans who support Biden for real.

Swing voters are not made up.

Bring us together again, more in common than what divides us.

Restore decency and dignity to the White House.

And finally, we want someone who will separate families and lock children in cages, but with decency.

Bring dignitas to the White House.

Yeah.

The thing about the Democrats is They're very attached to respectability.

Faced with the dangers of climate catastrophe, pandemic, economic meltdown, erosion of democracy, the Democrats are here with an appropriately respectable level of outrage.

Instead of energizing the nation to defeat the scourge of Trump and Trumpism once and for all, their approach is more like seeing Trump as the dirt on lettuce leaves that can be gotten off our political system by holding it under cold water and sort of gently massaging it until it floats away.

The speeches included the kind of quotes that were as stirring as they were totally totally vacuous.

For example,

former Democratic presidential candidate Corey Booker said, quote, I'm running for president to heal a divided nation.

Aim lower, man.

You're from New Jersey.

In a montage of

former Trump voters giving testimonials as to why they were voting for Joe Biden, one said,

Joe Biden has a detailed plan like unity.

Ah, yes, unity.

So detailed.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's face gave one speech about how his state faced the darkest days of the COVID crisis, while his eyebrows gave a completely different speech about the virtues of slipping into something more comfortable.

Cuomo said that COVID is a metaphor.

On the other hand, former Republican governor of Ohio John Kasich gave a pre-tape speech about how America is at a crossroads while standing outdoors at a literal crossroads.

So the difference between Democrats and Republicans is whether they know what a metaphor is.

I saw that that video and I mean it didn't look like a particularly difficult crossroads and it was more of a kind of you know tracks in a field that did suggest that if you went the wrong way at the crossroads you could just walk across the field and join the other road.

Is that really an appropriate enough does you not need a crossroads where one road leads off a cliff into a shark-infested pit?

Yeah, well, so I looked it up, Andy, where that crossroads actually was.

And

this is perfectly captures what John Kasich was trying to say because John Kasich was standing at a crossroads near his own house and the crossroads diverged from one $800,000 house to another $800,000 house.

That's American politics.

Wow.

What did you think of Kamala, by the way?

You say Kamala.

I say Kamala.

Is it Kamala?

We say Kamala.

You know, she's from here.

She's from San Francisco.

So I've been, you know, she's been in my life for a long time.

This whole, the whole, what they call the Veep Stakes was the most tedious reality show of the last several months with no judges, no audience voting, and no hot tubs that we know of.

Apparently, some Biden insiders felt that Kamala Harris was too ambitious,

which, as we all know, is a key liability for someone being considered for national elected office, is ambition.

Being too ambitious to be vice president of the United States is like being too sleepy for the 17th annual national napping contest brought to you by 1,000 thread count sheets.

So she's the senator from the Bay Area, and so her first elected office was in San Francisco in 2003

when she was elected district attorney, like our prosecutor.

And

what you may not know about San Francisco is that my city is defined by civic corruption,

but in a dumb way.

Like there's not exactly high crimes and misdemeanors, but more like constant, low-level, and stupid graft.

Like we regularly have public officials getting arrested for taking a bribe of $500 and a used bicycle.

We have so much corruption, Gay Pride Parade is a perp walk.

And

this is true.

Kamala Harris is no exception.

Her first run of office came at the crest of a scandal called Fajita Gate,

which was a cover-up of a fistfight among off-duty cops over a bag of fajitas outside a bar in a posh neighborhood.

So

it's the kind of sports bar where people shout while watching lacrosse and dressage.

Do you know what I mean?

And so

our local press has been like very excited about having a hometown girl on the national stage.

Our main daily newspaper has done several articles about like Kamala Harris is the only person on the national ticket with a refined wine palette.

That's very Northern California.

I'm backing Kamala because she's only the fourth woman ever, I think, on a major campaign ticket.

And in her speech, she spoke about her husband and her kids.

And then it was flagged up to me that they aren't actually her kids because they're already grown up and she only got married to their dad five years ago.

So she's a stepmom.

So speaking as a stepmother, I'm behind her because I there aren't that many of us in public life because we're normally busy talking to our enchanted mirrors and poisoning apples.

So, uh, and they could, she, like me, she doesn't like the term stepmom.

I like I only used that for the first time last year when I was like, Oh, stepmum needs a margarita.

And my stepson was like, Oh, god, that's going to be a catchphrase, isn't it?

And I was like, No, I just believe that's child labor we need to bring back from the 50s and 60s, kids making cocktails.

Every nine-year-old should have a signature drink in their repertoire.

Make me a martini.

Put some of your tears in it, you little bitch.

But the only thing that made me cringe slightly was they call her mamala because she hates stepmom.

And I was like, ooh, that's a bit cringe.

But here's the thing: she would have been told or she would have been advised that she had to talk about them in her speech because heaven forfend that we have a vice president who is not seen as maternal, like, and about family, because no single person has ever won a presidency right the thing is you vote for a family you vote for a first family you don't just vote for the president so I think she's been told that she's got to go on stage and do a bit of a speaking as a speaking as a stepmother so that we can all just feel relaxed that she's not a barren bitch that hates kids and you know has no interest in the future of the world

on the subject of Michelle Obama, Trump had a Twitter blast at Michelle Obama's

presumably, I don't know, some alarm went off at seven thirty.

He hadn't insulted anyone for a while.

And Michelle Obama made a very powerful speech, as she often does.

She says, Right now, folks who know they cannot win fair and square at the ballot box are doing everything they can to stop us from voting.

They're closing down polling places in minority neighborhoods.

They're purging voter polls.

They're sending people out to intimidate voters.

They're lying about the security of our ballots.

And I mean, it's impressive that the effort that is going in to

ensure that this election is as corrupt as American elections like to be.

Bearing in mind, this is a system that basically often declares the loser the winner in a two-horse race.

And also, I mean, this has been a lot of criticism for, you know, and we'll touch on the Postal Service issue shortly.

But we should remember, it's often said that people fought and died for our democratic rights.

And we should also remember that some of those people who fought were probably crackpot Republicans who would do anything possible to stop Democrats getting in.

So let's honor their sacrifice, if no one else's.

And Trump himself has claimed this week that he had a conversation with God.

We're still waiting for the official transcripts to be published.

Rumours are circulating that God told Donald Trump to, quote, suck a fat one, before adding, I've read your book and it's even more full of shit than my book.

And concluded, I know it might sound a bit rich coming from me to question you giving influential jobs to people from your own family, but at least my lad had a range of relevant skills.

If God is in touch, apparently he pays debts.

God pays debts, so can you tell him to get in touch with me?

Because I've got a few outstanding ones.

Again, the whole postal voting issue, NATO, is sort of quite hard for

democracy fans to understand.

I mean, obviously, the idea is you should try and make voting as open and accessible as possible.

And the chances of corruption through postal voting is maybe slightly higher than without it, but not significant.

Just talk us through the background to this story.

And Trump basically nakedly saying that he is trying to fix the election.

The polling for Trump is very bad.

And the general consensus is that the assumption is that the higher the turnout, the greater the chance that Trump will lose.

And because of the COVID virus, they are trying to keep people from queuing at the polls for long periods of time.

And so a lot of states are going to vote by mail.

And the other thing you should know about the post office is that there are a lot of black people who work there.

And the workforce at the U.S.

Postal Service is about 20% black, which is a higher proportion than the country as a whole.

And so that's why Republicans hate it.

A public agency that gives black people good jobs and a retirement plan, got to go.

And the post office is also used to deliver medications to old people,

including old white people, which is a core Trump voting demographic.

So, you know, they're a death cult, as always.

The fear on the part of the Trump campaign and the Republicans is they can't win the election fair and square.

And they're kind of like, well, for our next trick, we will wreck the post office.

And

Democrats are very upset about it.

Nancy Pelosi said that she was considering calling the Congress back into session to

discuss it.

And, And, you know, when Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, gets to considering something, you know, look for cover.

Because considering is usually followed by pondering and judging

and some stern disapproval.

So

you never know.

So, you know,

there are stories that they're like physically removing and destroying machines that will sort ballots.

And that then Republicans are saying that any late arriving ballots will not be counted.

So

it's a whole back and forth.

And so

people are charging out as part of their civic duty to save American democracy by buying postage stamps.

So never would have thought it came to this.

Trump tweeted today, if you can protest in person, you can vote in person.

So at least he knows who's going to vote against him.

Like he's acutely aware of all the people who vote against him.

But I read, and I don't know if this is true, that the chairman of the U.S.

postal system is a Trump Trump supporter.

He's given money to the 2020 campaign, and that the Republicans don't want nationalized postal service because they don't want to nationalize anything that will make people think a national health service is a good idea.

I don't know if that's true, but the post office and the NHS are very similar here, so I can understand that concern.

You know, a lot of cues, old people use it more, and there's always people shoving things in your box.

What I'm saying is, I've had a lot of smear tests,

But yeah, like,

is that a true thing?

The idea that the Republicans think a working, socialized kind of postal system is a dangerous, a slippery slope to giving people free health care?

Yes, it is.

And, you know,

wouldn't you like to be able to get to get

your paps mere and mail, mail, a book at the same time?

As long as people change gloves in between, I don't care.

Education news now.

And well, it's approaching that time of year where kids around the world are going back to school.

My son is about to start secondary school, assuming that the entire country doesn't shut down again.

And as discussed last week, exams chaos has reigned here in Britain.

Now, it's not been a huge surprise, and we talked about this a bit last week.

We can update you on it this week since the English A-level results came out, resulting in students from disadvantaged backgrounds being overwhelmingly penalised by an algorithm, then the government U-turning on it, and then going back to teachers' predicted grades.

And I guess it's not a huge surprise that a government of toadying incompetence

has performed with flounderingly cack-headed incompetence in dealing with the issue of exam results in a year when no exams have been sapped.

I mean, inevitably, inevitably, the government has whapped out the penis of blame and started spraying the WASM of culpability in as many different directions as possible, particularly the education regulator

Ofqual.

It's

been

well, I mean, it's quite, again, it's one of these things that is quite hard to explain.

So, Tiff, I'm going to pass this over to you and your

expert

confidante, Scottish boyfriend, to explain the exams chaos to our listeners.

Scottish boyfriend explains a hang.

Fing Tory shite bag wanks.

What more can I say?

All right, short story, fing long then.

Coronavirus stopped the fing world and stopped kids being able to do their exams.

So exam boards and teachers all decided that the teachers who knew the students' abilities better than anyone would be able to award grades based on their past performance amongst other things.

Makes fing sense, no?

Cut to exam results day.

Students have done better than ever.

Now statistically this means some kids got better grades than they deserve but I say f.

They just lived through a fing global pandemic, missed out on proms and their first drunken holidays without parents.

What fing harm can it do to bump them up from a C plus to a B minus?

But no, can he have that?

So they made an algorithm to decide who gets marked down and lo and behold, the majority of the grades that get cut are these for lower-income communities.

Apparently, it's to do with class size or some pish, but at the end of the day, we fing Tarquin, Feharo School of Future Bellens, didn't he get any results downgraded?

Because when a decision by a Tory government affects somebody negatively, it's never a fucking Tory.

Maybe that's just a coincidence.

And yes, I know they've done a U-turn and gied everybody down out of grades, but doesn't he make me like them any less?

Tory Scheitbag wankards

well i thank you for shedding light on a very complicated topic uh to uh uh scottish boyfriends um i think that's probably going to be one of the national parameters one day

the education secretary gavin williamson has refused to stand down after presiding over this uh um quite monumental f up um the former um department of education permanent secretary uh david bell uh said that blaming officials was quote depressing demotivating demotivating and disreputable which coincidentally is Gavin Williamson's Tinder profile

and

he said he's he's going to remain in post and told the BBC I'm determined that over the coming year I'm going to be delivering the world's best education system now can I please issue a message to our government who keep saying their stuff is going to be the world's best world stop aiming to be the world's best let's move past that imperial shit just aim for vaguely competent or probably fit for purpose or reassuringly, not total shit.

Let's just aim for what we can hope to achieve.

I mean, world's best, admittedly, we need to see this in the context of who is Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, allegedly, although he has barely been seen whilst all this shit has been hitting the fan.

And Boris Johnson could take a shit in a bucket and claim to be the world's best basketball player, which I think gives some context to what his cabinet ministers

say.

Boris doesn't know, like, can't give us an accurate figure on COVID deaths.

He doesn't know how many kids he has.

I don't know how we can expect him to get facts and figures correct.

It's not fair.

What did happen, though, on

the A-level results day was, and this happens every year, and it just always stuns me the amount of like rich, connected white dudes who went to private school who come out and go, sitting right here, too.

Who come out and say, Hey, don't worry about exam results.

I didn't do well and look at me now with like no sense of self-awareness at all.

So, people like uh Jeremy Clarkson, who's whose family are like millionaires because his mum like made the Paddington bear teddy bears.

Uh, Ben Fogel, who I did a radio show with and went, Oh, do you know what?

I just relentlessly failed, but people were very kind and gave me another, another go.

He actually said in a radio interview, he went, I got an N in geography, I don't even know what that is.

And I was like, top of a compass, mate.

Start there.

But his,

like, he just went, people just kept giving me another go.

They were so nice.

And I was like, of course, because you're a posh white man, you'll just fail upwards relentlessly until eventually you're Prime Minister.

Like, that's how it works for those guys.

But I do feel there's this like real, this kind of narrative that devalues education and doesn't take class into consideration, which is infuriating.

I get the idea of trying to make people feel better, but in the midst of all of this, it's just like such a shocking lack of awareness.

Well, the fact is, unfair, and I know that having been through private education and have seen the, well, the good sides and the bad sides of it, you know, that I've talked about on the bugle before, I left school, you know, unable to rewire a plug or talk to a girl, but I could express those gaps in my knowledge in grammatically perfect Latin.

So, you know, it was very much swings and roundabouts.

But unfairness is not just baked into our education.

Andy,

is your school proud of your achievements as a podcaster do they put you on the alumni brochure i don't think they enormously are i think they're you know they're proud of people who become city accountants i think essentially um

unfairness is not just baked into our education system it is written into the recipes it constitutes 98 of all the ingredients and then it's slathered on top like a glutton's icing uh and gavin will i mean they

talk about the government being made a laughing stock.

And that's not unusual for the government to be a laughing stock.

The problem is, it's the kind of laughter that is now the problem because it's been a kind of weird, terrified, nervous cackle of despair that has been reverberating around the nation.

And if Gavin Williamson was sent to your house to put up a shelf, you would flee the building, call the fire brigade, and emigrate.

He, everywhere he's been in politics, he has left a trail of administrative destruction behind him, like an untrained hippopotamus-sized porcelain hating puppy in a china shop.

NATO,

your kids are about to go to go back to school

in California?

They just started this week.

My children are back to school this week remotely.

I have 12-year-old twins

and I am on a mission to raise the most insufferable wokus white kids of all time,

which is a low bar.

That is a hotly contested title.

And

my children are in public school, which means they're being duly educated to take their place in the class system.

Can I just point out that public schools in America?

I mean, a very different thing to public schools in Britain, where public school is one of the charming quirks of the English language

in Britain, that public schools here are very much barred to the public.

Oh,

fascinating.

Yeah, so

my dad, before he retired,

was the principal or the head of school for a public high school.

And he couldn't get funding for some program that he wanted to do.

And he actually went to the town school board and asked

if he started calling the school a prison if they would fund it adequately.

So

that's our public school system.

So California public schools have adopted a curriculum focused on literacy, maths, and downward mobility.

So my kids, typical day, first period, they learn how to drive Uber and second period, they learn how to upsell from a black coffee to a vente latte at a Starbucks.

And the key is eye contact and nodding.

And so as a result, like a lot of middle-class families, we're supplementing with home enrichment.

And to stay completely on brand for NATO Green, as anyone familiar with my Uber will will know,

this is literally true of what we've actually been covering with my children.

We've done an extensive inquiry into the work of Alan Turing as a way of dealing with themes of homophobia, math, technological innovation, its relationship to capitalism, methods of warfare, and espionage.

Also, in anticipation of Trump cheating and stealing the election, again,

we've been discussing how to overthrow the government and using as a guide the Menard map that depicted Napoleon's unsuccessful Russia campaign of 1812.

My children have been learning how to calculate how many people would need to set out from San Francisco to successfully march across the country and lay siege to Washington, D.C.

and oust the Trump regime, taking into account maintaining supply chains, deaths along the way, desertions, Wi-Fi, road rash, calluses, chubrub, sunburn, diarrhea, true love, gout, dengue fever, weather, fisting, marauding Nazis, and the miles necessary to traverse the country.

And finally, like Tiff, my children are learning how to make a proper bourbon old-fashioned,

including a giant ice cube, muddling the orange slice, which bitters to use, and that daddy likes to be able to hold out his hand without looking up at 5:45 p.m.

on the dot and have the drink just appear in his hand.

It's important.

Sexually explicit rap music news now.

And who's our sexually explicit rap music correspondent?

Oh, it's me.

Oh, God.

Oh, this has gone very badly indeed.

So, well, I mean, very entertaining showbiz spats between

Cardi B, the rap sensation, and Megan the stallion, who have collaborated on a single entitled WAP.

Or is it WAP or WAP?

It's WAP because it's technically an acronym.

It could be wireless access protocol as well.

Could be either or.

It could be that.

Yeah.

There is a court case involving the Western Australia Petonk organisation as well.

And between

the rap stars and Ben Shapiro, the

Conservative commentator.

And for those of you who don't know Ben Shapiro, he's a kind of anti-messiah put on this planet to spread his message in order to make us think that humanity is completely f doomed and there is no prospect however remote of individual or collective redemption a man who exudes a certain jeunisse pour qui and

um

it has been um i mean i will admit i i'm i i'm not fully up to speed with the the full oeuvre of uh of cardi b and megan the stallion um uh tiff can you uh can you just fill us in a bit on the uh the the details of this this spat uh sure um although i would like to say i think ben shapiro is what would happen if a bottle of Davidoff Clearwater just for men hair dye.

I think that is the child they would have.

Ben Shapiro.

So Ben Shapiro has come out against WAP.

So the initials or W-A-P stand for wet ass pussy.

Now,

obviously, as a British person, you know, I want to say wet ass pussy, Andy.

I mean, I think we both do.

But it doesn't...

Wet ass pussy doesn't sound correct.

No.

Ben Shapiro won't even say pussy.

he calls it the P-word right in his dissection of it but he's one of two so we should discuss both Ben Shapiro and Russell Brand giving their opinions on female sexuality and how it's expressed in the form of song so

Ben Shapiro put out a video which I think is quite funny I think I'm hoping that he's doing it with a sense of humor but I don't know there's a lot of heavy moralizing in it and the first thing he does is sort of describe the video as it's happening and he says we can we we can see them going into a mansion, and there's a lot of water representing the amount of water coming out of the pee.

Here we see some golden buttocks and some nipples with some water coming out of them.

And these women have serious gynellogical problems.

Basically,

his deconstruction of the song is he thinks that they've got some kind of

I don't know urinary tract infection, I think, for which you know, maybe uh

to just drink some uh cranberry juice would help that out.

Ben Shapiro calls Cardi B a quasi prostitute who became a rapper and then said American success story.

And I'm like, yep.

He's saying he doesn't think it's feminist and he thinks it's gross.

And this is like Russell Brand's opinion as well.

Russell Brand's like, is it feminist masterpiece?

Is it porn?

And Russell Brand is the man who, on stage to protest consumerism, once shoved a Barbie dole up his ass.

Feminist masterpiece or porn.

I mean, it's difficult to tell.

But I think, like, listen, there could be a discussion around this.

You know,

I think what the rappers are saying is they're expressing their sexuality on their terms, what they enjoy.

Some of the lyrics are along the lines of I'll tell you where it goes, which is agency and consent.

And educational as well.

Yes.

We talked about the failings in the public education system.

Andy, you might want to watch it on slow motion.

With a notepad handy.

There is another line saying something about, you know, my pussy's going to pay for my tuition, which, you know, maybe has less agency to it.

But

Russell Brand's argument was that

is it empowerment if it's in the confines of male objectification?

And him saying it's okay for men to express their sexual desires, but not for women.

So I think what we don't want is people like Russell Brand and Ben Shapiro

giving their opinion.

You know, Russell Brand was Shagger of the Year three times in a row.

I'm not sure he's the one that we want to turn to to feminist discourse.

But also the option is there to like not watch the video or not buy the song.

So like good on Cardi B for like selling a shit ton of records.

Yeah, it's been a huge, huge hit.

I don't, personally, I have no musical frame of reference to express an opinion on the quality of the song.

It's Not My Thing, coincidentally, the title of My New Rap Collaboration with a CGI recreation of the former BBC tennis commentator Dan Maskell.

Suffice it to say, if you've not heard it, I can tell you what it's different to.

It's very different to I Should Be So Lucky by Kylia Minogue, Agado by Kajagugu, When I'm Cleaning Windows by George Formby, and Franz Schubert's 1816 chart-topping dance floor banger, Litene Auf des Fest aler Silen.

It's more similar, perhaps, in subtext to George Formby's With My Little Ukulele in My Hand, but even more sexually confident and assertive than Formby.

I think the song it is most unlike is probably Snooker Loopy by the Matrim Mob with Chasm Dave, which was a group of white men singing jauntily about snooker, which I think is the most opposite possible piece of music to WAP by Cardi B and Megan The Stallion.

One of my favorite things on the bugle is when Andy has to talk about pop culture.

It is

like

watching an alien trying to blend in with the humans.

Well, you say that.

Well, I've been doing my research about Cardi B, who's one of the most influential musical artists in the world right now, in my book, albeit a book that I've printed out from her Wikipedia page.

A few things about Cardi B.

Cardi B is not the same as KGB.

That's very important to remember that.

She took her performance name, it's not her birth name, Cardi B, from Cardigan Bay in Wales,

famed for its long sandy beaches, numerous campsites, and diverse marine life.

She has actually written an as-yet unreleased album of songs about the culture and economy of the town of Aberystwyth and places herself firmly in the bargic traditions of the Welsh Istedfoths.

So I've heard.

But if

there's a proposal that the US national anthem should be whatever happens to be top of the Billboard 100 chart that week, I mean,

we'd have seen some sensationally awkward faces this week if that had been the case and some baseball players holding their caps over their kajungles.

The song is so popular and raunchy that it was viewed 80 million times in the first week.

And

there are a lot of reasonable responses to a song about wet pussy.

This makes me feel things and I need some time to myself is a perfectly reasonable response.

This is not for me is also a valid response.

But Ben Shapiro, who is an online personality, anti-feminist, right-wing patriot who really puts the in my country to the V,

decided that

he was so offended that he so he tweeted out that his doctor wife told him that anyone whose pussy is so wet that it needs a bucket and a mop to clean up requires medical attention because they probably have bacterial vaginosis or a yeast infection.

Conservatives have so much difficulty imagining women enjoying their own sexuality that the only possibility they can imagine is, well, actually, this is false.

Pussies don't get wet unless they're broken.

And

so, what they're telling us is that they have no first-hand experience of a woman being so turned on in their presence that their body might have a common physiological response and that telling this fact to the public is a shrewd political strategy to win the culture war.

Ironically,

I love it.

Ironically, the more I listened to Ben Shapiro, the drier it got.

The one lyric really stood out for me, having read the lyrics, which I believe were lifted straight from an early Woody Guthrie song,

was

right near the end, macaroni in a pot, which does suggest that the whole thing was just disappointing product placement for Gerald's instant pasta meals.

Just add water.

That brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

Been a pleasure having you both on.

Tiff, you got any more uh live online shows uh coming up i think i have i think i'm doing another zoom gig uh of a new hour actually but i haven't set the date for it so uh if you just follow me on my twitter at tiffstevenson or on instagram i mean every monday night on instagram i'm doing old rope uh we have to get nato back on i think all the buglers have been on at this point so uh keep your eyes peeled for that that's about that's about it on the live front i think um so yeah come for all and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

I have one.

NATO, anything to plug?

Yes, I sure do.

Obviously, follow me on Twitter at NATO Green, Instagram, MrNATO Green.

But also, I have a new series out.

It's called Laughter Against the Machine, and it is streaming now on Means TV.

It's just out.

Means TV is the,

in, in true NATO Green fashion, it's, I believe, the world's first worker-owned post-capitalist subscription streaming service

for all of your socialist streaming needs.

And

so, Laughter Against the Machine is me and W.

Kamal Bell and Janine Burrito.

It's footage that we shot many years ago where we went on a comedy tour where we like crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.

We went to political hotspots, crossed the Mexico border from Arizona.

We visited the levees in New Orleans.

We were on strike with hotel workers.

And then we were like all in the middle of Occupy Wall Street during police riots and doing comedy the whole way.

So

look it up on Means TV

to check that out.

I saw clips of that.

It looked really excellent.

Yeah,

it's footage that we filmed in 2011.

It was sort of lost to the sands of time.

And I've been trying to figure out how to get it exhumed and released.

And,

you know,

it was a long time ago when

the country was riven by racial strife and division and xenophobia

and the right wing was on the move and liberals and progressives were despondent and disorganized.

And so, you know, it's a good time capsule and not relevant to anything that we're dealing with now.

Thanks very much.

And thanks for listening, Buglers.

We'll be back next week with Bugle 4164.

Until then, goodbye.

Don't forget to join the Bugle Voluntary Subscription Service.

Go to BuglePodcast.com and click the donate button.

And our new range range of merch is available

t-shirts socks and Christmas jumpers and more to follow soon until next week goodbye

hi buglers it's producer Chris here I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast mildly informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now quite simply it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.