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Paper Ghosts is a true crime podcast investigating the mysterious disappearance and brutal unsolved murder of Tammy's Wiki. They just kept telling us from the beginning, she'll be back, she'll be back. We had no clue where she was, they didn't know where to begin to look. Tammy's story shocked the nation. The deeper I searched, the more troubling things I found. The best lead, the best evidence, the best witness was blown off. Listen to Paper Ghosts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows. In 1968, five black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in Mount Meg's Alabama. I'm writer and reporter Josie Defi Rice, and in a new podcast, I investigate the abuse that thousands of black children suffered at the Alabama industrial school for Negro children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to unreformed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. The car kills, they just killed everybody, it was hell. Setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot, would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Bright-Pacheco, join me for Murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey everybody, Robert here. I recorded this with Jason about two days before Wizards of the Coast put out an announcement, completely backpedaling on everything they had been planning to do to the open gaming license. 89% of survey of 15,000 fans said they were not happy with the Wizards deauthorizing the 1.0 open gaming license. And what it looks like is a lot of people unregistered from D&D Beyond and a lot of people called in complaining and the numbers folks at Wizards Panicked. And as a result, they are completely folding on the plans to rescind or deauthorize the open gaming license. And in fact, have announced that they are making it the exact terms they use are irrevocable. And yeah, that's good. Yeah, and they put everything under an irrevocable creative comments license. So this is all just breaking. But I think it's broadly good news. Any time a giant company chooses to do something kind of crummy with a piece of what I would say is actually pretty meaningful intellectual heritage. And then they get slapped down and panic and reverse course. That's a good thing. It shows a number of things, which one of which, probably the most important of which is that the community of people who recognize the value in these kinds of games in this past time, this recreational activity, also fundamentally value the essence of like what is open source ideology, which is nice. Like it's nice to know that the open source folks, we can still throw a punch every now and again, even if it's just a punch at Wizards of the Coast. So happy ending everybody, happy ending. Also the good folks at Pizzo sold out of eight months worth of Pathfinder books in like two weeks. So that's nice too. Ah, it could happen here is the podcast that you are listening to right now. I am Robert Evans. This is a show about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. And today we're taking a little bit of a different tack in recent weeks. You've listened to us cover a wide variety of issues from conflicts in places like Myanmar to conflicts here at home in the city of Atlanta to deep dives in history and all that good stuff that you know and love us for. Today we are talking about a subject that is unusually close to my heart, dungeons and dragons. Now I'm going to guess just given the nature of our listenership, a decent chunk of you grew up playing D&D and just because of how really shockingly suddenly it's become much more popular than it than it ever was previously in much more mainstream. A lot of you may have encountered it as an adult. There's a lot that's actually been written kind of sociologically on what dungeons and dragons is. And one point that some people will make is that it's kind of the first new game that we had that human beings made up since like chess. By which I mean you have had war games for a very long period of time. But the concept of a role playing game and the way that D&D is where you're essentially sitting down with a group of people and engaging in an active collaborative storytelling that's kind of buttressed by a system of rules. That's actually a pretty new idea. Now elements of this have existed forever. And in fact kind of an interesting fact you'll run into is that in the late medieval period a lot of jousts had role playing elements, including ones where like rulers and their court would dress up as the Knights of the Roundtable and act in character as those Knights. So elements of all of this stuff have existed for a while. But when dungeons and dragons kind of came together as a game for the first time, it was it is kind of worth seeing it as as something really new and valuable in the history of play and the history of human creativity. So as a result of that I do kind of think I personally think there's something a little bit sacred about that that basic idea. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about the industry that grew up around dungeons and dragons is that there have always been a lot of people in it who I think feel the same way. And I think one of these people was a guy named Ryan Dancy and Ryan Dancy was vice president in charge of dungeons and dragons at Wizards of the Coast for a while. And he helped actually negotiate the sale of the Dungeons and Dragons property to Wizards of the Coast when the company that had been distributing it fell apart. And Dancy was a big part of the institution in the year 2000 of what became known as the open gaming license. And basically what this meant is that the set of rules that D&D worked by and at around 2000, which was I think you would call it like 3.0 was the system in place. Basically got elements of the mechanics got effectively open sourced. And so Wizards of the Coast went from what had been the previous move for the people who'd owned D&D, which was kind of to oppose people trying to make third party content using the rule source to embracing it and allowing it to do that freely. And now I'm going to introduce our guest who is one of the people who is kind of the one of the most influential folks in what happened after this because once the open gaming license came into effect, there's suddenly this galaxy of new games and supplemental materials that people start making, which you know, Wizards is not profiting from directly, but which the hobby profits from. And one of the people who has who has been most influential in that is our guest today, Jason Bolman, Jason, you are the the game lead game designer at Piazo and the creator of Pathfinder, which is the, I mean, it's not Dungeons and Dragons, but it uses as its base that kind of open gaming system. And it's what I play when I get a chance to sit down and play a role playing game. So first off, Jason, thank you for several thousand hours of my childhood and early adulthood spent playing Pathfinder. Yeah, well thanks for having me. And yeah, Piazo kind of spun off from Wizards of the coast, you know, back in the early days of the open game license. And we were their official publishers of their magazine until that kind of came to an end. And then we started making our own game based off the open game license. And did I, did I, is, did I get all that right earlier? Do you have any kind of clarification she'd like to add before we move further into the conflict? And there is a conflict, we're not just talking about how cool do you think Pathfinder are? I think there's a, there's an interesting thing to note about games. Games are kind of weird when it comes to copyright and ownership. And it's kind of why the open game license is so important, right? So T.S.R., the company that owned Dungeons and Dragons before Wizards of the coast was pretty, pretty litigious, as you mentioned. But they ended up getting into kind of a bind because, you know, the game itself is one that encourages people to make their own content to kind of home brew stuff and invent their own stories. And what it comes down to is that, you know, ultimately game mechanics can't be copyrighted. They've been long held that those sorts of things you cannot copyright. That's why you see so many versions of like Scrabble that aren't Scrabble. Yeah. And it's why anyone can make a basketball team or a basketball league and play basketball. You don't have to get the NBA's approval to play fucking basketball. Exactly. Exactly. So the open game license wasn't about giving everyone permission to use rules, which is something that could already kind of do. It was about giving them kind of a safe harbor, a place that everybody involved kind of knew that this was all okay. No one was going to be filing for the frivolous lawsuits and that you could use kind of direct references without having to be a copyright lawyer or retaining a giant staff. It allowed a lot of very little businesses to kind of spring up making, hey, here's my cool adventure that I ran for my group. You can buy it and play it with your group now little things like that. And I don't think it's for nothing that number one, a huge thing. And this has become as Silicon Valley has kind of turned more mercenary. This has become less of a thing, but a massive thing. And the early history of Silicon Valley and the tech industry was the open source movement. You know, was the idea that a lot of people should be able to collaboratively work and iterate on things without having to worry about who owns the basic idea, right? You know, Linux is a great example of this. And the the ideology behind the open source movement was a big influence in the open gaming license. I mean, Dancy kind of admits that himself. There's a quote where he says that like, yeah, I think we need to embrace some of these ideas at the heart of the open source movement because I think it will be a good business decision for Wizards of the coast. It will on the whole, even if we're not profiting directly from every sort of like thing that people make off of this. The fact that it's going to cause the the hobby to explode will benefit us. And I think he's been proven right in that because D&D has gone from this thing that like I got bullied for in high school to there's these massive podcasts. There's been TV shows that are just people playing the game like it has reached this level. I never really expected it would of like critical and and mass acceptance, which has been really cool to see. It's been one of the things that I've been happiest about watching occurs socially in the last couple of decades. Yeah, you can't disagree that the business case wasn't super tight, right? The way that the OGL got all of the other game companies, many of which had their own entirely different games. Yeah. The early 2000s, they all abandoned them and started making content for D&D. Yeah. And that just kind of carried forward a large swath of kind of the game industry, which is pretty cottage, right? There's a bunch of small players. There's not a lot of large corporations in here. In fact, Wizards is by far the largest. And so you got a bunch of small game companies that are seeing this as a great opportunity to kind of play in the big pool. And a lot of them fall in suit. So obviously the reason we are here today is that a poll has been cast recently over what has up until now been kind of a lovely thing. Wizards of the coast got a new CEO pretty recently, right? Cynthia Williams is relatively new. Yeah. And there is basically murmuring coming from the company that's like we don't think D&D is properly capitalized. We believe that there's we are leaving money on the table here. And kind of in the wake of some of that stuff coming out, they announced a series of changes to the open gaming license. And if you kind of want to take it from here and explain because I've read and listened to a number of different folks, I'm saying like, well, it's not as bad as people are fearing and some folks saying like this would effectively kill a huge chunk of the hobby and a bunch of the companies that have grown up in the wake of the open gaming license. And I'm interested in your take on what what Wizards is doing here and what actually kind of is at risk. So yeah, I think you you've clued into the start of this, which was in early December of last year, Hasbro earnings call. Cynthia basically came out and said D&D was undermonetized. And they had been spending the entire previous year really proliferating magic, the gathering, which is their other giant brand. And kind of really making a lot of money like talks of like it is a billion dollar brand. And as a result, you know, there was kind of some murmurings and some rumblings going through December, talking about a new version of the OGL. Wizards themselves came out on December 21st. So just a few days before Christmas and said that a new OGL was coming and that it had notes in it about royalty reporting and you know, mentioning that folks won't need to pay until later. And that, you know, really this new license is only going to be to make books and PDFs. So they said this on December 21st. And the royalty part of that is was really quite challenging because it said if you make over $750,000 a year, you might have to pay a sizable percentage of your your gross profit, like 25% and that's terrifying. Which when you're talking about a business and this is not the gaming industry does not run on huge margins. No, unless you're like making warhammer models that you're selling for $120 for a piece of plastic that's tight. Yeah, the margins are pretty tight. So saying like past, you know, 750K, your company with however many employees has to give a quarter, like that that'll sink people. Yeah, I think a lot of companies, the larger ones couldn't sustain that, right? I mean, I think saying pay 25% of your gross over 750K just basically means make sure you only make $749,000 that year. I do think that that is that is a real, real dangerous thing to a lot of these businesses. Now, for a lot of the content creators, this is never going to matter. But I do believe that part of this was, you know, seeing gigantic multi-million dollar kick starters happening and kind of going where is our thought? Yeah, we want a piece of this. And the answer to that is that like, you know, it's problematic just crediting the creation of D&D solely to Gary Gygaxe. But like the people who came up with and play tested and made D&D a thing and then the people who iterated and changed and evolved it from, you know, the original game to AD&D in the years of Thaco to 3.0 like morally outside of like what I think is justifiable and corporate law and stuff like morally, I think it's fucked up to say that like some company forever gets a piece of that when what it is is like human beings coming together to try to figure out the most efficient way to run an engine for storytelling. I don't know. It's fucked up to me to think about it this way. So they announced this alteration to the open gaming license and I'm going to guess those were some dark days at the PSO offices. So, so yeah, you know, most of us at PIZO at that point in time were kind of on vacation and we kind of just filed it away and we're like, okay, well, it's a draft and they're just talking. So, you know, we get to back, you know, from our break and it's the beginning of the year and this is now January 5th is when a bombshell article drops on Gizmodo by Linda Kadega and they really laid out kind of what was in this proposed license apparently having had portions of it leaked to them and you know, it confirmed a 25% margin but maybe only 20% for for kick starters, which then got confirmed by someone at Kickstarter on Twitter and it also included a bit in there that there was a clause that said, Watsy could was into the coast could use any of the content you create under the license for free. Never having to make pay royalties to you, never having to give you any credit, they could just take your work and and they phrased it in such a way that it sounded like it was, you know, well, just in case we make something similar, we don't want to get sued. But yeah, and we're talking about just to clarify it for people. We're not talking about like if you introduce mechanics because again, that's not what this is covered. We're talking about if you create characters. If you create or if you build stories, they they have a right to utilize that story that you've made. Things that are actually copyrightable, right? Stories, ideas and expressions are copyrightable, you know, but rules aren't. So that yeah, that drops on the fifth and on the night, the full draft document leaks and you've got streamers and influencers reading it live on YouTube and this thing just starts to snowball. And from the ninth forward, things start moving very quickly. On the tenth, a number of major kind of third party publishers, these are folks who print with the OJL announced that they were not going to go with that. And one of the largest ones, you know, announced, yeah, I'm not doing that at all. I'm going to create my entire brand new game. I'm leaving all of this behind. Yeah. And the fervor on social media turned into basically a firestorm. Yeah. And it's really a sign of how much more how many people both love and play versions of this game that there was so much media attention from like major media organs like this. This was not just you know, those of us who are into gaming, you know, freaking out over this change that Wizards of the coast has made. This was like, I mean, I was seeing it everywhere. Very few things have like broken as widely in my media in ecosystem as this. There was an article. There was a story about it today on NPR. So there was another one. There was one other important aspect in the leak that I think is really important. One is that the new OGL could be canceled at any time with 30 days notice. And they were claiming that they were deauthorizing the previous OGL, which up to this point, everyone kind of assumed was irrevocable. Right. It had it has clauses in it that say, if we ever put out a new version of this license, you can ignore it and continue to use this one. Right. But it uses this word in there that says, you can continue to use any authorized version of the license. Yeah. Never minding that the contract doesn't mention how you might deauthorize a license. So there, this draft of the OGL says that they're deauthorizing the previous version, which puts all of the work of the past 20 years into doubt. And at this point in time, the fans are revolting. Right. There are a lot of folks canceling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, which is kind of their in-house character generation tools that you pay a monthly subscription for. And things really start spinning out of hand to the point where D&D actually has to respond to it and pull back and kind of retreat from this and saying, hey, we're going to answer your questions. What you saw was just a draft, you know, and that was never supposed to leak. But it was at this point in time that we actually launched our own license. We had been talking to some of the other publishers and by that, I mean, we piezo to create a brand new safe harbor for folks to publish under. Now, it's not going to be owned by us. It's going to be owned by a law firm that actually drafted the first OGL. But you started to see this giant fork happening where a lot of folks are just abandoning ship. And I mean, what do you think this means? Because obviously, Wizards has already announced a new version of the OGL beyond like the one that got leaked. And I think are kind of in damage control mode. Do you think this is something that like there is any way for them to pull back from? Or do you think that kind of the inherent instability of the OGL now that they're kind of making these claims that well, we can actually change the delineate and we want? Has that sort of irrevocably altered the ground? I think that they've damaged a lot of people's trust in them. Right? I think over the past few weeks, especially when they went silent and then, frankly, the first retraction was really kind of awkward and filled with kind of like, well, we didn't lose. We won. This was great. Now we learned how to make a better license. They're clearly stepping back, stepping back, stepping back. And their most recent step back, which just happened on the 18th, so a week ago, or so basically said that they were going to release the core of the game to creative commons. And their new license was going to be irrevocable and last forever. But it still contains a lot of kind of poison pills, things like we are still deauthorizing the first version of the license. And we have this morality clause that says, if we find your content offensive, we can just kill your license without releasing the license. Which is fucked up because, I mean, I don't think I need to explain why that's fucked up. And that puts a lot of the most creative kind of projects to it, risk. That's ugly. I mean, I don't think anybody in this industry wants to see any deeply offensive problematic content. But there's a lot of stuff that is frankly a lot more marginal and explores issues of the human condition that folks might want to explore in a game. And who's to say that someone that wizards might go, well, sorry, that's offensive to me. You don't get to make it. I don't think anybody wants to invest their creativity and risk their business on what someone they will never have met thinks of their work. Yeah. The problem is not that like, I want as the most offensive role playing games, I can get the problem is like, well, who determines what offensive is? And it's a bunch of lawyers and businessmen at wizards of the coast. At least that's the worry, right? Like not necessarily that that's how it would work out. But you just you get no guarantee. And this stuff, this stuff evolves over time, right? You know, what is fine today? Maybe problematic tomorrow. We learned those things. We evolve from them and we change. But I don't think anybody wants to have kind of this, you know, axe hanging over our head of like, well, sorry, that's now offensive. So we're going to kill an entire license. Yeah. So where are we? Where are we now? Like it looks like Paiso Yaller are moving forward with the ORC along with a number of other people. Can you give me an idea of what that's going to look like? Because one of the things that that does concern me is, and this is a very selfish concern. But like, I grew very comfortable with, you know, 3.5, which is essentially the machinery that underpins pathfinder. And it's one of those things like if I didn't play again for 20 years, I could probably sit down with the material in my head and run a campaign just because so much of that stuff is burnt into my brain. Are we like, what is the mechanics kind of underlying the ORC? And how is it going to be different from what we've gotten used to? So I'll say this, we're in the very early days on this. And what's happening right now is we are, you know, in coordination with a number of other publishers working with Azora Law and they are the people who wrote the original OGL and had, you know, fully intended for it to be a perpetual license. And we're working with them to create kind of a rules neutral license that the entire game industry can use to share work because there's, there's like a lot of nuance that was in the OGL that allowed different companies to share creative work together. And a lot of companies used it as kind of a bridging license, even if they weren't using Dungeons and Dragons at all. They would just use the licenses of framework to kind of exchange ideas. And that's what we want the orc to be. The orc needs to be a license that allows everybody in the game industry to open up their content and share work with each other and iterate and expand and grow. That's our real goal. And ultimately, we are not going to own it. No one's going to own it. We're actually going to try and find it on profit to administer the license going forward so that we don't ever have to worry about this again. Nobody wants to go through what we've been going through for the past three weeks. So that's kind of that's kind of one half of it. The other half is what happens to Pathfinder. And obviously, you know, when it came to Pathfinder Second Edition, we rewrote the game from scratch. And it is now fully our game. It's something we own and we control. So we feel pretty confident that we're just going to keep on rolling with Pathfinder. And ultimately, you know, we don't actually believe that the previous version of the OGL even can be rescinded. Yeah. So I guess we'll see how that plays out. I can see this having an overall positive outcome just in that if we get this new kind of thing that creators can use as a core point to branch off from when they're making games that's actually under solid legal footing that isn't kind of reliant upon the whims of a publicly traded company. Then in the long term, you know, that is in the long term, it's better for creators because it's more like the way things were for the first 20 years of the OGL. Do you, I mean, like, what do you see as kind of some pitfalls and sort of trying to trying to make this this happen, trying to move things in this kind of more productive direction? Well, I think you can always, you know, kind of fracture, you know, vulcanize the market to the point where where everybody has such a small slice event that, you know, no one can really get the kind of numbers they need to succeed because you're right. It is, it is a pretty small industry. The margin on, you know, printed media isn't exactly great, but I think a lot of these companies do have the numbers to survive, but I think that right now, everybody's trying to figure out how to replace parts of what has just been lost. Everybody's trying to kind of go in their different directions right now. And some of that is going to be really good because I think we're going to get a lot of really great games. And I'm excited to see them. Yeah, but I do think that I think one of the worries just for the industry is that they kind of all had one flag they were rallying around and now everyone's running in different directions and hoping that after all of this shakes out, everybody has kind of enough gamers to support a community. I think it's going to work out. I think that there's a number of standouts happening already. You know, MCDM and Cobald are obviously racing to do things. There's a bunch of kind of known players in the industry. Us, Cobald, Chaos, CM, Green Ronin, all of them are pretty big companies positioned to kind of have good player bases with great games and mechanics underneath them. So I think the big loser here is frankly, was the ones of the coast. They, you know, up until, you know, the end of this year or the end of last year, they were undisputedly the largest game company in the entire tabletop role playing game industry. And that's still true today. But there's a lot of cracks in that armor and it does make me wonder how it's going to fracked throughout over time and how many of their fans, many of which never heard of Pathfinder, never heard of, you know, these other game companies, Call of Cthulhu and stuff are now suddenly exploring these games and, you know, frankly, the wealth of smaller Indian zing games that are out there. There's so much to play right now. And Watsi has just told their fan base, hey, go check it out. It's interesting because it kind of speaks to something that I've always loved and also found kind of sociologically fascinating about tabletop gaming, which is you just brought up Call of Cthulhu, which is a game that is, I don't believe is under the control of the original company that it was made under people have been playing versions of Call of Cthulhu for a very long time. Johnson's and dragons has gone through multiple owners shadow run, which I play a lot of as a kid has gone through multiple owners. And the rule sets change in the company that is profiting from the official licensed material changes. But no matter what happens, even when those companies go wonder the games keep going. And that's there's something I think unique there that is, it's not the case even like, you know, there's versions of it that happens in PC gaming. But there's also this thing that happens that a lot of gamers I know complain about, which is that like periodically, should'll get removed for whatever reason. A company goes under a game is not supported and that game is just gone. That little piece of culture is just gone. And it seems like so far, you know, I'm not going to say in every case because obviously there have been games that have, you know, people stopped playing and stuff in the tabletop space. But it's there's this continuity, you know, even in the face of of changing of the guards in terms of like what companies are successful, of like people keep playing these the same games and iterating them and changing them. And I don't know, that's that's always one of the things I found most inspiring about the way tabletop works. Yeah, I mean, I do think the legacy of tabletop role playing games is one of cooperation. It was there from the start, right? You know, the moment Gary and his and Dave and folks, you know, got together and started turning their, you know, miniatures war game and giving characters to them. And everyone started building a story together. That spark was the start. And it's carried through in a million different ways and a million different tables. And even if, you know, the companies go under or disappear, people with those books are still playing those games. There's plenty of people still playing AD&D first edition, right? You know, they never left. And they're fine with that. And I salute them. Yeah, yeah, I think about. And again, this is like one of the reasons this has such a place in my heart. I started playing AD&D, but you know, it was my friends and I would play it at at Cubscout Campouts and we didn't have access to dice. So we had the rulebooks. We had like the monsters manual and the players guide and we use those as jumping off points and we would bring like a bunch of nickels and we would, we would figure out ways to like, okay, for this action, you got to get three heads out of five flips or something like that. And that's a success in this. And like so many people have stories like that have variants of that because it really is fundamentally what you need for any of these games, which is what makes them so durable is a group of people to want to sit around a table and tell a story together, which is rad. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing else like it, right? That there really isn't. And that's why I think you're seeing so much fervor over this because for a lot of people, this is very deeply personal. Yeah, gathering together with your friends and telling a story together, that's something you and your friends built. And you know, if you happen to find a way to make some money off of it, great. That's that's your creativity coming to life. And frankly, kind of having a big giant corporation come in and say, hey, where's my cut? Is is not really very fun. No. And I my heart goes out to you and your colleagues over how stressful this last three or four weeks has been. And I hope that we're past the worst of it. It certainly seems like some what's going to come out of this is going to be pretty exciting. So I'm hopeful. And it sounds like you're hopeful. Yeah, I think you know, over the past couple of weeks, there's been a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of currency meetings. But frankly, I feel more excited and energized about the future of PIZzo about the future of gaming than I have in quite a long time. So buy PIZzo's games, pick up some pathfinder books, go to your go to your nearest game store and pick one up or two or three. Jason anything else you want to plug at the end here? Yeah, you can learn more about PIZzo in our games. So that would be pathfinder and starfinder at piezo.com. We have a blog there talking about the work and we'll have undoubtedly have more to say about it here in the coming weeks. As for me, you can find me on all the various social media platforms at Backslash Jason Bowman BUL MAHN. Thank you, Jason. Both for sitting down for this interview and for all of all of the many, many countless hours I have spent playing games that you had a hand in making. Thank you, Roger. We'll have to get together and roll some dice together soon. I would love that. Alright, everybody. That's a sod. See you tomorrow. Paper Ghost is a true crime podcast investigating the mysterious disappearance and brutal, unsolved murder of Tammy Zawiki. They just kept telling us from the beginning. She'll be back. She'll be back. We had no clue where she was. We didn't know where to begin to look. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I just had not really thought about anything except finding her. Tammy's story shocked the nation. There was no resolution. Nothing was ever zeroed in on. The deeper I searched, the more troubling things I found. There was a lot of physical evidence that had never been analyzed. Money and their **** from the FBI at a chocolate Missouri. The best lead, the best evidence, the best witness was blown off. Listen to Paper Ghosts on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows. Levitations, vomiting, strange voices. Have you ever wondered if the story is about exorcism or true? He definitely has something going on. It's primal. And if they are true, how could one protect themselves from these dark forces? It's still in there. It's really? That thing is back. I see it. These are the questions we posed to renowned exorcist father Carlos Martins, who agreed to open his case files to the public for the first time. Tell me who you are. The one you won't get out. The one you can't. My name is father Carlos Martins. I am an exorcist. I have seen things. 473, 12 with me. Very evil things. No, I'm not sick. Things that I wish weren't true. Oh, God, that's it's me. Forget what you think you know about exorcism. Listen to the exorcist files on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast. But wherever you get your podcasts. There is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe. On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balanchine. There are not very many of us that actually grew up with Balanchine. It was like I grew up with Mozart. He could do no wrong. Like he was a god. But what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life? Where the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed? He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you. Only I can see you. Most people in the ballet world are more interested in their experience of watching it than in a dance experience of executing it. Listen to The Turning, Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi and welcome to it could happen here. A podcast which today is only me and my guest Nicole. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about immigration, about immigration policy over the last three or four years and about some of the strange laws that impact it. So Nicole is joining B. She works for Alotro Laudo and Nicole would you like to introduce herself and explain a little bit about what you do? Hi my name is Nicole Elizabeth Ramos and I am the director of Alotro Laudo's Order Rights Project which is based in Tijuana, Mexico. Great. Okay. So I think perhaps to start off with you could clue people in on a little bit of what you guys do because you do some incredible work and it's very very valuable to board a community. So I think a lot of people if they don't live in along the border might not be familiar with it. Alotro Laudo we provide legal orientation to migrants that are considering seeking a asylum in the US. We started off as a project that focused locally on migrants in Tijuana and over the years we have expanded to serve migrants in Mexico and then remotely in other cities along the US-Mexico border including Buenos Mata Moros, Juarez, Piaveres, Negras, Labedo. And in this legal orientation we're providing information about what are the current policies the moment that will impact their ability to seek asylum in the US or prevent them from doing so or how these policies might be impacting their family composition. So policies that are related to detention or family separation. After we provide legal orientation we are then identifying asylum seekers that fall into several vulnerability categories to provide additional accompaniment through this process because the policies are shifting and changing and becoming more restrictive. Over time it's very confusing and cumbersome to we through all of the fuzz and figure out what you need to do in order to seek asylum in the US. So that's where we come in. And we provide the orientation in multiple languages. The border is a very diverse place. It is not just Spanish speakers that are coming but people that speak Asian, Creole, French, Farsi, Indigenous languages, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish and all of these people need access to information. That's one of the pillars of our program is that migrants have the absolute right to accurate legal information about the process that they will be entering. Among the asylum seekers that we work with we also identify those that are in need of shelter and make referrals appropriately to shelters for medical care. In some instances we assist with obtaining medications or obtaining a needed surgery if the migrant does not have access to those resources helping them obtain access to HIV medication or hormone treatment. And of those migrants we are also connecting them with other supportive services from our partners that have shelters that have programs where they're giving them basic dispenses of food because they are struggling with food insecurity. Trying to create as much of a social safety net as possible because folks are waiting at the border for longer and longer periods of time. The border used to be a place that people pass through. Maybe they were here for a few days before ultimately they were able to present themselves at a US supportive entry to a US official and enter the asylum process. However now we have individuals that have been waiting at the border for years who may not have worked status in Mexico may not be Spanish speakers and are really struggling to meet their basic needs. And so we've had to expand our services from not just legal service provider provider of legal information but also providing humanitarian aid so that people can be healthy and as well as possible while they're waiting. Yeah and it's incredibly valuable and it's amazing how you guys have like can continue to step up and scale up as federal governmenters continue to fail people. And I think if people haven't come to the border they probably won't be aware of like you say that diversity of people who come to the US makes code border like I remember a couple of years ago I was working with an aroma translator and we would speak to people who have come from Ethiopia people come from Eritrea it's a very of course people coming from Ukraine now it's very diverse space which is something that kind of gets collapsed pretty often in border reporting I think like all that diversity gets collapsed into like like just people lumped together as migrants or people seeking asylum and that's a shame because it's what makes part of what makes us so complicated but also what makes these border places such kind of interesting and special places and and I like what you said about all the sort of services that are provided as well it's incredible to look at how these services are provided by huge broad network of like volunteers of nonprofits of NGOs as well as some government agencies and how people have stepped up consistently especially in the last I guess six seven I don't know God it seems such a long time it's like since 2016 2017 how people have stepped up to help each other along the border so perhaps if we go back you know we're just talking before we started if we go back to 2018 which people may or may not remember was the midterm and the middle of Donald Trump's presidency and a large caravan of people a group of people particularly larger remarkable a group of people arrived at the border and became kind of the center of something of like a and they became I think their their arrival was used by both political parties as part of their sort of midterm messaging and and I think that was maybe for some people especially if they've they've younger and had been watching them use this sort of first introduction to the asylum process so can you as explain kind of how asylum is supposed to happen and then maybe we can get into some of the weird and bizarre things that have been happening to it in the past three or four years asylum is supposed to be a system that's managed first by by government authorities under title eight section twelve twenty five of the United States code a US immigration officer at port of entry or at any point in between ports of entry such as border patrol when they are presented with a person that expresses that they have a fear of return to their home country that they fear persecution to refer them along the track to the process as an asylum seeker now that can mean that that person is still detained for the entirety of their asylum case and sent to an immigration detention center that could also mean that that person is given court paperwork to show up in immigration court at a later date to begin the process of explaining their case to the immigration court and getting a final decision over the years beginning at the end of the Obama administration continuing through the Trump administration and also continuing even now into the Biden administration we have seen policies issued by CBP which restrict access to the port of entry for asylum seekers initially it started out in 2016 where the Obama administration came up with a policy called the metering policy which was known as the wait list which required at first only Haitian asylum seekers to put their name on a wait list with Mexican immigration authorities and then they would be called in groups to enter the US and that was in response to the exodus of immigrants that we saw coming from Haiti and through Brazil in 2016 the metering list was later expanded to apply to all nationalities including Mexican migrants that were trying to flee their own country including those that had legitimate claims for protection of being persecuted by members of their own government everyone had to still get on this list that policy was extended in an ideological framework when the Trump administration came up with a program known as remain in Mexico and just building upon that idea that it is okay to make asylum seekers wait in territory in which they fear persecution because a lot of people fear persecution in Mexico and under the remain in Mexico policy also known as the migrant protection protocols and P.P. they we always refer to it as the migrant persecution protocols because it feels like it's extremely oh wellian right people like to use or wellian wrong but that one that went pretty 1984 yeah this program required asylum seekers that were entered they were placed into a program called MPP they were given court date and people were to appear at court in their nearest border city where there was an immigration court at some date in the future it could be in a few weeks it could be several months it could be a year and in between their court hearings they would be required to remain in Mexico they could only go to the court of entry on their date of their court they would be transported to court and then transported back to to Mexico after their court leaving Mexico people in Mexico in limbo for years and then when the pandemic came we saw the border close entirely under title 42 the Trump administration built it as necessary to protect the American public from migrants that could be carriers of COVID-19 but this is really you know no different than other immigration legislation that we've seen throughout history which tends to paint immigrants as vectors of disease and we need to just keep them out at at all costs and under title 42 it's just a wall of policy people try to present themselves at the port of entry and they're turned away people enter the US at different points that are not ports of entry without inspection and get caught and they're expelled immediately back to Mexico or if it's not a country that Mexico will accept an expulsion they could be detained in US custody and then expelled back to their country of origin without any opportunity to speak within a asylum officer right now we have been dealing with title 42 in a process where certain number of people are exempted from this blanket denial every day and different ports of entry along the border participate each port of entry has its own cap numerical cap and initially when this program started in May the names of people that were being submitted as exemptions the asylum seekers names were submitted by civil society organizations such as alo dola lo alo just this year alone we submitted around 11,500 I'm sorry 2022 11,500 exemption requests and that was from individuals from 29 different countries speaking just over 30 different languages so now though the system has recently changed to a smartphone application known as CBP1 which requires migrants to download this application to their smartphone assuming that they have a smartphone and then complete this lengthy application that requires them to upload a photo for facial recognition software and wait for an appointment date to be made available and they have to keep entering the fifth time multiple times until an appointment date becomes available waking up every morning at 5.30 for when the new slots are made available at 6am and the problem among many problems with this application is that right now it's only available in Spanish and English so if you speak any other language you are not able to access it and we have to give you an example we have an online survey where people register or try to seek help from us we have over since April 21 over 15,000 unique 50,000 unique responses around half of those are from Haitian Creole speakers and not access this app to get an appointment the other issue is is that the facial recognition software that's integrated into the CBP1 app you know there's a lot of studies throughout the years about how this software will lead to false positives or failures to recognize or individuals that have afro descendant features or individuals that have more indigenous features and we have seen this firsthand so many of our Haitian clients are unable to even complete the profile and they are taking photos with cameras that have a decent lens capacity and they still can't get past the facial recognition software. Yeah it's just like a layers on layers of sort of I know sometimes it's just them being like ineffective so it just seems cruel. Let's go back a little bit to title 42 because that word's been thrown around a lot right and title 32 isn't an issue it's not immigration law is it it's public health law is that right I guess it's public it's a public health policy it is part of immigration law. Yes it's public health policy that's being applied in the immigration context to close the border yeah and then one thing that I think we've seen a lot recently is like one of the worst accounts on Twitter which is the Border Patrol Union likes to they do occasionally like tweet their around losses which is kind of funny but they like to throw out these statistics right constantly about encounters at the border can you explain how under title 42 each encounter might not be a unique individual yeah absolutely those individuals are over-accounted because people will make multiple attempts to try to enter the US because they're so desperate it's dystopian health escape on the inside of the border with people being trafficked kidnapped for extortion tortured raped murdered sold and so if that were any reasonable person you would try 10 15 times whatever it took to get across to safety and the Border Patrol Union is disingenuous because it knows this and instead it pulls out a figure that is much larger than what it represents in in actual people and they're disingenuous and how they describe it yeah yeah I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see through it and of course when we combine this with the the wall or the fence or whatever you want to call it it people are crossing in more remote and more dangerous areas which makes the crossing more risky right and and results in a higher incidence people dying or hurting themselves trying to cross which is you say it's it's not a reasonable thing to do when you're faced with these terrible circumstances yeah there's a beautiful poem called home by Warshan Sair who's a Somali British poet and one of the lines is you don't put your child in a boat unless it's safer than the land no one would attempt to cross a 30-foot wall or wade the Rio Grande or cross the Arizona desert in the middle of summer unless what was behind them they were so sure was going to kill them yeah and the way that we've structured the wall and raising the the height of the wall to make it harder to cross and to build as much wall along the places where it would be a little bit easier to cross for people making it so the only way to cross is through the most dangerous parts that's and that's intentional yeah that is you know designed for people to die because the government mistakenly believes that if it kills more people that folks will be deterred but that's not actually what we see on the ground no um like it's not a vacuum right people are coming from bad things like making just making the border difficult but do nothing more than kill more people which is what they've succeeded in doing sadly and so and then another thing I wanted to get it as title 42 with this this crazy series of court cases around title 42 right so can you explain like uh why title 42 hasn't been repealed when we've done away with almost every other protection for people in kind of an ongoing pandemic title 42 could be repealed if the government was so not so intent on fighting the repeal of title 42 the ACLU has been important for the last few years around title 42 um in a case called Wisha Wisha the myorcus and the judge in that case issued a decision in December ruling that turning away asylum seekers using title 42 as a pretext um to turn asylum seekers away was unlawful however that decision was stayed the government requested that the decision be uh temporarily stayed to give it time to make operational plans the ACLU did not oppose that stay and as a result during that time a group of conservative states filed intermeeting litigation um to make their arguments about how their interests uh were harmed by the decision so now that cases uh before the Supreme Court and they will not hear the case until February and we could be waiting as long as June for a decision yeah many of those court but a lot to those states weren't even along the border right there's some of the ones who sued yeah that's still a mystery to all of us along the border how interior states that sure might be receiving people coming from the border but um don't have that close nexus as in there are border community and they're being immediately impacted yeah yeah pretty pretty penal stuff and the the other issue I want to raise for people is that narrative is that we're in a crisis the border isn't a crisis uh there's so many people we can't possibly help them all we close the border for over two years so of course there's going to be more people um because we've made it impossible for people to access however the courts of entry have contingency plans for mass migration events this is something that um was learned during the context of our litigation um against CBP around access to the port of entry and we see that the government is capable of responding rapidly in a a manner that is consistent with human dignity and how it responded to 30,000 Ukrainians showing up in Teijuana this spring yeah in some days CBP accepted as many as a thousand Ukrainians in a given day whereas though on those days they were accepting zero of other nationality and they were able to get up to speed so quickly because our report of entry has a contingency plan we are the united states government we are arguably one of the most powerful well-resourced governments on earth if you buy the line that this is a crisis and we don't have a contingency plan then we've got a lot of work to do here um and so it's not it's a it's a manufactured crisis uh we have the resources we have the personnel CBP has the largest law enforcement budget of all the law enforcement agencies in the federal government and they have hands and thousands of personnel it's what we lack is the political will and the emotional capital to do what we've already agreed to under US federal law as well as the refugee convention which we signed uh following World War Two which was designed to prevent further genocide further persecution of large groups of people um but we continue to reneg on on those obligations which we agreed to yeah yeah like when we talk about genocide and persecution like I personally know uh people from Myanmar who are really struggling with the united states asylum system right now and yeah it's really deeply um just infuriating to see them continue to pursue this kind of like waving my hands in the air I don't know what to do kind of thing let's talk a little bit about Joe Biden and his policies because like they've been lackluster or just completely like it in some cases you know he's issued executive orders which basically have gone unfulfilled right um regarding asylum and so they made a statement a few weeks ago now when Biden visited the border um can you explain what he said in that statement and then sort of what the Biden administration hasn't done to clear up the asylum system that it promised it would do the Biden administration made a lot of promises on the campaign trail um made an effort to put advocates in places in DHS other key positions to give the appearance that it was serious about reform and treating immigrants in a way that is dignified and humane um but what we've seen is a continuation of Trump policies which restrict access to the border for example um the new asylum ban that they are proposing through regulation where individuals that have translated through another country um and did not seek asylum in that country even if that country was not a safe country for them um that they would be precluded from applying for asylum a lot of people have been enthusiastic about these new parole programs for specific nationalities like for rags winds and aswellins um Haitians Cubans however those programs are really just scraps um they have a 30,000 person cap um the Ukrainian parole program had a hundred thousand person cap which has already been surpassed surpassed um Ukrainian sponsors well as the Ukrainian asylum seekers that were presenting through that parole program had much less by way of requirements um and so they've made a separate and not equal program for other nationalities which just happen to be nationalities that aren't white yeah yeah it's hard not to see a kind of white people first approach to asylum here uh yeah it certainly challenges your ability not to believe it's outright racist so i wonder like going forward um obviously people listening will probably be sort of upset and concerned at the continuing failures of our government to do anything about it can you outline like how people can help i know uh there's there's lots of people who will do direct mutual aid right like people like food not bombs uh of feeding people into whana but how can folks maybe who are at the border and then who want near the border how can how can they help well organizations that are at the border including ourselves work with volunteers that are remote um particularly if they have a foreign language skill because we can't serve tens of thousands of people each year with just the staff that we have and so we have a really robust uh remote volunteer network um i would also encourage people as you point out to look for organizations in their own community that are serving immigrants it is incredibly humbling to move to another country and realize you don't know how to read the light bill you don't know how to register your kids for school can your kids go to school where can i go to the doctor uh what you know what is an ambulance what you know that i do i not have to pay for that all of these things that might be different for them and and a real lack of volunteers to assist people with those daily integration activities um that are so important to to figuring out how your new community works um i also encourage people to when there's an opportunity to have conversations with your elected official to have those conversations write emails go in person if that's an opportunity different officials will have open days for their offices where you might be able to get maybe not face time with that official but with their point person who is overseeing that issue right now our elected officials they don't care about immigration uh because a lot of their constituents are not making it known to them what it is that they care about and that they're willing to go to drastic measures such as shutting down their office um if they don't take action on immigration we're all just thinking about it as okay well this is happening to immigrants this is not me i am a citizen but all of the worst fascist policies are tried out first on groups and in society that have less political power um on people that have criminal convictions on the people who have disabilities that make it impossible for them to communicate um on immigrants and so i would really encourage if you're if you're concerned about fascism if you're concerned about how your rights may be trampled in the future focus on immigrants because they are the testing ground for a lot of of fascist government's worst intentions yeah and that we've already seen that right if people aren't familiar it was bought at what among others who were out there running around Portland chucking people into a marked vans it was dhs drones surveilling people in Minneapolis it was indeed dhs surveilling uh i think people from alo throughout and other organizations in 2018 when uh lots of us are crossing the border very often uh to to help people who were a part of what was called the migrant caravan then and so like this this is happening to us right there's a thing that crime think have on some of their posters which i always like which is uh the border doesn't protect you it controls you which i think is it's more true than ever now like it's this sort of yeah it's a place where we experiment with these policies and they seem to they seem to get away with them right like it doesn't seem to be something that people care about that they did even two or three years ago under the Trump administration i wonder they call like how can people another thing that i think people lack it's like a direct connection to people seeking asylum or to the situation at the border right like every time something happens i'm sure you've seen this more often than i have and someone from la odc or new york or ever kind of parachutes into border communities does it i can see that this is the frustration that you share it does a story which misses masses of context and then buggers off back to the place where they came from and so like uh where can people find better connections to the situation for people seeking asylum i really like a blog and it's also a podcast every week border chronicles toddler's border chronicles i also would recommend reading all of toddler's books he is an incredible investigative journalist that does deep dive on how we got to this militarized state of the border so i i would recommend starting with border patrol nation and just going straight through there i also think pro-publica also does really great investigative long-dive reporting the intercept i would i would look at those places yeah yeah i think yeah if you're in a border community like it's really not that hard to cross and see what's going on for yourself and and do a little something to help you know make some of your your money that you set aside developing other people can go a long way and if you choose to use it that way and nico how can people support your work directly because they're a website or a twitter account they can follow to find more about allotralado now we do have our own website we're also on facebook instagram twitter and linkedin we regularly post opportunities to volunteer remotely volunteer in person and campaigns that people want to donate to there's that opportunity as well great is there anything else you want to share about uh that you feel that our listeners should know maybe if they haven't been following border situation closely the border situation is part of a larger historical context and briefly i talked about earlier the u.s. is a signatory to the refugee convention which is an outgrowth of of the horror that the world collectively felt when we came to grips with what happened during the holocaust and you know we collectively said never again never again part of our part in in the holocaust was we rejected the ms st. Louis from the post of florida and there was over 900 Jewish refugees that were on that boat no other country accepted them Cuba Canada rejected and ultimately had to go back to europe and some of those people ultimately died in the holocaust and and those deaths are are on our conscience uh and any time the asylum seekers are being turned away along the border when they have the legal right to present themselves under existing u.s. law and international law it's a it's a repetition of the ms st. Louis except this happening all across the border every single day yeah that's very well put and it it's like yeah just matter of it's one person or a hundred people like it's a tragedy every time we can't give some we have plenty of safe places for people to go but when deciding not to not to welcome them and yeah it's very very sad well thank you so much for giving us some of your afternoon Nicole um if yeah if people want to find you personally do you have a personal uh social media yeah you can find me on twitter um and i'm loose on la frontera and i'm twitter okay great and uh alotro lado is it just uh alotro lado on twitter yes alotro lado sometimes we have alotro lado that work okay yeah so let's alot ro alad if people are need to spend our right thank you wonderful thank you so much paper ghosts is a true crime podcast investigating the mysterious disappearance and brutal unsolved murder of tamis a wiki they just kept telling us from the beginning she'll she'll be back she'll be back we had no clue where she was didn't know where to begin to look it just hit me like a ton of bricks i just had not really thought about anything except finding her tamis story shocked the nation there was no resolution nothing was ever zeroed in on the deeper i searched the more troubling things i found there was a lot of physical evidence that had never been analyzed money and their f*** from a tfb i had a job on the zary the best lead the best evidence the best witness was blown off listen to paper ghosts on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your favorite shows levitations vomiting strange voices have you ever wondered if the stories about exorcism or true he definitely has something going on it's primal and if they are true how could one protect themselves from these dark forces it's still in there it's really that thing is back i see it these are the questions we posed to renowned exorcist father carlos martens who agreed to open his case files to the public for the first time tell me who you are the one you won't get out the one you can't my name is father carlos martens i am an exorcist i have seen things very evil things things that i wish were true oh god it's me forget what you think you know about exorcism listen to the exorcist files on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts there is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe on the new podcast the turning room of mirrors we look beneath the delicate souvenir of american ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure dorge balancing there are not very many of us that actually grew up with balancing it was like i grew up with motzart he could do no wrong like he was a god but what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life where the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed he used to say what are you looking at dear you can't see you only i can see you most people in the ballet world are more interested in their experience of watching it than in a dance's experience of executing it listen to the turning room of mirrors on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome to it could happen here once again who's to be myself and true from the youtube channel andruism as we talk about whatever and whatever in question is the second most popular scundry in the world and one potential vision for its future drawn from its anti-cluid past i've spoken of course about india a sub constant from which i draw a good portion of my heritage and one that boasts over nine thousand years of recorded history and roughly 55 thousand years of no one human settlement india is an incredibly diverse country ethnically linguistically religiously and otherwise but unfortunately it has suffered much of the same fate that thrust the world has fallen prey to the rapacious appetite of british cloning of the sum now historically the indian local economy was dependent upon the most productive and sustainable agriculture and horticulture and of course pottery and furniture making jewelry it was very well known for jewelry in fact indian jewelry makers ended up starting some very successful jewelry businesses when they were freed from indentureship in trinidad they also got involved in leather work and a lot of other economic activities in india but the basis of india has traditionally historically you know thousands of years been textiles different types of textiles each village had its spinners and cartels and diars and weavers who were of course at the heart of that village's economy but an interesting outcome of british cloningism in india has been the flooding of india with the machine made inexpensive mass produced textiles from Lancashire during you know Britain's industrial revolution the local textile artist were very quickly put out to business and village economies suffered very terribly so i mean you know well i think we're familiar with this sort of general story smaller cottage industries became overrun by you know mass production and of course it remains to sound like i'm entirely demonizing mass production just describing what has happened of course mass production has had its many benefits in providing access to resources and to the products of many different people but of course it's also had its many drawbacks including you know the share environmental impact as well as the impact on people you know as markswork about of their alienation from the process of production as the industrial system basically separated each step in the process of production to different workers and so no one had a hand in the production of a product and start to finish and of course that that had significant social and i would also assume mental impact on the people with you know that whole era of british economic imperialism happening in india the changes that took place within a generation was so rapid you know your head would spin that evolution of you know the indian whole economy was really a sight to behold and another element of british economic imperialism british imperialism or broadly was the introduction of british education under colonial rule in the 18th century when lord mccolley introduced the Indian education act in the british parliament he said and i quote a single shelf of a good european library was with the whole native literature of india neither as a language of the law nor as a language of religion has a Sanskrit any particular claim to our engagement you must do our best to form a class of persons indian in blood and color but english in taste in opinions in morals and in intellect so the typical racism typical white pants putter and typical you know um of course this phrase was used in a north american indian-American context but i believe the phrase is taking the indian out to the man yeah kill the indian save the man yeah right um so it's kind of interesting it's a different type of indian talking about there but that sort of idea still applies and really that sort of sentiment is something that has existed throughout the history of cleanliness something that you know is seen in all of british formal colonies because mantis aem was put into parliament and pushed forward it was pursued with the might of the british rarge or the traditional schools that place in different village communities were gradually replaced by colonial schools and universities of course taking advantage of the caste and class system that was in place in india prior to their arrival the british would have selected wealthier indians we sense the public schools such as it on and harrow and universities like Oxford and Cambridge and those indians that you know they learned english poetry english law english customs to neglect their own culture you know it's like while read the classics of the Vedas when you have Shakespeare and the London times and so having been raised in that environment having grown up having basically their minds colonized from the crib they began to see their own cultures as backward uncivilized all-fascant regressive and again something you see all over the world you sort of the residential schools you see it's in the schools in the crib you see it in schools in africa basically everywhere they colonized it's went they were take a generation they were take generations of young people and they would develop that self-heatred not the state for the wound culture by you know positioning their education predisposition as you know superior in fact during the process of decolonization couldn't include of you know formal political independence many of the formal colonies of Britain particularly in the Caribbean that's where most familiar a lot of the people who became you know the fluis prime minister as the country the one that would establish the trajectory of the country for years decades to come thinking of people like booster manatee and Jamaica are air quilliums doctoric Williams in transpecu among others basically all of the philist prime ministers basically every single Caribbean country they had all been educated in english schools in english universities in well in the prestige schools of their countries they didn't end up being flown out to Britain itself and they basically became the rulers became the leaders were handed power over by the british to basically through will in their stead of course with all the talk of finally independence people got caught up in that energy of political independence and freedom from the control of the british after all the decades and centuries of struggle but unfortunately it proved i believe to be a ruse as very little changed for the average person in the as post political independence yes something that phenomenon talks about in in the sort of francophone context of like even even in countries where you have like at word you know the colonizers are thrown up ashore of elutions you get this class of like like lawyers and intellectuals who are like have been educated like in imperialist powers or in sort of their schools who wind up as like the first generation of of post independence leaders and those people like you know what whether they want to or not end up sort of like reflecting the sort of values and political positions of like of the formal colonial powers and there's this whole sort of dynamic that like i i feel like i feel like this is the part of for non that people don't read very much but that's about how these leaders sort of like lose touch with it with the sort of like anti-colonial masses and how they sort of like wind up re-incorporating their countries back into sort of colonialism yeah yeah that's really how you see that new clue in the dynamic developing um and it's really it's hard to tell um retrospectively whether these leaders thought they were actually you know anti-colonial or if they knew that they were you know carrying on a particular legacy but i find that because Trinada is only um only recently celebrated just last year 60 years of independence they of course people who were alive prior to independence and so you find a lot of the older generation how they how some of them speak particularly the more educated ones how they carry themselves or they dress or the attitudes they espouse is very much like to get any kind of respect in their time the you had to be here was going to get to present yourself with me it's a recent self in a as a proximate to britishness as possible you know conversation of respectability politics and stuff and so i have some understanding of what they had to go through and where they're coming from when they hold on to these perspectives still because that's what they grew up in um but there really is a shame that they've been hoolling back progress for so long now because they still hold on to these deeply conservative deeply religious deeply reactionary ideas that were uh just you know they just inculcated within the education system and in the cultural zeitgeist of their time i was just when um me was talking about fan i was thinking as well about like have you read a book called Beyond a Boundary by CLR James Andrew i have one because it's about cricket and i'm not too integrated cricket but i've been i know it's an iconic and i know it's an iconic read i think he yeah he explains a lot of that very well i think if people could read it even if they don't like cricket i'm not a big cricket person uh but uh certainly one of the best sports books i've read it maybe one of the best books uh and he doesn't like it's your own explain CLR did a lot of uh he put a lot of bangers in his time yeah he did have some bangers highly recommended yeah if you if you don't want to read about cricket he also talks about this in the crewman the gunner revolution yeah the youtube whatever we go to about cricket that is not about cricket it's more of an autobiography like seen through the lens of his his cricket i think but yeah it'll be cool because i know he spent a lot of time he grew up of course born raised and sefantirinad so we're interested to see um sort of if he talks about his political development how batteru is in his time in trinad yeah i think he does it's been a while since i've read it but i think he talks about like how he sort of saw himself constituted his colonial subject like through his experiences interacting with british people uh on one of the places where the terrain to a hidden counter them i guess was was playing cricket because right yes of course and of you know thankfully uh we've come to decimate them at their own game as usual yeah it's true yeah yeah and even like uh in english cricket at certain point like a gang running into cricket which i know is a diversion uh but like they had rules where you could only have a certain number of international players playing for each english county uh it's it's it's extreme like if you look at how the empire constituted whiteness through sport and like who was allowed to play rugby which is a touching sport and who was allowed to play cricket which which isn't normally a touching sport like it did it it's racist as fuck um yeah i mean of course there's there's a lot of racism in sports history yeah sorry for the cricket diversion so please continue ah it's entirely fine i see it's all Greek to me because i don't know what any of those points or numbers or anything means um there are too many different types of cricket i mean i've had people try to explain to me before it's just not my thing um i know people who play it though so you know good for them but back to india right uh if there's one particular person in india's history that really represent to this type of western educated colonized subject trying to be something bigger than that uh kind of mentality it was java harlal never who became the first prime minister after independence they were of course sort to promote the industrialization of india not via a capitalist route but by more of a centralized pattern route which is why if you look in the india's constitution you'll see that it's reversed itself as a socialist country yeah really if i'm remembering right in a room it was like a he was like a fabian socialist or something yeah yeah his inspiration came his inspiration came from the intellectuals of the London school of economics and the fabian society so yeah he's quite the character you see the sort of direction that the end up putting the the country in i mean even today india in many ways continues to be ruled in the english way without english rulers um just like in the kribian continues to be ruled in english way without english rulers in africa uh you know the various countries have been ruled in their various colonized powers way rather than in their own way without the colonized rulers further colonized in rulers um the industrials the intellectuals the entrepreneurs all of them are working with the government to see the salvation of india taking place in a subordination to the world back and candy i-m-f and the g-a-t-t uh you know they see india as part of this global economy meant to submit and to sue to multinational corporations um but of course the people of india not to please and the people of india are suffering under the brunt of that um after seeing the failures of of course the congress party under niru and his daughter indira gandy and his son rajiv gandy um um the poor continues to be poor the navel the middle classes uh and tuning towards uh just to see certain directions um and of course as we've seen in in the past three years the farmers have been agitating uh against the various pressures they've been pleased under things kind of so and it was pretty much how uh mahatma gandy predicted that it would because unlike niru and unlike other uh washtenite here to think as of his time um gandy thought differently about what india's potential could be what it looked like and that's part of the reason they killed them and i must preface this discussion of gandy's vision of a free india by notein of course that gandy himself was a very flawed person um you know racist sexist pretty sure he assaulted somebody he did some very um fucked up stuff to his knees yeah yeah yeah i just let me leave it at that but i mean that's not something you can put aside so it's something to be cognizant of but one of the aspects of um his time on this planet um i've been his development of a sort of a vision of a free india not as a nation state but as a confederation of self-governance self-reliance self-employed people living in village communities, deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads it would have been a sort of a bottom up system where the power to decide what could be imported into or exported from the village where economic and political power all remaining the hands of village assemblies where people in these village assemblies in these communities would continue to live in relative harmony with their surroundings with um they would continue to weave their homes upon clothes eat their home grown food use their homemade goods care for their animals their forests and their lands uh take care of the fertility of the soil enjoy the home grown stories and epics of india and continue to build their temples and appreciate their various regional distinctive cultures this was meant to be the system the practice the idea the philosophy of swadeshi which is a conjunction of two Sanskrit words swā which mean in self or own and dash meaning country swadeshi as an adjective meaning of one's own country according to the principle of swadeshi the idea is that whatever is made or produced in a village must be used first and foremost by the members of that village so i mean there could be trade-in and collaboration between villages and communities uh but ghandi thought it should be minimal like a sort of an ice and on the cake um goods and services to him was something that should have been generated within the community the things that needed to be used by the community should be created in that community another influential perhaps the most influential aspect of swadeshi and swadeshi philosophy took place in the early 20th century as a direct fallout to the decision of the british india government to partition bengal the use of swadeshi goods with the goods that were produced and made in india by and here for indians and the boycott of foreign made goods were among the two main objectives of the swadeshi movement and so the boycott resolution ended up being passed in karkata city hall in august 1904 boycott in the use of Manchester cloth and sold from Liverpool in the district of barisal the masses adopted the message of boycotts of foreign made goods and the value of the british cloth sold there fell very rapidly various songs and cultural works ended up being produced in the time to sort of bolster the movement at one point 150,000 english cloths were burnt as part of the boycott and the symbol of caddy spinners the sort of tool that was used to weave cloth to weave fibers to create yarn became a major force in the movement and in the representation of the movement I think I get what you're saying like we can all benefit from a little specialization and the like improvements that that brings was still sort of acknowledging that autonomy is desirable yeah I think there needs to be some some balance between your autonomy and sufferlines and that kind of thing and also collaboration I think he goes a bit too much in that autonomy direction but in the context of when these ideas being developed it's sort of understandable because in this time you know the self-reliance of the people is being vastly eroded people being forced and you know cities they've lost their livelihoods and they were there was a sort of a developing reliance in the global economy where Swedechi proposes that you know India avoids economic dependence on external market forces that treat these vulnerabilities and communities that end up in a really harming the members of that community Swedechi is meant to avoid the unhealthy and wasteful and environmentally destructive transportation of goods between communities avoiding the excessive emissions that would cause and promoting of course the development of a strong economic base to satisfy the needs of the community to satisfy the local production consumption Swedechi is kind of about both creating a self-reliant India and also creating self-reliant villages within India so that each village is a microcosm of the greater India a web of sort of a distributed decentralized web of loosely interconnected communities in a time where the British were promoting the centralized industrialized and mechanized modes of production Gandhi was turning to the principle of decentralized homegrown and handcrafted modes of production rather than mass production production by the masses I think there was also a spiritual component to the idea of Swedechi because at the time Gandhi was on a fan of the idea that people were not using their hands to produce the idea that you know everyone should be involved in some kind of trade or skill of some kind that utilizes their hands because of the whole spiritual component of using the body that you have fully and another aspect of the spirituality of Swedechi was of course the idea of this locally based community enhancing our community spirit community relationships and community well-being an economy that actively encourages mutual aid that encourages the principle of care between families, neighbors, animals, lands, forestry, natural resources for present and future generations it's a there a confrontation of the driving force between mass production which Gandhi saw as this cult of the individual where there must be expansion of the economy in a global scale and expand the consumption production of the sake of economic growth out of a desire for the individual's personal whims for the desire for you know personal and corporate profit another reason of course that Gandhi rallied against this idea of mass production and promoted insert production for the masses by the masses as because mass production led people leaving their villages their land their crafts and their homesteads to go work in factories where they became cogs in a machine standing in a conveyer belt living in shanty towns and dependents upon the moves see the bosses and of course as those bosses gained access to more efficient technologies because they were constantly in pursuit of greater productivity in those greater profit the masters of this economy you know they want more efficient machines work in faster and so they want less people we can do as machines as the result was that the people who are to move to these cities to work in these factories we eventually thrown out when they were no longer considered useful and became enjoying the millions of unemployed you know rootless jobless people in Indian society swedishy instead encourages the idea that the machine should be something that subordinates the worker but instead something that is subordinated to the worker that it doesn't become the master but instead it is mastered and allows us to orchestrate our own piece of you know human activity as on that swedishy is necessarily against automation against technological development but it's more so that it aims to circumvent the harms that could be caused by such technology is being out of the control of the people themselves and in the control of the select private few I think swedishy has a sort of an element of glorification of the past it might do my research for this episode I ended up looking into of course the writings of proponents of swedishy and people discussing and these thoughts and the subject and I've just called one particular passage swedishy is the way to comprehensive peace peace with oneself peace between peoples and peace with nature the global economy drives people to what high performance high achievement and high ambition for materialistic success this results in stress loss of meaning loss of inner peace loss of space for peace on family relationships on loss of spiritual life Gandhi realized that in the past life in India was not only prosperous but also conducive to philosophical and spiritual development so dashi for Gandhi was a spiritual imperative I think it's understandable that a decolonial project would attempt to develop a pride in the history of the people who have gone through so much in you know their legacy and their traditions and their ideas but I think it's a bit of a stretch to glorify India's past and pre-colonial past and such respect I don't think any peoples pre-colonial past should be excessively glory glorified or like mythology I study mythology is yeah romanticized yeah yeah it's a good idea because I feel as though one that clouds our judgments and our critical eye for the aspects of you know past societies that do do it need to be challenged do need to be changed I think that's part of my issue with swedishy is this idea that you know if things just go back to these sorts of villages and village communities that everything else would just be okay but of course there were other issues that in here was dealing with even practicalization you know in terms of sexism in terms of the control of the caste system and the higher caste and the other aspects of Indian society that of course we made more severe by British colonialism, colorism I think is one of those issues that of course existed prior to colonization but was made worse by the British and their presence in the subcontinent but I think striking that balance of cleaning learning from respecting that that pre-colonial past but also in articulant projects not excessively romanticizing the past in an effort to progress towards the future these days I believe swedishy is most known for its focus on protectionism its disdain for an important investment but it was of course a very wide span in philosophy it was a vision and a philosophy of life that Gandhi held his entire life and it's not something that I was familiar with prior to looking into it and my continued pursuit of decolonial perspectives and explorations of various post-clean projects but and philosophies but it's something that I've appreciated despite my criticisms or some aspects of it that's about all I have for you all today you can find me on youtube at andrism on twitter.com slash and it's go insane true and you can support me on patreon.com slash say true kiss and claim paper ghosts is a true crime podcast investigating the mysterious disappearance and brutal unsolved murder of tamis a wiki they just kept telling us from the beginning she'll she'll be back she'll be back we had no clue where she was didn't know where to begin a lucky it just hit me like a ton of bricks I just had not really thought about anything except finding her tamis story shocked the nation there was no resolution nothing was ever zeroed in on the deeper I searched the more troubling things I found there was a lot of physical evidence that had never been analyzed my name is from with the FBI at a chocolate Missouri the best lead the best evidence the best witness was blown off listen to paper ghosts on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your favorite shows levitations vomiting strange voices have you ever wondered if the stories about exorcism or true he definitely has something going on it's primal and if they are true how could one protect themselves from these dark forces that's still in there really that thing is back I see it these are the questions we posed to renowned exorcist father Carlos martins who agreed to open his case files to the public for the first time tell me who you are the one you won't get out the one you can't my name is father Carlos martins I am an exorcist I have seen things very evil things things that I wish weren't true oh god that's me forget what you think you know about exorcism listen to the exorcist files on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts there is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe on the new podcast the turning room of mirrors we look beneath the delicate veneer of american ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure dorge balancing there are not very many of us that actually grew up with balancing it was like I grew up with Mozart he could do no wrong but he was a god but what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life where the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed used to say what are you looking at dear you can't see you only I can see you most people in the ballet world are more interested in their experience of watching it than in a dance's experience of executing it listen to the turning room of mirrors on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to dick it happened here a podcast that's being done for the first time and not the second time because we had bike problems i we did not just record a very funny intro that is now completely lost yeah you'll you'll never hear it you'll never you'll never know what great fun we had and the joy was in the creation there not not in the sharing yeah process not an event structure etc etc yeah yep so i'm i'm Mia i'm a i'm a doing this episode also garrison is here hello hi also james hi i'm recording so we're good now admit yet the good news is stunningly as as as as much as it seems we are now more prepared to record this episode we were last time so yeah well what are we what are we talking about we we we are talking about the age of the gender bear crap so as as people are probably aware there is a raft of anti trans bill sweeping through state legislatures um the the latest of these bills to pass as of time of recording is the bill in Utah which has banned minors from getting gender affirming care like hormone therapy hormone blockers and any kind of gender affirming surgery for anyone who's not already receiving them it does does the Utah one also banned like therapy like talk therapy no but there so on the one hand it doesn't ban talk therapy on the other hand there's a provision in there that i think might also suggest that people do conversion therapy so that's great um it fucking sucks ass uh yeah kids are going to die because of this bill the people who are writing and signing these bills know that kids are going to die we know this because Utah's governor Spencer Cox who is the guy who signed the bill vetoed an earlier ban on trans athletes participating in school sports specifically citing the risk of suicide so he knows this is going to kill kids he signs this anyways and we are now living in what i call the age of the gender bear crack um we're we're gonna spend so we're gonna have another episode later on where we spend a lot of time going through all the individual bills and the stuff Trump's been saying about this because Jesus Christ and pretty pretty pretty grim stuff that they're I mean on the one hand making making trans people out to be the boogie man did not work in their favor greatly in the midterms but it seems like they're not trying to they're not trying to change their uh their tactics here they are still going all in based on Trump's speech from a few days ago they have of of using the using the transgender menace as the as the greatest threat to America and the and the nuclear family so I think it goes for them like electorally but it's pretty bad rhetoric to see flying around yeah I think they um it does really well with the people who who allowed and like like you you often see this in like uh primaries right like people push to the limits of their party because that plays well with the most politicized people and for sure if you're going to a Trump rally what like three years after he got kicked out yeah you are also a bigot yeah yeah but before we do that I I want to before we actually like really do an episode on this I want to take a look at the sort of bureaucratic grounding for this entire thing and to do that we need to look at gender bureaucrats the American gender bureaucracy so I'm gonna cite my sources a bit and say that I stole this from a incredibly unlikely source which is the Maoist review of Shrek 2 what what wait stop the way yeah yeah that's true I think that's true yeah never speak those words again this is the Maoist review of Shrek 2 is is one of the three great sort of text of American Maoism there's this one there's torgid retracted people's war the Florida Everglades and then there's that time the art the the RCP got into a fight with the PSL they're both trying to grab each other's signs amazing amazing stuff but unfortunately you know having having come up with the term gender bureaucrat which is incredibly useful I they're Maoist so that they're constitutionally and politically just unable to understand what a bureaucrat is so I have now stolen this term and I'm using it for other purposes reappropriate no it's stealing their Maoists it's never wrong to steal from Maoist okay fine so all right to get a getting back sort of to some more serious stuff to understand what this is I want to talk about sort of the term a sign gender at birth this used to be a like it used to be fairly common kind of in in in circles to like refer to people is like a mapper a fab's like a side male a birth or a sign female a birth and it's a kind of sucks as a term it's been replaced by other stuff but I I think there's something important here which is I want to go back and look at the assigned part and I want to I want to look at the specifically the part about the gender being assigned because I think there's something I get lost in sort of popular discussions of this which is that when when people think about like the term like the assignment of gender right they think about it as something that's created socially right they think about it as you know people being like pressured to perform one kind of gender or another by the people around them sort of by their families by just like people walking down the street and this is all true but there's also something else going on here that something else going on here is we need to ask ourselves when we talk about someone's gender being assigned who is it being assigned by because this is an actual specific person right the person who actually assigns the agenda is a doctor sometimes a nurse or a midwife and this person is the first gender bear crack they they're the first gender bear crap because they are the persons who sits down and puts down what your gender is on a form now okay you you may be asking yourself right Mia why should anyone care that your gender is now on a piece of paper well because I also maybe like they're they're also mainly at least you know in like a like a medical scientific sense that's mainly like oh what parts do you have and then using those parts as as a carryover for gender as that's been modeled after ever since we stopped dressing boys and girls and dresses and all the same clothing when they're yeah and and we'll we'll get into sort of like how this has sort of changed over time but okay to understand why this actually matters I think what we need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is because this is a thing that used to be fairly common to talk about on the left and then people have stopped doing over the past maybe like half decade the anthropologist David Graber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career probably his most famous book is one of his later words called bullshit jobs but I want to go back to an earlier thing that you wrote called the utopia of rules I'm good I'm gonna I'm gonna read a little bit of one of the first sections of it bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization in practice bureaucratic procedure it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real life existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formula whether it's a matter of forms who rule statistics or questionnaires it is always a matter of simplification typically it's not very different from the boss who walks into the kitchen to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong in either case it is a matter of applying very simple pre-existing templates to complex and often ambiguous situations the result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see 2% of what's in front of them so in you know we can see some of the the the the the core aspects of bureaucracy here right bureaucracy inherently is an active simplification um because of sort of the tech like literally the technical systems of what a bureaucracy is and because of how it how it stores information how it moves information around it can only see the world in incredibly sort of simplified terms yeah it has to like abstract these things and then make assumptions based off those abstractions in order to have any type of functionality yeah yeah so great great great great later says that like this you know okay on the one hand like simple this sort of simplification and model making that goes on in a bureaucracy can be really really frustrating with you have to interact with it but on the other hands you know so the reduction of the complex to the simple it's not just you know a thing that's inherently evil in it's in and of itself it's the basis of all thoughts because you know like we we actually can't and like in and of ourselves process the world by immediately holding it our minds all of the information at one time right the way we understand the world is implications of models yeah and we it's pattern recognition recreating recursive thought loops that give us the very concept of meaning and like that's how we know what words are yeah and it's not a true you know you can you can look you it's also possible to take a lot of data and make nonsense out of it uh this is this is this is a field called economics marketing yeah but yeah you know okay so it's this is also the basis of all social theory right like all like social theory is about taking a bunch of incredibly complicated like and messy relationships and just statistical stuff and just the noise of people doing doing things in their everyday lives and trying to establish sort of like ways of understanding them and you know this in some sense is a kind of violence right it's a violence as simplification but on the other hand you know the the violence you're doing to reality here bear as more resemble to sort of like Bacoon is creative destruction right you're you know you're imposing a kind of violence on reality you know in in simplifying and destroying a bunch of aspects of it so you can understand just like one part of it at a time but you know this this is a useful thing right it's how we think it like we we literally couldn't do anything without it but as Graver puts it the problem of right the problems arise at the moment that violence is no longer metaphorical here let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones Jim Cooper a former LAPD officer turned sociologist has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime cops don't beat up burglarcy rights the reason he explained is simple the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from police is a challenge to the right to as he puts it define the situation yep that is to say yeah that that perfectly describes any any physical interaction with police like this this is this is one of the things I like about greater because I mean this is something that I noticed and I was in academia is it is very very easy to tell who like when you're reading a theorist also theorist talking about stuff like who has been true gas before right who hasn't yeah yeah yeah I'm always reminded when we talk about like academics who have a real fucking life of that picture of Edward Syed throwing stones yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah go on most based academic thing anyone has done yeah and like Graver Graver I think I think it's been to your guess on five continents or something like that like he's he's he's he's gotten around he's he's done a lot of stuff yeah it is it is always nice whenever the you can whenever these types of theorists who like you know they often will philosophize about like the nature of power the nature of the state and sometimes it can get a little bit wishy washy and it's nice when there's people who do that yeah also know like the material like the material reality of like power yeah and how that's how yeah like how how how like the how like the philosophy of power transfers over to street politics is always a always an interesting difference to compare compare various theory too in 2020 I was teaching a world history course in obvious to you to remote because of the pandemic right and so like we were just logging in the morning like fully aware that I had seen and being tear gasped with some of my students and like before I then just discussed like how the state has a monopoly on violence people are going to get all the fucking lines up like you've got a massive bruise again yeah yeah it was very instructive and everyone should do it in their history glasses yeah okay so I'm gonna keep reading from this quote because there's a couple more things I want I want to get out of this cool so okay so he you know he's talking about how like you get a violent reaction from challenging the right to define the situation that is to say no this isn't a possible crime situation this is a citizen who pays your salary walking his dog situation show shove off let alone the invariably disastrous wait why are you handcuffing that guy he didn't do anything so it's true it's talking back above all of an inspires beatdowns and means challenging whatever administrative rubric it orderly a disorderly crowd appropriately or improperly registered vehicle has been applied by the officer's discretionary judgment the police truncant is precisely the point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and it's monopoly on coercive force come together it only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost on attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations at the same time if one accepts john p. j's famous definition of mature intelligence is the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives or multiple or possible perspectives one can see here precisely how bureaucratic power at the moment it turns to violence becomes literally a form of infantiles stupidity yeah it's it is this weird like childlike sense that is that is an interesting the combination of thoughts that's a fantastic grave of passage I love it is this I like literally reading reading this book is like one of the things that like really sort of like committed me to anarchism because in you know like it it's it's it's a book that actually takes violence seriously and while talking about bureaucracy which something that really doesn't yeah I don't know it's a good critique and we kind of have lost it over the years I feel like we've gotten into arguments about this sort of thing when discussing the usefulness of like a Foucault's theory of power and like how power functions you've definitely brought up this passage before talking about how the extent of that is always is always measured by where the truncheon is hitting yeah on like the actual street level yeah but you know okay draper isn't writing about gender here really right he's he's he's mostly writing about sort of direct police violence although I mean it is worth noting that like all the stuff that he's writing is informed by sort of like like by by actually specifically by by by actual critical race theory and by sort of like like feminist ampoult theory stuff yeah yeah um but you know okay if if if you if you if you look back at this right and you look back at sort of the you know the the the the the the point at which the states bureaucratic imparity imperative for imposing simple administrative schemes and the monopoly on force come together or specifically the parts that are about right like the the way you get a violent reaction is by being something that being something that a bureaucrat thinks you're not yeah that is it's challenging their their version of reality yeah it's challenging the validity of their perception of reality yeah yeah and you know and if you think about this for about five seconds if you're a trans person that's not good because someone a bureaucrat has already assigned you a gender at birth and if you're not that gender things are going to get really bad really quickly well do you know what bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely consider greatly is all of the bureaucracies that support the products and services that that fund this podcast well I hope you enjoy your your your your five new bars of gold thank you for supporting the show we are back uh let's talk about gender and the bureaucracy that seeks to contain it violence yeah sure yeah you know if if if you are for example intersects the point at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and it's monopoly on course if force comes together is on the operating table of the hospital where you're born um you know first you a doctor assigns you a fucking gender which is never in a sex by the way the doctor just decides whether you're male or female then you know puts that gender on your birth certificate um it's technically possible in some places to get it changed the intersex later in life but when I say it's technically possible I I there there might even more people who've done it the first person to we know ever changed their gender to intersex did it in 2017 so yeah I'm sure there were like yeah I mean pre bureaucracy and ditching the societies I know that yeah this is yeah this is yeah I mean like yeah like and this is like the the the way that like we treat intersex people also has gotten worse it's yeah yeah yeah like yeah and and we're going to get into this petubitus like it's like you know this is a very like it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly more than two genders and how was how a society reacts to that I think says you know a it's an enormous sort of like it's something an enormously impact intersex people right like you know you have like an incredible amount of violence that is flicked it onto them and then secondly the the way intersex people is dealt with it's something that reveals a lot about how this society is going to look at gender and how society is going to look at the enforcement of gender I think on the point of how it's in a lot of ways the treatment of intersex people has gotten has gotten worse the past like a few hundred years if you're like as the bureaucracy grows yeah yeah yeah that of violence that is necessary to maintain it also grows yeah and the the bigger any any small thing threatens the validity of the entire bureaucracy so they have to come down hard on anything that that is that is like deviant from that because yeah they need to maintain the validity of the system that they have built I think that's definitely an aspect yeah and the other thing that's really really bad is that you know we're going to talk about this more a bit later but like the the actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has increased so dramatically even in the past 50 years it is like like the US is a if someone does someone living in 1890 right the modern US is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society it is like like it it made it even like the even like the yeah like yeah like even like the the most sort of like totalitarian style on his bureaucrat like looks at the US and is like what the fuck guys you guys are taking bureaucracy too far like the surveillance capacity is definitely would like you would have loved that what to to be to be fair to be fair the East Germans did really well with what they had but I think it's really so I think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the way you're able to do gender when you're yeah yeah this is the thing getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your internet searches they're like that that's one side of it and there's other sides of it in terms of like you know people people seeking to make like different gender presentations illegal how the how how that type of surveillance will eventually lead into pretty pretty a truckaunian well if and I think I think I think in a lot of ways like the violence that is done to intersects kids is sort of is is one of the sort of origin points of this right um I I do actually want I want to sort of get into what what this is a little bit um since the 1960s and again there's what I'm saying this like this stuff is kind of recent right um doctors have started commonly performing non-consensual surgery and intersects kids to force them to conform to a gender here's from a 2013 report from the United Nations special raporteur on torture that's cited by human rights watch children who are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to irreversible sex assignment involuntary sterilization involuntary genital normalization surgery performed without their informed consent or that of the parents in an attempt quote in an attempt to fix their sex leaving them with permanent irreversible infertility and causing severe mental suffering yeah and this is fucking horrible it happens it's all the time and on all of the people who write these fucking laws that are like giving giving someone gender affirming care is like meddling them specifically carve out sections so that doctors can keep fucking doing this intersects kids and it's horrible it's really interesting how like um so often the sports field is a terrain where this kind of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for the first time like the sports governing authorities have been fucking brutalizing intersects athletes for 50 years now and every time it's because yeah they'll and they'll they'll put forth an argument and then lose in court most of the time because they'll they'll seek to advance like a very narrow definition of gender based on chromosomeality or something or test australian levels or something and then demonstrably this binary doesn't exist right like and then they'll lose and they'll respond to losing by fucking destroying that person yeah yeah it's there are plenty of cases people can can find in history of that happening and yeah it's fucked up yeah and and I think the more I've been thinking about this the more I think that the sort of like that a lot of what turfism is is this kind of like it's attempting to take the bureaucratic categories as literal truth but that doesn't work it doesn't it doesn't actually work on a sort of either on a scientific level or on a sort of more philosophical level because again what what what what that sort of bureaucratic assignment is is there is a radical simplification of reality that destroys it destroys reality itself in order to create a sort of like an ambore and f on a page and when you when you try to go back into the real world that shit doesn't work it only works when you can enforce it with violence tests do be loving to enforce gender with violence yeah and you know I mean this is this entire thing is sort of this is the basis of the sort of of the of the American gender bureaucracy right it's inherently violent it's it's not just sort of a procedure for recording what your gender is it is it always sort of has been and is increasingly more so now becoming a system that imposes it imposes a gender on you um you know and there's also a lot of ways that this bureaucracy gets imposed on you that are you know less extreme you know if if if we go back to the question of like who are you assigned a gender for right you're assigned a gender for the state and you know almost everything in your life depends on these bureaucratic documents because that's how the state understands you as a person by by these bureaucratic documents like specifically birth certificates brought to us like driver's licenses social security cards and sports yeah yeah I mean like here here's the American Bar Association talking about birth certificates they are so common that we might even overlook their significance in the United States birth certificates serve as a proof of an individual's age citizenship status and identity they are necessary to obtain social security apply for a passport in Rowan schools get a driver's license gain employment or apply for other benefits humanitarian Desmond Tutu described the birth certificate as quote a small paper but it actually establishes who you are and gives access to the rights and privileges and the obligations of citizenship you know and and I think that does meant Tutu is being enormously optimistic about sort of what it means to be seen by the state here because the other thing that it does is it exposes you to the state's violence in a way where you know it now the state like this is the mechanism through which it now knows who you are right so does not having one like yeah yeah it's when the soft sits try to not have birth certificates for their children yeah yeah get real violent and this and this is the thing and one of one of the things I hear about this is that like you know okay you used to be able to like get away with not having birth certificates right like a lot a lot of Americans used to not to used to like not but one of one of the things that happens over the course of World War II is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity and there's an expansion the state's bureaucratic capacity because it has to you know it has to go to war but simultaneously this and this is something that didn't have to happen but did is that you get the army and you get employers starting to ask people's birth certificates but like people don't have them because like I don't know I was white white the fuck do I need a record of me being born right like this is this is only a this is another thing you need it's only a thing the state needs yeah it's interesting to look at like I was just thinking about how this is also where the kind of frontline of colonialism happens yeah like the the enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people like you can look at specific individuals um Osh tissue is one of them they were a crow person in the coronation who like fought for the United States as a scout um was what's called a bad day and then was like in later life kind of forced to conform to a binary gender with which they didn't identify and they hadn't lived that way and and because they had to having been assigned identity papers to live on a reservation you have to take one of the fucking boxes yeah and you know and the thing about those fucking boxes right is you know even like to this day there are a lot of states where you can't change your gender like on on you can't change what says in the fucking card you just can't and you know if they've assigned you a gender that's not your gender then well tough luck they have they have an op they have a monopoly in the legitimate use of force and you don't you know on this other stage we need a fucking court order saying that you've had surgery in order to get the fucking like you know in order to change your bureaucratic person and again the reason for this is and I cannot emphasize this enough fuck you that is that is that that is the reason for this um yeah I want to I want to go back also to you know look to look a bit more about sort of bureaucratic effects um I'm going to read from an itriple EPs about a trans guy in the UK in the 50s from the start the sensationalized press coverage of Ferguson's transition focused on some surprisingly quotidian elements quote change of sex puts them in a different employment category with a raise and salary reported one newspaper underscoring the fact that being reclassified as male in the eyes of his employer the British government tied into a complex network of gendered economic and labor discrimination in fact not only did his pay change but his whole job category changed even though he was doing exactly the same work under the same conditions this was because woman workers were simply we're not simply paid less but also kept in feminized job grades in the civil service despite the government's claims that service was a meritocracy a question a question raised in parliament by an N. P. Who had heard about Ferguson demanded to know what form and number of proofs other than a mirror announcement by the subjects uh they misgendered them a couple times I it is required before us uh uh uh a female quote like like civil servant is permitted to obtain a higher salary in a different employment category owing to a change in sex by gaining a quote official change Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself uh suddenly suddenly transformed into chief experimental officer with a male breadwinner salary large enough to support a family rather than a woman's lower wage that was expected to be supplements mental to a family's earnings for obvious reasons noted the treasury we should not have to say anything which would have led to a request for the male pay rate to be applied from his data entry to the civil service in other words the treasury wanted to ensure for that Ferguson did not try to claim back wages incredible turf island always been very normal um and i there's a i want to read a little bit more of this um conversely a different civil servant this time a trans woman who was working in the admiral p department and transitioning around the same time was advised it was in her quote interests to delay official recognition of the change until at least January 1960 assuming full equal pay in the civil services introduced by 1961 her employers wrote that it was in her quote own interest in their opinion to continue wearing men's clothing for the time being in order to avoid a significant reduction in pay that is it's funny because like i was not funny as fucked up in this instant stupid isn't it but uh like i knew trans people in britain who would have grown up around this time who like socially transitioned after retirement yeah at least like openly to you know we want like bf fs or anything but it's it's absolutely fucking insane that like that this argument was deployed yeah and you know and you can you can see what's sort of going on here which is that like you know it's more it's more explicitly obvious and here that it isn't a lot of other cases but your status in the gender bureaucracy is a key element of how you're able to extract resources in the state and you know sometimes that's literally just an explicit pay gap like it was based on institutional sexism but you know i i i think i think the second case is in a lot of ways more revealing right the the state and a gender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying conform to what the jet the bureaucracy says your gender is and you it'll you'll get paid more and if you don't you'll get paid less and if you look at this more abstractly right in order to interface with the state in order to extract wealth or benefits in order to pay your fucking taxes in order to drive in order to buy alcohol apparently now in order to buy i i the stupid cleaning bottles of compressed air that you have to use to to clean out your computer keyboards uh in order to buy alcohol in order to get on an airplane you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic view of you and if you don't you can't do it and and you know this this brings up the question what right does the state have to assign my gender and you know the state will spit out a variety of sort of like pseudo-medical and pseudo political explanations but the answer is that the state has no right to tell you what your gender is except force and you know the the extent to which the state has actually been able to sort of do this kind of stuff has changed over time we've talked about this a bit but what like you know over the course of sort of uh over the course of sort of the 20th century and you know we can also look at things like uh we can look at the war on terror we can look at neoliberalism and David Raibers iron law of liberalism uh wishes the iron law of liberalism states that any market reform any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing a total number of regulations the total amount of paperwork and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs which I always love but you know like we've seen the sort of consequences of this playing out over over the course of you know the last about a century right if you go back to the 1890s it was possible for basically private citizens to have just full on wars with each other in parts of the US and the government would just be like sure okay whatever like the people mining bird shit off of the coast of California are shooting each other with cannons again like whatever right like it's it's not really until the 20th century and really even in like the last 50 60 70 years has been a massive expansion this like the state actually has full territorial control over everywhere that it claims to have control of right we're like we're we are just now getting to a place where the police can actually you know like have like militarily hold the entire country at one time and even then they can only do it as long as people sort of cooperate with them um but you know this this is really bad if you are a person who who who the bureaucracy has deemed to be something else or and this is another you know another sort of angle on this right like if you're someone who does not have documentation the state very very quickly will just attempt to destroy you because you know oh hey you don't you don't know the right papers this means the government can fucking arrest you and kick you out of the country yeah and you know this is fucking horrible um I did that there's a lot of stuff but like there's a lot of other angles you can look at this from right I mean like at some point we probably will do an episode about like the process of getting medical care and all of the people who you have to convince that you are your gender but you know that that's another episode entirely what I want to get at here is that state bureaucratic power is being used in in by just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats not only to force people to comply with their sort of state mandated gender when they deal with the state but also to force them to inhabit that gender in their private lives which is constitutes nothing less than a form of full scale genders will tell Terry and is them um we talked about that fucking Utah bill which you know again prohibits minors of getting gender affirming surgery P.B. Block is a hormone treatment that that is a bill that forces people to live in their state mandated gender in Florida gender bureaucrats are allowed to physically inspect athletes they suspect of being trans which is to say not conforming to fucking state bureaucratic gender controls it's children right like it's yeah fucking children like they they they are allowed to molester child uh because they think that because they're they think they're trans the other aspect of this is obviously there this is something we've talked about before it's something that you're starting to see with these bills is they're trying to make the bills uh uh age number goes highest possible yes there's bills for people say 25 now 21 there's bills proposing 25 not now so it's trying to pull trying to police and control the the bodily autonomy of of complete adults which obviously is not not a new thing for the GOP specifically especially in the wake of the Roe v Wade overturning um but also another aspect of like this this this goes beyond just people who are younger than the age of 19 yep this this this they're going to try to keep raising this as much as much as much as possible and this is where the types of surveillance that I was talking about before it's going to become a problem because if you're if you're googling how to do DIY HRT and get stuff shipped in from Brazil don't think that the surveillance stuff's not going to not going to impact your ability to do that they're also policies like the gender presentation of cis people specifically cis women I think like the people who are getting physically inspected because of these laws are just girls who are good at fucking sport like there's cis girls they just they might be like like taller or stronger or and like some anyone has the power to just be like oh you're not you're not a girly enough girl so fucking now you get to go to the pervert room and get inspected uh well you know we see this isn't like in Texas right the law right now is that if the if the state thinks your fucking child is not sufficiently close to the gender they can fucking take your child from you and force them to be whatever fucking gender the state wants to be right and you know any other period in history if you walk into a room and tell a bunch of people the state is going to decide your fucking gender everyone would lose their god damn minds this would be like this is a this is a like unfathomable like even in sort of like the depths of the sort of totalitarian like nightmare or states this is like an unfathomable level of sort of state bureaucratic like imposition onto people's lives and yet you know it's the fucking US right we have the we are the most bureaucratic society humanity has ever produced nobody thinks it's the most bureaucratic society is ever produced and you know we are right now every day seeing the points at which bureaucracy be its violence the last thing I have to say is that you know like this this is this is the future of gender the future of gender is government beer crats whether their cops politicians doctors shop protective services the school board administrators forcing you to be a gender that they're not but fundamentally they have no fucking right to do this right what they have his power and their rass one power is still right now tenuous so you know it is possible to stop them from going any further than this it is possible to beat back the power of the state and it is possible to have a world that's not this and we know it's possible to have a world that's not this because it wasn't fucking like this like 50 years ago so yeah fuck them and that's that's that's that's that's that's that's gender bureaucrats people should read David Graber learn about intersectionality for fucking second another another another great resource to learn about how you can like mix up gender stuff there's this new video game out right now which has a pretty intense character creation selection what you can you can it's called let me see it's called Hogwarts legacy is that no no I thought you're going with cyberpunk oh no no but it has it has it has a lot of different customizations that you can do for your gender presentation and and your body parts you know okay okay I've I've I've I've I've been refusing to do this on Twitter but I I need I need to take fucking one minute talk about the dumbest argument anyone's ever made which is that I have to buy this game in order to support the developers which think about this is right right okay if you have to buy this game in the sport developers don't you have to buy every other game to support their developers in fact are are you not morally obligated to buy every single product on earth because if you don't buy every single product has ever been made you the those those the people who made their products will not be deployed it's bullshit this is such a weird like capitalism look poison development thinking you're obligated to consume lots of people on the lot I I I have been holding my tongue on Twitter about this amongst now fuck watching people watching people make the argument I have to buy something to support developers which again buy a different game support those developers I buy fucking go go on strike fucking I don't know if you want to support the hell give your money to the sauce someone who isn't a fucking video game development well I'm glad we can I'm glad we could have that that special bonding moment over the very inclusive gender settings inside this new hit video game so that's that's pretty cool I feel like I'm ad from them scene but I hope so I hope so the worst Twitter day of my life is the day we get that fucking ad gold presented by Hogwarts so paper ghosts is a true crime podcast investigating the mysterious disappearance and brutal unsolved murder of Tammy's a wiki they just kept telling us from the beginning she'll be back she'll be back we had no clue where she was didn't know where to begin to look it just hit me like a ton of bricks I just had not really thought about anything except finding her Tammy's story shocked the nation there was no resolution nothing was ever zeroed in on the deeper I searched the more troubling things I found there was a lot of physical evidence that had never been analyzed money and their f**king from with the FBI to chop them Missouri the best lead the best evidence the best witness was blown off listen to paper ghosts on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows levitations vomiting strange voices have you ever wondered if the stories about exorcism are true he definitely has something going on it's primal and if they are true how could one protect themselves from these dark forces it's still in the it's really that thing is back i see it these are the questions we posed to renowned exorcist father Carlos Martins who agreed to open his case files to the public for the first time tell me who you are the one you won't get out the one you can't my name is father Carlos Martins I am an exorcist I have seen things 473 miles with me very evil things no i'm not sick things that i wish were true forget what you think you know about exorcism listen to the exorcist files on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts there is no need for the outside world because we are removed from it and apart from it and in our own universe on the new podcast the turning room of mirrors we look beneath the delicate veneer of american ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure George Balanchine there are not very many of us that actually grew up with Balanchine it was like i grew up with Mozart he could do no wrong like he was a god but what was the cost for the dancers who brought these ballets to life where the lines between the professional and the personal were hazy and often crossed used to say what are you looking at dear you can't see you only i can see you most people in the ballet world i'm more interested in their experience of watching it than in a dance's experience of executing it listen to the turning room of mirrors on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hi everyone is it could happen here and it's just James today because today i'm doing a little interview on the situation for rachindia people if you're not familiar with the rachindia genocide we're not going to cover that in depth but we will give a little bit of an overview and i'm talking to onks your moe who is rachindia himself and who works with the national unity government and advising them about rachindia people's human rights i think a new cycle hasn't really covered many rachindia issues since the rachindia genocide the world's kind of moved on from carrying about them but there's still in a very difficult situation and we want to update you on issues that continue to face the rachindia people hope you enjoy the interview so today i'm joined by onkyo moe who's an advisor to the national unity government of miyama which people will hopefully be familiar with if not he can explain a little bit of what that is he's an advisor to the minister of human rights and also a rachindia human rights activist himself and so hi thank you so much for joining me thank you for having me yeah so what i'd love to do today is i think if our listeners have listened to our previous coverage what's happening in miyama or or verma depending on your which one you prefer they will know a lot about the coup and they will know a lot about the things that happen since the coup right the pdf's and the ethnic resistance organizations but i think they might not be as familiar with the situation that rachindia people have been in for a long time and continue to be in it's a different part of the other country to we were we were in may sought which is on the other side that's something we've covered like less so perhaps you could begin by explaining like why there are so many rachindia refugees who have left obviously the history of the persecution of rachindia people is very long but if you could give us sort of a potted history of the persecution of rachindia people by various governments in miyama and what has led to this massive exodus and this big refugee population of rachindia people now that would be great to start with great thank you thank you for having me in the history is very long but i will be concrete and short the rachindia people has been in miyama before burma even exist before burma become burma and before british came in their significant architect related infrastructure that exists indicates existence of the rachindia there's a lot of literature research and rachindia people themselves living in generations and generations their it indicates that rachindia are part of yan maran and it used to be and it will be and rachindia not only the ethnic minority they are also the religious minority majority of burma for me is people are Buddhist and of course the second largest followed by the muslims are christian and then the third largest are muslim and ruhingya are muslim and and ruhingya singdala muslim ethnic groups and sing also religious ethnic groups and there has been historical exclusion discriminations sponsored by the and sponsored and carried out by the consecutive government of yan mar to target these religious and ethnic minority to exclude from religious ethnic and social aspects of the society and and it has been politically motivating for many government it has always been beneficial in in in convincing the larger populations of yan mar by showing ruhingya as a threat to the country this but because of their religious differences and to the the way that we wear and we eat a slightly different than than burbis because we have our own culture and own traditions and own language and and it's enriched by by those thus the the first start of execution in like executing these discriminatory policies towards the ruhingya as started as as long as as far as back in 1960 where the first coup took from 1962 when first coup took place and then military a consecutive military government accelerated that's to form to a situations rate could be defined and all under the category of the crimes against humanity so in 1978 there is a big operations against ruhingya people to deport them and 200,000 people has to flee to to bangladash and some of them still remain as refugees to part generation for generations in bangladash not being able to perpetuate it to the place where they come from and followed by that the 1992 there was another influx of the refugees and the refugee it's also the quite significant larger number of the refugees and and and not everyone could come back and there is another layer of the refugees that remains from the repatriating then from the the demolish the human right demolitions became towards the ruhingya as business as usual limiting the child the number of child that you can have and treating you less than an animal's not having the religious right to exercise the way that you believe and restrictions of movement killing, raping and it's continued and it has been accelerated in different form and shape where it could be it could come to a situation it's from from crimes against humanity it's being transformed to genocides and and in 2017 it's one to the highest peak of the genocides where a million people are being deported by burning and many of you had a thousand people died and many a thousand human being raped and there are a lot of a fatherless child in the camp today being you know being born by by by by the humans who victims of the of the rape of the Nyanma military and today there is a million people in Bangladesh and with no hope to be repatriated were soon to the place of origin with safety and dignity and and of course the political landscape in Myanmar has shifted it used to be in the democratic transition from 2010 to 2020 with the two consecutive different government and and the democratically elected government has been overthrown by by a tamku by the military who had ruled the country for for many decades and and and of course the the democratically elected government which I advise to is is being some of the member of the government are being arrested and some are in the in the ethnic territorial control and and some are in exile and and and so the country say the the the reactions of the 50 million people has been different because there has been several kuh in Myanmar and this was the the the the the political calculations of the military leaders to attend the coup was wrong that they did not expect the resistance of the people and then of course the the young generation see people came in to resist and usually they claim to be peacefully protesting to hand over the power back to the to the democratically elected people but as a result they were being brutally cracked on and and killed arrested and then and then young people started to understand that we need to speak the language that they understand so they speak that language is grabbing a gun and and and and and forming the military so followed by that national unity government has been formed by with elected members of the of the of the parliament vote lower on upper house so the national unity government today is the most the legitimate government of Myanmar and having also some territorial control of course majority of the government infrastructure infrastructure are being being captured illegally by the military. Yeah and it's interesting that people are familiar with the sort of ethnic makeup of previous governments and then the national unity government for what I understand it's not as much dominated by the majority ethnic firm and people in the national unity government as it was before and even under the NLD right even under sort of the most most democratic that it that has been in Myanmar for some time like there was still a domination by by one ethnicity right that the national unity government is more ethnically diverse is that right? Correct but still there is a lot of rooms for improvement particularly Rohingya people has always been part of Myanmar and politically excluded and despite a million people being pushed out to the Bangladesh through a genocidal attempt the remaining populations in Myanmar is 600,000 people politically represent this both size of populations under continued genocidal attempts of the Myanmar military and national unity government did not include politically meaningfully the Rohingya populations still now and they appointed me as an advisor but a politically representable size of populations need to be represented not by functions alone it's need to be both represented by functions and number equally to other ethnic and we are in the context of identity politics in Myanmar and your political rights and responsibilities to what the nations are associated that the very identity that you were so time to time there is a big question like you know we're moving forward to the path of democracy to make the country to back to the track of democracy but the very principle of democracy is majority rules and respect the minorities right right and still the Rohingya are being despite the international pressure particularly the United States and it's allies to have inclusive democracy and Rohingya people are not yet meaningfully included in the government yeah and I think that's something we've spoken about a lot with with the Karena and Kareni people who we spoken to about sort of the need for a more inclusive structure whether that's like a federal democracy after obviously after the military hunter has been deposed or certainly something that's more inclusive and perhaps we can talk about how like it's very interesting to me when I talk to young people generation Z people from Myanmar they will say that like they wouldn't have even said sometimes Rohingya like 10 years ago that they wouldn't have used a term they'd have they'd have seen the people who we know who we would call Rohingya as Bangladesh's right because this was the narrative can you explain how you've explained very well that's not true but how that narrative was constructed and what it was used to do I think it's once again to a slow-throwing and Kareo's systematic distractions meant physically on the Rohingya is also a lot to do with the spreading propaganda misinformation and disinformation through a state like media was online and offline and so this means this destruction has happened with the state sponsored and state pre-plan intentional intentional way of doing it and thus the society the Rohingya people has been restricted from moving and this one of the least developed region where the Rohingya people live and a lot of people from from like other state wouldn't be able to travel and go and see what is happening really inside there and Rohingya people would not be able to move out of that to tell the stories so all the narrative that people here is the military and the government what the government used to put at that moment so in the in the in the eyes or in the perceptions of the people the Rohingyas are from Bangladesh and they are trying to take over the country and they are a national security threat and that was the narrative so the the reality is being defined by the perceptions and false and misinformation that being given in the consistent intentional way to the young people and of course today I think has changed slightly to be seeing towards what is the reality and people showing the sympathy to what happened to the Rohingya because it's every time something happened in Myanmar like that it's consistent towards the Rohingya the the human right violations crimes against humanity and genocide and the people 50 million people in Myanmar were not either they are seeing neutral or they are standing with the military not like to that they should do this and this is right to do to kill people right to rape because they are national security threat but what had happened to the Rohingya people perhaps in the not the same shape and same a solidarity or or velocity or momentum or intensity started to happen after the coup to the to the Bama people and then they tend to realize oh what happened to Rohingya what Rohingya used to tell burning the whole village is killing and raping is exactly what what what is happening more or less exactly what is happening to us than they they they were right and it's the big teams change and the proper treatise remain the same and with that concept of people come to but again I think the still it's very small number of the populations compared to the whole populations that lives in Myanmar and in in in the democratic principles there is no like you do not tend to see something just because that you sympathize and there there are principles and values that you do not compromise in any circumstance so equal right justice and inclusivity and in like like celebrating of the diversity these things are very core principles of of the democracy that's that we are like as a Burmese people asking for international community to help what we are preaching for to what to the democracy need to be demonstrated at home first we need to act up on and and so I think the the the benchmark there's no the benchmark shouldn't be defined to include or exclude someone based on the sympathies need to be based on the principles and values can you explain a little bit about the situation that Rohingya people who have left Myanmar maybe they're in Cox's Bazaar maybe they're in No Man's Land maybe they're they're now being moved to an island right can can you explain what life is like for those people of course the when Rohingya people flights to Bangladesh it was attempting to survive like the managed to survive and otherwise many died and they they could be one of those who who died and they they survived meaning that these all people are have physical and mental destruction and unhealous cars in their physical and mental aspects of the life and and of course a million people in Bangladesh to be hosted by the Bangladesh government and Bangladeshi people has been also very difficult because the resource in the given area is very limited and Bangladesh itself is a small country with with limited resource and and we should always appreciate Bangladeshi people and Bangladeshi a government to open their arms and hearts to to to to absorbs and and and and and and and again I think the problem has started in Myanmar and and the the solutions need to be in Myanmar and and people need to be going with safe dignified way to the place of origin and and of course Bangladesh it has been five years plus now that the people like the largest influx took place in 2017 and they were repatriation set and being made and and and they when people fled from Myanmar jump into the Nafriva and Bay of Bengal in 2017 because the land was more dangerous than the sea situations remained very same or even worse than that now in in in in Myanmar to be going back so you are you escape from a grave that you have have buried to be killed and being pushed to go back to to to Myanmar is as in sending back to to the to the grave that you escape from from from lying so the situation doesn't favor for a safe dignified voluntary return for for the Rohingya that's Bangladesh's authorities are trying to find different innovative modality different ways how to how to create a sustainable situation for the Rohingya including relocations of the of the certain number of the of the Rohingya populations because the the the camps are very congested and the hygiene level are in the camp are very low and there are a lot of also the the the crowd on like you know if a million people in a smaller scale place like that are being being closed anything could happen anytime you know so the the the idea was to buy the Bangladesh government which doesn't fall into into the principle of international community of doing things and and relocating some of these refugees to an island that has is an EU island to know human being has been ever lived there and that island has been technically from various technical assessment has identified it's not livable by human being yet and because there are a lot of like cyclones and and and flops and things like that and it's very far away from millions of Bangladesh and and it so there is risk from from from various perspective to be able but but despite this Bangladeshi government has built sheltered this and relocated some number of soft Rohingya and some of them went by their own will seeing that it might be a different and some are being maybe perhaps forced and and of course there are certain number of like around close to five to six thousand people in no man's land when Bangladesh at the beginning did not open its border to when Rohingya were fleeing and so this no man land we're being occupied by the nearby villages because Bangladesh wouldn't open the gate for them and they were stuck in there so they have happened to be stuck there since last five years and the the the remaining Rohingya lives in in in Cox-Bhazard districts of Bangladesh in different part of this this district so that's the situation yeah that's very worth it and some people have have taken on recently leaving these camps in Bangladesh they've taken on this very risky boat journey right I think they're going to places like Malaysia if I'm not mistaken in Indonesia and can you explain a little bit about like how prevalent that is and of course how incredibly like high risk it is for people to take that journey sure the the situations in the camp is not much different than the life that they used to live in in in Myanmar despite that the level of a level of human right violations and the treatment that they are having may not be the same but Bangladesh is not a signature to 1952 refugee conventions and it's not legally obliged to be to be following all international norms and protocols to be to be hosting the the refugees but despite they have demonstrated the humanity and demonstrated the moral obligations towards the humanity to host the the immediate people and then the the immediate people some of them has been from 1978 and some of them are from 1992 some of them are from 2017 has a very dark future they they are closed in this fence camp and the movements are restricted access to information so not given like the access to information so like internet service and things like that has been denied access to livelihoods are denied and they're not able to legally walk and solely rely on to to the international community and assistant access to litigation has been denied so the the young people who are growing in this camp does not see a future that they will be able to go back to Myanmar or if they live here as if you're living at that like you know you don't have any any way forward seeing a bright future so there is there is the only they don't have a best alternative to be tried to be exploring different parts and the only part it's happened to be is being created in the past in the past by some Rohingyas taking these boats and making to Malaysia where they could do some domestic walks and get a refugee status and maybe able to work and and some you're lucky enough to be resettled in a third country as small number maybe less than two less than two three percent of the total of the Rohingya in Malaysia so the journey is very risky the the the the boats that they are taking the first the sea is very rough that they take and they are the the infrastructure what infrastructure that they're taking are not built like they they not built any way to be coping with this rough sea and rough rough waters and climate so many of these Rohingya people who make this less than 50 percent of them make it to the to the destinations either they die on the sea or they are being arrested by different navies and and or they are they are being jailed by by Myanmar Myanmar junta and in 2020 alone 3500 more than 3500 people including children as young as two years old are jailed to five years for crying to attempt to to go to Malaysia yes so this is this is what it's happening so the the life is meaningless there and of course taking this journey mean that you are tocing a coin whether you you get a tail or you get a you get head or you got tails you know and and and so it's like betting your life whether if you make it you're alive to somewhat level meaningfully if you don't make it your life and it is more or less the same that you will live in there in there so that's why these are the push factors and of course they are full factors reunifications if a son has made three years ago five years ago to Malaysia and working in the constructions or or or or or or gardening like levers and and you have a remaining family in the camp and you don't want to see your family in that situation and you're going to bring your family the kids or children's or wife and you do that and and lastly also they are growing youth in Malaysia who are who want to marry the Rungia and maintain the culture and language and things like that so they want to have brights bringing from the refugee camp and so they're different push factor pull factor as well from from Malaysia but the primary primary factor is the push factor in in Myanmar and in Bangladesh right yeah I like to have the reasonable people to want so yeah some futures and chance to realize their own life and their goals so can you explain people will probably have seen like I think we're recording this on Thursday and which is the and people will have seen the last couple of days maybe videos of fires in no man's land and and they will probably have seen like some acronyms which are a lot of acronyms when when you're really about Myanmar it can be very confusing so could you expand a little bit about who these two groups that we've seen right the ARSA and the RSO who they are and what they what they represent and and perhaps why these two groups who are normally Rohingya are fighting each other so the in the context of Myanmar politics the ethnic people has been fighting for decades and and and decades with Myanmar, Malaysia and Bama ah supremacy like for larger majority supremacy at the beginning they were attempt during the time of independency through reconciliation and dialogue meaning like without arms but the the language again being understood by the by the Myanmar larger majority is the language that they speak as well so then ethnic people started to grab the arms and and resist control the territory to attempt to control the territory in order to get equal right and decide for their own future be part of the decisions that collectively impact donations and and and basically equal right justice and and those those things that's what ethnic people are are fighting for and giving their lives and livelihoods it's nothing less than that and nothing more than that's very simple we want to live with dignity freely equally with anyone else and and so many ethnic revolutionary organizations firms came came up in different part of Myanmar representing different ethnic and Rohingya also used to be one of those back in 1950 ah for after 1948 dependent and 1952 Rohingya is the first one to drop the gun in a change of the peace with the government saying that we are peace loving people and as long as you give us what what what our identity and and and we're able to and we are so then there's a certain period of time that the Rohingya people did not have an arm of decisions group because I am someone who believe in non-violent movement but in a context like Myanmar again non-violence movement wouldn't go anywhere if it's worth 70 years ah Myanmar wouldn't have longest civil war in the world yes more than 70 years right so we need to be practical and and seeing the reality like that so then then 1978 again these things happened and then and the Rohingya things okay then what we have been promised and what we have we are we are being told to be promised to be given is not given so we have to grab the gun again and and form ah do as others are doing in order to to so the Rohingya solidarity organization has been formed and and it has been one of the popular organizations getting a good lot of popularity from the Rohingya community and then there were issues within the institution that has been growing of course ah they were not able to maintain the the institutional growth and institutional resource management and then the the institution collapse and as well as it has to do something with it like you don't have a territory like other other other arm of positions group will will be in me a station in Myanmar where Rohingya where stations in Bangladesh and Bangladesh government were not really supporting and now for them to survive with with with the military to enhance its military capability and of course there are several other other other things and and so then it's disappeared in between and then and 2014 this guy a guy called ah this the guy who is leading currently the the are air AC arcance celebrations army who was born in Pakistan and grew up in Saudi Arabia his parent he claimed his parent is Rohingya and of course he speak the Rohingya language that means it's indicate that he is and came to to our Rakhina stage to mobilize people saying that you need to grab the gun and this is what then ah people of course ah who have critical thinking skills and did not believe in to things because it's need to be from and within and someone who does not understand how Myanmar politics look like cannot lead a revolution because revolutionary has to do a lot with with with the politics ah political landscape as well in the country and and but however there is a thing number of people who believe in it and fall very small number and and Rohingya didn't want to again fight or or and train to violence and they just want to live peacefully and and and and today are resilient to what to the to to what they are trying to gain equally as others and and so then the our our conservation army ah ah ah ah ARSE has attacked the post ah 30 different police force in 2017 that's where the the collective punishment has been given as a result of the Rohingya community and it's not collective collective action it was individuals action a certain hundred four people gathered together and attempt police force and and and the whole Rohingya population has been punished so then followed by that as well RSO has been free a strategic strategy themselves and then so are are Rohingya solidarity organizations also pop up parallelly back in 2018 2019 and and and of course the the ideology that they stand are slightly different from one another and so the the that's why the the clash happened and and Rohingya solidarity organization think that ah like the man the way that RSO has been conducting and they are responsible they they for what happened to the Rohingya people as a yes collectively ah genocide and things things like that creating opportunities for vermice military to to wipe out the Rohingya and deport the Rohingya and ah so they they were these political disagreement between these two groups and this no one land has been mostly occupied ah ah within the Rohingya refugees there some RSA members are often ah try to to enter there and and and stations there and so recently the what we have learned from the ground is that our RSO Rohingya solidarity organizations ah root out and operations to remove them from there and so that the Rohingya refugee in the normal lands could live peacefully without crimes and things like that and and that's how the fight has started and and it's escalated and they were ah 200 houses being burned on ah shelters Rohingya refugee shelters around 2500 to 3000 people has been ah ah has to be displaced ah they were not a lot to enter to Bangladesh because no man land is not accessible by neither parties and and it's it's in between so some of them has destroyed the fence toward Burma and enter to the because they are just from the nearby villages they could see their villages for five years but they could not go back so they so they so they they went back there ah but now my mom is pushing them out from from their back to the normal lands yeah it's just yeah a terrible situation and the the abilities on the only armed groups in that state right there are other armed groups but like this this sort of explains it more succinctly like if we get into the other armed groups it gets even more complicated and so I wonder what people listening obviously will um they've they've heard a lot about about the conflict in Burma about the various different groups that have been persecuted by the Burmese military how can they help specifically with with this issue is there ways that people can can help out I think we have seen how the world came together to help Ukraine people unjustly illegally to be attacked by by Russia and and threatening the democratic society of the world and and that has been very inspiring I appreciate it and and and we stand with the Ukrainian people and people in Burma has the the life of the the value of the life of the people in Burma has also the there is no difference in lives you can buy one you know so we have been the people in Myanmar has been fighting for for the cost of life and livelihoods today with whatever means that they have to make this country back to the part of democracy and and so international communities should do beyond releasing the statement our our our our our our our our our our our of concern. And statement of concern may be may may name and shame and may put political pressure and political pressure is not the the the the the the things that being cared by by by the by the junta. So the the the the the total enemy of the overall people including drinking people are the military and and and they are the one who has destroyed this country and they are they are who is destroying and they are responsible primary responsible you know people in institutions who wipe out the rungan who carried out the genocide. So I think the international community should do beyond beyond sanctions arm embargo and and and respective citizens of the country should claim to the respective government to do more for permits people and the rungan people to demonstrate the moral obligations to what to the humanity. And in 20th century genocide took place while the world was watching and we set in the United Nations back in nineteen nineteen fifty forty eight that's never again and and it's very shameful that it could the genocide could take place in the eyes of eight billion people in twenty percent in modern age and the world failed to protect the runga despite there has been compelling stories images and the satellite stories and and and and still it's continued to be so and followed by that crimes against community war crimes has been being committed continually by the by the same melody that committed genocide. Yeah and I think I think the international community will have at some point to answer to themselves on their beliefs of the humanity. Yeah like I think the international community let's happen for too long and they ignored it for too long and and then now it's always happens right like it's like Foucault's boom rang at the violent spreads and gets you in the metropolitan and yeah it's deeply upsetting what does that support look like from the international community does that mean manpads for PDFs does it mean recognizing the national unity government like what concrete things should the community be doing. The international community should recognize there are again the there are some issues that need to be fixed within the the the national unity government particularly the inclusions of the runga and other like it's it's positions to the religious other religious and ethnic minorities particularly those are small and that need to be fixed and international community should do it in an incentivized way that okay you do this and we'll do this for you and and and the recognition come with incentive of supporting supporting the because it's only legitimate whether we like the national unity government or not we don't have the best alternative to it it's democratically elected and and there is a lot of issues within the within the within the the national unity government particularly when it's come to the runga issues so these need to be dealt in the national unity government I have been consistently advising them to fix this acting beyond policy and and and and showing like state level prioritize agenda with concrete milestone to to to the change to what to the runga and of course parallel to that international community should ensure that being supports are being given being recognized and and and in order to win these revolutions which has shaken this very institution that has consumed the the the resource of the country in various means and ways some and one of the strongest institution has been shaken by the young people with various small means that very small and time to time very innovative and and and utilizing whatever means that they had an international community should provide support to PDF to be a person for most institutionally and and and and and capacity building enhancing acting upon international as standard we are we are operating as a as a as a military group and and of course when you are being established as an as a military institutions and and it's it's it's being formed by the by the legal government of Myanmar and to support this this this military and many many nations are getting military assistance package and and and I think international community should have no problem to provide military system package to of course in in a very principles and value base with with the value base approach and and and and and to that's include the technical support to to to set up the mechanisms to help the accountable and to ensure the transparency and account of across this spectrum. Yeah yeah I think that that's very well said and they do tend like people aren't familiar with the way the PDFs have been organized like they they have been very respectful of like norms and laws of war and things like that which obviously the the Burmese military have not and I think an institution that's a group that has been with 100 100 thousand of people young people with no prior military experience and mostly operating in a very limited to no resource context and being able to respect the human rights and human dignity should be recognized you know they're yes when you you have a gun and they are things that happen and need to be justified and and and being held accountable for but I'm saying that I'm not saying that it should be a lot and any any any kind of misconduct within the military systems need to be investigated properly and take actions upon and held accountable those who gave these who carried out these actions and who gave comment to carried out this action but the number of cases related to the to the to the to the PDF has been significantly low and when it's come to the to the human right violations and and it has to be zero and even one is too much but I'm saying compared to to and and and I think continued support need to be given there in order to to to enhance their capacity to defeat the junta plus to defeat it in a principle and value based the within principle and value based approach yeah yeah certainly they could definitely do like people who spoken to a terribly equipped by any modern standards incredibly brave and innovative they could certainly do a lot better they have a lot more okay where can people if people want to follow along with your work which is very impressive how can they find you do you have like do you want to share your Twitter account or a website maybe where can people keep up with you so I'm on twitter and facebook mostly and my twitter is aka mo2 and to which you can see it's with my pictures and and I have put my bioes well there and I'm also very active on the facebook and and what are the work related most of the work that I do are being not off everything but some part that international community need to know are being portrait there and particularly the the the human rights situations related to the Rohingya and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are being being being shared there in a timely very timely manner sometimes even lives you know it's happening now and being and yeah yeah you've been very good at that and I follow your twitter account it's very informative it helps me stay informed so that's it's aka mo2 if people are searching for it thank you so much for giving us some of your evening I really really appreciate your time is there anything else you want to get to before we finish up now it's lovely to be part of the program and thank you so much for having me once again thank you very much hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcast from cool zone media visitor website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening you know what it's like to endlessly seek a remedy are you ready for a prescription that's one stalee steroid free vtamma to pinner off cream 1% is a prescription topical treatment for adults with plaque psoriasis do not use if you're allergic to vtamma cream the most common side effects of vtamma cream include red raised bumps around the hair pores pain or swelling in the nose and throat skin rash or irritation including itching and redness peeling burning or stinging headache itching and flu tell your doctor about all the medicines you take and if you're pregnant or planned to be ask your doctor vtamma cream is right for you you deserve more from your topical to learn more visit topicalebrising.com paper ghosts is a true crime podcast investigating the mysterious disappearance and brutal unsolved murder of tamis a wiki they just kept telling us from the beginning shall it shall be back shall be back we had no clue where she was they know where it began to look. Tammy's story shocked the nation the deeper I searched the more troubling things I found the best lead the best evidence the best witness was blown off listen to paper ghosts on the iHeart Radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your favorite shows in 1968 five black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in mount megs alabama i'm writer and reporter josey defy rice and in a new podcast i investigate the abuse that thousands of black children suffered at the alabama industrial school for negro children and how those five girls changed everything listen to unreformed on the iHeart Radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts