Britainology 81: George Galloway feat. Hussein Kesvani
Added 2024-03-20 00:03:22 +0000 UTCThe eternal gadfly of British politics and reality TV returns to the centre stage yet again, and as such Milo and Hussein cobble together all their anecdotes and facts to explain George Galloway's whole deal to Nate. No guarantees that they succeed, but they try.
Comments
Would you consider doing an episode on 'Jerry Springer The Opera'? It was aired on BBC 2 in 2005 and received over 47,000 complaints BEFORE it aired. It was one of the occasions where the Christian movements in the UK had some actual sway, with the tour of the show being cancelled. I'll even post you the DVD I have of it (for lending, I'll want it back) but it is on Youtube in full! I did an A Level in Christian Philosophy and when we focused on Christian Art I got obsessed with Jerry Springer the Opera. Blame the 'Tism.
Mariana Trench
2024-05-12 11:22:08 +0000 UTChow many more of the trash future crew worked for RT and when?
log
2024-04-10 08:05:14 +0000 UTCDumb question but what was the issue with the phrasing of "Jews don't have to be on the side of apartheid"? Is it just that it implies that they *are* by default/nature? I guess when I heard it I took the probably-too-charitable reading of "even though they are pressured to be by society as a whole, they don't have to be".
Jillian Donohue
2024-03-26 00:26:07 +0000 UTCKinda looks like Van Morrison during his freshly converted to being an evangelical era in the 90’s. This guy feels like an NYC borough president from late the 80’s.
Man, I Got Nothing
2024-03-24 00:27:28 +0000 UTCI looked up when Galloway was on Celebrity Big Brother only to stumble into a clip in which they welcomed Jimmy Savile into the house as a guest
Thomas
2024-03-23 14:16:27 +0000 UTCWe have it, but it depends on the city, or lack there of.
Donovan Burns
2024-03-23 02:32:45 +0000 UTCHis Respect victory was very interesting internationally for some of us in the far left trying to break out of isolation. At some point I proposed to my socialist org in Australia that we organise a speaking tour. I was informed that this had been checked out and apart from some caution around his politics, his speaking fees were just way too high.
Nick Fredman
2024-03-22 22:34:55 +0000 UTCI met him few times during STW years and yes, as Hussein said, as i took him to the venue and set stuff up, all you'd get is grunts, then suddenly... 'show time' and he'd have the audience enthralled in fiery rhetoric.
Ben
2024-03-22 14:35:59 +0000 UTCThe talk about Galloway being a wrestling heel and keir being basically John Cena brings the horrifying thought of what a "professor of thunganomics" starmer would look like.
Josephine
2024-03-22 00:13:40 +0000 UTCOne of the reasons I said on the episode that I wasn't trying to do Jewish takfirism is that I'm very uncomfortable saying "disregard this group's opinion entirely, they're just a weird outlier" given how antizionist and pro-Corbyn Jews were/are treated in the UK. I don't even know if I can articulate this correctly, but the idea that an opinion counts double if it's held by someone with payot wearing a shtreimel is just... weird? And it reveals such a lack of understanding or even curiosity about Jewish communities and beliefs, and—like you guys—I feel like I see it *everywhere*
Trashfuture
2024-03-22 00:07:12 +0000 UTCI don't think you need to apologize at all. It's a sensitive (and personal!) topic, and you felt like a community you know very well was being misrepresented. If anything you were very even-handed. I guess I just wanted to explain my reasoning in case it had seemed flippant or oversimplified.
Trashfuture
2024-03-21 23:57:52 +0000 UTCI fully agree. The vibe is very much “these guys give us legitimacy because they’re Real Jews. they’re the heart and soul of Judaism. please don’t turn the camera 90 degrees to the group of queer jews and biracial jews and 25-year-olds jews with septum piercings holding ‘fuck the occupation’ signs. those are not Serious Jews”
isaiah
2024-03-21 21:22:49 +0000 UTCI really appreciate the thoughtful response. I’ve been very lucky to be exposed to some of the more openminded and accepting segments of the haredi community, and I was coming from a place of defensiveness for that community, but I realize that left-liberal Orthodox Jews are not the norm and that my comment probably came across as pretty dismissive towards the broader chauvinism (to use your word) of the community. The specific fixation from gentiles on how Orthodox Jews think they don’t have souls and want them to die horrifically when the moshiach comes is something I’ve seen posted about on twitter by people with antisemitic caricatures as their profile pics an alarming amount times in the past few months, so I think I felt instinctively defensive against that because it does seem to be a spreading piece of antisemitic paranoia. That being said, I realize that the specifics of what NK do/don’t believe about gentiles wasn’t really relevant to what you were saying. I definitely agree that the way people talk about NK and similar groups is extremely tokenizing and kind of bizarre to watch when you’re actually Jewish and know just how Zionist the broader community is. I think your broader point came across well, I was just feeling frustrated about some of the ways I’ve heard Orthodox Jews being spoken about recently and I reacted pretty uncharitably because of that, which I’m sorry about.
isaiah
2024-03-21 21:14:45 +0000 UTCAlso re. the Neturei Karta, I don’t know much about their specific beliefs but as an antizionist Jew myself I have been finding it increasingly frustrating how much attention they get at every Palestine protest when there is a Jewish bloc on every demo that unquestionably *is* there because of our moral opposition to Zionism. It feels quite othering and frankly antisemitic to see many non-Jewish leftists gawking and taking photos of them because they’re visibly Orthodox while not paying the same attention to the hundreds, if not thousands of Jews who turn up every time out of genuine solidarity with Palestine.
Felix Moore
2024-03-21 18:32:23 +0000 UTCGalloway was my MP when he was on Big Brother, when I was 11 or 12. I remember watching it with my mum. Who’s to say how that shaped my fledgling understanding of politics.
Felix Moore
2024-03-21 18:00:12 +0000 UTCI'll be the first to admit that I'm not speaking from personal experience regarding NK, but regarding this specific line, I'm not describing NK here but rather an overall chauvinistic / supremacist tendency specifically among Satmars, based on how it was explained to me by a learned and experienced friend who grew up modern orthodox in what could best be described as a Kahanist family and who has traveled a long way (I wouldn't describe him as antizionist in the slightest but he's far more evenhanded than anyone else I've ever met from Borough Park). This was specifically in the context of his discomfort with idiosyncratic beliefs of very distinct haredi sects being seen as representative of a kind of "officially correct" orthodox Jewish religious practice—which seems to be the point you're making as well. I'm also drawing from my own experiences studying with Lubavitchers at 770 and some of the conversations I had with them about reform Jews as well as gentiles. In my experience a lot of the Lubavitchers I met were strongly opposed to the Israeli government because of conscription, and I don't want to say that there's not humanistic or even secular antizionism among haredi communities, albeit in my experience very uncommon. If anything, I'm finding that it's some of my fellow American reform Jews who are the least reachable. But, speaking frankly, nothing in my personal experience would support the argument that a significant amount of haredi antizionism stems from opposition to the Israeli state's treatment of Palestinians. And I don't think I could say in good faith that there isn't a strain of chauvinism in the way that some haredi communities interact with the secular and gentile world. Having my close friends and their kids just sort of hand waved as not Jewish because of being reform put a bad taste in my mouth about this tendency, and the difference between how I was treated on the street in CH versus my wife (who is Black and Cape Verdean) factors in pretty heavily too. There are much more lurid examples from the time I lived in CH as well, eg in the behavior of the shomrim towards Black residents of the community. I don't want to paint haredim with a broad brush, but this isn't just hearsay or something I read on the internet. What Satmars do or do not believe about gentiles is less the point here; the point is that a gentile politician trying to brandish the support of a haredi group as being indicative of some kind of uniform Jewish consensus is always unsettling to me—both because it elides understanding how heterogenous these groups and beliefs are, and because it feels tokenizing at best and exploitative at worst. I don't speak on this topic much because I don't feel comfortably equipped to not misspeak, and I thought about cutting this whole segment out of the edit, but I guess I left it in because I imagined that some of the listeners might have wondered why the one Jewish member of the cast hadn't said anything at all on the show about Palestine. It was mostly because I was on parental leave and dealing with a lot of unrelated crises, but also because I've been watching close friends from home start talking like Baruch Goldstein despite only ever having been to Israel on taglit, if that. I very much wish this were not the case.
Trashfuture
2024-03-21 10:04:27 +0000 UTC(And to clarify, I know NK are strange and fringe within an ultra-Orthodox context, but I couldn’t find any evidence of them believing that gentiles don’t have souls. Like most religious Jews, I don’t think they’re very bothered with souls either way.)
isaiah
2024-03-21 09:02:37 +0000 UTCApologies for the paragraph, but I’m from what might be described as an “ultra orthodox” Jewish family and around the 37 min mark was kind of a painful listen. There are lots of valid criticisms of Jewish orthodoxy in general and the Neturei Karta in particular, but the idea that Orthodox Jews think that gentiles don’t have souls and are sitting around waiting for non-Jews to be obliterated in the apocalypse is a pretty insidious antisemitic trope that’s largely a product of the right-wing imagination. I’m not saying that absolutely no one believes those things, but I’ve never once heard them expressed and they’d be strange, fringe views to care about even within an ultra-Orthodox context. (It’s also not true that haredi Jews as a general statement don’t have a genuine moral and political antizionist stance - lots of them do, and the idea that they’re all disingenuous and religiously motivated is pretty sketchy. Not trying to be too harsh but please be wary of the things you hear/believe/repeat in front of an audience about Orthodox Jewish people. If you hear someone say “Jewish supremacy” and they’re not talking about Zionism, 9/10 times it’s a dogwhistle.
isaiah
2024-03-21 08:45:31 +0000 UTCThat would have made the song Christmas Island by The Andrew Sisters, which is a Christmas staple in our house, a very much darker affair
Stuart Harrison
2024-03-21 07:18:33 +0000 UTCFrom Australia, why can't the local government do a quarterly collection of bulky garbage?
Jacob Vardy
2024-03-21 02:45:00 +0000 UTCReferences to Omar's challenge naan is the real Britainology I need
Meroka
2024-03-20 19:08:37 +0000 UTCRochdale is in Greater Manchester.
Chris Hyland
2024-03-20 17:45:03 +0000 UTCRogue Traders/Flytipping could totally be an episode
theboredbird
2024-03-20 17:18:28 +0000 UTCPitcairn Islanders would for sure be the tier one operators of the nonce force.
Breakaway
2024-03-20 17:17:11 +0000 UTCRest of England is, however, more interesting than London. It's one of the stupid things about the UK that basically non-London is culturally invisible. England is a colony of London. Heck, London is a colony of London.
Michael Hopwood
2024-03-20 12:55:17 +0000 UTCgeorge is clearly competent at doing very cynical politics to get elected, but it annoys me that he never uses that to any end, like soliciting graft or using parliamentary privilege to baselessly accuse people of pedophilia
Fingerless
2024-03-20 12:32:08 +0000 UTCDude you guys gotta make a video of Hussein taking Nate's friend John to the Pakistani restaurant and John getting made the muad'did, that would go so hard.
Rusty Shackleford
2024-03-20 12:27:07 +0000 UTCOnce again I am calling for actual normal people to go into politics.
Michael Hopwood
2024-03-20 12:01:21 +0000 UTCyikes
Shivvy
2024-03-20 10:51:42 +0000 UTCHussein, you were thinking of The Big Questions with Nicky Campbell, very popular with the usual question time-type guests looking for more exposure
Amer Qaiyum
2024-03-20 10:20:16 +0000 UTCFinishing the giant naan and the curry house owner murmuring, "Lisa al-gaib..."
Oliver Cant
2024-03-20 10:13:38 +0000 UTCI think Nate mixed up Christmas Island, which AFAICT is a perfectly nice place, with Pitcairn Island, where 1/3 of the adult male population were indicted for sex offences with children and young adults. Apparently part of their defense was "The defence maintained that the UK never made a formal claim to Pitcairn, and never officially informed the islanders that British legislation, such as the Sexual Offences Act 1956,[note 1] was applicable to them."
Raymond Price
2024-03-20 07:30:56 +0000 UTCI go freeform jogging all the time and see TONS of flytipping in Germany and Lithuania. I think mental illness and social mailaise are international.
Michael Hopwood
2024-03-20 07:12:26 +0000 UTCIt's therapist-recommended 👍
Michael Hopwood
2024-03-20 06:28:47 +0000 UTCAh, Germany. It's true, we still have some survival instinct. But let me introduce the AfD, or "Alternative TO Germany" as I call them. Political death spiral in 3... 2...
Michael Hopwood
2024-03-20 06:27:57 +0000 UTCyeah americans and canadians have trucks to dump our busted fridges in the woods or river or something
Moira Brown
2024-03-20 04:01:43 +0000 UTCChristmas island is part of Australia, so it doesn't have a nonce army but it's open to just regular war crimes
Will Hitchcock
2024-03-20 03:02:54 +0000 UTCYeah I'm in the same boat as you, I hope they bail out soon enough.
Rusty Shackleford
2024-03-20 03:02:03 +0000 UTCI don't condone mixing up Lancashire and the petty counties Yorkshire, but to cheer up the hosts: when I introduced my spouse to my family up there they were more interested in hearing about London than they were about the U.S. Which, fair enough.
Andrew Davis
2024-03-20 02:55:31 +0000 UTCBritain is like a train crash, I just can't look away. I hope you all get out of there and move to Germany or someplace that's less actively trying to destroy itself
Calvin Garbacik
2024-03-20 02:45:32 +0000 UTCFirst!
D Iva Facliffe
2024-03-20 00:54:16 +0000 UTCI consider this show required research for understanding my British boyfriend as an American.
Camoose
2024-03-20 00:49:00 +0000 UTC
