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- [00:00]
A
Sam. Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Zoran Mamdani's walked back plans to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, wildfires in Canada, and permanent daylight savings time. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, really the second most prominent politician in the United States, has promised in the past to seek to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu on the basis of an outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court. That is a court whose authority is not recognized by the United States, but is recognized in some ambiguous way by the city of New York. Jeff, our New York correspondent, what have you made of Mamdani's dance on this issue?
- [01:31]
B
Well, I suppose, for one thing, it speaks to the way that being the mayor of New York City has this global, outward facing aspect in a way that being the mayor of any other city in the United States would not. And part of this has to do with the presence of the United nations, which ensures that a constant stream of world leaders are present here, coming to give speeches to the General assembly and so on. But obviously part of it also has to do with the many diasporic populations in the city. And clearly there's sort of a particular function, kind of outward looking in relation to the globe that that is quite specific to this role and that is differentiates it and makes it more similar in its profile to that of a national leader and less similar to that of any other local leader. So I suppose the origin of this particular promise is just that Mamdani is an effective politician, in part because he's able to come up with ways to signal through policy promises and choices, his priorities. And so what he was able to do here was simply to signal to a highly motivated and mobilized base of support that he was going to use the power that he had to do something about this problem. And obviously we can compare this to the way that much of the left became disillusioned with the Democratic Party under Joe Biden, in part because there was kind of the sense of, well, this war is going on, this bombardment of Gaza is continuing to happen. Yet it seemed that even the President of the United States was powerless to do anything about it, to actually act in any meaningful way. And it became this odd kind of position of passivity of, you know, claiming to actually have no power or leverage over the situation. And so by making this promise, Mamdani could present himself as somebody who was actually going to act, somebody who was actually going to do something about this, you know, key priority of progressives. And so I think, you know, the campaign promise was an example of his effectiveness as a politician that he's able to come up with promises during the campaign. He was able to come up with promises during the campaign and to some extent he's been able to come up with policies once in office that effectively signal in a, in a simple and straightforward way what his priorities are. Now obviously the problem with this was that he didn't actually have the power to carry out this, this particular promise, to fulfill it. And so one could argue he was essentially being disingenuous. The problem is that I think in some sense it still doesn't really work against him because the people who are going to criticize him are not going to say, well he never really meant it, he was lying to you, he was being disingenuous because the people who oppose him want you to think that he is a fanatical anti Israel extremist who, you know, believes everything he says about the Middle east, about Israel because he is a sort of crypto Islamist, you know, far left radical. And so it wouldn't really make sense for those people to then turn around and say well, you know, he was just lying to you. He, he never really, he, he always knew he could never actually do this because you know, the city doesn't actually have the enforcement authority to, to arrest a global leader in town for the UN etc, etc. So if, if they did say that, that, that might well be true. I, I, I think he probably, and, and his advisors probably were aware that it was a dicey question as to whether he could actually pull something like this off and probably a good number of people in his camp knew that he couldn't actually achieve this. However, I'm not sure that that fact really damages him again because the messaging of his opposition relies on the claim that he is in fact a sort of fire breathing fanatical anti Israel extremist and therefore for them to say, well he was just lying, he didn't, he didn't actually ever believe he could do this would completely contradict that, that particular characterization of him. So in other words, I don't think that, you know, I think it's a further example of his general savvy and cleverness as a politician because I don't, I don't see how his, I, it seems that his, his promising to do this certainly didn't harm him in his priority in his prior campaigns. And let me, let me add one other thing. You know, if you, if you speak to, you know, I think a group of people who are not particularly well represented in the, at this point in political commentary, but who do remain a quite large group within the broader population of New York City, just liberal Zionist Jews, many of them hate Netanyahu even if they are not completely anti Israel or anti Zionist. And so the basic sentiment that Netanyahu has to be brought down, he has to be brought to justice, is not one that would even alienate a lot of people who are more sympathetic to Israel in some respects than Mamdani and his most die hard supporters are. And so I think it's basically this just pans out as another example of him being quite an effective politician because it doesn't actually give his opponents any particularly, you know, particularly damning line of attack because to take the most effective line of attack would be to contradict their other much more fervent claims about him. And also I don't think that opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu is a particularly unpopular position even among the majority of Jewish Zionists in New York City. So I think it's basically an issue that obviously, even though it's a campaign promise that he had to walk back, it's not one that it's not an action that's going to do him much damage as a politician. And it may actually continue to enhance his standing that he promised to do this. He earnestly, you know, presented a video saying, here's how I, I tried to figure out how to do this and unfortunately was unable to, this is, you know, I, I, I don't think this is a, a particularly harmful development in his, in his mayorship. Obviously it, it gives him a way of getting out of the actual trickiness of, of trying to do something like that. And so it's, I think, just another illustration of his general political wiliness. And honestly, it leaves his opponents looking quite pathetic and ineffective. So whether you like his policies, whether you like his, whether you like his agenda or not, he's I think, continuing to prove effective as a politician, particularly in terms of campaigning and messaging and putting his opponents in awkward positions.
- [09:26]
C
But isn't that just the story of politicians for the last, like several decades? They're just great politicians. For what purpose doesn't really matter. They're just great politicians. They've got the PR savvy, they know exactly what to say at the exact right time. Oh, isn't that so great? I always hated listening to political shows where people commented, no offense, I'm not saying to you, but where people it just became such a common topic of conversation where it's like, oh, that was really politically savvy. That just shows, you know, his maneu. How great was that? And you're just sitting there, like, thinking, oh, my gosh, isn't the purpose of these people to govern? You know, like, and for what? Yeah, you can be a great politician, but for what? And I think this is such a great illustration of the. For what? Being something totally stupid. Yes, it was smart. It was a smart move. Like, even a legal failure is smart because it allows Mamdani to portray American law as the mechanism that, that protects Israeli leaders, that protects like the, the genocide, that protects this, this grave injustice from going on. So he wins even when he loses, even when it's not possible to do what he said he would do. Because what is preventing him is the, is American law, which, which insulates these awful people from, from, from justice. So it's great. Yes, but the idea that this, that this idea to arrest Netanyahu is student politics. And like, he, it seems to me that he's trying to kind of demonstrate that this wasn't just some kind of youthful exuberance, but something that he's carrying through into his mature politics. Why you would want to do that? It's, it's like young, when, when, you know, back in the day when student leftists were calling for Bush and Blair to be sent to the Hague, like, it's not serious. It's student politics. And I think a lot of. And it's, I think it's instructive that a lot of these, like the DSA is like, you know, the famous line is a workers party without workers. It's like students. It's graduate students. These, these rising socialist leaders, they are graduate students themselves. They're the children of academics, this sort of thing. And they're taking, they're using very effective political maneuvering to take student politics, which is fundamentally unserious and doesn't have a, A proper coherence, a proper understanding of how the world works, that doesn't desire to push back against capital, but has this kind of, you know, redistributed redistributionist outlook as the beyond the end. All that. This is like the horizon of their politics. Great. Be great at politically maneuvering. But maybe we should think about for
- [12:02]
A
what Mamdani's promise to arrest Netanyahu. It reminds me of the common law tradition of the citizens arrest. The idea that anyone can. I, as a free Englishman, knowing you to be a felon, can arrest you. Of course, if you do that in inappropriate situations, you yourself can face legal penalties. But you know, really, the walk back on this kind of attempted citizens arrest of Netanyahu seems to be in keeping with a variety of Madani's policies. The promised city grocery stores, he's opening these. There aren't that many of them. I think they're going to be notable failures. It's also worth highlighting that these have been presented as city owned, not as city run. So presumably I don't have all the details yet, but maybe that reporting is out there. But what you've seen in other American jurisdictions is that the city buys a property and then contracts with a nonprofit which hires a catering service or food provider to then run the grocery store. So it's this kind of weird, outsourced, sort of more frankly neoliberal mode of doing socialism than the actual sewer socialists that are sometimes invoked in DSA circles who built public works that were publicly owned and publicly operated. So he has the grocery stores. I don't think that's really going to amount to a ton. He also has his freeze of the rent promise. That's happened. He's brought it about. If you lived in a rent stabilized apartment in New York, now your rent has been frozen. So rent stabilization is generally the idea is that you take out your first lease at a market rate, but then in subsequent years the rate of increase is strictly capped. So for example, in my own apartment here in New York City entered at a market rate, but since then the increases have been capped at something like 3% for a one year lease and at 4.5% for a two year lease. Something like that. Right. Well, you generally end up way below market value if you're in the apartment for any kind of long period of time. And also that increase is really not huge when you're considering inflation and other things. Right. It's really just trying to keep the number from being. Trying to prevent you from getting an effective rent decrease every year. And it's so Mamdani did this. My rent is now frozen, but also my rent was not going to increase by any great amount. So the kind of. The people who are affected by this rent freeze are arguably some of the people who needed it least. You know, in my own case, I'm in this rent civilized apartment. There was no income qualification for it. It's just available. If you want to live in this building where I happen to live, anyone can take it a lease. And then you have your rent stabilized apartment. So that also is a kind of small ball thing. I Think it's a bad policy, like his grocery store idea and like his arrest of Netanyahu. But as Jeff says, these are things, each of these is kind of a symbolic assertion of a progressive priority and it's very polarizing. But in terms of wide scale effects, the policy themselves are less important than their symbolic potency. They have less immediate economic effect than they have symbolic effects. So he's a great kind of symbolic socialist.
- [16:33]
B
I mean, I recently did my taxes after getting extension and I noticed it, you know, it had these, I believe when Mamdani was elected, I compared some of these policies to the no tax on tips. And in my view, even more absurd, no tax on auto loans, which I just find like one of the most ludicrous policies anyone has ever proposed. But the next, what was the justification
- [17:05]
A
for no tax on auto loans? Was that a kind of swipe at student loans or something? Or what was going on there? Never explained.
- [17:14]
B
I don't think it was ever particularly well explained. But again, these were examples of policies that are essentially quite dumb and arbitrary because they arbitrarily favor one sort of, in the case of auto loans, consumer behavior. In the case of tips, they arbitrarily favor one sort of employment over another. So if I'm a high end masseur with lots of Hollywood clients, then presumably I'm paying very little in taxes now because so much of my income comes through tips. And there are ways that certain types of independent contractors can reclassify their income as, as TIPS and thereby avoid tax. So I mean, it's a very silly policy in a lot of ways, but it's, it's effective politics because it signals something quite clearly about, you know, a certain priority, even if the effects are not. So I, I mean, I suppose what, you know, going back to Ashley's point, it's like, for what? Well, I mean, yeah, the point here is sort of that policy is, is being merged into politics in the sense of your policies are sort of gimmicks that you use to advertise the priorities of your politics. And it just seems that that's kind of the direct. I'm not sure that that's just about sort of student radicalism because I think, I think, you know, Trumpian populism is very effective at coming out. And you know, I think just recently Kathy Hochul, New York governor, also proposed introducing no tax on tips at the state level. So it's really spreading as an idea that for whatever reason, people who earn a tipped wage rather than a regular hourly wage are somehow to be preferred through the tax code. So again, this is sort of, it's a shortcut by which you are a kind of heuristic by which you signal some kind of commitment to tax relief for working class people by sort of making tipped wage workers into a stand in for all working class people. So, but you know, it seems to me this is just, it's the way that kind of populist politics is, is going, you know, for better or for worse. It just seems to be, I mean probably largely for worse, but it just seems to be where the, the political tendencies are heading at the moment, at least in the United States.
- [19:50]
C
What concerns me about some of these policies, you know, the idea of like supermarkets and you know, what you've been describing is it's not just that it's kind of student politics, it's that it's, they've kind of struck this compromise that allows them to flourish where you don't challenge capital, you don't like, unlike, you know, socialists of the past, you're not clamoring for expanding opportunities and clawing back more for the worker. It's. Well, I don't know, I guess, yeah, but instead the larger kind of focus is on redistributing wealth and you know, creating these opportunities largely within the state. So you have like publicly funded employment and that's, that's kind of where opportunity is expanded. And, and the idea of like expanding opportunity in the market, that's what the right wing does and the left is like, okay, we use the state as a kind of charity. And it's like this is attractive to the underemployed educated professional of which there are many, many, many. Because the idea was that we were going to like solve poverty by encouraging everybody to go into university. Again, not kind of paying attention to the expansion of opportunity, which is a failure across the political spectrum. So now you have all these undereducated would be professional middle class people. And of course jobs in the state are incredibly, well, they're lucrative, but they're, they are something that attracts them. But then you have the rest of the people where there it's like, well, you know, we kind of will give them a pittance. Maybe we'll have universal basic income, we'll have some kind of redistribution. And it reminds me, maybe it's a bad comparison, but every time I read about this, I think about when, you know, you had native people that were still kind of existing and they're like, what we'll do is we'll put them on, on these reserves or on these islands and we'll like feed them and eventually they're just going to die. They're going to die out. That's kind of like the idea toward the old working class. It's like, well, if we just put them on these islands, you know, out in the middle of, you know, the boondocks of America, eventually they will die out or they will intermarry and our differences will be forgotten. This is kind of the attitud instead of. And then, you know, what happened was years and years down the road, these people weren't dying out. They just wouldn't die. And you got, you can have the same problem here where it's like, oh, we'll just like, you know, toss them some breadcrumbs, you'll be fine. And it no like, people get mad, they get angry. And then you. Well, when it came to like you had like the American Indian movement and that sort of thing, but when the resolution of that conflict was transforming these people into wards of the state and, and people who are completely dependent on welfare and these are not like the chosen ones, you know, native people living on reserves off benefits are not living like lives of idyllic communist futures, even though they're living on what is essentially universal basic income for them anyway. So this is, you know, this is not a good strategy to like sort of hope that the working class, the old working class will die out and you can pacify them with welfare. You're either going to create a horrific kind of underclass or a lot of angry people. And what's happening now is you have a lot of angry people who don't have a voice and right wing populism picks them up.
- [23:18]
A
Wildfires in Canada, spreading smoke across God's country, the United States, we're threatening tariffs on our northern neighbors. You know, the drums of war are beating. I grew up in a small town in Nebraska founded by and named after an Irish Republican leader who twice invaded Canada. His goal was to conquer it and use it as a base of forward operations for liberating Ireland. You know, just try to get the British wherever you can find them. I guess so. You know, I'm probably not an unbiased source on anti Canadian sentiment, but maybe we could get someone who's a little more detached to explain this wildfire fracas to us. Ashley, Canada Native what have you made of it?
- [24:17]
C
Yeah, I mean, just on a basic kind of experiential level to begin with. I mean, it's terrifying. And I've been through this before. I'm in Canada, actually, right now I feel like I follow fires. I don't know. So some years back, I was in Greece during the Evia wildfires. And I think maybe I've described it before on the podcast, but it was, you know, the way my dad was describing waking up in the morning the other day and he said he went outside and this is in Canada, went outside. And it was. Even though the temperature was meant to be quite hot, it was cold because the smoke was basically covering the sun. And that's what happened in Greece. Like the. When the wildfires got very, very close to us, we woke up in the morning and it was like raining ash down from the sky. And the temperature was supposed to be like 37 degrees, but it was cold. Like, it was cold on the ground. And it was the most eerie, terrifying thing. So, yeah, it's a very scary thing. It's very visceral. But, you know, the most obvious point to make is that while because it is so visceral, because it is so terrifying, it is fantastic fodder for, you know, people who want to make points about environmentalism, this idea that this is caused by climate change. And that's become the kind of standard narrative anytime that something like this comes up. But, you know, there are actually fewer wildfires now than perhaps ever before, and that's part of the reason why they're raging so out of control. We become perhaps too effective at extinguishing them as soon as they come about that not enough of the dead wood and so on is cleared out. And so when a fire does get out of control, it is. The likelihood of it becoming extremely destructive is much, much higher. I had. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he was saying that he was hiking in France some years ago and he could see in the distance a fire burning. And he's like, oh my gosh, that's the trail I'm supposed to be on. And. But by the time he got to that part of the trail, the firefighters were so effective. They had extended, distinguished it and. But they hadn't left. They were sitting there and they were waiting for hours and hours and hours in case another kind of a missed spark was fanned and reignited the fire. So they're just. It is, you know, incredibly, it is ironically, a testament to the incredible, incredible effectiveness of fire control that we have such out of control fires. The other downside, though, is that the flip side of excellent fire control is poor forest management. And this is why we're kind of in the situation that we're in. But one of the things that I found really interesting is the way that conspiracy theories often ignite after, during these fires. And it's something that I noticed, you know, in, in Greece, where this is perhaps much more common, but immediately. So for instance, there were fires in 2018, and the big conspiracy was that it was migrants because the area where the fire had initially ignited was a migrant, a place where. Where migrants. A kind of a stop away stop along this kind of migrant path. And there were camps there. And so it was like, okay, you have these like invaders and then they set fire to our world. They're like literally destroying our world. And so it became this kind of conduit for right wing anxieties about immigration that were not being spoken about in other areas. And this is what happens when you're not allowed to talk about something. Conspiracy becomes the way that you are allowed to talk about it finally. So there was a sort of right wing, but there was also a left wing version of this as well, where one of the most common stories that floats around left wing circles is that these fires are started intentionally. They're arson fires to clear out areas that would otherwise be unavailable for development. And so it's the capitalist that's doing this and destroying our world. And then of course, the environmentalists, they jump on this as well in terms of like climate change and so on. So it's interesting because they're so visceral, they become this conduit for all sorts of anxieties in society across the left and the right. And it's actually very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what actually causes these things. And it's often something much more banal, which is the effectiveness of fire management, which is probably the culprit. And the fact that it's quite hard to control a fire in that kind of situation when you accidentally start one or you intentionally start one because you're mad at your neighbor or something like that, but just become. It's just interesting how it's like the perfect vehicle for grand narratives about what's wrong with the left or what's wrong with the right, what's wrong with capitalism, what's wrong with our society, what's wrong with immigration and so on.
- [29:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, fires are quite scary. We've been getting the smoke in New York, which is the first that I can really remember that happening in the past few years, thanks to. Thanks to Canada. Another reason to slap some tariffs on them. But yeah, I think the, the basic situation is not look, I mean the, the sort of climate left response to it is this kind of apocalyptic one. The basic issue here is that there's a concatenation of different factors and one of them is the fact that average temperatures are increasing and that makes these things more likely. But it seems that people slip into thinking that means that this is sort of a monocausal thing. Of course, in many ecosystems these kinds of fires have always been present to varying degrees. And it, I think is a good example of how difficult it is for people to think about the nature of these sorts of risks and also to come up with policy responses for them. You know, the overall situation is that we are both more and less vulnerable to these sorts of natural disasters than we were in the past. Insofar as, you know, there have been more, they are becoming more frequent for a combination of different factors. One is, as Ashley mentioned, the long term legacy of fire suppression in a lot of these places. But another is the increasing temperatures and other climactic conditions, you know, hotter, drier summers and so on, that, that are making them more, more likely. But you know, it's not as if that simply switches on something that wasn't there in the past. So the question is how you deal with them. And I sort of think this is an example of where the people who are most worried or sort of fixated on this problem also seem to have the least idea of how to actually respond to it. Because for them it becomes this kind of all or nothing judgment of modern civilization where, you know, well, it essentially becomes a kind of expression of some sort of divine punishment where, you know, we've, we've done harm to nature and now it is somehow punishing us and the only way we can deal with that is through some kind of radical, you know, repentance from the evil path that we followed in modern times. Whereas the most meaningful responses to this are just pragmatic and based on mitigating various kinds of risks while also trying to figure out how to manage
- [32:06]
C
our
- [32:07]
B
relationship to the natural world in a pragmatically effective way going forward. So I don't know, I mean, it seems like when. But the thing is, in this case I actually understand the apocalyptic response from the sort of climate activists left because I do when I'm in places where, you know, the whole city is sort of enveloped in smoke and ash, which I have been in a few occasions, it's. I genuinely understand why that feels terrifyingly apocalyptic. It is truly awful. So in this case I sort of can, even though I Think it's fundamentally counterproductive in all kinds of ways. It, it seems to me understandable that that is the reaction, that it is one of just kind of impotent terror in the face of something that seems, you know, cataclysmic and like some sort of expression of, of divine judgment. It's, it's a place where I, I find this situation so kind of terrifying and unpleasant that I, I can actually quite seriously understand to a greater degree than I can with much of the climate discourse, kind of where that mood comes from, even if I can also see how it leads us in various wrong directions.
- [33:30]
A
Permanent daylight savings. Great idea. Bad idea.
- [33:36]
C
Yeah. I mean, why do you want to waste the sunlight on like five or six in the morning when nobody's up anyway except these like, I don't know, puritanical weirdos? No offense to anybody. Why not have the sunshine when people are, you know, have the sunshine, sunlight hours available when people are outside drinking, shopping, being in public, in the public world. I think it's a, you know, it's a pro. Social thing to do. The, the clock is a, It's a human thing. We, it's not like, you know, it's obviously, it's a social construct. It's a human convention. It's not something like a commandment that's been issued from nature. We organize our time for human purposes. And there's something kind of drearily therapeutic about these, these, these experts that you see rolled out about, well, we can settle the matter based on the science of the circadian rhythms with the this and that and that sort of thing. No, we should, we should resolve the debate about how we want to organize our, the, the literal, literally organize our time based on like the human use of time. And I think, you know, we should use, we should enjoy sunlight. We should enjoy it when we are alive, when we are awake, when we are with each other, when we are doing things together. Together. That's my basic take on it.
- [35:07]
A
You know, people used to say nothing good happens after midnight. I think you could say something more like nothing Good happens after 4pm Right. We need a more puritanical ethic.
- [35:20]
C
Hard disagree.
- [35:22]
A
If you make daylight savings time permanent, you're going to have school children walking to school in the dark. You know, you disparage the circadian rhythms. I've always thought that's just a marvelous term, the circadian rhythms. I mean, you can object to pseudoscience, but this is cool. It sounds like something that might have been described by early modern astrologers. Or something, the circadian rhythms. And so I believe in that. I credit it. I think it's very important. I think the sun should rise generally before 8:30am which permanent daylight savings time will render impossible. I think we're going to see just a great impurifying of fluids, of the circadian fluids as well if we make this move. So I strongly oppose it. I think let's not make daylight savings time permanent. In fact, let's get rid of it. Let's get rid of it altogether.
- [36:31]
B
I think this should start a global civil war between morning people and night people. I mean, that's clearly where the shift is.
- [36:38]
C
That's true. I am a night person, so that may be my bias.
- [36:43]
B
That's clearly the real dividing line here.
- [36:46]
A
I'm not much of a morning person, but I think it's important to be able to kind of experience guilt and regret about waking up too late. That's one thing that this move would deprive us of. I mean, what else is there in life really than feeling bad about getting up after the sun?
- [37:06]
C
But here's the thing, though. Here's the thing. Walking to school in the dark is wonderful. I'm from Canada. This is what I did. Waking up before the sun is wonderful.
- [37:18]
A
Yeah, that's a great point. As a Canadian, you're really thinking, okay, all right, you weak Americans. I've, I've lived this. Right? Yeah.
- [37:27]
C
That's interesting that, that such a simple issue actually reveals such a difference in their thinking. Because as you were saying that you're like, oh yeah, circadian rhythms. That's like something like so, no, no, no. Our laws don't come up to us from the earth. They don't spring from our bodily fluids. The point is like, that was. Marx's disagreement with the German idealists was like, you think that everything comes down from heaven into the brain of man. The whole point is to bring the brain of man up into the heavens. So we want to, we want to go up. And that means that we make rules for man, not man for rules.
- [38:05]
A
I think this reveals the.
- [38:07]
C
Which is also Jesus's line.
- [38:10]
A
Oh well, without getting into the religious elements, which is certainly above my pay grade, your invocation of Marx, that dark name, makes clear the profoundly utopian and revolutionary character of this proposal and why every conservative and God fearing American ought to oppose it.
- [38:37]
C
Ought to love it.
- [38:38]
A
Ashley's.
- [38:40]
C
You just supported it.
- [38:42]
A
Ashley's aim for the, for this permanent daylight savings time, her belief that we can kind of remake society and lift man in this way. It's in keeping with the French Revolution's ten day calendar and other such invocations. It partakes of the fanatical cult of the meter, which is inhuman and dehumanizing, unlike the yard. And it ought to be resisted, as I'm sure Jeff agrees.
- [39:17]
C
I must disagree. I'm afraid it's in keeping with the cult of the Hebrews. The cult of the Hebrews which made a covenant with God which was to slowly detach themselves from God and be one with him. That you would put David on a throne and David was a man that eventually we will be as gods. We shall be as gods. This by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we released ourselves from animal nature and we will never be one with it again. We can't go back to the Garden of Eden. We will only be one with it again through bringing ourselves up to godliness. And that is what the whole Hebrew Bible is about, according to Eric from.
- [39:55]
A
Anyway, I do want to. I certainly want to bring Jeff in here because I know he'll absolutely support my position. But as the great sages of conservatism have taught us, man must learn to live within his limits. And all that aspiration and flimflammery that Ashley's talking about just shows the kind of incipiently revolutionary and communistic character of the Bible as it's been handed down to us. And we ought to regard it all more skeptically. You know, we need to maybe, kind of maybe to hold on to our conservatism. We ought to become a little anti Christian. Actually. That's, that's the. I'm speaking facetiously, of course, but that is the direction that various intellectuals on the right are going.
- [40:44]
B
So I did want to throw in here. I think we are sort of channeling a Cold War era debate, which is that I remember my parents would occasionally talk about this, that, you know, when they were younger there was a lot of sort of, you know, John Bircher, McCarthyite sort of anti Daylight Savings Time discourse. Is anybody else familiar with this? I, I need to verify that this is actually true. But I remember my parents saying, you know, when I was a kid there were, you know, you'd hear these kind of right wingers railing against Daylight Savings Time and saying it was a communist imposition. So, you know, this conversation would seem to.
- [41:21]
A
That's exactly my argument.
- [41:23]
C
No, but that's exactly it.
- [41:25]
B
And I believe because it was a
- [41:27]
C
failed worker state, I'm totally, I agree it was a horrible communist imposition. It was the wrong direction. It was a move away from freedom and humanity.
- [41:36]
B
Wait, but I thought you were pro Universal Daylight Savings Time.
- [41:40]
C
I'm pro keeping one time that allows us to enjoy the sunshine is all the essence of my argument.
- [41:48]
B
But I think you were both pro not changing the clocks. It sounds to me. It's just that, I mean, and there is a distinction here which I believe has been debated, which is do you abolish Daylight Savings Time, which I think is Matthew's position, or do you make it permanent, which I believe is Ashley's position? Both of these have the same result in the sense that you don't change the clocks.
- [42:08]
A
Yeah, we're both opposed to the arbitrary rule of clock changing, which is just a kind of massive interference in the natural rhythms of life. But yeah, we. Otherwise we have sharply contrasting visions and that's. That's what's important for radio. We can't all agree.
- [42:28]
C
Yeah, sorry. Too. Yeah. It is that it's the idea of, like, not to abolish Daylight Savings Time, but proposing the abolition of the Winter Standard Time that makes Daylight Savings Time permanent. That's the idea.
- [42:41]
A
Our producer Herman informs us that Mexico got rid of Daylight Savings Time a few years ago. Do I feel another compact article coming on about how AMLO got something right? Recurring genres? Maybe. Maybe. With that, thanks to Ashley. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks to our producer Herman. And thank you, listeners. For more, go to compactmag.com subscribe.
- [43:15]
C
Sam.