Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Hello, this is episode number 155 of Give the People What They Want. Today is the 29th of December. This is the last show of the year. Unfortunately, we don't have Vijay with us who is on a reporting trip. His internet connectivity was not strong enough for him to join, although he sends his best wishes to everyone on the show. It's been really quiet a year. It's very difficult to sort of... I mean, we're having an interview with Roger Waters soon coming up tomorrow where he says that 2023 was perhaps one of the worst years in the history of humanity. And there are many reasons for saying that one, of course, the sheer impunity with which we have been destroying this planet. There is no question of that. This year has been apparently one of the hottest, if not the hottest on record. We saw a COP summit which did not really reach, make any major conclusions. People, scientists warning of impending doom, political leaders, those in power, of course, refusing to heed any of these concerns. That's, of course, one aspect of it. But in so many other ways, this was a very difficult year, although there were also the usual stories of crime, stories of struggles. We'll cover all that in this episode. But I think any episode, any year-end episode has to deal, has to talk. We have to talk about Gaza first. We have to talk about the situation in Palestine over the past three months. That has really been what is sort of, I think, consumed. Every journalist consumed, every person of conscience at this point of time. There is no talking, there is no way we cannot address Gaza. So Zoe, what's going on right now? I mean, there's so much happening every week. Yeah. I mean, I think many people get the sensation that every single day we wake up to new atrocities committed by Israel. And it really feels wild. We're also just one week away from the three-month mark on this genocidal war with the people of Gaza, just at around 22,000 people who have been killed by Israeli bombs, by the ground invasion. And added to that is at least 7,000 people who are unaccounted for. And many, many people fear that this number will actually add up to the death toll. So some estimates are even saying that 30,000 people have been killed. It's really, we're still in the moment of the fog of war, which these details and the minute details of what's happened to these people is still unverified. But as you said, Prashant, that is something that's been consuming everyone across the world. And this is evident not only in the protests that we're seeing and the outrage by people on the streets, but of course media from all different perspectives, having their own takes on this. We've seen the best of times and the worst of times in terms of media reporting pretty consistently mainstream media has had the perspective of sort of taking every single thing that Israel says at face value. And we know that throughout these three months there has been an atrocious amount of fake news and fake stories concocted by the Israeli propaganda machine. This Hasbara machine that has created stories like for example that babies were beheaded, that mass rapes were carried out, that all sorts of atrocities were carried out which have since been retracted by the same authorities. That I think one of the most possibly it's hard to say what's the worst of these but that there were bullets inside of babies incubators and that's why they had to invade the hospitals. I mean first we back in October it's funny because you look back at the coverage and looking back at the lies that one had to combat that were put out by the Israeli media and by Israeli government authorities they said that they did not bomb any hospitals. That this was a Hamas rocket attack and that's how the entire hospital was destroyed and then we're at month three and every single day they're putting out more and more statements and decorations about actually why they have to attack hospitals, why they have to attack schools, why they have to bomb residential towers where civilians and children are living. It is truly horrifying and a true stain in our conscience as the world and I think that again this mainstream media has really stuck to these talking points. They've been forced of course to cover the civilian death toll. They've been forced to really speak about the atrocities just because the level that they're occurring at and the level at which these atrocities are actually being communicated to the world that people are seeing every single day horrifying videos of children of babies being killed in these airstrikes of grandmothers and fathers and mothers mourning their children being killed and because of these images mainstream media has not been able to just say oh they did this, Hamas did this, Hamas did that and they're having to actually report on what Israel's doing but that being said we still see them attempting to kind of parrot these lines and yesterday a ridiculous New York Times report came out after the allegations had been debunked, dismounted but they continue trying to push this. That's one element I think of this war on Gaza, the media war but again it really seems like we're at such a different point in society I think the world is really watching and seeing what's happening through alternative media, through social media and so these mainstream media outlets are kind of really steps behind the reality and then on other in terms of what's happening on the ground I think more and more since the ground invasion started we're seeing very concerning reports about the thousands of Gazans that have been detained by Israel inside Gaza they have been seeing the images of these dozens of people that are rounded up, stripped and ordered to kind of march in single files brought to stadiums it reminds me a lot of images that you would see from the dictatorships in Latin America who knows what level of atrocities is being committed against these detainees already people have been released, have shared stories about being tortured about other detainees being killed point blank there are a lot of historic stories of extrajudicial executions of detainees of people in UN schools, even the UN has been talking about this so I think we're ending the year with heavy hearts with unseen levels of atrocities being carried out with complete complicity really of western governments I think we have seen a shift and governments of the global south have been trying to take more action against Israel as long as the US is bankrolling this genocide it's unlikely that Israel will feel the real pressure to actually reverse course and I think that the struggle against imperialism has really intensified in many countries in the west people are standing up against their governments but the struggle against imperialism this year saw another important blow Prashant can you talk to us about the developments in the Sahel? It's interesting you also mentioned the media because I think the Sahel region has been one at one level of course under reported there's not enough writing or reporting on what's happening in the region but I think also equally important to remember that the region has also been misrepresented massively in terms of how the political and social developments in that region are being characterized now of course the key point here which is of course not just one incident this is a coup in Niger that took place in July and around that coup in Niger a lot of developments took place so you can actually see you can sort of think of it in terms of that coup or that military takeover sort of being the culmination of a series of events that have been taking place over the past many years we talked about coups in Mali, we talked about coups in Burkina Faso and we talked about developments in Guinea as well and all of these I think sort of converged all of these developments converged with what happened in Niger in July when the former president Bazoum was overthrown, Bazoum very unpopular in his country seen as a puppet of France, Niger of course was hosting French troops and a new force takes over, a junta takes over which like in the case of the other countries we talked about seems to have popular support especially in its stated intention to sort of push back against French influence in the region now we need to remember that the influence of France in the region is in various ways there is of course a military aspect Operation Barkhane where France deployed soldiers in various countries in the Sahel region in the name of fighting extremism now very important in this context always to say that the extremism of course stemmed at least one of the factors which caused extremism was the invasion the NATO invasion of Libya and it is from there that you know it explodes from there the kind of both in terms of personal and weapons people travelling kind of explodes after that but France of course arrives you know it pretends to sort of be the saviour of these countries but what happens is that not only is it effective but French troops become extremely unpopular and the collusion of the governments in these countries whether it be Mali or Burkina Faso or Niger was a huge factor in these governments becoming extremely popular unpopular among the people so we have this strange situation where there are military takeovers but these military takeovers are not the kind of takeovers you were talking about earlier where for instance in Latin America you know you had CIA backed military takeovers you know which strengthened the hand of imperialism in the region we are talking about military takeovers which in various ways have actually pushed back against imperialism now the jury is still out on how successful they will be how consistent they will be every country has its own process of course but I think the important thing to remember is that the Sahel region is becoming one of the most important in the world primarily because of this kind of a pushback there is of course a pushback against the French military presence and France was forced to withdraw its soldiers but equally I think there is also a pushback against you know the French economic presence in the region as represented by the CFA Frank there is an attempt to sort of, or by countries in the region to sort of come together they formed the alliance of Sahel states recently which is actually quite a significant development and this alliance itself builds on earlier attempts in the previous century immediately after national liberation movements so very very interesting developments taking place in the Sahel primarily also due to the fact that there is a, like I said, there are pushbacks against on the one hand there are pushbacks but there is also a greater sense of integration now what will this integration bring is really its challenge they face a lot of challenges let's be clear these countries because among the challenges is ECOVAS, the regional body which is you know almost functioned as an arm of France and even the United States to an extent we still have governments in those regions which are very loyal to you know which are considered by their populations to be very loyal to French interests so it's not going to be easy sailing for these countries which have sort of tried to carve out an alternative path and I think that's a very important question because they have been so many attempts over the past decades to sort of carve out this kind of an alternative path but rarely have they succeeded because of a combination of both internal and external forces so very important developments here a big challenge for all these countries is going to be how they deal with the question of extremism because it is the failure of the French and French allies in these countries to combat extremism that led to their unpopularity in the first place so it's a very important question for them question number two is how do they sort of broaden their support base to sort of you know make it more make their governments more inclusive to actually more more powerfully capture the will of the people we saw that Mali went quite a few steps ahead with its referendum that it took place with the new constitution that has some very interesting provisions including some explicitly anti-imperialist provisions so that's actually a very interesting thing so whether the other countries follow suit very important question a big uncertain element is the United States which for instance continues to have the agarese drone base in the J.R. the largest in that region also has soldiers as well so even though France has been suffering setback after setback what is the United States going to do in this region also remains a very big question so I think so many important questions that are there but very positive science as well I believe in fact it was very widely read on the people's dispatch site Ibrahim Trawari the president of Burkina Faso his speech that he delivered in Russia where he posed a question to both the people of Africa and the leaders of Africa about what is the path that we have to take and he was kind of channeling the spirit of Thomas Sankar I mean he asked some of these questions which is a very interesting development a very key moment so I think 2024 going to be very very important for the Sahel region and what happens there could actually have a domino effect in many other paths of the continent as well especially in the northern part we have countries like Senegal there are so many other countries we have for instance our recent article by our colleague Tanupriya about the situation in Guinea the south where you know again the forces of progress the forces of you know the forces looking for a socialist path are being hindered by a powerful president so in many of these countries I think very important developments are likely to take place in the coming year well on a less positive note I already warned in the past episodes that Argentina is going to be a recurring theme on this show just because what's happening is quite remarkable under we've let's see 19 days of Javier Mille's presidency and to remind people Javier Mille is the right-wing libertarian who won the elections in November and Javier Mille since being sworn in on December 10th has really gone on a rampage we spoke last week about the economic measures which he implemented which really hit directly to the working class in terms of affecting the currency devaluation affecting subsidies for transparency looks like Zoe is also facing some technical issues she'll be back in a few minutes talking about Javier Mille and the situation in Argentina which has really become a frontline state in the battle between I think the people the masses of the people on the streets and what is a very wild version of neoliberal capitalism masquerading as anarcho-libertarianism or something of that sort very difficult situation in Argentina people really kind of struggling to sort of fight and push back against this very brutal offensive not only on livelihoods but also democratic rights and the freedom to protest Zoe will come back on some of those topics but meanwhile I'll pick up and go talk about Sudan and DRC to these Zoe is back rough days Zoe sorry about that it seems like the internet forces are against us however I will continue where I left off back to Argentina yes Javier Mille's far reaching so yeah as I was saying there have been a number of economic reforms that were implemented within days of him taking office there was also his security minister Patricia implemented what is called the public security protocol which they also have termed the anti-picket protocol because essentially it hits the Argentinian people their principal form of struggle which is blocking roads and it's saying that anyone who blocks a road anytime there's a road blockade essentially the police have full authority to intervene and anyone who participates actually runs the risk of losing any social programs that they benefit from so this is hugely serious and then as if that weren't enough this week again he pushed forward an omnibus law which had many many different provisions one which essentially expands the faculties of the security forces in the country the police it says that they're allowed to use a firearm and shoot at someone if they feel their life is in danger and we know that this is an extremely subjective sort of provision because really what who defines when your life is technically in danger it essentially opens the door for the police to kill with impunity already police violence against the working class people and poor in Argentina was a problem and this is essentially saying police go ahead you can do what you want there was this law also affected many environmental regulations Argentine society had organized for many many years to protect the glaciers in the country had organized because there was serious threats of open pit mining taking place on these very very precious glaciers in the country this is essentially stripped away and so we're seeing more and more these protections that people have fought for in long long struggles are just being taken away another key thing is that Argentina was sort of a safe haven for students across Latin America because universities free there there's no entrance exam and so people from all over the continent would go to Argentina to study there's thousands and thousands of students from many different Latin American countries that go there Javier Mille just announced that there's no more free education for students of the region you have to have residency which again is possible to obtain but it's a quite long process this really cuts this really important provision this will hit hard for a lot of people who had been studying there who had planned to study there again this is he's saying that he's going after political cast but in reality he's going after working class people he's going after the rights of the working class to free education to free healthcare and so many other things that they fought for so again just two days ago there was a huge huge protest called for by all the central trade unions those protests are going to continue I think we're going to see intense intense struggle in Argentina going forward right Zoe intense struggle also another country which did see intense struggle over the past few years was Sudan Sudan is a bit of a it's a country we've actually very extensively covered over the past many years and almost every every month we talk about it actually to be honest because such has been the seriousness of what has been happening over there and this year is a very unfortunate year for the people of Sudan because what the people's movements had warned for the longest time that the generals could not be trusted we're talking about a completely different set of generals over here you have the Sahel region where generals seem to be trying out some interesting not just generals captains and colonels seem to be trying out some interesting you know policy directions and then you have Sudan where the generals who the the international community the so called international community loved the head of the army general Burhan and general Dagalo the head of the rapid support forces basically fell on each other started a war in April which continues to this day refugee crisis of epic proportions taking place right now millions of people are displaced I think it's the biggest refugee crisis in the world one reason we don't talk about one reason we talk about it so much in this show is because it's a war which is actually pretty much been forgotten and if there is a reason why this war is forgotten because the war is you know this is a war which kind of was in many ways the direct responsibility of this international community they kept including the generals in the transition process they kept propping up these generals they kept backing these generals despite the fact that the hundreds of thousands of people on the streets said that they couldn't be trusted and finally the ambitions of these generals ended up clashing and we have war breaking out so very difficult times for people in Sudan and the conflict there's some talk of negotiations but still no clarity on you know when any of this would take place reports of ethnic cleansing in Darfur very alarming as well going south or going to the west actually you have elections that took place the DRC as well very closely covering it in the coming days is the final results come out the DRC one of the most important countries in the continent and you know because not only if it's not not only because of its mineral but also because the struggles of the people for sovereignty over these resources the struggles of the people against you know their leaders who are basically acted as in some senses props of various imperialist powers the struggle of their people against Rwanda and Uganda which have at various points armed people the M23 rebellion still continuing back by Rwanda you know so very very important developments taking place in many of these countries in the whole continent as a whole we are seeing I think a very important moment where progressive forces people's movements are rising in various ways to sort of push back against what imperialism is trying to do against the loot of resources against the compromising of their sovereignty against the dilution of the democratic and political systems and I think it's interesting to note that the dilemmas of humanity conference took place in South Africa this year I encourage all of you to go to the site read reports about what happened in that conference of course Palestine was front and center in the agenda but also so many important points on these issues on sovereignty on democracy on building socialism very very interesting debates and discussions which brought together people's movements across the world and since I think our motto or you know since people's dispatch are so much about resistance are so much about people's movements are so much about struggles I think it's only apt that we end with you know labor this year that's always been I think very much our focus that's really what we enjoy the most working on the struggles of people across the world for their rights so take us through it well yeah that's exactly right I think that with all of the challenges facing the world with all of the destruction and just huge seemingly insurmountable difficulties that people are dealing with especially in Palestine right now struggles still remains the principal thread which unites people across the world and I think that's even you know what is the main thread that we're seeing in Palestine despite all of this destruction there's so much resistance and this resistance again has been seen in countries across the world I'm going to just talk briefly about the labor movement in the US which has seen huge victories this year we know that labor in the United States and levels of unionization are at record lows but in the last couple of years there's been this kind of upswing and resurgence of this movement of course it's the decimation of the labor union that was very closely tied to this anti-communist anti-socialist rhetoric and movement and that at the same time that socialism is becoming more popular in the United States we're also seeing that unionization is being seen upon more favorably we're seeing that the presidents of unions that are getting elected are much more militant and this year really was kind of the culmination of that 300,000 teamsters almost go on strike UPS workers but even though they reached an agreement with UPS we saw really unprecedented levels of militant organizing they did practice pickets they were organizing with communities it was a new level and a new kind of new forms of organization that emerged in this moment it saw more people paying attention to actually the struggle of unions and understanding that a win for the teamsters which they ended up achieving is actually a win for the entire working class as it forces other industries to kind of respond to the conditions that these teamsters were able to achieve in this contract and again they aren't small changes this was getting air-conditioning in trucks for workers who were working in extremely hot temperatures getting them trying to do away with this tiered system wherein people the newest hires are given the smallest amount of rights I mean this is a problem that we're seeing across the country that more and more the new hires are getting these extremely precarious not even contracts and so this was one of the major wins of the teamsters later we saw the united auto workers take on the big three automobile companies which is really symbolic in many ways because the labor union united states is so linked to the auto industry the assembly line these classic images of the workers on the shop floor and they were fighting back against at the end of the day against neoliberals and against plants being closed against their wages being again brought down against their rights being whittled away at and they also won very very important victories Hollywood actors and writers also went on strike at the same time which really hasn't been seen in years they were picketing the studios and Hollywood was feeling the pressure to actually consider that writers and actors are workers and so as we're seeing this growth of the working class movement of labor unions taking militant action taking industrial action we're also seeing a growth of class consciousness across the united states and now this very intense moment of standing in solidarity with Palestine is occurring we're seeing that labor unions are the ones that are actually standing up and standing in solidarity with Palestine and saying we won't move goods we call for a ceasefire we're going to challenge the democratic parties line despite the historical allegiance of major trade unions in the united states to the democratic party so this is a tremendous moment and that the working class people of the world are the ones who have to benefit from this and that more and more organizing that's taking place is definitely historic and has to be noted right Zoe it's we've crossed of course the half an hour mark which usually is the duration of our show but what occurs to me is that so much we still haven't got time to talk about we haven't talked about the Ukraine war which in the latest reports indicate that there is some kind of a strategic rethink happening in the US we haven't touched upon the question of multi polarity which was I think one of the most significant words or significant trends this year there was a brick summit lot of controversy around it a lot of promise around it as well bricks heading for expansion so many regional organizations and regional bodies heading for expansion very interesting ways we haven't been able to talk about the reconfiguration that is taking place in West Asia of course it started with Saudi Arabia and Iran re-establishing ties but expanded in so many ways and even now after as Israeli assaults continue it continues to have its implications so many developments take place across the world important to that Europe is the only region we don't have much to talk about but again so many struggles taking place for instance United Kingdom against the conservative governments immigration laws for instance very powerful trade union movements in countries such as Belgium so it's been an incredible year it is true that of course that 2023 in some ways was probably the worst year but in many other ways it also I think has been full of promise it has been full of struggle it has been full of the willingness the desire and the dream of trying to build a better world and I think that is sort of what we cherish that sort of what we take with us and give us give us strength as we enter 2024 so see you next year next Friday for episode 156 which I will hopefully be back to show you a fresh set of stories from across the world


What I wanted to talk about today in the Circuit Python parsec is how to download the latest build of Circuit Python up to the minute build using our Amazon S3 site. So why do you want to do this, first of all? If you take a look at this, Synthio, Synthio has been getting a lot of work, Jepler has been doing a lot of work on it. So he's updating it and he's getting a merge of it into Circuit Python pretty frequently, but that takes a while to find its way into the big releases that you find here on the downloads page of CircuitPython.org. So if I go to this downloads page and I do Feather RP2040, I'm going to find the 8.1.0 and even a 8.2.0 beta zero, but if I look back at this one from Jepler, this is newer than those. So what I can do is scroll down a little further to this absolute newest section and it says I can click on this to browse S3, that's our Amazon S3 storage, and this might look a little bit weird to people who aren't used to old fashioned internet. So this is a directory structure and if I go to the language I want to use, I'm going to use English US, this ENUS, I'll click on that and now I get a list of all of these latest releases, oh in fact this beta is new enough that I could have gotten it from there, but until maybe an hour ago, the one right below it, that was the newest one. So I'm going to go ahead and grab that one, let's say I'm not grabbing the beta, but I'll grab one of those, any of those, grab a UF2 file and then I can go to my finder and grab from the downloads folder, you'll see right here, here's the UF2, I can go ahead and put this into boot select mode, oh I missed the button, tiny button, and that's going to show up now as the boot drive, RP2, now I can drag and drop that UF2 that I downloaded onto there, it'll take a minute to copy over and then when it restarts it'll be running CircuitPython and it'll be running the version I want, this is a really great way to grab up to the minute or pretty close to it, merges of CircuitPython to get the latest features and one of the reasons I'm doing this is things like the LFO and other synth IO features that I want just aren't in those big releases that take a little while to get out there, so if you want to grab that really new stuff, head to the download page and then find this link right here, Browse S3 and that'll take you right to the language page to grab the CircuitPython build that you want and that is your CircuitPython Parsec.


Hey there friends, how's it going? My name is Kevin and today we're going to be playing some Rainbow Six Siege But we're not going to be playing it alone. We're playing it with my goose And it's been a while it has been a while since we played some Counter-Strike So some things have happened. He's formed a relationship and now they say a Mrs. Goose and not only that they've really committed They've gotten married and they've had a baby goose So I'm gonna try playing some Rainbow Six Siege with three geese on my side I don't see how anyone could stand a chance if I'm bringing my own team. Okay, they're already oh look they're saying hello They're doing their own intro. They're already kind of getting in my way We're gonna jump in before they ruin it even more. I don't want to give them more time. We're going into a ranked game I'm sure this will be fine in ranked. I am not good at siege as it is I'm out of practice and I got three geese on my side This is a winning combination, but I actually spoke to the developer and he gave me a few games that work with the Grabbing the mouse and it actually affects your aim. So we're gonna try one of those games, too But I thought just siege is such a friendly community.  Hey guys. Hello. Can you hear me? Yeah? Fantastic, I can't hear you with all the footsteps too. Well, I'm starting to think this is gonna be a serious issue A lot of my screen is being taken up already Okay, let's see how it goes. I'm sure my teammates will understand if I'm struggling not great more pictures They're really trying to ruin my game before it even starts and all this sounds are driving me. I'm a crazy There's just constant pitter-patterns.  Are you know he's on to me How does he know wait for me?  I don't know I Think I injured him. I'm not sure I can't my goose put a lot of stuff in the way But I think he's down if you see someone come and let us know I'll shout I'm just gonna scream if he comes in. Okay. He's coming in Wait, I thought we were planting the bomb they diffused it. I was just celebrating even though they won Did they win? Oh, no, did we win? I don't know. I can't see what's going on I just have no clue even the people I can only choose like this half and I only have like three over here I didn't even know they could use gifts in this. This is even more distracting Okay, I'm just gonna follow you guys. Just tell me what to do because I'm struggling here Okay, sorry, I can't really hear anything my goose is super loud Sorry, I can't really hear my goose footsteps are so so loud. I'm scared Don't be no, I'm really scared.  Okay, this is just getting harder and harder. I can't see anything Who do I want to be? I've got these three as my choices I couldn't see him on my screen. Sorry Jesus Christ. I don't even know where I'm going I'm not familiar enough with the map and I have no mini map. I can't see anything Dexter Where are you? Where am I gonna hide? Okay, I'll try for you I'm dying from somewhere. I don't know where I can't tell. Oh my god.  There's just so many footsteps and just visually there's too much going on How many of us are left Dexter the feck? Sorry.  He's been really nice so far, but I imagine I'm gonna wear on him Much like my goose. I liked him at the start. I think it's his family I don't like I don't think I'm gonna take his family to TF2.  I think yes, I got someone Got another one just me and my geese rush go in no balls left Am I getting him? Well, we did our best guys. Good job out there. It's close. I think I don't know.  I mean we had them out numberage. I thought we'd win because of that No, never Well, no, I had me and my three geese. So now the interesting part. How do I quit this game? I don't know where the quit button is.  I think I just click keep playing I don't how do I get out to stop stop matchmaking? You know, I'm tempted to just try another one of these I feel like that was just an unlucky game. I think we almost had them I should have actually looked at the scoreboard because I got a fair amount of kills. I think all things considered Okay, I think since it's a fresh game, we're gonna get rid of all the image tabs I'll leave the text tabs. He's gonna bring out loads more anyway. So I don't think it really matters Okay, it's still an absolute mess, but this is doable. This this I can work with He has such mood swings. He's like, how are you today?  Great, the kids just starting. They're already pulling out images.  Oh god. Jesus. I almost banned buck and I want to play him I just couldn't see that this was the banning stage. I thought we were picking Why is he bringing out this bird in a banana hole? Suddenly brought out two of them. He's just really amazed by this. I am two to be fair. I got duck You got duck. I got goose. Do you get it? Nice. Yeah, I got it. Nice one, dude I don't think he got it One is on a bandit. All right, listen for me because I can't hear anything on account of my geese I got duck again, and I still have my geese. Do you get it? Yeah, yeah, still Nice one, dude. I like that you get it. I just realized he's saying duck by the way, not duck I didn't actually realize what he was talking about earlier. I just heard the word duck I think I killed someone. I'm not quite sure to be honest Did I shoot? Oh no, I shot him, but I didn't kill him.  Get out of my way goose. Not now I mean ideally not ever, but like especially not now. Oh god. We're running out of time I I never know what's going on with the time or how many people are dead or whatever even though I can't see that There's just too much going on. I don't know what's happening. My bad. My bad. No, believe me. That was my bad Sorry about that. Hey, Kevin. Have you ever heard of a series called house? What did you say? Sorry? I didn't hear you. Have you ever heard of a series called how to annoy? No, I don't think so. On TV? No, it's on. It used to be on machinima years ago when uh college It was stored like really popular. Oh, I used to watch machinima, but no, I didn't I don't remember that one I am on machinima I don't believe you here, dude. You actually sound like the guy so much. Oh dear. It's starting to get serious again There's a lot of geese. I've got so much going on at once. I'm trying to win this game I'm trying to not get distracted by my many geese and their pictures and I'm trying to pretend I'm not myself Okay, see he died somehow and I don't even know I killed him because I can't see the kill feed Here we go. I'll nade them to avenge my friend That didn't work at all. All right Oh sugar, that's me, isn't it? All right guys, be my ears because I can't hear anything Sorry, I didn't know where the bombs were My fault.  No, honestly, this is all me and my geese's fault. I feel bad I'm kind of afraid to look at the score. Let's take a little peek. Oh, no, it's best. We don't see that We're gonna leave that hidden Wait, what why are you saying? No, I'm multi. Oh, sorry. I didn't realize I can't see what anyone is playing as It's okay. These people are the most understanding people I've ever played with in siege In both games everyone's just so nice. God. I think when I finish this game I'm actually not gonna know what it's like to just be in silence I think the silence will be deafening because I'm getting so accustomed to hearing these little pitter-patterns now Uh, I did something. I don't know what it was but I got plus 20 Who's useless call outs ever? Oh, he's already dead. Okay.  No, not you your honor. I'm sorry I want to save you buddy. I just be my ears crawl into me. Come on. Crawling crawling. What button is it? How do I revive you crawl over here? Oh my god, I can't revive Okay Sorry, dude, I couldn't remember the button. I don't think I could revive you from in there Oh, that was a good shot. I'd assume. I don't know. I couldn't really see it. All right. No worries We'll get them next time. Come on next round is ours. No, no, no, it's not because we have officially lost Okay, rainbow six is really hard to play with three geese. All right.  We're gonna play some team fortress instead. Oh my god silence. Thank you Oh my god That was driving me insane. I didn't realize how nice silence was this almost feels weird now. I having most of my screen back I I don't know. I kind of grew accustomed to looking through a tiny little people Oh god I'm good without my screen completely blocked. Look at this. Oh, no. All right. Not that good Oh god. Here he comes. Here he comes. Oh the fantastic Oh, Jesus christ and then I'm shooting myself and everything. Don't worry. I got your back as long as my goose doesn't grab me Wait, that scout is not moving fast enough to be a scout. Also the enemy medic was healing him Not for fuck's sake. This spike keeps getting me and they're not even sneaky. Wait.  Take away the kids, but I'm not a home wrecker You know, what is minecraft trying to talk to me? I could see he's talking on the bottom right, but I can't hear him Jesus christ. They don't stop coming. I know I'm with you. Get out of here.  My goose doesn't even care. He's used to the bloodshed at this point No, no, no bad timing bad timing bad timing. Jesus christ this tornado. Where the hell am I? Oh god No, no, no, no. Stop moving. Stop moving. I'm trying to kill them The goose literally lost us the game I was on the objective and then he just went nuts No, no, no, no, no, no not the time not the time not the time. Oh for fuck's sake No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm standing on explosives.  I don't know.  It sounds so playful.  Great.  Oh wait, maybe because it's hungry.  All right, come on final push. We can do this everyone No, no, no, hold on.  We can't do this He saw we were making a great push for victory and he put a stop to it fast Oh goose. I'm sorry to break this to you. I really am but I think we need to break up. Honestly, it's not you It's your wife. Honestly. I don't think this uh three-way relationship is working out I could handle one of you, but both of you together are just a disaster Oh, but I hope you enjoyed this was fun though. It's fun to mess around with I also met some really nice people in rainbow six siege, which is rare Honestly, especially twice in a row since when does that happen? But I hope you did enjoy the video if you want to see more of me and my goose Do let me know just suggest a game that might be fun and I'll take a look through the comments and whatnot But uh, yeah, I hope you enjoyed I appreciate you watching as always and I hope to see you next time


He finally goes into this downright eye movement, which we associate with emotional accessing, thinking about emotional stuff in our head.  So what we always teach you on the, on this channel is to look for changes. This is a big change. When he's got the answer, he goes back to self aggrandizing, back to close eye talking, which is usually the superiority and false humility. And he's like, when I need to persuade something, he does the closed eye thing again, which is a little strange. And he says, whatever piece of furniture or what I'm working on, I think this is the point where right when he tries to add more information to furniture, like maybe something else, so that he can feel close to the edge, his hands retract quickly back to his body. They close really quickly. This is called digital flexion.


We can start these lightning talks up first. We've got Scott Massey. He's going to tell us a bit about oil, acid, and agencies. That sounds right. That sounds right. That sounds right. You guys hear me? Awesome. This has been so much fun. Thank you all. And thanks for coming and listening to my short little thought experiment. I wanted to talk about Martek a little bit and Drupal agencies. But what I wanted to start with was salad dressing. So I picked this up, and I thought about this because I try and cook. And I was watching a video of this guy, Jack Pippan, and he was fixing this dinner. And it was this awesome dinner, and he makes this salad. And then he says, and if you look at salad dressings at the supermarket today, it's 50% sugar. That is not salad dressing. That is dessert. And you should always make your own salad dressing. And I was like, OK, well, I'll do like Jack does, and I'll try and make my own salad dressing. And I realized that it's a pretty standard formula. It's three parts oil, and then one part some kind of acid, like vinegar or lemon juice or something like that. And then almost anything else you want that you like that tastes good that's like your own kind of style, whether it's like salt and pepper if you're pretty vanilla like me or like wasabi or anything you want to add. And it almost always turns out good. And you shake it up, and it's good for three days, and it's the best salad dressing you ever had. And I just thought about like I was raised on this stuff, and I looked at my refrigerator of these like 10 little bottles that had this much in there, because who knows if salad dressing expires or not. So you just keep buying more and putting it in there. So I was thinking about that, and I thought like how you get used to like this is like the standard, and you buy the organic stuff for like an extra $2. And you think, oh, that's so much better. But it's still horrible compared to stuff you can make at home in your own five minutes, in five minutes. And so like I go to a lot of events like TripleCon and TripleCamps, but I also do a lot of MarTech stuff where I'm talking to CMOs. And there's this trend where like 2017 to 2018 CMO budgets are going down in terms of staffing, in terms of paid media, in terms of what they spend with agencies, and going up in terms of what they're spending on MarTech. And so MarTech is kind of exploding, and that has a big effect on agencies. And we work with agencies a lot. So like your welfare is important to us. And so in thinking about that, I go to these events, and I talk to these folks. And when you look at what's on the market for them, they have a lot of different products that are being sold to them, promising them great returns and Lyft and all these different things by adding personalization or adding different information gathering and all this interesting stuff. And that's a lot of stuff. But that's not even this year. That's 2011. If you look at what's going on in 2018, they have a whole ton of different tools that they're trying to evaluate and use. And when you see the segment of how much of that is going into the website, how much time that they're putting into their websites and their digital experiences, if you like calling them that, that's getting gradually smaller and smaller. And so like I've been trying to talk to these folks in a way that sort of validates the importance of having awesome websites and the value of using Drupal. And like what I've realized is that the agencies that we work with that are super successful at making this argument are the ones that recognize that marketing teams are sort of thinking along the lines of some kind of model like this, like some kind of framework to how they get from strangers to sales qualified leads through whatever sort of pipeline and customer life cycle of attracting, converting, and engaging their audience. And so like they're choosing the apps that do that. And I think that like the agencies that understand that and can understand not just like what they want their content to look like, but also like what their goals are and what their KPIs are, they're super successful. And like that framework doesn't have to be like this professional consulting agency which has their 43 point customer value analytics prioritization matrix. It can be something much simpler than that. It can be what I call like three steps to doing that which is be accountable for your customer's success, like use their KPIs as your KPIs and make sure that you're aware of what they're suffering on, where they're suffering and where they're trying to succeed. Number two, be like their trusted advisor that helps them understand like how not just the website works, but how the marketing stack interacts with the website and the fact that everyone somehow ends up at the website. So it's one of the most important things and it needs to be super awesome digital experiences because when I talk to these people, they'll say yeah, we got a point or two of lift from personalization, but what really did it was the awesome digital experience. And I try and tell them that like the key to that is having an awesome team on your side because this is good enough for your competitors, but it's not good enough for you. Discontinue. Thank you, Scott. Okay Vlad, please tell us about Drupal Camp, Bar and Bay. Thanks everyone for putting great conference. It was a great event. So we are organizing Drupal Camp, Bar and Bay, another one, so if you are an international visitor and don't know where Bar and Bay is, so if you look at the map of Strelia, so at the moment we are here. Bar and Bay is not too far away, so it's just right up there. So you would ask why Bar and Bay, why not something famous like Canberra? So Byron has beach, so lots and lots of beach. You can go on either side of it and it's pretty much the whole beach all the way to Gold Coast or all the way to Sydney. So Byron has a lighthouse. You go and make probably one of the most recognized photo in Australia. Byron has Australia's greatest expert, which is Ham Swares. They live there, one floor, that the guy. Byron has Chile, Bar and Bay Chile company is pretty tasty. Also has cookies, they're also very tasty, you can actually find them in a lot of places in Australia. So Byron has dolphins every day, no breaks, and Byron has surfing with the dolphins, if you want. If you're lucky enough, you might see a whale. So jokes aside, we're looking for sponsors last year, those four companies did a great job of actually sponsoring us, so the event went through. So thanks more, previous next Gaia and Tamata Elephant Studio. Without you, we couldn't put a great event. We're gonna announce next month call for paper, so if you're planning to go to Byron, make sure you submit a session. That was one of the session out there. So we're gonna have workshops, great speakers. So some of them you might have seen here. So this is the third event we're gonna be running. There's gonna be a code sprint. There's gonna be burritos as well. So that's quite a cool thing. So as you can see, it's very quite small and unique boutique event, and we're running right in the heart of Byron. So our website is Drupal Camp Byron Bay. Go there for all the updates. We also have social media, so we are on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And make sure you come into Byron. That was efficient. Okay, Karil, please come up and tell us about Drupal-based IDP. That will be probably even more efficient than the previous talk. Hi, my name is Karil. I work for Catalyst IT, and I've just wanted to share my thoughts about the single sign-on, because every time you hear about single sign-on, or the questions about it, it's kind of Drupal in the role of a consumer. Like we want to sign in using someone's data and provide the user details to our Drupal installation. But most of the time, not most of the time, but there is a good situations when Drupal can be actually playing a role of IDP and provide the user data to the applications. And it's quite cool because you don't need to have an installation of some horrible monsters like IBM suits or some other stuff. You just grab your data and serve it to the other sites, even WordPress or Joomla, if you will. And it's basically, you can use a standard like SAML with the integration of simple SAML PHP library and module for it called the Drupal auth. And off you go, you can serve your user data to the like your satellite sites, or you can just split the concerns of your Drupal application and have a standalone self-managed portal which the users can put the details, manage their preferences and all of that. And then this data going to be used by the main website. And this way you kind of simplify it a bit in terms of management. And yeah, just when it comes to singles, I don't think that the IDP is something not Drupal. Drupal can do it and do it quite good. So if you have a situation like that, some kind of requirement when you need to provide the data and you think, where should I store it? Just use Drupal. That's me. Thank you. Okay, we have Nick. He knows something about previous next local Dev stack. And while Nick's getting ready, do we have Doug Courtney in the room? Nope. Doug's out. What about Mayor Gigi? You'll be next. Prepare yourself. Right, can you all hear me? Cool, so we had a bof. Yesterday, it was discussing local development stacks and what people are using, what problems they're encountering. And so many of you already know solutions out there like DDev and Lando and Wodby. In my opinion, those are like a great tool to kind of kickstart you and have like a quite fast on-ramp. But when you need to extend your Docker Compose stack to be able to say, maybe you need a solar instance or maybe need elastic search or what have you. You then need to get into the internals of DDev and figure out how you add that in there. So rather than spending that time doing that, previous next we just go pure Docker Compose and I just wanted to take you through some of the pieces of our stack. Like I don't want to put this out there as a competitor to DDev or Lando. This is just how we do it. And there's some ideas you might be able to implement in your own stack to make it work a little better. So one of the problems that we've come into recently is that extra bug in containers really slows down development with Drupal. So you're clicking around a site and your pages are taking five, 10 seconds to load and that's pretty much all you're doing on any given day in Drupal land. So what do developers do? They either have the choice of turning off extra bug or leaving it on and dealing with the slow page requests.  So we devised a solution to get around that, which is, so we have in our Docker Compose stack two PHP containers, one with extra bug enabled, one without, and in our nginx route, we just say if there's a header set that's saying that you've got extra bug enabled, it'll go to the extra bug container. If not, it'll go to your standard container. So you get the best of both worlds. We also have a, and I understand this will look a little weird at first, but rather than just having a single Docker Compose file in our project, we actually have a base Docker Compose file and then one for each of the different platforms that we support with specific overrides for the weirdness that you have on OSX or Catalina. To then kind of wire it all up for a nice developer experience, we just get everyone to add a little bash alias in their .profile file. And so what, in general, what this is doing is building up like a Docker Compose dash f Docker Compose dot yaml dash f Docker Compose dot OSX dot yaml and it just load up all the different files required to define the stack. And then you can just do DCU and you've got your stack up with all of the right configuration. So what that looks like, this is our kind of example project. So engine X, we've got the two PHP containers and the rest of the stuff's not important, but this is pretty standard DevStack that will run on your Linux machines. Then we'll have like a Catalina stack. So what this does is the default file mounting system with Docker for Mac is notoriously slow in large directories. So we actually get our Devs to set up NFS on their host machine and then we mount an NFS volume into the containers and we've found like pretty significant speed improvements for that. Oh, yep. So to make the web server appear on just 127 dot o dot o we put network mode host. That's just the thing that our Devs prefer. Oh, don't we got that one? And there's a couple of other little ones here for OSX in general. So this is, you know, because you've got the virtual machine sitting between the host and the container that you need to have this like extra bug host set. Anyway, so that's it. Maybe that can help you with some of your Docker compose issues. Hey, Mayweur, please tell us about Drupal thinking out of the box. Hello everyone, you hear me? Yeah, so my name is Maor Giggy. I'm a web developer working as a contractor for Queensland Government. And I'm origin from Israel. So who's not, don't know Israel. We are serving the army. And we thought about since we were born to think out of the box. That's mean how to take the things that you have available and make a combination of it and create new stuff, a new solution for the requirement. We call it combina. Combina, it's mean, it's come from the word combination. So it's a well-known word in Israel. I'll give you, for example, my previous employer was a state library of Queensland. He required me to build the mega menu. Now, a Drupal developer will probably go do some research and try to find models or any solution that someone else already contribute. I didn't find anything that will match the requirement or would be easy to implement or use in the organization. So I thought about what will be the best to use with what I already have. So we're using paragraphs. So we already have paragraphs that have the grid and we already have paragraphs that have a sub-menu, text, image, so we can create basically mega menu from paragraphs. So I create a custom type page, custom page, sorry, custom type pages and I call it the mega menu. So the editors can create the mega menu, the drop-down structure in paragraphs. Now that was very easy for them because they're already familiar with the paragraphs. So what left to do is just to render the paragraph or the page that they created inside the drop-down of the menu. And that was easy. I just installed a model that's called the field menu as paragraph. It's called, sorry, it's called, I forgot, I will check it later. It's just an extension that will render the page reference as a field inside the menu item. So basically you, when you're over the menu item, it will drop down and show the paragraphs that you created already. Now this is one example of getting few models and build something that is out of the box, thinking out of the box. No need any extra developing or extra features that our editor is not familiar with. So bottom line, I encourage you to try to think first, reuse what you already have instead of create something new or use something that your editors need to train them again and maybe they can be confused about it. So this is my talk for today. Thank you. Marichiru, Drupal migrations, good, bad, ugly, wonderful. We'll find out. One moment. Can you hear me? Okay. I'm glad that I have the microphone because I lost my voice already. My name is Marichiru Dinharte. I come from Nicaragua. It's a very, very full place in Central America, very warm. We have like 28 to 32 degrees all year round. We have lakes, all volcanoes, and lakes inside volcanoes and volcanoes inside lakes. It's pretty crazy. If you want to see lava, like you can either go to Nicaragua or go to that website and that will give you like a real tour of how to go all the way to the crater and see the lava flowing. Nicaragua is right there. So it took me a while to come here. It's my first time in Australia and I'm enjoying it. So thank you very much to you all. So I want to talk a little bit about migrations. When I first started doing Drupal migration, I have been doing Drupal development for quite a few years already. And I thought that, you know, this cannot be that hard, but little did I know, right? When I first started, I was presented with so many concepts that I didn't understand at all. And it was very frustrating. And, you know, at some point I just wanted to cry. Like, I just want to move some content to my website. Why does it has to be so hard? And the moment that everything started to click was when I realized that all these words that I didn't understand at the beginning were part of a group. So in any migration project, any particular migration project, I will always have one source and one destination. So I only have to pick one of those categories. And I will have a lot of processing plugins that I will use to manipulate my data. I believe that one of the best way to learn is by teaching. So in August this year, I had the crazy idea of writing one article every day about a migration API. So that is available in a website called Understand Drupal. So it's like 31 days of migrations. And the idea of the goal was that if you have no knowledge at all about Drupal migrations, you can go to this website and it's like a step-by-step guide on how to think about migrations in general. What are the different concepts? How do they be on top of each other? And then how do you start migrating from different type of sources to different type of destination? Like for example, when I started, I didn't know I can migrate from Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel or so many other sources. So this was basically a brain dump and a lot of research about the migrate API. I was not able to cover everything I wanted, but after the 31st blog post, I needed to take a break. So I hope to write more in the future. You will learn how to debug migrations, where are some traits of using one or another tools and so on. And it even has an introduction to outbreaks like going from six to seven to eight or nine. This is a, well, thank you to many people including Vicky who is there who helped me understand the API. And also this project was sponsored by some companies. So thank you to them as well. One thing is that this is all for free. You can go to the website and learn about this. The website is a general education project. It's not only about migrations. I haven't written a lot because of lack of time, but I want to keep doing more on migrations and more on different topics, testing, theming, site building, and so on. Another thing is that it's a little bit ambitious because it is not only in English. I tried to, I published in English first, but I am also learning French. So how do I learn French? By writing in French of course, right? So about five or so articles have already been translated into French and more are in the queue. So if you know French, please practice with me because I want to learn to do this better. And even though Spanish is my native language, I still haven't translated into Spanish, but that is coming soon. And I also say this is ambitious because my long-term goal is not only about text. I also want to put videos. So check the site for what it is already there. I think that I wish I had had this resource when I started doing migrations, so have a look. I would love to talk in the other party or on Twitter in general. So, yeah, thank you very much. Thank you. I don't know what Si is going to talk about. Hopefully something is going to wrap it up. Is this on? Is this thing on? One moment. As I set up my laptop to do the closing notes for the conference, my lightning talk that I just decided I wanted to spontaneously give is that I think that I've been, so Campbell, who's organized this conference, works with us. And thank you, that was cool. And so two years ago, Drupal South Auckland was Campbell's first Drupal South. And the second night of the conference, we went back to the Airbnb and pretty sure Campbell had like found some lines of something somewhere, but essentially he was just off his head on community collaboration. So, and then a year later he's like, I want to submit for a Drupal South. I want to be in Hobart now. I want to do, I wouldn't do a conference here. And I'm like, whoa, you're okay. Go for it. It's a big thing. Like I didn't necessarily know if I was going to be able to support that. And, but it's been really, really amazing to see how the community that I'm part of and that we're all part of has essentially come into play in all the aspects of that and allowed someone to go from not doing Drupal a bit over like three years ago, or IT to be organizing a Drupal Conference, Drupal South Conference. So if you think that sounds cool, perhaps you want to submit a conference. It's not really out of the question, right? So if you want to have something in your hometown or if you want to actually add that to your skillset or something, it's not a simple thing, but like I think we've got the evidence that you can do it. So submit. So that's the end of the lightning talks, three minutes and 15 seconds. So I'm just going to close up now. So thank you everyone for being here at Drupal South, obviously very close to my heart, Campbell's hometown. So I'm just going to wrap everything up and we can get on with it. Firstly, PlatformSH had a Lego competition. It had a, what is it called? Eiffel Tower out of Lego. There it's being held up. And the winner of that is Tom Wilhelm. If Tom Wilhelm's here, you can immediately start constructing Lego. Second is Doghouse did a raffle and the winner of that raffle, and I don't know what that was, what the prize was, it could be a magical thing. It's a voucher, Flight Center voucher. Mm-hmm, you can get home. Marcelo Moriera. I don't know, I said that in the real Spanish way, yeah? And then Annex, I don't know if anyone saw the Annex because I helped him, I helped a little bit with this, I was very proud of it. But if you ever want to see your image as a box here, full box here. Fong Le, I don't know if I've said that right. And I think the prize for that was a subscription to one of those things, those training things. Driplazmi, Front End Masters or Driplazmi. So I just want to call this out again because not everyone was here, but it's also doing this thing where if you want to see something, if you want to order Salsa around and get them to work on something you think you're passionate about, you can go here and you can vote to get them to do things. And I think I've represented that correctly. I like the idea of ordering Salsa around, it sounds really good. So there's that, so that's a really great initiative. And then next year, 2020, November 5th to 6th, we have a DriplGov and that's at the hotel realm in Canberra. So it's a great conference, very similar to this. We get a lot of government-oriented stuff so if you haven't been there before and you don't like surfing, come to. Maybe you like a bit of smoke. It's a lot of smoke there at the moment. And something that people wanted to know all about was where is the next Drupal South gonna be? And Drupal South is going to be in Wellington. And this picture's legit. There's a city there, there's a bay, there's wind that you can't see, because you can't see wind, but there's a lot of wind in this picture. But no, it's well, it's great, excellent. I think there's like a craft beer thing going on there as well, which we all love. And next slide. So we all said it, after parties at Shambles, I was here a few weeks ago for congratulations to Campbell because he got engaged a few weeks ago. So we're at Shambles, we're here with our Shambles. I'm hoping they still have this cocktail because I would only ever have one of them per week. But yes, Shambles after party, it's up in the town a little bit if you wanna share, it's there or walk, you can walk there. So yeah, please join us. And then this is the thing, we are at 298. Like, and like this is me and like Lee Rollins, like love child, right, is to see how many people we can get into the Drupal Slack. So, you know, 299, legit. I'm not closing this damn Drupal South until we get 300, but I'm, yeah. So yeah, that's how you can get in there. And I think I wanna take just a moment to mention that people do point out that this is a bit annoying that we lose history and stuff like that. I feel like getting everybody in one place is really good. So we don't, this is the best place to ever for everyone to be. Please join if you wanna share and if you wanna get some knowledge or if you wanna find me, I'm Simon, S-I-M-E, if you wanna come and find me. Which reminds me, the only person that I know who doesn't want their photos taken and I'm aware of is Jess. If you are one of those people, can you please talk to me because I will personally make sure that you didn't get captured in anything. So I just wanted to call that out as well. And then I wanna just do a couple of quick thank yous. I'm nearly done.  I just really wanna thank like Pamela for helping us out with like sponsorship, like working with the sponsors and stuff like that, like jumping in, Owen jumped in and helped out with managing keynotes. Like 80 options, they're a sponsor, but over and above that sponsorship, they're based here, they basically provided massive amounts of resources for this conference. Guys like Eduardo here in Hobart's been really supporting. I don't wanna have missed our Vladimir jumped in and like he's doing all these photos and stuff like that. And he's always there and always does these sort of things.  And who? 301. 301. What do you want? No, I can't do it because I'm not fit. All right, so that's good. That's it. Thank you. Now I am going to hand over to some more formal thank yous with Chris who's probably can tell you about DrupalGov in Canberra next year, but take it away, Chris. I can tell you about DrupalGov in Canberra. DrupalGov is a great event. It's really public sector focused, but it's fun like this one and it gets a great turnout. So I would expect we'd have potentially over 300 people there in 2020 and that's being run by Salsa who stuck their hand up to do that as well. So that'll be great. And Wellington, which is my other hometown rock on Wellington, that'll be awesome too. But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here in my capacity as a member of the Drupal South Steering Committee. And my job, even though there aren't very many of us left, well done for staying guys, is just to call out those who've done an excellent job in organizing this event.  So first of all, can you guys stand up as we go? I'm just gonna read your names out. Enzo Garcia, Sy Hobbs, Sharon Minicarage, Vladimir Rudikov, Feb Dao, Margie Sermak, Fonda Lee, Yana Malakova, Jamie Schmidt, Owen, he's gone. Jay Friendly, Rosie Gooch, Marjorie Tongway, Navdeep Kaa, Kate Hogden, Ivan Azugik, Daniel Nitchie, and of course, Campbell Tilley. Can you give these guys a big round of applause? Thank you very much guys. You've pulled off another awesome event that will go in the annals of Drupal South. Consider yourselves done. Thank you.


Well, now that we've finished describing reality using the categories, Aristotle wants to move from the description to what's going on or what's real. And this is where we start talking about the problem of metaphysics. Now, when we're talking about the problem of metaphysics, the way it's dealt with in the book and the way that Aristotle deals with, another way to understand this is the question of metaphysics. And what that means is what question are we trying to answer when we're dealing with metaphysics. So to think about this, think about questions in other fields. So I've already given some kind of off-the-cuff responses as to what these different fields study. So if we're dealing with the physical sciences, the question that's being asked is what are the causal relationships between material objects? If we're dealing with mathematics, what are the relationships between quantities? If we're dealing with, say, history, what events have happened and what are the reasons or the explanations for those events? And these all have kind of a general form. And the general form is what are objects of this kind or what are the things of this kind and why do they happen? So with physical sciences, the question is what are the physical objects and with the why, we're looking for what are the causal relationships between material objects. Now, something to note is that physical sciences don't ask about relationships that we deal with in metaphysics or in history. For dealing with English, what is a piece of written work and how can it be evaluated? That would be something to deal with in English, but that's not what's happening in the physical sciences. So this is kind of division. In history, the objects or the things that they're dealing with are the events. These are the subjects or the objects of study for history. And then the explanation or the why, well, that's going to deal with what kinds of relationships exist between events. History won't necessarily involve causal relationships with material objects, sometimes, but not always. Sometimes it's with human motivation and psychological reasons. Mathematics, same thing. Mathematics deals with relationships between quantities, but these are specific kinds of relationships such as additions, subtraction, multiplication, division. We can kind of go on from there. So when you're dealing with a question or problem within a particular field, you're dealing with objects of a particular kind or things of a particular kind and relationships that exist between those things. It would be strange in the physical sciences to start asking what beauty is in a poem. That's appropriate for English, not so for sciences. Well, this leads us to metaphysics. Metaphysics is broader than these other more specific questions, these other more specific fields. Metaphysics, as Aristotle is dealing with, is metaphysics is dealing with real things, not just some, but all real things. So where physics deals with material objects, history deals with events, mathematics deals with quantities, metaphysics deals with all of them, and we can go on further. What does it mean to be a poem? What does it mean to be a novel? What does it mean to be a beautiful poem or to have beauty in those written forms? What does it mean to be a piece of art? What does it mean to be a beautiful piece of art? Metaphysics deals with all of it. There's nothing outside the purview of metaphysics. So this question, remember the general form of the question when we're dealing with all these particular, with all these specific kinds of questions, is what is it to be things of this kind and what are the relationships? You know, what's going to explain the relationships between them? Well, the problem of metaphysics is much broader. The problem of metaphysics is what is it to be? What is it to be an existing thing? That's the first part, and the second part is why does it exist? Aristotle's categories are going to attempt an answer to both of those parts. And in this video, we're going to deal with the first part. What is it to be? And the categories are going to have a very direct answer for that. So we were talking about the categories in the previous video. Now I don't know if you picked up on this, but there's a very important point that you have to get when talking with the categories. So remember what's going on. We're dealing with substance and with accident, or another way of saying this is we're dealing with subject and predicate. So you have substance and accident, or you might even say, you know, substance and predicate, you could start mixing and matching there, but that might get confusing real fast. Now the predicates describe the substance, and the substance is what is described. So those are three important points there. We're dealing with substance and predicate, or substance and accident. Substance is what is described, predicate is what describes. Well, there's something that follows from this. Predicates do not describe themselves. Predicates do not describe themselves. So to think of a really kind of a simple example, consider the predicate red. Actually, since we're out here, consider the predicate green. So these trees back here are green. There's several bushes in this grass that's green. Now the predicate green does not describe itself. The predicate itself is not green. I know this sounds strange to you, but the predicate itself is not green. The trees, the bushes, the grass, that's green, but the predicate itself is not. Take this one step at a time. Here we have several shades of green. We've got some dark greens in the shadows. We've got some almost yellow greens where the light is striking the green. We've got some almost pale green with the grass because it's got some more browns in it so it's not vibrant green as the rest. We can start going on and on. Here I've provided a spectrum of green. We've got several shades of green happening right here. Now suppose we say that the predicate green does describe itself. That means that one of these shades of green is the predicate green. What does this mean? None of these shades are identical to each other. We can even produce more shades when we start talking about shade in between. You can have many shades of green real fast, but if green is one of those shades and that shade is not identical to the rest, then the rest of these shades are not green. They're something else. The rest of the shades are green. Green is not any one of these particular shades. It's not any particular shade in the trees here. Green is what all these shades have in common. Green is what they all have in common, but that doesn't look like any particular shade of green. Green is what they have in common. The predicate green is itself not green. The predicate green is what all green things have in common. So right now I ask you to imagine the predicate green. You're not imagining the predicate green. You're imagining a particular shade of green. So again, look at the shades that we have here. It's not any one of these shades. It's what they all have in common. Now what is it? Remember Plato and Aristotle's carrying on with this. The predicate green, what's really real there, is not the appearance. So it's not something you see. It's what you comprehend. What you comprehend is what all the shades of green have in common. I don't know if that was quite confusing enough for you, but I can try some other way. Again, think of squares. So here we have some squares. The predicate square, what it means to be a square, is not any individual one of these squares. It's what they all have in common. Well, what are we supposed to carry from this? Well, the predicates do not predicate themselves. So when the predicates predicate the subject, the subject is not identical to the predicates. I'll say that again. The subject is not identical to the predicates. So looking out here, when we have these trees, we have green, we have rough bark, we can talk about the structure of the tree, start thinking about the categories, the structure of the tree, its place, its time. We can look at it mathematically. We start quantifying it. We can talk about its relation to the other trees. These are all the predicates of the tree, but the tree is not identical to those predicates. There's something else, right? But it's not identical to the predicates. So this is a really important point to remember. The substance, so we have substance and accident. Substance is not just the accidents. It's not just the collection of accidents. There's something else. What this means is that the substance is what is described by the accidents. But the substance is not identical to the collection of accidents. So there are these trees out here, and we can have the collection of the accidents, the green, the branches, the tight, its place, the time. We can have all that collection of accidents. But the substance is something else. It's what is described by the accidents. So this is a really important point to remember here with Aristotle. The same thing happens with Plato, too. The substance is not just the collection of accidents.  That's the question, right? For Aristotle, just to kind of preview or forecast here, Aristotle, the first part of the problem metaphysics is what does it mean to be, and what explains or what causes that being. And for Aristotle, the first part of that question, what does it mean to be? Well, it means to be a substance. That's what exists, our substances. So what are they? Well, before we dive into that, let's take a step back for a second, and I want to return to the accidents for a second. All right. Now, some of these accidents, some accidents with particular things, with these things that exist around us, are essential to these things. So when we're dealing with these trees here, if it's a healthy tree, with the cedar trees and some of the oaks, if it's a healthy tree, if it's a living tree, an existing tree, then it has green, especially with the evergreens. The needles are going to be green. They're not going to be maroon. They're not going to be black. Maybe you can start pushing a point and say, okay, when the tree is dying, then the needles are going to die in turn. Okay, that's fair. But the point you get across here, though, is that what's essential to that tree, what's a living, it's a vibrant tree, is that the needles are green. Green is essential to the tree. What else is essential to the tree? Well, with cedar trees, they have a particular kind of bark. That's essential to the cedar tree. It's more strip-like. You can kind of take off the bark. So looking at this cedar tree here, we have this bark. It's very strip-like. It can be kind of taken off in strips. That's essential to a cedar tree. That's essential for the bark of a cedar tree. When we're dealing with trees like oak, the bark is different. It's more block-like is the way that I describe it.  So that's essential to the cedar tree. Well, this is an accident. It is an accident. It's a predicate. It's a description of the cedar tree. But because of the kind of thing it is, it has that kind of bark. Now, it's going to vary from tree to tree, sure. But there are even going to be things that are essential to be a tree. So needing water. That's essential to a tree. Again, I'm showing my ignorance in botany here. Trees are going to require carbon monoxide to process into oxygen. They're going to need certain minerals and nutrients from the ground. They're going to need to be rooted in the ground. I believe that's an essential characteristic of a tree that has roots. So these are essential to the tree, meaning it can't vary.  So that's what an essential accident is. It's a predicate. It's an accident or essential predicate, I should say. An essential predicate is a predicate that can't fail to be with that kind of thing. There are essential predicates and there are accidental predicates. So these trees around us, for instance, they have a certain number of branches. Now, there might be a range in which they have to be, but say the range begins at 5 and ends at 105. The tree has to have between 5 and 105 branches. But any particular number in there, that's not essential. Some of these trees have 40 branches. Some of them have 25. The number, so that's an accident when I talk about the quantity, the number of branches is accidental to the tree. It can have a variety of different predicates there. It just takes me. There are lots of accidental predicates about me right now. One of the categories is possession and I'm wearing a black shirt. I have a black shirt. Well, I have lots of shirts. I could be wearing one of my red shirts. I could be wearing that shirt that caused everybody problems whether it was maroon or black or brown or whatever it was. I have a blue shirt. That possession, well, that's accidental. I could have a variety of shirts. I could even be shirtless right now. I'm not going to do that. Even having a shirt is not essential. I can still be what I am and not wear a shirt. So this is the distinction between essential predicates and accidental predicates. An essential predicate is what a thing has to have because of the kind of thing it is. An accidental predicate is pretty much any other predicate. I can have this predicate or not and still be the kind of thing it is. I'm human. One of the essential predicates of me is that I'm human. I can't be me and be a reptile. Since I'm human, one of the essential predicates of being human is being warm-blooded. So that's an essential predicate. But there's lots of ways that a human being can exist. For instance, human beings can exist in the United States and they can exist in Mexico and in the Philippines and Africa. So they were talking about a place there. Human beings can exist in a wide variety of places. Well, that would be accidental. What's essential would be warm-blooded. So now we have another distinction. We have a distinction between form and matter. And this should be pretty familiar to you by now. Again, we're appealing to Pythagoras. The form is the universal. It's the definition as the essence of the thing. And the matter is the stuff. Aristotle takes it a little bit further. Lots of things can be matter without necessarily being physical. So for instance, matter... We're appealing to this distinction between form and matter before. Form is the kind of thing that it is. And matter is what composes it. Matter is the composition. What do you put together to make the thing? And the form is the kind of thing. So part of my form is human, philosopher. We can start throwing in other things, male. This is all part of my form. These are the kinds of things that I am. The matter, in turn, is what comes together to make that. So matter, again, for appealing to physical, it's also going to be flesh, bone, muscle, blood. But also part of that will be my experiences. This isn't necessarily physical. Maybe yes, maybe no. That's subject for debate. But this comes together for the kind of thing that I am. My education. I am, amongst other things, a philosopher. Well, the particulars of my education come together to make that kind of thing. To make me a philosopher. That's what composes my being a philosopher. So form is the kind of thing. It's the universal. It's the abstract. It's the essence. It's the definition. It's the meaning. Matter is what composes, what comes together to make that kind of thing. Not only the physical, but events in history, personal experiences, thoughts and beliefs. So a philosopher is a particular kind of person. But there's a wide variety of thoughts and beliefs that can come together to compose philosopher. Just ask the variety of philosophers that are out there. Aristotle makes a distinction between the form and the matter. It's a fair question to ask what's the relationship between the essential predicates and the essential and accidental predicates and form and matter. It's kind of hard to nail this down, but a handy way to start to think about it is that the essential predicates are the form. The essential predicates are the form. And the accidental predicates, well that's the matter. That could come together to compose that kind of thing. We might push on that in class, so don't take that as just a hard line answer right now. But it's a way of trying to think about that answer. So this is what we talked about. We talked about substance and accident, about the subject of the predicate. And this is supposed to help us answer the probable metaphysics, which is what does it mean to be and what's the cause of the explanation of that being. And we'll be dealing with substance. And substance is not the same thing as the predicate. Predicate is what describes the substance. It's not the same thing as the predicate. So we're real familiar with predicates, we're real familiar with descriptions. So what does it mean to be that substance? Well we've also been dealing with form and we're dealing with matter. So how is Aristotle going to answer this question? He wants to answer the question what does it mean to be, what does it mean to exist? What's his answer? Don't you figure it out yet? The problem with metaphysics is what does it mean to be, what exists? Aristotle is focusing on substance. The question is what is substance? Well substance is a composite of form and matter. Substance is a composite of form and matter. These two things come together, the kind of thing and what composes the thing, and that's what exists. The kind of thing and the composite and what composes the thing, that's what exists. So looking at these here, these are substances. There's the kind of thing and the kind of thing is it's a tree, it's a cedar tree. And there's the matter. I mean that particular grouping of bark and minerals and water and sap, it's location. All of the categories coming together, that's the matter of the thing. Where is it? How long has it been here? What's its relation to other things? All of that is the matter. So what exists is substance. What's substance is a composite of form and matter. Form is the universal, it's the kind of thing. Matter is what composes it. What composes it to make that kind of thing. Now this is going to have some serious implications which are very different from Plato's view. So ask yourself for Plato, you know what exists, or you might even ask yourself what's the most real thing for Plato? Is it the particular objects or is it the form? For Plato what's most real is the form. For Plato what's most real is the form. Therefore for Plato you can have form without matter. So matter of fact that's the most real thing, it's form without matter. Aristotle disagrees. What's real is substance. Now what is substance is a composite of form and matter. You can't separate the form from the substance. You do that, you don't have a real thing anymore. Same thing is true with the matter. So if we're dealing with Annex Amanda where he's talking about the boundless, that's matter without form. Aristotle says you can't do that either because what exists is substance and what is substance is a composite of form and matter. So the boundless doesn't exist for Aristotle. If there's matter there has to be form. This is a pretty different view than Plato. Still appealing to some of the same ideas though. Aristotle still wants to hang on to universals. And the reason why he wants to hang on to universals is because we can't do for instance any science without universals. If I can't talk about tree as a kind of thing, I cannot study trees. I'll study that and that and that and that and that. But if there's nothing that they have in common, I'm just studying five individual things. I'm not studying tree. Same thing with gravity. If we're going to talk about physical objects, we're going to deal with that too. So if we're dealing with protons, neutrons, electrons, well as many talk about proton, neutron, electron, you're dealing with a form. So you can't do away with form. Aristotle's answer is pretty different. The answer to the question of what does it mean to be? The answer is it's to be substance. What does it mean to be substance? It's to be a composite of form and matter. And the categories come in when we start, again, we might question this later on, but at least the way to start thinking about it is what's the form or that's the essential predicates and what's the matter or that's the accidental predicates. We'll push on that in class, but that's at least a way to start thinking about it. So this is the answer to the first part of the question, the problem of metaphysics. In the next video, you remember the question of the problem of metaphysics is what does it mean to be and why? What's the cause, the explanation of that being? Well, the next video deals with a why.


And I made a post earlier that shows a photo of Tim Ballard wearing what appears to be a tie with a Freemason logo on it. I found this post on Twitter and it's gained a lot of traction on there. To many of us, Tim Ballard is a hero for all he's done in not only helping to rescue children who are being trafficked, but also for bringing awareness to the issue. My comment on this photo was FWIW for what it's worth. The reason I put FWIW on the photo was so hopefully it could be debunked. Maybe somebody saw this photo on 4chan or something and it was on a Photoshop page. But I'm sorry if my post offended anyone. And regardless of whether that picture is photoshopped or not, when Tim Ballard removes his tie, whatever tie that may be, he's still a hero.