 To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away as the outside world has done so many times before. Those are the words of Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2001 when he sent British troops into Afghanistan. Today, after the withdrawal of NATO troops against the wishes of the US-backed government there, the Taliban looks set to regain the country. I'll be speaking to two expert guests on the current situation. I'm also joined tonight by Ash Sarkar. How are you doing Ash? I'm okay. It's a bit of a sad news day, really. So it's hard to do the little jokey intro that we would normally do. Yeah, we've got two incredibly serious stories tonight. The horrific fall of Afghanistan of various cities to the Taliban and also the really grim, horrific mass shooting which took place in Plymouth yesterday. We'll be speaking about the in-cell responsible for this. It does seem like there were some really dark ideological motivations behind what has happened. We will also talk about the latest development in the battle over Britney Spears' conservatorship. As ever, if you have any comments about what we are speaking on tonight, please do tweet on the hashtag Tiskey Sour or comment under the video. After the withdrawal of US troops, the Afghan government's rule is crumbling faster than almost anyone for sore. The Taliban who already controlled much of the nation's countryside now control 18 of its 34 provincial capitals. The fall of these cities has all taken place within the space of a week and the biggest losses were in the past 48 hours. This map from Al Jazeera shows how much has changed in a short space of time. The blue areas you can see there are those which remain in government control now. The light orange represents those areas which were under Taliban control before Thursday and the dark orange areas show those provinces and cities captured by the Taliban since then. So that includes Kandahar, the country's second largest city and Herat, the third largest city in Afghanistan. They both fell on Thursday so within the space of 24 hours. One resident of Kandahar is Pristana Durrani. She runs a charity which focuses on getting girls into education and she spoke to Channel 4 News as the Taliban took control of her city. This means I'm going to lose my everything that my father and I and my whole family has worked for. Every girl has worked for every person who has worked for in the last 20 years. This means losing your houses, losing your dreams, your goals, your ambitions, your identity as Afghan, everything. Can you tell me how do you think that is going to happen? The Taliban don't stand for anything other than violence, other than their white flag, other than the Islamic Maratha. They don't stand for the word Afghanistan or Afghans or women or justice or fairness or education. I mean like we sacrifice thousands of men just for our girls to get to school and now I don't even know where my students are. I don't even know where the students are right now. I mean like yeah, I feel weak right now. I feel like crying right now because I don't have any other option. I don't know where my students are. I don't know where half of my staff is right now. What's he going to do? In all honesty, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I might be evacuated. I might not be evacuated. I might be murdered by tomorrow. I might not be, I might not be able to go out anymore. I might not be able to mobilize anymore. I might not be able to work or educate myself. I don't know. I'm going to be honest. All I can think of is one thing that my family did so much to build the Kandah that I knew, the life that I lived as a refugee and all sacrifices that we made to be here, it's for nothing. Everything for nothing. Did you consider leaving or did this all happen too quickly? I didn't. I didn't consider leaving. I thought even if stuff happened, this is not going to happen. Kandah cannot fall. Kandah can never fall. Cities won't fall. Hirat won't fall. Farah won't fall. This is not happening. This is the 21st century. We have everything. We have a good army. We have a new defense system. Everything is in place. We are educated more. We are liberated more. We have every kind of right. But I didn't know our leaders are so corrupt. They are so powerful. They are so greedy that they will sell us out. That was, of course, a really heartbreaking interview to what she was speaking, literally in the same moment that the Taliban were taking over the city that she lived in. You heard their reference to corrupt leaders selling out their citizens. That's likely in part a reference to those regional governors who are making deals with the Taliban instead of putting up a fight. That includes the governor of Ghazni. It's a city 100 miles from Kabul. The governor there is accused of striking a deal with the Taliban, handing them the city in exchange for safe passage to the capital. You can see him here within a Taliban convoy. He was later arrested by the security forces of the Afghan government. I'm joined now by Gowali Pasale, an Afghan political refugee now residing in the UK and author of the Lightless Sky, My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee. Thank you so much for joining me this evening. To start, I know you currently have family in Afghanistan. Could you tell us how you are viewing the current situation that we're witnessing, the dramatic fall of Afghan cities to the Taliban? Michael, it's heartbreaking to see because I grew up in a war zone and I didn't expect to see this happening again. Perhaps it's worse than what it was when I was growing up as a child seeing the recent invasion of Afghanistan. So I not only do I have family there but I worry and I fear for my fellow Afghans in the country. It's burning and it's bleeding and seeing it from afar, it's quite hard because I've been struggling to sleep and I had many sleepless nights. It's just so much a stake and lives have been lost. The Afghan people are the one who are suffering. There's been half a million, almost half a million displaced Afghans in the last week or so. A lot of people move from district to cities and those cities has now fallen. There's just so much violence and yeah, it's just beyond me that this is happening and this was allowed to happen. This was preventable. This should not have happened. What's your analysis of why the Afghan government has been so quick to crumble in large parts of the country? I think everyone knew and admitted there was going to be a risk of Taliban takeover but there were many people who thought that the government would be able to protect these large cities for at least a decent period of time. They've all crumbled in a space of 48 hours. What allowed that to happen? Indeed, I mean during the when the Soviet Union left the Afghan government were able to hold on for about three years and this was something I did not expect. Many Afghans who suppose the Republic did not expect it. I think there was a lot of factors. The U.S. leaving abruptly without consideration because the Afghan army, the national security forces, realized so much on the U.S. air power and expertise and experiences and advice. I feel like there was issues around corruption. Of course, there was issues that wrong people were in charge of our forces and most cases in there just they left provinces and cities and districts without a fight and also of course factors around soldiers not getting food, soldiers not getting their salaries and there was a you know the morale was low mainly because of leadership but because also the Taliban propaganda was quite strong and in pushing you know and letting taking over cities and getting the government to either surrender or to just leave. We saw so many you know especially in Nimroz and a lot of in northern cities the police and the army just leaving and also I think there's this was technically done to not inflict suffering and more destruction on cities so that's in a way kind of admirable but at the same time it's very concerning. So there was many factors not just one. The Afghan government corruption in the U.S. the way the U.S. has made deals with the Taliban and have given sadly legitimacy and there was just momentum was on the side of the Taliban and the Afghan government clearly had no plan. So you said I think that's an important point. These deals between the governors and the Taliban could be seen in a more sympathetic light which is that they think they're going to lose anyway so they might as well spare the fighting. I want to ask you about the Taliban in particular because we often talk about this in terms of the weakness of the Afghan government what about the strength of the Taliban for them to be able to take over this much space in such a short space of time. Presumably they do have a you know a significant deal of legitimacy and support among some sections of the Afghan population. What's your analysis of that? I mean things that Afghanistan is a very complex society but the Taliban would not would not have been able to do what they have done in the last month or so without of course the U.S. legitimacy but without the support of Pakistan and Iran in other regional countries. But the point about you know not not fighting in cities for example in Lashkar Gain Helmand the Afghan national security forces put up a fight for over a month. Literally the whole city got burned and it was fallen anyway. So in a sense that was understanding understandable and parts of some of Afghan officials and leaders and giving up cities without a fight because they knew that they might fall anyway because they were not able to get support from the central government. They were not able to get air support because most of our pillars being pilots being dead or the you know the Americans were actually not providing air support. So yes and I think the Taliban doesn't nobody really elected them but of course they have support because of the the the government is corrupt. People are not happy with government in most parts but whatever it was the government is a lot better than what what is to come. And a lot of Afghan supports the government because that's the least bad option. I'm going to bring in now I'm going to come back to you in a moment Gawali. I'm going to bring in Professor Anatole Levin. Anatole is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute who worked as a journalist for The Times in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. He's visited the country on several occasions since 2001. Can I get your your analysis Anatole of this rapid collapse of the Afghan government? As I say lots of people expected them to struggle once the the US withdrew but I think you know most people seem to be surprised that this is happening in the space of 48 hours. What's your analysis of that? Well as previously actually in Afghanistan in the 80s and the 90s there have been continual conversations going on sometimes along you know because of common tribal links between government forces local government forces and the Taliban. This is also very often involved you know sharing out the proceeds of the heroin trade and these links between the two sides have meant that government forces have been able to surrender to the Taliban without fearing that they would be massacred. And this is also an Afghan tradition tradition in other places which the Taliban have actually adhered to in general very closely which is that if an enemy garrison surrenders in good time they will be allowed to go home with their personal weapons by the way. Some commanders will be told that they must leave or die but the rank and file will be spared and that is clearly what's happening today. Now of course on the other hand if you try to fight it out to the end then no quarter as the old expression went. So you see I mean Afghan we have been presented by the Western media and the Afghan government as well you know with this picture of you know bitter ideological divisions in Afghanistan clear cut allegiances very often on the ground it hasn't been nearly that clear. There's also been a very common arrangement by the way where a family has sent one son to the government forces and one son to the Taliban so as to be covered whichever side wins. And of course at a given point when it looks as if one side is losing and now it's clearly the government the order will go out from the family or the son will make his own decision simply to go home in peace and that is why you can you have had this pattern three times by now where you have had some very very ferocious battles and great atrocities and then suddenly the whole thing goes down very quickly and actually astonishingly peacefully. That's interesting the idea you think it could happen relatively peacefully we'll come back to that issue a little bit later on. I want to focus now on the international context which has been very much at the forefront of all coverage of this in this country at least at the moment. The context here really is the US had set 11th of September this year as a deadline for full withdrawal from Afghanistan this followed a deal between the Taliban and Donald Trump in 2019 in which the Americans agreed to withdraw from Afghanistan and lift sanctions against the Taliban while also pressuring the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange the Taliban agreed not to harbour al-Qaeda in areas they control this is widely seen by many as selling out the Afghan government. The dominant position represented on Britain's airwaves at least today has been that this deal and the US withdrawal and the NATO withdrawal was a mistake that was the position of Defense Secretary Ben Wallace who spoke today it's also the position of prominent conservatives who are outside the government Tom Tuganheart is a backbencher and chair of the foreign affairs select committee this is how he responded to Biden's comments that the US couldn't prop up the government in Afghanistan forever. That's rubbish it's absolute rubbish the Americans have spent 20 or so billion dollars but that money's not coming back there's no way they're going to get that money back there's no way they're going to get the 2,000 lives that you know the the Afghan sorry American troops have been killed they're not coming back what we're now talking about is what you do going forward and actually 2,500 US troops was managing to keep the lid on an insurgency and enabling 400,000 Afghan troops to continue now the United States better start planning for refugee emergencies in places like Pakistan and Iran because that's what we're going to see next so the idea that the US couldn't endure is complete rubbish that's not a military choice that's a political one what he's saying is he didn't want to endure that's not the same as saying he couldn't. That was Tom Tuganhart Rory Stewart and he's a former Tory MP he was governor of an Iraqi province post invasion and then he moved to Afghanistan he lived there for a while he spoke in similar terms. Well it's it's terrifying I mean the Taliban in the matter of about a week have taken much the country and this is a horrifying group associated with terrorists they've been backing suicide bombing in the areas that they control women are not going to school and it's a total betrayal by the United States and by the United Kingdom what is NATO if it's not able to work its way through these problems it ought to have been possible if the US were withdrawing because there were very very few troops there 2,500 troops in some air support for the other nations to take up that slack and to ask President Biden to provide some support while he took his troops out it's totally shameful for NATO and it's pretty shameful to blame it all on the United States because this was a massive coalition operation and people are forgetting the Turks for example are very courageous you remained in Afghanistan while everyone else is left. Anatol I want to bring you in to respond to both of those comments from Stewart and Tuganhart and indeed our defense secretary what do you make of people who say what we're witnessing now that's because the US withdrew in an irresponsible way they withdrew before the Afghan government had built up significant strength to to fend off an encroachment from the Taliban look if the Afghan government couldn't build up sufficient strength in 20 years with US military aid that gave them a budget at least 10 times the size of the Taliban with heavy artillery with tanks with air cover this was never going to happen clearly there is something just fundamentally rotten about the state that we helped to create secondly now I'm not saying this for Rory Stewart I'm a very brave man who was in Iraq and also traveled and wrote an excellent book about Afghanistan but in general my reply to this is look mate you you want to say that we should fight to defend this Afghan state then you pick up a rifle yourself I'm not stopping you you know go off to Kandahar or Herat you know the the previous Afghan state you know defended by the Soviet Union outlasted the Soviet military presence by three years ours has collapsed you know on the spot that really should tell you something as for the idea that Britain and NATO could somehow replace the United States in Afghanistan you know or fight without the United States or to cover the United States I mean this this is just absolute self-deception you know we must have learned from you know previous experience going back to Bosnia you know in the 1990s that NATO is not that kind of organization and certainly I mean the British army has fought very gallantly unsuccessfully but gallantly in in Afghanistan that has most certainly not been true of most of our NATO allies and believing that they ever will is I'm sorry but it's foolish and I mean I mean from from your understanding I mean there are many people who are saying that for the US to withdraw in this way after you know spending all this money propping up the Afghan government and saying they wouldn't leave in this fashion they've left against the wishes of the Afghan government and allowed it to be you know allowed it looks like the country is going to fall to the Taliban is Biden not concerned about that are are the US and NATO not concerned about the fact that they promised to build a new nation and have now just left it to to collapse are they are they consigned or resigned to seeing that happening I'm afraid that they are because we failed to build a new nation and but you know I mean the point is that in the end I mean that also reflects the fact that people have to build their own nations you know on their own historical and cultural foundations and Afghanistan just has not provided the base for the kind of state that we wanted to create I mean leaving aside the obvious issues of massive corruption heroin dealing and so on so I think the Biden administration I mean it doesn't like this but yes it's resigned itself to the fall of the afghan state and its strategy is now moving towards that frankly of the russians the chinese the iranians and even the pakistanis that we have to deal with the taliban while of course insisting that they um give up and do not resume things that really threaten us which means in the first instance of course support for international terrorism and perhaps in the longer term also um that they should really crack down on the heroin trade but um yes I mean people that have not been willing to say that quite openly yet because obviously the afghan government is still there just about in Kabul but the the obvious movement is towards um in future trying to manage the the talent I want to bring Gawali back in and get your perspective on the withdrawal of NATO troops there are sort of two narratives here one is that you know they it was doomed to failure they shouldn't have been there in the first place the other analysis is they have abandoned afghans when there are many people in the country who want the afghan government to survive even if they don't like it very much and then they feel like this has been an abdication of responsibility on the part of NATO what's what's your position on that so yes I mean as an afghan I don't want foreign forces in afghanistan they shouldn't have been there in the first place but when they did they should not have left the way they have leaving us to the wolves and giving so much legitimacy to the taliban and basically the afghan government in the army is collapsing because of you know lack of american support and they created the afghan security forces in a way to be dependent on the u.s. and NATO forces and you know it's just very unfortunate and I worry and my concern is mainly for the you know ordinary afghans who will go through a hell again and again and just just not fair and I hope we respond to this humanitarian crisis in a humane and responsible manner I should apologize again that was then my problem I didn't think I could hear but everyone else could um anatole I'm going to go back to you from your perspective what do you think is going to happen next I mean there is you know there are a number of options which is either that the taliban take full control of afghanistan or there is some sort of surprise resurgence of the afghan government who've been hiding forces which are which are invisible to the rest of us I don't really mean physical the energy to to to push back against this onslaught or some kind of power sharing agreement between the two which of those do you think is is most likely and which would be I suppose least bad is one way of putting it I can see no possibility of a successful government counter now um they have lost cities across the country the absolute key thing is that they they have lost cities key cities in non-pastoon areas the cities which it was thought would be the last to fall to the taliban which is still at heart a a pastoon force but has clearly now recruited many non-pastoons as well so the survival of the government as such is not an issue it's just a question of how long they you know get on to helicopters and get out uh what is very much open is uh how many government commanders go over to the taliban with their men and are allowed to do so uh ismail khan uh in herat a famous old mujahideen commander who then became governor and has supported the the government since 2001 now he did not flee uh from herat as the taliban came in he is now under house arrest the taliban have claimed that ismail khan has joined them i mean that obviously shows that they want him to join them whether he has of course who knows we we can't say the point is that um you know both um when the communist government fell in 92 uh and as the taliban rose in the later nineties many commanders on the other side came over to the winning side with their forces now a key question there is also taliban respect for ethnic and ethno religious minority rights uh and the single issue there is the hasara shia uh who are backed by iran and iran is is very committed to them uh if the taliban do not respect their religious rights as shia then they're going to have very serious problems with iran um and you will have the the basis for future atrocities and repressions but i think the um a key thing to watch uh is just how many people the the taliban can recruit from the from the government side that's the first point soldiers from the government side commanders from the government side the second question will be but that's for the rather for the future uh whether the taliban will recognize their need for western educated technocrats uh whether they understand that they need people like that to help run an afghan state and the evidence from the past on that is mixed um of course in certain respects where in key respects the taliban were extremely repressive conservative uh in occasionally however for example in in their support for the campaign to eradicate polio they showed that they did have a certain sense of what makes a modern state in modern state responsibility um we will have to see whether that they will uh try to recruit those people and of course in the process whether they will give them uh sufficient cultural freedom because if they don't then of course all their technocrats will leave one way that the west can really go on influencing the taliban and i hope against hope that we try to work together with the chinese and others on this uh is of course through continued aid making continued western aid conditional on the taliban observing certain rules and limits uh that's why i am uh you know absolutely against um the german statement for example that they were going to cut aid if the taliban won the taliban are going to win the question is how we can use aid to influence their subsequent behavior guwali i want to give uh the final word to you and particularly i suppose drawing on your personal experiences whatever happens it does seem like there is going to be you know to some degree a refugee crisis here um you've clearly come from afghanistan as a as a refugee as a child how does that experience inform what you think is going to happen next and also i suppose do you have a message for for western governments who at this point many of them are actually still saying oh actually afghanistan is a safe place to to deport people back to i mean sitting here listen to untold it's like a academic discussion i mean we are talking about human beings we're talking about about 35 billion afghans who will suffer as a result of our policies or lack of it and the taliban's are i don't think there are people who we you know we could put a lot of you know trust or or give legitimacy to but anyhow i think you know i was hoping and i had aspiration to be able to see my family and to go back i've been here came here as a child been here for the last 14 years and we will see a huge displacement i mean there's already about five million afghan internally displaced and there has been rising and so most afghans will will leave because of you know they they pro the government or pro republic of the taliban are saying that they will not go against these people but actually in practice we saw a lot of videos and evidence where they've been executing um commandos even forces who surrendered to them and they've been going after afghans who are anti-taliban and so my message to the world is please don't abandon afghanistan support us i mean they made it support we need is a humanitarian response we need to help people who are displaced who need basic necessity and we need to look for the longer term goal should be we need to find a political solution a diplomatic solution there needs to be pressure on pakistan and pakistan is to stop supporting its proxies in afghanistan the taliban will not have been able to do what they have without the support of pakistan and run other regional actors and i think america and the uk is making a huge mistake by leaving afghanistan in this mess and they they have a moral uh responsibility towards afghans and afghans into the to the afghan state go wali pasale thank you so much for joining us this evening and anatole liaven we really really appreciate you speaking to us tonight if you do want to hear more from our guests or read more from our guests you can check out go wali pasale's book the lightless sky which is currently available in paperback as is anatole livens most recent work climate change and the nation's state we do recommend you check both of those out we are going to go straight on to our next story five people have been killed in britain's worst mass shooting since 2010 the horrific incident took place on fursday night in plimoth and police have named the shooter as jake davison aged 22 davison first killed his 51 year old mother maxine Chapman inside their house he then went out onto the street where he shot and killed a three-year-old girl he also killed father of that girl who was aged 43 he shot a 53 year old woman and a 33 year old man both of whom remain in hospital he then entered a park where he shot and killed 59-year-old steven washington and 66-year-old kate shepherd she died in hospital he then killed himself today more information about the killer has been emerging according to police he was a licensed holder of firearms he also has described himself on his youtube channel as an incel which stands for involuntary celibate his youtube channel has been taken down but these are some quotes from the videos which he had uploaded there davison had said why do you think sexual assaults and all these things keep rising the reality is that women don't need men no more and they certainly don't want and don't need average men and below average you have to go abroad to find a woman you can see there is his attitudes towards women really horrible stuff he also repeatedly described himself as black pilled the black pill is named as an alternative to the blue pill and the red pill in the matrix that's the reality or the alternative to reality the black pill is a fatalistic outlook centered on the belief that success with the opposite sex is determined by genetics at birth in an online comment beneath one of his videos davison wrote the black pill makes you obsessed with your looks i never used to be this way the longer you go without any kind of interaction with women and sex relationships etc etc the more you become concerned about looks but black pill turbo charges it in his final youtube video uploaded on july the 28 davison had ranted about how his life had hit a dead end as he struggles to or struggled to attract women or lose weight he closed the video by comparing pairing himself to the terminator saying the whole premise of the terminator movies is that you know everything is rigged against you there's no hope for humanity you know we're on the brink of extinction these machines are unstoppable killing machines that can't be beaten can't be outsmarted but yet humanity still tries to fight to the end i know it's a movie but you know i like to think sometimes i'm a terminator or something and despite reaching almost total system failure he keeps trying to accomplish his mission ash this is all i mean terrifying horrible stuff this is a 22 year old radicalized by violent misogynistic ideas who goes on to kill five people including a very young child what what possible response is there to this i think the first thing we've got to do is try and understand and in an unflinching way look at the culture and the subcultures and the material factors which produced this man and his way of thinking which ended in this dreadful act of violence and i think there's lots of things going on here i think one of the really useful phrases which i've learned to describe this culture around incels is internet nihilism so it's a way of becoming addicted not just to misery but to cruel and even violent behaviors and finding some kind of agency within it so it's not about asserting your agency by trying to go maybe i could be happier or maybe i can give people a better and more nourishing experience of my company it's really about embracing the most nihilistic and brutal idea of human nature and behavior that there is so even that thing about women aren't interested in average or below average men speaking as a woman that is just not how you categorize men at all you just don't rank them like that there isn't some kind of excel spreadsheet that we're fitting men that we meet into there are men that you're attracted to that might be on the basis of looks that might be on the basis of how they live it might be on the basis of their personality or it might just be on the basis of on some level they remind you of your absentee father right there's lots of things going on there and it's not as if we walk around kind of algorithmically sorting men so in a way you can see the internalization of a kind of a hyper neoliberalized logic and the way in which by adopting that logic you not only think of women as objects and as status objects but also you think that that's how they're all thinking as well it's incredibly nihilistic you've also got a culture around using some of the most dehumanizing language possible for women calling them foits female humanoids the way of thinking about women not in terms of their personalities or the kinds of experiences you might be able to have with them or ways in which relationships can be nourishing and kind of expand your horizons and your experience of the world it's a way of thinking about women and access to sex as something which gives you meaning and purpose as a man there have been other things which have emerged about this murderer the fact that he broke his ankle and couldn't get back into work which I think really does chime with the kind of people who can sometimes be very vulnerable to incel culture and internet nihilism more generally which is depression a sense of futility coupled with a sense of entitlement nurtured grievance and fantasies of what it means to assert your masculine agency over the world which is very much framed within violent terms so I think that there's a lot to understand here there's also of course the role and the expectations of the nuclear family in terms of managing and containing male violence male rage and male anger and what happens when the nuclear family is unable to do so so yeah a lot to think about a lot to understand and I would be very wary of anyone who's presenting a simple answer and saying here's this one thing that legislators could do or tech companies could do to deal with the problem is complex because it is so deeply rooted within our culture and so diffusely expressed through digital spaces I want to talk about the police response to this killing because it was quite odd so despite this appearing to be an ideologically motivated mass well I mean it was an ideologically motivated mass killing right the police insisted it wasn't terror related this description of the mass killing by Devin and Cornwall police chief by the by the Devin and Cornwall police chief constable I thought was particularly bizarre so he said we believe we have an incident that is domestically related that has spilled into the street and seen several several people in Plymouth losing their lives in extraordinarily tragic circumstances there's so many weird parts to that statement so one it's a domestically related incident which seems to sort of kind of underplay what's going on and then it spills into the street as if there's sort of some natural bleed from that first murder to the other murders and then it's described sort of extraordinarily tragic circumstances like it's it's all in this bizarre passive voice that even if the full extent of this guy's ideological motivations weren't known I just find that a really odd description I mean look what happened we should be really critical of how things get labeled terrorism and also what that label does in terms of our expectations of a state response so let's keep our critical hats on when we're thinking about terrorism but when the police in this instance is saying this is not terror related what they mean is he's white and we don't think he's a neo-nazi that's all they're saying when they say that it's not terror related now of course there's all kinds of ways in which acts of violence can have ideological underpinnings to them so if you wanted to take another kind of misogynist act of violence the honor killing of course that's deeply ideological it's deeply tied up with cultural norms about expectations of women and what women's sexual behavior means to the reputations of their male family members around them okay right we would say that that's deeply ideological and even here even though that the targets of the killing do not necessarily appear to have been politically motivated as such it does seem that this man's very deep and troubling radicalization in online spaces is something which facilitated this act of violence now I think what that shows us is that sometimes our categorization of what is and what isn't terrorism starts to break down when you look at the individual circumstances around each violent perpetrator and I imagine that if we applied the same amount of scrutiny to some of the people labeled islamic or jihadist terrorists we might find similar dynamics around alienation loss of purpose thwarted sense of entitlement masculine fantasies of violence so on and so forth and I think that points towards some of the weaknesses around the category of terrorism but what this police officer meant is he was white now let's move on to the whole domestic incident which spilled out one of the things about domestic violence is that it somehow becomes its own special category separate from murder and GBH and all the things that we imagine as street crime the things which as a society tend to drive our moral panics around violence and violent crime because it's within the home and it has its own kind of halo of special you know circumstantial language of oh it's a crime of passion or it was motivated by jealousy or oh he was scared of losing the kids all these ways which in I think quite a subtle way serve to either diminish or in some cases even justify acts of violence which are carried out by a man in and around the home so in a very subtle way I think we are starting to see that kind of diminishing and justification even though this was such a brutal murder of so many people and was also a mass shooting which in this country thankfully is something which is relatively rare so I think that this is an example of the police and their understanding of violence being wholly inadequate either to deal with the realities of misogyny in misogyny as an ideology as an ideology which can radicalize people but also the nature of online radicalization and what you would call stochastic violence random violence it's not necessarily organized it's not necessarily being carried out because someone's given an order from on high but it takes place because somebody is in an environment along with lots of other people which makes an act of violence more likely even if it's random as to who it is that ultimately does it you've said there that mass shootings are thankfully very rare in this country that's largely I think because we have gun control we don't have a huge number of people having guns now one bit of this story that I mean definitely we will need to find out more about is how this guy got a gun license I don't think many people in this country have a firearms license but this guy did and we've just had an update since we've been on the show um this is from The Guardian that apparently Davison had had his license withdrawn had had his license revoked but then had been given it back because he'd attended an anger management course so something appears to have gone incredibly wrong here I'm not quite sure why he would have had a gun license to begin with as I say I'm sure this is something we will we will learn about in in the coming days but for him to have had a gun license handed back to him after doing an anger management course and then going on to to kill five people other people in hospital by the way there are clearly going to be lots of questions to answer for for the authorities in this instance Ash I'm not sure if you're if you're anymore you know if you understand more that the issues involving firearms control here and how he would have ended up having having a firearms license but it does seem here that there are going to be I mean this is very very odd for this to happen by someone who's very young with a firearms license I don't understand what's going on there I mean look I am thankful every day that I wake up in a country with very tight regulation of firearms there's something which I know other people in the radical left don't agree with they think people should be armed it means that I don't know even the odds between the people in the state but I'm just glad that if God forbid I wake up tomorrow in an abusive relationship the likelihood is is that my partner doesn't have a gun on them right I am glad that we do not live in a society which is awash with guns so I think that you're right we have to wait for the facts to emerge on this one because I'm not sure how or why an anger management course is seen as adequate to deal with somebody who is potentially violent potentially has impulse control problems and also has access to a gun right that just seems to me to be something that shouldn't happen all right we're in a society where guns are not normalized they are very tightly regulated so I would always hope that we erred on the side of caution and just said to somebody you really shouldn't be having one and then the other thing is that if they are someone who has been identified as having a problem with violence a problem with anger to the extent that they had to take an anger management course in order to have a firearms license that there would be a bit more of an investigation it's been less than 24 hours and it has been remarkably easy to find this guy's reddit to find his youtube in which that there are fantasies around violence or at least a preoccupation with violence and a very problematic set of ideas and viewpoints around women and sexuality that is something which was so easy to dig up it wasn't under a fake name or an anonymous name or anything like that so you'd think that there would be a little bit more background checking particularly if someone has been identified as a risk and they've got a firearms license but let's wait for the facts to emerge I don't know if something has gone wrong if he slipped through the net somehow but this is very very troubling I think that incel culture has been able to establish a foothold in online spaces for lots of reasons and not just one reason I think one reason is the epidemic of loneliness and the fact that I think that we do live in an increasingly atomized society and I think it's quite easy for people to get pulled further and further away from their real life connections which can hold them accountable and kind of keep them steady and you know give them the kind of care they need and get sucked into an internet culture which is telling you that these people don't understand you they never will they don't understand the reality of things and they're in some way the enemy so I think that the way in which loneliness combines with online radicalization is something that's really potent and I think that one of the other things that it seems that we don't have a language to talk about this in a nuanced way but I think that the overlap between online radicalization loneliness and I have no idea if this was a factor in this case I'm just pointing it out as something which I think can deepen and amplify and render more acute the problem of misogyny is online pornography now I'm not an anti-porn person I don't think that porn is bad I don't think that it's inherently exploitative I think that there are people who make it in a less exploitative way and that's very good but I think that when if you're a young man and you don't have any fulfilling relationships with women and you feel this sense of real agreement about it having an endless supply of really hardcore pornography in which women tend to take certain roles you know it's a kind of pneumatic and dehumanizing kind of sex and of course you would start to think well women kind of hold the power over who they have sex with but also at the same time they're completely undiscerning about who they do it with of course you would end up thinking that all women are a bunch of like malevolent sluts so I think that we we don't have that nuanced conversation enough about how all of these things are combining I think so a really troubling effect to put turboboosters under incel culture that combination of online radicalization wounded grievance and entitlement real life isolation and yeah what what they see in pornography again not anti-porn but just saying we should think about this quite seriously I mean it's quite possibly much more widespread than any of us you know are currently aware of I think that's one of the things so terrifying about it Joseph Hannon with a tenor as a plimovian I find it so bizarre to hear people talking about us nationwide the whole city really is reeling much love to Navarra for covering the ideology behind the disgusting attack and thank you so much for that comment and yeah you know solidarity to everyone in in plimov it must be really appalling to have had such a disgusting you know attack happen in your neighborhood we're going to go straight to our final story I think we can get an image up for this one Britney Spears' father has agreed to step down as the singer's conservator pledging to participate in an orderly transition to a new legal arrangement jamie spears has controlled the affairs of his daughter Britney since 2008 when concerns were raised about her mental health he was granted a conservatism conservatism over the pop star by a US court which gave him control over Britney's financial affairs and many aspects of her personal life Britney Spears has recently spoke about how the how how the relationship became abusive telling a judge that she had been drugged forced to perform against her will and prevented from having children according to the bbc jamie spears his response to his daughter's petition was welcomed by her lawyer Matthew Rosengart who called it a vindication for his client we are pleased that mr spears and his lawyer have today conceded in a filing that he must be removed he said in a statement yet he accused jamie spears of his own shameful and reprehensible attacks and said he should stop making false accusations and taking cheap shots he said the singer's father should instead remain silent and step aside immediately mr Rosengart added that an investigation into the actions of those involved in managing her estate throughout the conservatorship would continue um so they're welcoming this this um or this statement that he is willing to hand over the conservatorship but also commenting on the fact that he is he is remaining quite unrepentant when it comes to who is in the right and who is in the wrong here i understand that jamie spears has said you know there is no reason why i should hand over this conservatorship but but i will do it other you know essentially i'm paraphrasing here out the goodness of my heart ash it's obviously welcome that Britney Spears father is now willing to give up his conservatorship over his daughter but i mean it's really bizarre and also quite i mean you know i mean it's worrying is an understatement that for such a long time this man had control over his adult daughter in a relationship that she didn't want to be in i mean i only discovered about conservatorships through this case and i think you know most people are as shocked as i have been i mean look one of the things to bear in mind is that Britney Spears is uniquely legally disempowered by being in a conservatorship so one the attorneys being paid for for the conservators are being paid for out of her money in her estate she has no option to stop funding those lawyers two initially the attorney she had was not even of her own choosing so there is a question being raised about potential conflict of interest whether attorney who she didn't pick is able to represent her interests adequately considering he's got vested interest in the conservatorship continuing so he can keep representing her and being paid by money from her estate and three now she has her own lawyer she's got her own attorney three she didn't even know that she could petition to bring the conservatorship to an end now so far that's not been successful but these are certainly gains uh Jamie Spears having stepped down as his role as a conservator at some point when he deems the time to be right that is a step forward but again she's in a uniquely disempowering position um it's not even clear what the criteria would be for her conservatorship to be deemed no longer necessary because a conservatorship usually is brought in and imposed when somebody is very very old or is otherwise incapacitated from taking care of themselves or managing their affairs now with Britney Spears obviously she's not very very old but also throughout the duration of this conservatorship she's been working she's been doing a vagus residency she's been asked to talk uh she knows she's put out music she's been dancing she's been performing these aren't usually things that somebody under a conservatorship would do so you can see how this quite easily starts to look like a young woman who experienced a mental breakdown who had some really tough issues to go through and that was an opportunity to put her in a legal straight jacket which meant that she can still be a money maker and a piggy bank for those around her and she is legally prohibited from changing that arrangement at all so yes this is a step forward but this is still an incredibly troubling case and I think it also shows that sometimes just because somebody on the outside looks like they're very rich doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be very powerful there are all sorts of legal means to inhibit somebody from exercising that power particularly if they've experienced mental health issues in some kind of way and they're vulnerable for that reason particularly also if they're a woman this is often reported as if it's a bit of a legal quirk like as I say I didn't know that these things existed I think many people didn't but since it's become a very high profile case we keep hearing that you know the judge you know rules partly in favor of Britney Spears partly in favor of her dad you know it's still very ambiguous it seems like it's still difficult for her to get out of this relationship and I would have assumed you know in any civilized society that the moment you realize that a 39 year old woman can have her financial and personal affairs controlled by her father for a decade when she's uncomfortable in that position and she's you know nights at Vegas over and over again making hundreds of thousands of pounds but which go to her father the moment it's you know made public that that kind of thing is made possible by US law there would be an unstoppable clamoring to stop it and I do find it strange that it doesn't seem that there has been this overwhelming clamor to say oh no this is some weird quirk of our legal system that obviously needs to be changed well look there's actually this isn't the only law that's on the American statute books which is really troubling in terms of the amount of parent of the amount of power it gives to a parent of somebody who has been deemed unfit for whatever reason um I was listening to a podcast called uh it was part of the g series by radiolab I think was named unfit about the history of forced sterilizations of intellectually and physically disabled people now this law in many states is still on the statute books where if you are the parent of an intellectually or physically disabled child you can go to the court and petition for that child to be forcibly sterilized that is something that can still happen if they are deemed unfit now this is obviously a huge amount of power to exercise and not only that the tendency has been to rule in favor of the parent and not in favor of the child who's got the disabilities so I think this comes with an illegal context in which uh you know people who are deemed to be unfit for reasons of disability or mental health issue are denied for you know full access to the rights that any other citizen would have on the surface level you could say and this is all happening in a country which is supposed to value individual liberty above all else but when you you know think about it a bit more actually the right to individual liberty has always been you know fairly vulnerable in the United States because it also means the right for property owners and this is almost as if you know Britney Spears is his property and the example you're just talking about there is as if a child with learning difficulties even once they become an adult it's the property of the the parent and so it's it's their freedom which is enshrined in the law um all yeah it's incredibly grim let's go to a couple of comments Oliver Kant with a tenor just want to mention that I turned 30 today I've had a great day with the family lots of presents and good times I love Navarra media and relish being a mod thanks to everyone who tunes in every week that's such a lovely comment Oliver Kant I'm glad we've got some good vibes in the comments now because as I say it has been a fairly grim show thank you so much for being a mod all of this time we really do appreciate it and happy birthday happy birthday Oliver is is Oliver a Leo I guess I guess so this is Leo season I feel like you knew the answer to that before you asked the question I think so I was just in my head going okay when's the transition to forget about happy birthday Oliver we love leo's leo's a great happy leo season I endorse that message Nathan cues with a fiver shout out to my beautiful partner Becky on her birthday I'm not allowed to watch without her anymore but she delights she dislikes it when you and Aaron argue it's never for you know we're all we're good friends we just you know we we spar over certain political issues people often think we're annoyed at each other we we've never really been annoyed at each other actually Joshua max filled with 10 pounds just quit my night job at amazon solidarity for all the people forced to work these strenuous jobs it can feel very dehumanizing thanks for all your work navara really appreciate that comment thank you so much for that donation and you know congratulations for quitting your night job at amazon I I do hope you have something else to fall fall fall back on but yeah night jobs at amazon I can I can see why you wanted to leave it Jane Baker with a fiver happy birthday Mike Baker we are watching navara as we do every monday wednesday and friday a couple of kisses straight back at you and thanks michael and ash great insight on incels and active pro with 449 this is a reference to a previous show this week question why did the romans build vineyards in northumberland all seriousness thank you navara media for giving us all hope you lighten up my day I still don't quite have the answer to that quick I didn't know where he was going with that one so I was just like I choose not to engage I think that like you know dahlia I listened to what she said about climate deflection and she got it bang on the technique is just be like a katharine wheel right you know just like like firing out like fraff in all directions in order to deflect and derail the conversation so I don't know I don't know why the romans built vineyards in northumberland because they're like wine because they're romans they're like that kind of thing I don't know yeah I mean what what we did on so that was a that was a question that was posed to ash on Jeremy vine earlier this week we did do a segment on that on on on navara media and and as ash said there dahlia said you don't need to respond to those kinds of questions probably correct and thanks to a a j with a 15 pound donation and thank you everyone for watching tonight's show ash sarca it's been an absolute pleasure as always speaking to you this evening it's been great being here and we will be back on Monday at 7 p.m. as ever please do hit that subscribe button if you haven't already thank you to all of our regular donors you make all of this possible if you are not already one of those and you can go to navara media dot com forward slash support for now you've been watching tisky sour on navara media good night