Episode 1142
Smartphones and society.
Mar 10 2020
If you look at what people sort of senior levels in the BBC have said about this, it's this idea that the BBC needs to be a calm space where people, when they surface from their echo chambers, can find reliable information and not feel like they're being attacked for their views. But the problem with that is, first of all, not all echo chambers are equal. Um, you know, social media increasingly has been colonized by far right ideas and rhetoric and propaganda. The other problem is that that only works if the kind of the impartial balanced space that you are providing as the alternative is actually doing the job it should do, which is to tell the truth. On a key issue of the day, the Gaza War, the BBC has not been able to kind of tell the truth about what's happening in as clear and focused away as as we need it to.
Daniel Trilling returns to discuss his new Equator piece, "Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco: How the world’s most trusted media organisation fell apart."
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Ben Freeman
Dec 2
A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War / William Hartung & Ben Freeman
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Feb 27 2020
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Disclaimer: an unholy slew of cultural references will follow.
The thought of Al Pacino as an Ashkenazi Jewish-accented Holocaust survivor made my sister not want to watch the new Amazon Prime show, Hunters, about Nazi-hunters in the late 70s, produced by Jordan Peele. She loves Peele, but didn’t like Pacino as Hoffa in The Irishman, and also, in a nod to identity politics, she wondered why they didn’t get a real Jew to play Nazi- hunting millionaire Meyer Offerman.
There’s a lot about the show that doesn’t work, and a lot that does. Pacino’s accent is not horrible. Saul Rubinek’s ebbs and flows. Carol Kane’s is perfect in a way I don’t understand why Rubinek’s isn’t. Josh Mostel, son of Zero, not Zoro, who played King Herod in the film of Jesus Christ Superstar – “prove to me that you’re no fool/walk across my swimming pool” – is perfect as Carol and Saul’s rabbi, although the writing doesn’t rise to the level of the performances. German actress Barbara Sukowa, who played Rosa Luxemburg in Margarethe von Trotta’s not- great biographical film of the Jewish anarchist, is featured in an episode as a possibly-wrongly executed possible Nazi.
Why this show? Why now? Because Nazis are coming out of the woodwork, all over the world, acting like “Nazi” is a valid lifestyle choice, and, somehow, whether or not it’s all right to punch them has been a persistent moral question. And that’s the big moral question of the show: is it all right to kill Nazis three decades after they committed their Naziness? Or does, as Nietzsche had it, the abyss gaze back into you? Do you turn into a monster if you hunt monsters and kill them? Another current show, The October Faction, tackles this question, and answers that, yes, monsters are people, too, and going around killing them is immoral. At least, it is in a world where monsters are people, too.
But those are vampires, warlocks and such. Not Nazis. In Hunters, the Nazis are irredeemable monsters. Mustache-twirling monsters. Obvious in their evil, evil in their declared ambitions. There’s even an idealized “Proud Boy” style monster. It’s a relevant show! It’s not anywhere as good as HBO’s Watchmen, though. I’m not even sure Hunters is good at... read more