Episode 1243
On populism and anti-populism / Thomas Frank
Oct 13 2020
I think if we accept that we are in the Anthropocene, and the Anthropocene, it is our product, not the product of a few companies, not the product of the tech titans, but part of the evolution of our collective intelligence. We shouldn't have anxiety. We should embrace it, as I say in the book, and use it for the common good. We need a positive action instead of being the recipient of whatever these tech titans are sending us instead of being the resource that they use in order to send their product and marketing the product more and more, we should take over. We should take over and we can do it, but in order to do it, we need to accept the first step.
Loretta Napoleoni returns to discuss her new book, Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good. "Rotten History" follows the interview.
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Michelle Buckley
Apr 17
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Keri Leigh Merritt
Apr 16
The US South's Elites Have Kept the Region Poor and Underdeveloped / Keri Leigh Merritt
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Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the telltale fluid.
It’s worth saying: no one needs to feel bad about feeling good that Dump got the virus he convinced 40% of the country was a hoax. He denied it existed, he denied it was serious, he came out with all kinds of back-of-comic-book remedies for it, and he rarely if ever wore a mask. He disbanded the pandemic response protocols and the team put in place during the Obama presidency, like a spiteful preschooler, because everything vaguely attributable to Obama must be erased.
As many have pointed out, it is objectively funny that this particular loudmouth got the virus. It’s, to coin a phrase, hilarious. Just like it would be funny if he went around insisting he was impervious to fire and then spontaneously combusted. Just like if he’d kept insisting he was an expert juggler and then finally got a chance to demonstrate his juggling ability at Carnegie Hall, and he chose to juggle a fish bowl with a fish in it, a chain saw, and a stick of dynamite, and right off the bat he sent the fish bowl crashing to the stage, then the chain saw cut off one of his arms, then the dynamite blew up his upper torse and head, like, that’s how funny it is that Donald Dump has the virus right now. And if he’s on a ventilator, so much the funnier, and if he’s in a coma, even funnier, and if he dies, hilarious.
Did you see the lame-ass speech he gave with no makeup on? He looked like Grampa Munster with a nest of yellow fiberglass insulation on his head. He looked like one of those baked-apple shrunken heads Vincent Price used to advertise on TV. Incidentally, here in the text is a link to a website that harks back to those apple shrunken heads and teaches you how to make them:
https://www.hgtv.com/design/make-and-celebrate/handmade/how-to-make-apple-shrunken- heads
Imagine being so insecure about how you stack up to a black man – and bear in mind no one else is actually comparing you to this black man, you’ve taken it upon yourself to set up this success contest, this battle of shallow achievement, literally inside your own sick mind – imagine setting up this contest – a contest which, even by your own shallow criteria, you are clearly losing – imagine having constructed such a giant public display of your own inadequacy and your own fear of that inadequacy, like a giant aquarium on display in Times Square... read more
Oct 8 2020