Episode 1176
Bars, mid-pandemic.
May 14 2020
This idea that the mark of how civilized the country is is based on its free speech rights is rooted in the Cold War. It's funny that you mentioned this because one of the most popular old school respected journalists in Brazil recently wrote a column about Glenn Greenwald down here, saying Glenn Greenwald has to stop acting like he's down here to convert the natives to his free speech absolutism. I think you should judge a nation about how democratic it is by how it treats its poor people, by how it guarantees the basic human rights like food, water, education, and housing. That should be the real gauge of judging how civilized the country is, not how free Nazis are to goose step around threatening people.
Correspondent Brian Mier on the Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting article, “‘I Knew They Had Fabricated a False Narrative’: An Interview with Estela Aranha on 'Twitter Files Brazil.'” Estela Aranha is former secretary of digital rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry. "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview. We also announce this week's best answer to the Question from Hell!
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Apr 30 2020
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome the Moment of Truth, and the conclusion of the 4-part semi-fictional expose of one doctor’s degradation from healer to heel.
Fame was taking our Odd Couple for a lovely jaunt. Dr. Dave made guest appearances on sitcoms, and Mel was jobbed into a number of cable network talent exhibits. About the time Mel started doing the “Big Balls Show” on MTV alongside fellow thinly-disguised fictional standup, Kimmy Jimmel, he began adopting a definitively rightwing stance on issues about which he had no business opining.
Mel: What is it about the Middle East that causes people to be violent, do you think? Dave. Is it something in the soil? Is it –
Dave: (sarcastically) No, it’s two hundred years of oppression by the West, that’s what the liberal, the politically correct —
Mel: – is it the humus? The babaganoush? The crappy music? What is it?
Well, what are you implying, Mel and Dr. Dave? Is it just that dark people on the other side of the world have more violence in their blood or genes? Is it their religion? Their swarthiness? Middle East experts and armchair scholars alike knew that the region had been carved to pieces and raped by the colonizing powers, and the CIA had, as recently as 1953, overthrown the elected Mossedegh government in Iran to install the Shah, and were – even as Dave and Mel were busy disparaging knowledge – continuing their manipulations of peoples, their propping up of dictators, and facilitating when not outright committing the murders of political leaders in the region. The West was not an innocent observer. Radios could be heard across the nation being smashed in fury.
This was no longer a “hip” sex advice show slipping common-sense abstinence, monogamy, condom-wearing, and heterosexual-leaning advice “under the radar.” This was a couple of media figures peddling naked rightwing racist and corporatist propaganda.
And that’s how Dr. Dave finally found his ideological home in the Fox News milieu.
He tried to make it as an actor, no one knows why – I guess he figured if a rightwing toady like Ben Stein could do it, so could he – but someone who’s handsome because there’s nothing wrong with him isn’t a particularly memorable face. Safer to build on his brand as the new, less repulsive Dr. Laura (not fictional. Why keep up the pretense?). And that’s exactly what he... read more