Podcast #116
John Steppling, Dennis Riches, Shaenah Batterson, Max Parry, and Hiroyuki Hamada.
https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-lawmakers-unite-to-push-for-jewish-colonization-of-gaza
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014765132400486X
https://jennifermargulis.net/plastic-nation/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/17/europe/italy-record-low-birth-rate-intl-cmd/index.html
https://jennifermargulis.net/glyphosate-in-honey-a-sweet-and-sour-story/
https://theredsnail.substack.com/p/the-barfy-movie
ttps://jacobin.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wages
https://jacobin.com/2021/06/small-business-monopoly-socialism-collective-ownership
https://jacobin.com/2020/04/anti-shutdown-protests-coronavirus-covid-trump
As I have constantly said, the Left demonization of the Canadian truckers (which itself was only a tiny part of a general Left demonization of covid sceptics, climate change sceptics, etc.) wasn’t simply an “organic” prejudice but a deliberately sown division that was prefigured by the mainstream “Leftist” rhetoric of “people before profits” and “we’re all in it together” etc. and then pushed by official “Leftist” organisations like Jacobin and the World Socialist Web Site which have never departed from the covid script.
On the topic of Rod Stewart waving the Ukrainian flag, I sometimes feel that he is a representative of an embarrassing demographic that my own generation falls under. We are the ones who always fancied ourselves to be “on the Left”.... but not really! I have visions of Joan Baez, “The Queen of Protest”, now painting adoring portraits of e.g. Fauci, and Bruce Springsteen joining up with Barak Obama for a book called “Renegades” (the president is a “renegade”?) We are all duped by this easy dissidence, this “opposition” which has a glamorous seat reserved for it in the media theatre.
On UPS, there has been an incredibly depressing plunge in services everywhere. I took my son into an Argos store and he accidentally left a toy in there. In the old days I could simply have phoned someone in the store. But now all phone numbers are directed to a centralised bank of operators. Perhaps the most brazen case of contempt for the customer is the tendency of some companies (e.g. Amazon) to redirect complaints to a forum of advice from other customers! Imagine you went back to a local store to make a complaint and, instead of seeing any employees, you read a notice that says, “The next customer will serve you”! More and more of the labour is being handed back to the customer.
I recall seeing one episode of the American version of “Cracker” and felt it seemed jarringly “un-American” or, to be more precise, it was an attempt to “Americanize” something unsuited for such a process. But then I’d have to define “Americanize” as a concept of how American programmes are “supposed to be” i.e. what the customary process seems to be. And I’ve always felt there was a kind of “softening” always at work.
Technology as scapegoat is reflected in the media obsession with AI which is being hyped up as the latest fear pornography to make allowance for blaming the increasing centralisation of wealth on an “inevitable advance”.
I too very much miss Gore Vidal. His prose was inimitably wry and “politely” scathing. I can’t resist a Vidal quote:
“TV-watchers have no doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. “Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?" A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators— whether in the FBI or on the Supreme Court or toiling for Big Tobacco—are up to. It is also a sure way of keeping information from the public. The function, alas, of Corporate Media.”
Good stuff, thank you. I appreciate particularly you bringing up the rising incompetence everywhere - the systems in place for society's functioning depend on a certain level of collective intelligence and mutual understanding that has now been entirely sacrificed. The unreality of the 9/11 narrative, and the ramifications of this development, took me years to begin to reckon with. Not that there haven't been hundreds of years of psyops (capitalism, colonialism, religion and so on), but things really accelerated with the turn of the millenuim. Covid has since blown down any remaining moorings for rational civilization to persist. Hannah Arendt has some pithy quotes about how authoritative deception undermines our very ability to adapt to reality and deal with actual problems.
I think this is a lot of what we are seeing in everything you all talked about from your UPS adventure onward. It seems like EVERY DAY now, I am reckoning with some utter foolishness, as if I am living in an ongoing real time sequel to the movie Idiocracy. As someone who works at two organic farms and a few related projects, I can tell you this trajectory has dire consequences. People can't add numbers, or reason out basic logic, and those of us trying to hold it all together are getting stretched thin (while simultaneously being underpaid AND OFTEN CRITICIZED by those who are too dumb to grasp basic arguments). Were Lahaina, East Palestine, and the Key Bridge due to malfeasance, neglect, simple stupidity, or does it even matter? After Covid, it's all one giant corrupt and stupid shit show, collapsng at an infuriately glacial pace.
One question is what to even bother investing in anymore. Your stuff is one of the few inputs I even take the time for anymore, but I am encouraged that a few people (Neil Oliver, Michael Ginsburg) are at least asking better questions now, such as: What is activism and where is the "battlefield"? How can any solidarity be built at this point? How much can be done at all on the web? Post-covid, where is there any real hope?
I'll end with this: the "felt sense" I have is of a rising flood of idiocy. And I want to get to higher ground, some community with intelligence and practicality, but where is it? This was the normal circumstance I think for much of human existence - societal structures allowing for learning and maturity, cooperation and beauty amid the considerable challenges of getting through this life. Well-adapted societies support efficiencies and flow states to balance out the chaos of unpredictability - effective leadership, social contracts, agreements, collective avenues for learning, etc. That in a nutshell is now all gone.