This is such a good episode. Fuck the west fuck america. Cultural wasteland. RIP the Soviet Union and what it stood for.

The idea of "oh but these artists would have made the art they did the way they did anyway, so no problem" is itself a product of this first person, "non" political, avert to communal and conceptual thinking. And yes, also very wrong. Even if you take that for a fact, that talks about the individual level. But what happens on a societal level? That is right, those who conform (voluntarily or by desire of financial benefits, it actually doesn't matter) will be better funded and able to put out more cultural products representing and so promoting the desired narratives. Those who don't, will be in a lower position. This imbalance creates an artificially biased representation (thus societal perception, which is a consequence of it) and sense of acceptance of the desired narrative, and makes different narratives seem far more niche than they are, if they even are. Potentially shaping individual works is an added bonus to the system, not the main goal or necessary for the main goal.

“Write from experience.” “Show, don’t tell.” Self-knowledge. Self-discipline. Well-known conventions like these, whether delivered in classrooms, writing seminars or simply from one writer to another, often anchor traditional writing advice for literary authors and journalists alike in the United States.

While they may seem benign and often useful, they also have a history of political utility. Thanks to a network of underwritten cultural projects and front groups, state organs like the CIA and State Department collaborated with creative-writing programs like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and publications like the Paris Review to cultivate and reinforce writing tenets like these. The aim: to focus literature and journalism on the individual, feelings, and details, rather than on community, political theory, and large-scale political concepts.

This, of course, isn’t to say subversive literature cannot be first person and sensory, or that these modes of writing are per se conservative––but there is a long and well-documented history of conservative, anti-Left institutions pushing them because, on the whole, they veered (or at least were thought to have steered) writers away from the dot-connecting, the structural and the collective.

On this episode, we discuss the ways in which first-person journalism, solipsism and creative nonfiction, as taught and prized in the US, reinforce existing power structures, exploring how a Cold War-era history of state- and state-adjacent funding of literary journals, educational programs, and other cultural projects taught writers to center themselves and inconsequential details at the expense of raising urgent political questions and notions of class solidarity.

Our guest is author Eric Bennett.

Episode 144: How the Cold War Shaped First-Person Journalism and Literary Conventions

“Among these central ranges of continental mountains and these great companion parks…lies the pleasure-ground and health-home of the nation,” wrote journalist Samuel Bowles in 1869. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life,” mused naturalist John Muir in 1901. “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst,” opined writer Wallace Stegner in 1983.

North American and European traditions of conservationism, especially those in the U.S., are endlessly celebrated in Western media, with figures like Teddy Roosevelt and John James Audubon placed at the forefront. They’re not without their merits, especially at a time when some of the world’s most powerful countries refuse to take action on climate change. What often goes underexamined or ignored, though, is the deeply racist, settler-colonial history–and very much still the present– that has informed the “conservationist” movement in the US and much of the North Atlantic.

What have been and still are the ecological and human costs, particularly for Indigenous and Black people in the US, of this settler-colonial ‘conservation’ movement? Why, in the American collective memory, is the ‘conservation movement’ often credited to powerful white figures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the extreme environmental and social destruction that they helped caused? And why should there be a need for a settler-driven conservation movement when the original inhabitants of, what we now know as the US and Canada already very often already had systems of ‘conservationism’ in place?

On this episode, we study the racist origins of Western conservation movements, primarily in the United States; how the conservation movement and romanticization of nature have served the settler-colonial project; how these histories continue to inform certain currents of the mainstream climate activism of the present; and what an inclusive, decolonial understanding of environmental conservation can look like.

Our guest is UConn professor Prakash Kashwan.

Ep 155: How the American Settler-Colonial Project Shaped Popular Notions of 'Conservation'

We explore claims of bioweapons facilities in Ukraine, as well as more outrageous stories spread in QAnon circles about Putin liberating deep underground military bases of children being trafficked for their adrenochrome.

Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week: http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous

Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks)

QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com

Episode music by Doom Chakra Tapes (https://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com). Editing by Corey Klotz.

Episode 183: Ukraine, Bioweapons & Adrenochrome

Nick Marx, co author of "That's Not Funny: How The Right Makes Comedy Work For Them" joins us to talk about the book!

NICK MARX
@marxnick
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520382138/thats-not-funny

EMAIL US
whyyoumadpod@gmail.com

PATREON + DISCORD
patreon.com/poddamnamerica

Why You Not Funny

Two great new Buus for no money down

For GT coverage support the show @ patreon.com/BOSpod

LAWSON'S GAME
sodabags.itch.io

GAME BOYS 11/18 @ CAVEAT
https://caveat.nyc/events/hard-drive-presents-game-boys-11-18-2022

Z 142 - Buu's Eating Buu?

This week on the Global Research News Hour, as the UN talks on Climate Change finally comes to an end, we will host a show discussing the agenda of the billionaire foxes wearing the clothing of planet saving sheep.

In our first half hour, we are joined once again by independent journalist and environmental activist Cory Morningstar to discuss what is coming out of this year’s Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Then in our second half hour, we will hear from academic and author Claudia Von Werlhof about how secret military geoengineering in the United States and abroad is actually happening and how the agreements signed by the multiple climate meetings together with the COVID scare is helping the billionaire architects create a brave new economic and political world for all of us.

“What a Scam it Actually Is.” Assessing COP27 and Modern Climate Activism

Subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/americanexception

Sarah Kendzior joins us to talk about her book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent. She is also the author of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America and The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America. Sarah is the co-host of the podcast, Gaslit Nation.

Special thanks to Dana Chavarria for the sound engineering!

Music: "Do You Want Out" by Mock Orange

Episode 96: Of Course They Knew w/Sarah Kendzior

It’s a fan cam episode for our favorite tech columnist, Brian Merchant, who had two pieces come out recently that are back-to-back bangers. First is about why all the people making and selling AI keep talking about being afraid of their own creations. It’s Frankenstein meets sorcerer's apprentice but as a marketing strategy for their own power (and their unique ability to control that power). Second is about what all these people should actually be afraid of. As history shows us, there is more than one way to crash a computer.

Article we discuss
••• Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be | Brian Merchant https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-03-31/column-afraid-of-ai-the-startups-selling-it-want-you-to-be
••• Silicon Valley elites are afraid. History says they should be | Brian Merchant: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-03-24/column-how-afraid-should-silicon-valley-be 

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

245. Shook Ones (Tech Style)

Learn about China's economic model with Beijing-based scholar Roland Boer, a professor at Renmin University and author of the book "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners".

VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mgcyqkEOhQc

Understanding China's economic system: Socialism with Chinese characteristics

with Cory Morningstar, Varun Mathur, Johan Eddebo, Hiroyuki Hamada and John Steppling

--relevant links--

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/frankfurt-school-against-nazis

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/06/poverty-and-crisis-sucking-humanity-dry/

https://steigan.no/2023/07/hvordan-us-department-of-homeland-security-ble-globalt-tankepoliti/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.ifpma.org/news/first-of-its-kind-event-brings-together-10-companies-that-partnered-to-deliver-vaccines-and-treatments-in-response-to-

https://theelders.org/news/mary-robinson-joins-president-zelenskyy-and-greta-thunberg-discuss-environmental-consequencescovid-19/

https://theelders.org/who-we-are/advisory-council



https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/07/the-future-of-international-

https://www.cp24.com/world/thousands-of-north-koreans-march-in-anti-us-rallies-as-country-marks-korean-war-anniversary-1.6455852criminal-law/

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-fourth-revolution

https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-history/cia-vampires-communist-rebels-philippines.htm

https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/investment-laws/laws/253/ukraine-law-on-the-regime-of-foreign-investments

PODCAST #89

Russia, as we all know, has sinister “oligarchs” whereas in the United States, we are told, we have “philanthropists,” “job creators,” and “titans of industry” who earn their wealth through hard work, moxie, and guile. Aside from a few cartoonishly evil billionaires – like the Walton family, Peter Thiel, and the Koch brothers – the average American has a warm and fuzzy feeling about the super wealthy. 

The most notable of these Benevolent Billionaires is Bill Gates, whose foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, operates the largest overseas “nonprofit” regime in the world, worth over 40 billion dollars–– twice that of the next biggest foundation. The Gates Foundation receives almost uniformly softball coverage from the media, many of whom receive funding from Gates through various investment and donor arrangements, both from his personal coffers and the foundation that bears his name.

In this two-part episode we ask how much this network of patronage effects Western media’s overwhelmingly positive and uncritical coverage of Gates. How can one can be critical of this type of massive outsized influence without devolving into paranoia? What is the nature of the capitalist ideology that informs Gates’ so-called philanthropy? And how do his programs often harm those they allegedly aim to help?

We are joined this week by Dr. Linsey J. McGoey, associate professor of sociology at the University of Essex and author of the book, “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.”

Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire - Bill Gates and Western Media

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Episode 144: How the Cold War Shaped First-Person Journalism and Literary Conventions

Citations Needed Podcast

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