Name: News Brief: The Casual Soft Eugenics of Self-Help "Friendscaping" Content by Citations Needed Podcast
Duration: 45 min 46 s
Description: In this public News Brief, we discuss a recent advice column in the New York Times advocating upwardly mobile professionals dump their fat and depressed friends and how it's part of a much broader trend of pop sociology repackaging cruelty and soft eugenics as "science-driven" self improvement.

this shit is as embarrassing as it is chilling and that's never good.

being obese is unhealthy, full stop. it doesn't make you a bad person or deserving of abuse but you will die sooner.

I will go beyond criticizing this as 'problematic'.  At a much more basic level, people should share mutual obligations to their friends and family.  A lot of the discourse is driven by people with toxic family members and the like, but this is a minority of human relationships and should not inform the general vocabulary.  You should not cull the various bores who make up your friends and family (with the exception of abusive relationships) but be devoted and loyal.

the neoliberal anglosaxon mind is truly something horrifying

What about the materialist conditions that produce even the abusive? A person getting away from them is good. But what about the abuse those people likely experienced, often beyond what any of us can imagine, that made them abusive?

In this public News Brief, we discuss a recent advice column in the New York Times advocating upwardly mobile professionals dump their fat and depressed friends and how it's part of a much broader trend of pop sociology repackaging cruelty and soft eugenics as "science-driven" self improvement.

News Brief: The Casual Soft Eugenics of Self-Help "Friendscaping" Content

“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

“It’s not about right vs left, but the people vs the elites,” “Wall Street and the media are leaching off hard working Americans like you and me who play by the rules.” “Our elite have sold us out to China.” American media consumers are routinely fed, a particular, and often confusing brand of so-called “rightwing populism” –– nominally taking on “elites”, “the media,” and “bankers” and standing up for the every man but with a suspicious mix of xenophobia, self-help audience flattery, anti-Semitic dogwhistles and a semantics cup-and-ball game about how exactly, the speaker defines “elite” or “the media”.

With the rise and eventual presidency of Donald Trump there’s been no shortage of pontificating and reporting about the appeal of “rightwing populism” but one aspect worth dissecting is the way in which wealthy Republican-funded media deliberately seeks to win over confused and sometimes lefty media consumers with a clever mix of faux class warfare, vague appeals to post-partisanship and piggybacking off legitimate discontent with the Democratic party to sow nihilism and suppress voter turnout.

From President Andrew Jackson and Alabama governor George Wallace to today’s billionaire-backed charlatans like Tucker Carlson, Saagar Enjeti, JD Vance and Josh Hawley, there is a longstanding effort to take the working man and insist the author of his suffering isn’t a class of people marked by a concentration of wealth and power, but a deliberately ill-defined “elite” of snot-nosed, overeducated liberals, immigrants, Jews, secularists, women and academics out to undermine their culture and way of life.

On this first part of a two-part episode, we focus on the many ways that “rightwing populism” operates to confuse and distract, to pick off independents, liberals and even leftists, exploiting real failures of the Democratic Party and use fake class war to muddy the waters of real class war.

Our guest is Daniel Martinez HoSang.

The GOP's "Populism" Rebrand (Part I) - How Well-Funded Charlatans Pick Off Disillusioned Lefties

"Deregulation will make the economy more efficient and stimulate GDP growth," insist think tanks like the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute. "Fiscal hawks," claiming to be worried about the deficit, demand austerity measures to reign in government spending. When it comes to "entitlement programs," we hear that "there are always tradeoffs."  

Time and again, the media and policymakers spew the same tired recitations meant to convey the seemingly natural, immutable laws of economics. The economy, we’re told, is thriving when business owners and hedge fund managers are making record profits, yet failing when investments in social programs have gotten too big. And that's just how it is.

Terms, phrases, and sentiments like these are part of a lexicon of economic euphemisms, cliches, and other forms of business-school speak designed to blur class lines and convince us all that our current economic system - entirely a result of policy choices largely designed to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the broader welfare - is merely a function of cold, hard science, with rules and principles no more pliable than those of physics or chemistry.

But why should we be expected to accept that a news report that “the economy” is on the upswing means the average worker is doing any better, when all evidence is to the contrary? Why should our media’s economic "experts" come from a pool of elite economics departments beholden to corporate donors and right-wing think tanks? And why must "the economy" be defined in terms of whether the Dow is up or down, rather than whether people have food, housing, healthcare, and job security?

On this episode - Part II of a two-part series - we’ll examine another five of the most popular cliches, jargon, and rhetorical thingamajigs that economists, economic reporters and pundits use to sanitize, obscure, and provide a thin gloss of Science-ism to what is little more than power flattering cruel, racist austerity ideology.

Our guest is writer Hadas Thier.

How Economic Jargon and Cliches Make Cruel, Anti-Poor Policies Sound Sterile and Science-y (Part II)

This episode we sit down to discuss the recent antiwork internet phenomenon, its detachment from its more pointed ideological origins, and the growth of online spaces where people vent their frustrations with the nature of contemporary work. This discussion was spurred by a recent appearance by an r/antiwork moderator on Fox News, that lead to a viral backlash against it that, by the time you're hearing this you may well have forgotten about. Joining us are a few ex-mods from the anti-work discord.

#145 - Antiwork

“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'

"Let the Culture Wars Begin. Again," The New York Times announces. "How the ‘Culture War’ Could Break Democracy," warns Politico. "As The Culture Wars Shift, President Trump Struggles To Adapt," NPR tells us. "Will Democrats Go on the Offensive in the Culture Wars?" Vanity Fair wonders.

Over and over, we’re reminded that so-called culture wars are being waged between a simplified Left and Right. Depending on who you ask, they tend to encompass issues under very broad categories: “LGBTQ rights,” “abortion,” “funding for the arts,” “policing,” “immigration,” “family values.” While there is some validity to the label of “culture war issue” – say, Republican opposition to an art installation, or tantrums over the gender of M&Ms – most of the time, the term is woefully misapplied.

Despite what much of the media claims, LGBTQ rights, police violence, abortion, and so many other issues aren’t just “culture war” fluff in the same league as the latest Fox News meltdown about a cartoon character. Nor are they both-sides-able matters of debate. They’re matters of real, material consequence, often with life-and-death stakes. So why is it that these are placed under the “culture war” umbrella? And what are the dangers of characterizing them that way?

On this episode, we discuss the vague nature of the term “culture war”; how this lack of clarity is weaponized to gloss over and minimize life-and-death issues like police violence and gender-affirming healthcare; and how the only consistent criterion for a “culture war” seems to be issues that impact someone other than the media’s default audience, i.e., a white professional-class man.

Our guest is The Real News Network Editor-in-Chief Max Alvarez.

Episode 157: How the "Culture War" Label Is Used to Trivialize Life-and-Death Economic Issues

YO! Our public episode this week got FUBAR'd due to some scheduling problems but that makes this a perfect opportunity to release something from our patreon feed by POPULAR demand. I (Jake) made this a while back after playing the video game Disco Elysium and people seemed to like it. If you hate this and want us to get back to calling Barack Obama "cheugy" or whatever don't worry, we'll be back to that next week. Here's the original description:

----------------------------------------------------------

That's right, we're youtube video essayists now. Not really, there's no video, you don't have to watch me dressed up like Evrart Claire or whatever for an hour during this, it's just a podcast. I (Jake) played Disco Elysium recently and decided I wanted to make something to process its rich marxist themes and whatnot so here we are. That said, MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING, if you have not played this video game and think you might want to at some point, you may not want to listen to this, as the whole plot is dissected. If you're a Disco E freak or you're just curious though, enjoy.

MUSIC:
British Sea Power - Disco Elysium OST

UNLOCKED: Dread Tube #1: Disco Elysium

It begins! Your ghosts, I mean hosts, have heard of some strange happenings in the woods near a quiet Pacific Northwest town and we had to investigate. 

Join us for a complete retrospective on everything Twin Peaks! 

Follow us on social media for the best coffee tips this side of the PNW:

twitter.com/HorrorVanguard

www.instagram.com/horrorvanguard/

You can support the show for less than the cost of again fire liability insurance for your wood mill at www.patreon.com/horrorvanguard

224 - Twin Peaks Retrospective - Pilot Northwest Passage

We are joined by reporter Avi Asher-Schapiro who, along with his colleague Fabio Teixeira, has published an investigation into the crypto carbon credits markets. This collision between green finance and crypto economics reveals many of the worst tendencies of both sectors as financiers take advantage of highly profitable opportunities for price arbitrage. Such as bundling low quality “zombie credits” with high quality carbon credits, labeling these subprime assets as premium, and selling the tokens at the highest price. All in the name of making the markets more efficient at saving the planet, of course.

••• Follow Avi: https://twitter.com/AASchapiro
••• Fears of 'subprime' carbon assets stall crypto rainforest mission https://www.context.news/net-zero/long-read/fears-of-subprime-carbon-assets-stall-crypto-rainforest-mission  

Grab TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

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)

203. Saving the Planet with Green Crypto Arbitrage (ft. Avi Asher-Schapiro)

Dimitri and Khalid beam themselves back to the foundational recurring SJ topic of UFO “disclosure”, focusing on serrrious journalist Leslie Kean’s most recent exposé in The Debrief (??) about Pentagon UAP whistleblower David Grusch, who claims that the US government possesses crashed alien spacecraft. 

Topics include: mispronouncing Leslie “Kaaayyn” because you didn’t go to the Spence School or Bard, Tucker soyfacing, silk topper UFO maestro Chris Mellon, a possible Yankee-Cowboy war simmering over the framing of Disclosure, comparing the UFO and psychedelic communities, critical support for Ezra Klein erming the shit out of Kean’s story, Dr. Garry Nolan’s shifting narratives around his ET fixation, his insistence that he’s not a eugenicist, Kean downplaying the Pentagon’s interest in cryptids and psi phenomena, the trickster element of the Phenomenon, Jacques Vallée’s  “Messengers of Deception”, and more. Part One of Two.

For access to full-length Patreon episodes, upcoming installments of DEMON FORCES, and the SJ Grotto of Truth Discord, subscribe to the Al-Wara’ Frequency at patreon.com/subliminaljihad.

[#157] AINT NUTTIN UAP UNDA DA SUN Pt 1: Leslie Kean, Dave Grusch & Disclosure Season, 2023 Ed.

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.

News Brief: The Casual Soft Eugenics of Self-Help "Friendscaping" Content

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