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timur lenk was also famously lame, no?
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Sep 1, 2020 10:21
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who does he think he is, annibale????
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Oct 26, 2021 21:19
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"i think this might have to be split into two episodes" [it would take six long episodes]
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Oct 26, 2021 21:19
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lol yeah i really like the old exiled guys' transparent contempt for both the journalist and taibbi it's very funny would like an actual Rise of Mao series, though, there's so many completely insane stories in that guy's bio and some of the military feats the CPC pulled off just boggle the mind
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Nov 1, 2021 19:55
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a major movie now costs a hundred gajillion billion dollars to make so that's not likely to happen any time soon
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Nov 2, 2021 21:04
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i want a russian civil war series and i want a life and times of mao series mao has got to be one of the most insane stories of all time. came from a moderately privileged but really quite modest background, survived all kinds of improbable poo poo and became supreme leader of china. we should all be so lucky
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Nov 8, 2021 19:14
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yeah out of all the podcast set, dolan and ames seem the most genuinely relieved at being able to make relatively stable, decent money for once. one gets the impression that they're not entirely sure this isn't all some kind of elaborate hoax which will pull away the carpet from under them at the worst possible moment
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Nov 14, 2021 19:27
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i checked and they've got about 4000 subscribers. at $10 a month, that's $40,000 a month - they hired a sound guy, which probably costs them a fair chunk, and i don't know how much of that goes out in taxes, patreon's cut and various expenses, but i'd guess that they're taking home about $100,000 per annum each which is Pretty Good for independent journalists and must simply seem like heaven to a previously eternally broke ESL teacher
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Nov 14, 2021 19:38
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Nothus posted:It is darkly amusing that despite this success, he and Katherine still can't seem to wrangle permanent resident visas in Europe. i suspect that both dolans are extremely bad at this kind of paperwork tbh
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Nov 14, 2021 22:36
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:$10/month? i pay $5/month and get all the episodes and newsletters........ you know i've never actually checked but when i signed up it said $5 for each episode up to a max of $10 per month. if it's $5 it's a much smaller $50,000 per annum, which is still a solid base income but obviously much less than what i thought
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Nov 15, 2021 02:56
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R. Mute posted:every time dolan starts talking about the warrior spirit in various ethnicities im reminded that he's essentially a 19th century thinker and that he probably owns multiple bicorn hats yeah he's incredibly and openly old-fashioned and it sometimes allows him to see things much more clearly than most of his contemporaries but sometimes also leads him into very weird places stuff like his open admiration for organisation and martial discipline makes him a very interesting dissenting thinker, but as they keep insisting on the podcast you really do have to know how to read him
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Nov 21, 2021 02:31
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Atrocious Joe posted:This year in world of wars, we start off with Mark's campaign against a dumbass PE teacher and his defenders in the PTA. RWN's inexplicable rambling about completely irrelevant personal stuff is annoying but also weirdly helpful in setting the tone dolan going on a long tangent about albanian flag etiquette does add a certain texture, but it's not immediately obvious how this relates to cold war nuclear strategy or w/e
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Jan 3, 2022 10:46
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i get the impression that dolan and missus live out of two very dented suitcases
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Jan 5, 2022 23:13
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the spain episode was interesting but structured in a somehow weird way where i zoned out several times before snapping back and learning something. might've been the (understandably nervous) guest, i suppose
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Feb 2, 2022 23:29
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the english and the dutch had a naval battle in the bay just outside of my home town there's still a cannonball stuck in the local cathedral
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Feb 4, 2022 00:55
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forkboy84 posted:Should've got Varg to burn it down, that'd sort out the cannonball unfortunately it's a stone church and he was quite particular about which churches he liked to burn (i.e. the cool ones). the rear end in a top hat.
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Feb 4, 2022 12:09
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aamer is more americanised in his presentation than either of the other two, but imo if you don't find annibale's insanely knowledgable rambling in a thick italian accent charming you have no soul
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Feb 14, 2022 19:06
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i say swears online posted:it's a blindspot and i'm increasingly frustrated that they do not. north, west, east, central, south, pick a region, contact a professor, set up an interview. again their last biafran expert had a british accent. i want someone to scoff at john as oyinbo i liked the al-shabaab episode they did if you just call up a rando professor you risk getting someone with whom you just absolutely don't gel or who has weird crank ideas. may be preferable to tapping whatever affluent expat you can get your hands on, but it's got some risks attached
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Feb 22, 2022 10:45
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the basic account seems straightforward, though - ames got visited by the feds, people got spooked, paper died. i can certainly imagine that they didn't really earn enough to justify further investment, especially in the new, more repressive russia and that ames himself didn't handle the stress very well, but it's natural to not want to blame oneself when something one's fought pretty courageously for fails if there are other credible culprits available
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Feb 22, 2022 11:21
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TenementFunster posted:yeah instead they should apologize to melinda haring let's not go too far
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Feb 26, 2022 12:25
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do note, however, that if you play board games with bots you're a loving nerd and should get dunked on
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Oct 17, 2022 22:35
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wasn't there some trouble with getting his wife residency in the US? i get the impression that dolan's incredibly bad at paperwork and that they keep loving up some kind of documentation
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Oct 22, 2022 13:09
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RWN has a chip on its shoulder about pundits refusing to acknowledge their Ls and this was a pretty serious one. i can understand them being perhaps a little over-apologetic about it
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Oct 23, 2022 11:13
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you'd think that with all the friends they have all over the shop, someone would be able to help them out. but alas, they are doomed to roam the lands searching for off-season holiday resorts at reasonable rates!
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Jan 31, 2023 15:21
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i appreciate that they have various ideologically oriented people on they had that lady (vlahos?) from the american conservative at one point. they had the igbo supremacist lady on. it wouldn't shock me if they got peter hitchens on the podcast at some point. i enjoy them being this eclectic
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Feb 9, 2023 12:51
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Honest Thief posted:good ep with ben aris but kinda laughing at his callousness of sanctions that if they had cut russia's gas and oil revenue there would be tumults, government would collapse, total chaos then they would make a deal i remember my own mindset at the time. i remember being in favour of the economic warfare efforts specifically because i reckoned that the damage would be less than the damage of a continued war; i had been persuaded that the war could be ended by this effect, which would be short and painful but would almost certainly not end in a nuclear war. idk if i stand by that reasoning now, but if that's the calculus it makes sense that you have to embrace this sort of callousness for a greater good of some kind. i certainly feel a little mad now that everyone's quietly dropped the actual objective of the sanctions; critical discussion seems to have completely evaporated.
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Feb 12, 2023 12:33
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hersh seems like an extremely intense guy, is my main take-away from that interview
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Feb 12, 2023 23:57
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fatelvis posted:I'm not sure I understood this, because he implied that what would happen is Europe would keep the money, but gasprom would keep pumping the gas because 'laws'. nah europe would've gotten hosed, the point is that it might've eliminated the russians' ability to fund the war and ended it before too much damage was done, which was ostensibly the objective of the economic war. we weren't willing to bite that particular bullet (for honestly pretty good reasons), but it meant that the economic war measures - even as harsh as they were on everyone involved - were just about manageable for everyone involved. so now we're in this weird long-term quasi-divestment posture wrt russia because they're too big to ignore and too connected to properly isolate without breaking globalisation.
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Feb 13, 2023 23:11
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it's wild that dolan didn't really get financially secure until he was sixty goddamned years old and somehow anticipated a new media explosion
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Feb 14, 2023 16:01
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Nothus posted:The original Mark Ames fanboy interview with Robert Parry he is a middle-aged-to-ageing italian guy who knows 60% of everything in the world and has opinions about 100% he also seems to have no notes, an aversion to basic podcast structure and a pretty thick accent i love him as a guest but i can see how he'd rub some people the wrong way
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Feb 16, 2023 21:01
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i really like their syria episodes with that american professor guy who talks a bit about syrian internal politics etc whose name i cannot recall
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Feb 16, 2023 21:42
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pangstrom posted:One thing I'd like to hear Hersh talk about is being "used". Sometimes it's a way to find out something true and a cost of doing business, and sometimes it's something somebody wants out there but it's a lie, etc., how to suss that out, or maybe even somebody would want Hersh specifically to eat poo poo. I'm sure he would be coy to some extent because it's source-adjacent but he's been around long enough that I'm sure he could talk about something from the 1980s or without being super specific, or maybe the source was lovely and burnable enough that basically they're the story at that point. i get the impression that hersh has a serious enough ego that even if he knew of an instance where this was true, he probably would not admit it
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Feb 16, 2023 22:51
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brugroffil posted:Haven't listened yet but it sounds like he's an rear end in a top hat? there's been reports that a (norwegian) plane with the capacities hersh describes was in the area around the time of the explosion. i do not remember if it's the precise type hersh alleges. an alta-class ship did participate in the exercise hersh alleges was used as cover, but it's not obvious how it would deploy a team of divers without getting noticed - from available data, it doesn't seem to have stopped and waited for them to get back up directly over the pipeline which would presumably be the most straightforward way to do it. mostly, though, there's just been crickets. i've seen very little serious follow-up beyond some medium-effort attempts at debunking. for something like this to be actually confirmed you'd need further leaks from the relevant services, parlimentary inquiries or someone in the press taking this very seriously indeed, and none of this seems to be forthcoming. this is why the attempt to discredit hersh personally makes sense - if the source can be dismissed, so can the allegations, and you can assume that they're wrong without substantively engaging with them. most people would agree that if there's even a fairly small chance that this is true it should be taken very seriously indeed, so this a priori has to be obviously false, which leads to a number of interesting cognitive exercises. people really do not want this to be true and so will interpret any incongruities they can find to be fatal to the overall story, to the point where in their mental calculus simply entertaining the idea that it might in some part be true is more damaging than committing to a serious investigation of some sort
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Feb 17, 2023 08:29
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genuinely funny
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Mar 27, 2023 10:46
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the impression i get is that he trained as a historian at some point and was interviewing surviving eastern front veterans for some kind of research project. it makes sense that he would be doing this in the nineties, which is when everyone realised that the WW2 veterans were soon all going to be dead and that someone should probably be writing this stuff down
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Jun 13, 2023 22:49
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i actually think that landmines are a specialised enough subject that they should've brought someone on to talk about it - they do the reading they can, but by their own admission the literature is quite sparse and just by virtue of having this as a special interest i noted some mild inaccuracies, specifically when they were talking about mine clearing technology
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Jul 23, 2023 01:35
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well, the issue is that a lot of the advances in mine clearing are not about hardware it's about how one organises grids and trains clearing teams etc., which really has changed quite a bit over the past couple of decades. how this stuff is organised on a higher level is also very interesting, because it's largely outsourced to NGOs as jobs for the more idealistic segment of ex-Troops
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Jul 23, 2023 01:45
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:it's no wonder, it's a right-wing concept this is not accurate, i think. to my knowledge, the first case where the doctrine of "identity politics" is formulated properly is in the combahee river collective statement (https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf) which is absolutely not a right-wing text in the way "right-wing text" is normally understood. the idea is that: quote:We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves quote:(...)to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression this takes a standpoint theoretical approach; those who experience oppression, have some level of epistemic privilege regarding that oppression. the origin of solidarity is shared experience of oppression, rather than some posited objective shared interest stemming from one's place in the political economy. this is a qualitative break with the traditional marxian way of seeing things. it's not that anti-racism or feminism etc are incompatible with marxism; the early bolshevik policies on the national question and women's issues are clear indications of this. however, once you start down the road of basing your politics in experiental categories, you're in a fundamental conflict with at least marxism and its descendant strains of left-wing thought, and this really does bear discussing i do not, however, think that the falun gong is particularly likely to offer interesting or useful perspectives in this debate
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Sep 3, 2023 12:23
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Corsec posted:It seems like capitalists don't need to have shared subjective experiences in order have solidarity amongst themselves against everyone beneath them, and to collaborate to keep wages and taxes low. Their 'posited objective shared interests' seem to be enough for them to do this. I find it difficult to imagine shared experiences of oppression countering this unless they *also* posit shared objective interests. right, the problem with this is that you lose a lot of the useful disciplining etiquette if you start talking hard interest politics. inevitably you're going to at least countenance some quite unpalatable conclusions about e.g. immigration policy, and if you cannot tie the objective interests to some greater project it quickly becomes very narrow and vulgar. the big innovation of marxism is to identify the proletarian interest as fundamentally revolutionary and thus representing the general interests of humanity, giving a political project as well as a rough strategy to this interest. however, this project has serious problems with disciplining its elites, and the movement often ends up either coopted or crazy. the identitarian politics of the day identify [oppressed group] as a general agent for change, but as you note this is a very dynamic tendency whose radicalism tends to be channeled to very different ends (abolition of gender and categories being the most visible atm). the big-big thing is that it's very straightforward for middle-class comfortable types to engage in this sort of politics without ever feeling really queasy about it, since you have a decent answer for just about everything. a marxist typically has to be a bit desperate; a dedicated "ally" really does not.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:57
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 21:00 |
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Corsec posted:Yes, identity politics seems to provide a pipeline for would-be radicals to be co-opted into a useful get-out-the-vote place in the electoral machinery for the staus quo parties. It's very easy to co-opt people if it is framed as an advancement for the sake of whatever oppressed group they are a member of. There's nothing within identity politics that lends itself to expect more from people than dealing with their own issues, it's cool for the CIA officer to drone-bomb people now because getting hired to the job is a victory for, like, hispanic neurodivergent enbies or whatever (like that CIA recruitment ad). to be clear i'm not suggesting that identity politics in and of itself is the motive for coopting "objectivist" left-wing elites, though it can certainly have that effect, but you can also see co-optation in practice in e.g. the post-war european social-democratic movements; when you have an elite (which you really do need to be an effective social movement), you need some way to keep that elite in line. this is an enormously difficult problem, because the other side has prestige and money to spare, as well as all kinds of plausible stories as for why this was necessary. the middle classes support a political project which can be effectively expressed as enforcing certain standards of behaviour and etiquette. conforming to this standards makes them less racist by definition, since the racism exists in the experience of oppression of the racialised minorities; since that is what racism is, it can be addressed on the personal level through etiquette or on the structural level through policy. since such policy is very difficult to formulate and enforce, the etiquette tends to get a lot of attention. middle-class people love etiquette.
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Sep 4, 2023 14:56
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