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A sad state of affairs that this excellent podcast drops off the first page with less than a page worth of commentary.
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Feb 1, 2017 21:44
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Matthew 7:6 should be the official bible verse of C-SPAM
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Feb 1, 2017 22:09
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This episode made me want to check out Rania Khalek's podcast but I wish there was a way to access it without having to go through iTunes.
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Feb 1, 2017 22:47
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Even if you're some joyless contrarian idiot who doesn't really like Dolan's editorial voice / gimmick as the War Nerd, considers Mark Ames a perverted hack and doesn't buy the War Nerd's specific analysis of X or Y military situation this show is still a treasure for 1) having a consistent line up of really interesting guests like Patrick Cockburn and Kelly Vlahos and Rania Khalek and 2) giving good historical overviews of conflicts that rarely get any attention in English language media such as the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Ethiopia vs. Eritrea or Iran vs. Iraq.
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Feb 13, 2017 18:53
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*puts on tinfoil hat* A lot of the stuff in the episode about why Nixon acted in the brazen way that he did he did and why Johnson protected him 1968 becomes less inexplicable if you entertain the notion that Nixon and Johnson shared a mutual secret, perhaps related to "that bay of pigs thing". 
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Mar 23, 2017 01:36
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The Nagorno-Karabakh war was discussed in episode 29. The episode is from before they had proper audio recording equipment so make sure you've got decent headphones or can turn up your speakers before listening. The first time I tried to listen to this ep I was biking through a park and the wind whistling through my ears made it impossible to hear anything they were saying. You can also access a pdf version of the book they use as the basis for the discussion here. Ep 40, on the Ethiopia-Eritrea War, was also interesting.
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Apr 11, 2017 04:40
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John Dolan is a failed academic from the Berkeley rhetoric department who has spent most of his life scraping by at third rate universities in third world countries. Gary Brecher is a persona he adopted to write acerbic commentary on wars and violent conflicts in both the present and throughout history. Dolan wrote for the Exile under both his own name and as the Brecher character he invented. I remember in a past Radio War Nerd he mentioned that at one point there was some speculation that he was Brecher, and one fan angrily responded that "Gary Brecher has more talent in his little finger than Dolan has in his entire body!" In fact Dolan agreed and claimed he alwayers preferred the way his writing sounded when he was channeling Brecher.
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Apr 18, 2017 21:27
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Their criticism of Vice was its shallow commercialism, not its edgy nihilism.
Helsing has issued a correction as of 02:14 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 02:09
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Thug Lessons posted:The guest on the latest war nerd kinda creeped me out. Elijah Magnier is a hardcore pro-regime guy and I really hope they don't end up going that route. Do you have any good examples of why his analysis is untrustworthy or should be viewed with particular suspicion?
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Jun 18, 2017 13:22
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I enjoy radio war nerd a lot and think Ames has done good journalistic work on stuff like the Koch brothers but it's completely predictable and reasonable that people would object to his repeated glorification of rape back during his days at the Exile. "Jezebel is just anti-leftist propaganda" might not be the best rejoinder to people criticizing Ames for writing stories that sound basically indistinguishable from stuff written by Roosh.
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Nov 5, 2017 19:18
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I strongly object to the characterization that Ames "glorified" rape. Let's be as generous as possible and accept that this is mostly Ames being in character and doing a gonzo parody of how an American expat behaves in a foreign land, it's still glorifying rape. At most you could argue that Ames is glorifying rape ironically. quote:They say they also take advantage of what they like to call the “white god factor” and make trips to the provinces. “Tens of millions of people live in dire circumstances, stranded in the center of the world’s largest continent, with little hope of going anywhere,” said Mr. Ames. “Which means–sexual opportunity for me.”
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Nov 6, 2017 00:08
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Anyone here keeping up with Carl Zha's new podcast? I've been meaning to check it out but haven't had the time yet.
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Jan 5, 2018 20:18
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Still, all that travelling has got to be rough on an immune system that was already sickly.
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May 10, 2018 03:15
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Part of what makes the War Nerd great is the coverage of topics that rarely get discussed elsewhere, often with really interesting guests. Episodes I would particularly recommend to someone who is working through the show's backlog would be 29 (the Nagorno-Karabakh war, an interesting incident from the break up of the USSR), 40 (the Ethiopia-Eritrea War), anything with Karl Zha, and especially episdoe 76 where they interview the late Robert Parry, a very important American investigate journalist who helped break some of the biggest stories of the 1980s on Reagan's dirty war in south America. The Joshua Landis interview in episode 118 was a really interesting Afrin-centric episode on Syria and 117 on the bizarre history of the MEK in Iran is worth a listen.
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May 14, 2018 04:49
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Mark Ames has repeatedly alluded to the Church committee as a sort of 'American Perestroika', and talks about that brief post-Watergate moment when journalists seemed like public heroes and some of them actually prided themselves on being independent minded and tough enough to dig deep into the establishment's dirty secrets. The Parry episode is about as close as we've gotten to a deep dig into that topic and how after that brief moment it all came crashing down. I thought it was especially interesting how Parry discussed the way that senior editors in the media were very actively supportive of the Reagan administration and its efforts to instill a new sense of optimistic patriotism in a heavily demoralized population. I hope they get around to do an episode on the cultural turn in the late 70s / early 80s where it seems like there was a significant elite consensus about the need to reign in the excesses of the 1970s. There are plenty of discussions in both the academic and popular press about the economic backlash (the destruction of unions, the transition to a 'lean' or 'neoliberal' state, etc) but there hasn't been nearly as much attention paid to the cultural side of things (at least so far as I am aware). I guess that Episode 51 on the Red Scare, and specifically on the novel 'The Spike', also covers some of this ground.
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May 16, 2018 02:57
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Dreylad posted:the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro is a completely insane story One of my guilty pleasures is reading about JFK conspiracy theories and the Aldo Moro episode was absolutely fascinating from that angle. They should really do an episode on DeGaulle and the failed coup / assassination attempt against him. Post war deep state shenanagins in the 60s and 70s deserve more attention!
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Jul 3, 2018 18:10
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The subject matter of the recent episodes on the Philippines and Yemen have a real "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" vibe.
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Sep 14, 2018 20:39
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Matt Christman's Chapo episode on the history of fascism. Which episode is this?
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Sep 14, 2018 20:40
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:It really puts things into perspective when a luminary of the NGO industrial complex is an SA goon who scans the boards for any mention of his name to defend himself.
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Oct 27, 2018 22:03
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Atrocious Joe posted:It'd be interesting to compare the spread of evangelicalism in the Christian countries of the global South to the spread of Wahabism/Salafism in Muslim countries. Both movements have US backers, and seem to have targeted domestic progressive political and religious movements as their main enemies. Fundamentalist religious sects and organized crime groups seem to be the two forms of non-state actor that the United States have relied on the most consistently in situations where they needed an out-of-the-box anti-communist movement.
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Nov 16, 2018 19:43
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:"Yellow Vests" are exactly why issues-oriented politics don't really work. If all you're doing is acting against a particular policy or agenda, then you end up being an empty vessel that anybody can just project their own worldview into. If you're an American Nazi then the Yellow Vests are true Frenchmen resisting left wing green gas taxes, and if you're a Ukrainian Nazi then it's Russian active measures to destabilize Macron and get Le Pen elected. Imperfect as such inchoate protest movements might be they have been some of the only occasions in recent years that put millions of bodies into the streets and actually seemed to energize people rather than enervate them. OWS was a pretty disappointing wet fart in terms of achieving anything immediate but yielded some long term gains for organized groups who were able to capitalize on some of that energy before it dissipated.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:38
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:OWS was also explicitly leftist, and had services set up for people to get an ideological education. when issue protests fail or achieve their goals, everybody demobilizes and goes back to their normal lifestyles. That hasn't happened so far in France, and Hell for that matter the February Revolution in Russia was triggered by protests (or the suppression of protests if you prefer) over food prices. I'm not saying your concern has no basis but I'm not sure people get the luxury of picking or choosing what sparks a revolutionary uprising, and more often than not the inciting incident is seemingly some kind of local grievance that explodes.
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Dec 8, 2018 23:56
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Here's a list of some of the episodes I've really enjoyed: Episode 29 - Nagorno-Karabakh war (bad sound quality but really good episode, pdf version of the book they used for this ep is available here.) Episode 40 - Ethiopia-Eritrea War Episode 51 - the Red Scare and in particular an overview of the 1980s paranoid right-wing novel "The Spike" which both Dolan and Ames were once unironic fans of Episode 63 - Interview with William Hogeland discussing the Whiskey Rebellion Episode 76 - Interview with the late Robert Parry, one of the last great American journalists, broke very important stories on Iran Contra Episode 91 - Recovered History with William Hogeland, focuses on his book "Autumn of the Black Snake" which describes the incidents leading to the creation of the US army, including arguably the worst defeat ever suffered by American military forces (at the expense of a now largely forgotten native uprising) Episode 117 - fascinating history of the MEK in Iran Episode 118 - Really good interview with Joshua Landis about Afrin Episode 147 - Really good interview with Isa Blumi about Yemen and great power / local rivalries in the middle east
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Dec 15, 2018 19:53
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I looked up Alexander Reid Ross and he appears to have pretty much written "Horseshoe Theory: The Book", and based on the first few pages its every bit as thoughtful, well written and informative as that article.
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Jan 21, 2019 22:56
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Dilkington posted:See, I know this is satire: you had A Modest Proposal or The Great Dictator available to you but you went with The Onion reference, and that is exactly the kind of character you'd expect a War Nerd listener to be. Ah yes referencing Jonathan Swift, truly a sign of literary erudition and definitely not one of the stalest cliches in the English language.
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Jan 29, 2019 01:07
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I don't know if there was some specific incident that pushed them apart, but from an outside perspective it seems unsurprising. Starting from more or less the same place in the 1990s, covering many of the same issues and using a very similar authorial voice, these two guys ended up have very divergent careers, with one achieving a lot of mainstream recognition and success while the other was semi-blacklisted from respectable journalism and relies heavily on a subscriber funded podcast. Combine that with two macho personalities and it seems like the bigger shock would be if they hadn't had some kind of falling out.
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Mar 19, 2019 17:31
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The Nagorno-Karabakh episode was reslly interesting if you can get over the poor recording quality.
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Jul 2, 2019 17:32
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swimsuit posted:are there any hot recs for specific eps accepted as the best / most interesting?? Some suggestions, though ymmv depending on what specifically you find interesting. Episode 29 - Nagorno-Karabakh war Episode 40 - Ethiopia-Eritrea War Episode 51 - the Red Scare and in particular an overview of the 1980s paranoid right-wing novel "The Spike" which both Dolan and Ames were once unironic fans of Episode 63 - Interview with William Hogeland discussing the Whiskey Rebellion Episode 64 - Sci fi and fascism, a popular episode with listeners Episode 76 - Interview with the late Robert Parry, one of the last great American journalists, broke very important stories on Iran Contra Episode 91 - Recovered History with William Hogeland, focuses on his book "Autumn of the Black Snake" which describes the incidents leading to the creation of the US army, including arguably the worst defeat ever suffered by American military forces Episode 117 - history of the MEK in Iran Episode 118 - Really good interview with Joshua Landis about Afrin Episode 142 - Iran War scenarios, topical given current events Episode 147 - Really good interview with Isa Blumi about Yemen and great power / local rivalries in the middle east Episode 148 - Spanish-American War, Neocons & Anti-Interventionists, with Stephen Kinzer
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Jul 2, 2019 22:17
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I feel like Patlabor would be the logical gateway anime for someone like Dolan
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Jul 23, 2019 21:00
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Come on guys, this thread dedicated to the works of a self described lifelong nerd who has watched Army of Darkness a thousand times and spent hours on his show lovelingly detailing why Gene Wolf and Frank Hebert are better writers than John Updike or David Foster Wallace is clearly no place to talk about military sci fi.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:12
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Dreylad posted:no lie, it got me to watch the weird show and I don't exactly love anime, but now I get why it's important in the "canon" and how much of an influence it's had on popular culture. The more or less open secret of Evangelion is that all the Christian and Qabbalistic imagery are surface level aesthetics disguising a thoroughly Freudian allegory.
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Aug 15, 2019 15:24
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Dolan wrote a really great article on exiled a long time ago about how Orwell was a colonialist pig, and his relation to Christopher Hitchens. I dunno, I love most of Dolan's writing and he scores some good points here but then there are paragraphs like this: quote:And this too is a lie. Orwell was never the only maverick around, and every time he implies that his colleagues all joined some totalitarian club, he libels them and shames himself. It’s true that in the mid-1930s huge chunks of the Continental intelligentsia chose sides among Stalin, Hitler and the Pope; but even in more factionalized worlds like France, there were many independent writers doing very well. Celine, a real loner, with more mad courage than a reactionary like Orwell could even imagine, became famous at the very worst phase of Leftist hegemony in the Parisian scene without following any party’s line. Calling Orwell a "reactionary" and praising Celine's "mad courge" in the specific context of choosing sides during the 1930s is vile. No one should praise Celine's conduct during the war, the man collaborated with the fascists and authored numerous anti-semitic texts. Setting him up as the more brave and dignified contrast to Orwell forced me to reevaluate the entire rest of the essay and makes me feel like I can't really trust Dolan here. His sullen bitching about Hitchen's criticizing Mother Theresa doesn't inspire much confidence either.
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Sep 18, 2019 14:15
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The first 30 or 40 episodes were all like that even when it was just Mark and John. I forget exactly which episode it was but in one case I remember John was literally sitting in the public lobby of a hotel with audible music and voices in the background for the duration of the interview.
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Sep 22, 2019 20:39
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Joementum posted:Sad to hear that Yahoo took away John's favorite comment threads Somebody
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Sep 17, 2020 17:36
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