frandroid

Double-header on The Eurasian Knot, which is a Soviet Union history podcast, from a liberal perspective.

The first episode is a recording of a lecture that Prof. Mark Steinberg gave years ago, titled The Russian Revolution as Utopian Leap in the Open Air of History. The episode description says "Mark Steinberg on the symbolism of angels, wings, and flight in the Russian Revolution." I would add that the talk starts with Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus to set the motif and then goes into Nieztche, Trotsky, Lenin, Maiakovskii, Ernst Blöch (remember the Utopia guy from a post a few months ago?) and last but not least, Alexandra Kollontaï. It feels a bit rushed and I was listening with one ear while doing laundry but there were too many things in it not share it for sabotabby. :)

The second episode is episode is Intimate Lives of International Communism. Historian Maurice J. Casey wrote a book on the inhabitants of Hotel Lux, which was taken over by the Soviets and turned into apartments for many important though not top-level early Bolsheviks in the early years of the Revolution in Moscow. What I found particularly interesting is that Casey regards Bolshevism as a millenarian cult. The interview doesn't dwell that much on it but that's the part I would love to read the book for. Very interesting beyond that part anyway.

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You might have noticed that I'm sharing 2017 and 2024 episodes of the podcast at the same time. You might wonder, how do you manage it, frandroid? In the case of very long, non-sequential podcasts, I'll pick amongst the most recent episodes, but when I've covered the ones I want to listen to, I switch to the start of the podcast and make a selection there, instead of just going a little further back. I find that the dead zone of podcasts is 2 to 9 months ago, where you might think an episode would be interesting but you realize your knowledge to the future of the episode renders it mostly irrelevant or uninteresting.

Of course that's 99% irrelevant for a Russian history podcast, though you would think it would, judging by the war in progress. But this guy is limiting his coverage before 2005 or so...

Popular Front - Exploding Pagers, Carpet Bombing, and a Dead Nasrallah

Popular Front is a podcast that covers armed conflict around the world, particularly resistance struggles, and gets into all kinds of obscure corners of weapons geekery and sometimes the most obscure insurgencies and related topics you can think of. Jake Hanrahan is a pretty good host but my level of interest from one episode the other varies greatly.

This episode though really hits it out of the park, thanks in great part to guest Elia Ayoub. Ayoub himself hosts another very excellent radical Middle Eastern politics podcast, The Fire These Times – Voices From the Periphery. So I thought this would be a simple post-mortem of the Nasrallah assassination, and it was that. But it was also a pretty good primer of the history and politics of Nasrallah's Hezbollah. It's not laid out in chronological order, but Ayoub is so knowledgeable that he just expounds about this stuff through the conversation with Hanrahan. This is episode is very anti-campist, and takes good care to highlight how while leftists can support the ontological point of the right of resistance and insurgent violence against an oppressor, they politically should not be supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, because they really aren't our friends. (Actually that's partly a point taken from a different Podcast Friday post that's sitting on my To Be Written shelf in my brain, but it's almost as explicit here as well.)

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THIS IS REVOLUTION ＞podcast - EP. 719: WHAT'S GOING ON WITH THE PKK? ft. Djene Bajalan

Another primer! This time with Prof. Djene Bajalan, who talks about the events related to the recent letter Abdullah Öcalan enjoining the PKK to lay down weapons. The host is pretty clueless but thankfully, he knows to just shut up and let Bajalan speak, which he does at length. It's a short and unvarnished history of the PKK and some other parts of the Kurdish freedom struggle at large, in particular its relation with Hafez al-Assad in Syria, where I did learn/refresh some things. Like the other episode above, this is not too didactic and comes out in a meandering but accessible way as well.

Time to get my bread before the bakery closes...

Back when The Onion bought InfoWars, there was this whole thing about how "Onion owner Global Tetrahedron buys InfoWars for undisclosed sum", and this seemed like a fun mock company name to describe the Onion owners. Except... That's actually the name of the company. It turns out that The Onion itself was bought mostly by Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson, and is run by Collins, former disinformation reporter at NBC. The idea of buying The Onion was floated by Collins on Twitter, Lawson got interested, and they eventually bought it off the hedge fund (!!) which was the owner at that time. They brought the print edition back, they have a subscriber base even though the content is all free, and the whole purchase thing was done in collaboration with the paper's union. Lawson was basically interested in keeping The Onion alive and is not interested in doing a flip at some point. (He said he hopes he still owns The Onion when he dies.) It's really good media news overall. You can hear them discuss this with Nilay Patel on Decoder, The Verge's "how does this [tech] company actually work" podcast.

KPFA - Against the Grain
Ernst Bloch’s Utopianism

So this guy Jon Greenaway wrote a primer (pree-mur!!) on Ersnt Blöch writing on utopia, and he's being interviewed on Against the Grain. It's a good interview. They go through his personal history and how he got there, interactions with Marxist thought, etc. It's making me want to read the book. Unfortunately my public library doesn't have it and the closest academic library which has it is... Harvard. BOO.

I mean who am I kidding, I'm not really reading. But I like reading about utopias. Your suggestions are welcome.

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Beaux-Arts de Paris
Penser le Présent - Autour de Paul Virilio
La fille de Paul Virilio, Sophie, travaille à documenter les carnets de son père avec une académicienne. Elles parlent pas mal de sa vie et comment sa pensée a évolué. C'est sidérant les opportunités de l'époque, il s'est mis à enseigner à l'école d'architecture sans avoir de doctorat. Il était auparavant peintre, et vitrailliste (!!!!) avant ça! Un autre balado qui me donne envie que lire qqun où je ne me rendrai pas... :P

( #PodcastFriday explanation )

It's been a thin week for podcasts... Looking at the backlog.

Darts & Letters - Mathematical Morality (ft. Émile P. Torres)

A discussion of "Effective Altruism", in light of the collapse of FTX. The TL;DR is that EA is just another form of utilitarianism, and left in the hands of weirdly socialized men, mistakes will be made. Surprise!

A few entries this week...

Revolutionary Left Radio -
Modern China pt. 4: The Deng Reform Period to Today w/ Ken Hammond. This was a 4-episode Modern China history series by RevLeft Radio. An absolutely banger of a series, with an American guest, Ken Hammond, who spent years working in China and studying China. I particularly enjoyed the last instalment of the series, because it starts at the market shift initiated by Deng Xiaoping, demolishes the Tienanmen Square mythology (did you know that dissidents had killed hundreds of soldiers before the regime finally cracked down??), comes to the present, and then peers into the future. The "present" part discussed what happened in the 2008 economic crisis and the 2020 COVID crisis, and the contrast with the United States is very stark, highlighting why socialism works in China. Then looking at the looming population decrease in China, which here would create an economic crisis (or at least economic stagnation, as seen in Japan in the last 30 years), Hammond, without uttering the words, nearly summarizes China's plan as "fully automated communism". My heart swelled.


The Great Battlefield - Progressive Messaging with Anat Shenker-Osorio of ASO and Words to Win By. Earlier in this tag I recommended episodes of the Words to Win By podcast. If you don't want to load up on the whole thing, this interview with her is a great summary of her way of thinking and how progressives must shape their messaging to win their campaigns, particularly focusing on the current American election. It's quite delightful to listen to sharp thinking. She's a clear descendent of Saul Alinsky in how she's able to look at issues from a different angle to be laser focused on what's going to move the needle. Jagmeet could use some of her insights... She'd be wasted on the Liberals.

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An anti-recommendation of sorts here:
Everyday Anarchism - Q&A: Who Counts as an Anarchist?. I've mentioned this podcast before for its early Christian and LOTR episodes... Then I came to this episode where the host admits that even though he got a PhD in late 19th and and early 20th century social and political movements, he never studied anarchism??? And then it took him 20 years to organically synthesize anarchism on his own, until a student pointed him to... Oscar Wilde?? "But no one told me [about anarchism]!". Like, dude. Dude. Duuuude. I mean kudos to him for catching up since then, with 100+ episodes of his podcast, but holy cow.

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

This was really a special day for podcast episodes, as I listened to those two today.

First, the big scoop:

Canadaland Commons - The Crucible of confinement

I don't know if this made news at all, but Arshy Mann got a huge scoop in June when he got the sole interview from Zakaria Amara, the leader of the Toronto 18. They were a group of Toronto Muslims, mostly youth, who were cradled by the RCMP and other intelligence agencies into planning acts of terror, then arrested. Amara pled guilty and received a 17 year sentence. From the interview, I could gather that he spent much of his pre-sentencing custody in 23-hour a day solitary (unknown period of time, but over a year, certainly), then spent the first 6 years of his prison sentence in 22-hour a day solitary at a Canada's only supermax prison, where he was rubbing shoulders with super-hardened criminals (usually people who had committed crimes in jail on top of their initial crimes).

The interview is interesting because Amara traces his psychological journey from planning acts of terror to being in jail, to finally starting his own rehabilitation (in spite being detained), to today. Mann wanted to interview him in part to discuss the role of prison in rehabilitation, particularly the supposed rehabilitative role of work in the life of the prisoner. The perspective brought by both Mann and Amara is pretty abolitionist. Amara is very generous in his evaluation of the carceral system but still ends up finding it useless. Then Amara discusses his post-prison life, from his current work to his dreams. The guy is really mellow and you wouldn't think that he once wanted to lay a finger on anyone else. Anyway, I thought that was a pretty special interview and episode, probably one of Mann's best.

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Obscuristan - Navalny on the Periphery

Obscuristan is a podcast hosted by two Armenian women, radical critics of Russian imperialism, who discuss the post-Soviet, extra-Russian sphere in particular, so particularly Central Asia, but really much of "Eurasia" (or is that Russasia?). Here, along with guest Daniel Voskoboynik, they discuss the complex legacy of Alex Navalny after his death, torn between his early Russian nationalism, his unusual charisma, his chutzpah and what alternative he was offering for all citizen prisoners of Putin's Russia and its periphery. Lots of layered discussion of Navalny's contradictions and evolution. It was a delight to listen to.

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

I've fallen behind so I'm just now discovering that Atlas Obscura has some sort of partnership with Canadaland. Like, pleaaaase. I thought you were cool, AO. Also I'm seeing that Canadaland has some animal lover podcast--these seem like a ludic departures from news? And Canadaland is now pushing ads from Acast, one of the mid-size podcasting networks (possibly the largest international one? though much smaller than iheartradio/Clear Communications)... This smells like Brown is looking at expanding beyond his news/current affairs/politics niche. I wish him to step on rakes all along the way. Too bad his timing is perfect, as Spotify has mostly exited the space and VC predators have realized that there's nothing viral enough to wreck with their money, other than Gimlet media and whatever else Spotify had bought.

I'm this close to stop listening to Backbench--I miss Fatima Syed there.

Another super niche Canadaland annoyance--I listen to most podcasts at 1.3 to 1.5x, but Jonathan Goldsbie already speaks at 1.5x, so I have to slow down my Canadaland playback speed to 1.x when his episodes come on, and then I have to remember to re-accelerate Canadaland when someone else is hosting.

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I'm really loving the Empire Podcast, which I've just recently started listening to, from the beginning. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand have an excellent chemistry, and I'm absolutely dying for Anand's voice. They're both stellar historians... Even though obviously they prepare their episodes, it's amazing how they can just riff off the cuff on various historical tidbits, and how their podcast will turn on a dime to deal with current events within the context of their current historical topic.

Guys, I have so many good episodes for Podcast Friday (particularly about things other than Palestine!), but it turns out that Friday is the worst day for me to do these write-ups because that's when my procrastination bites me in the ass and I feel more urge to do my actual work rather than this, so I have a large backlog that's becoming more irrelevant as time passes. But today I'm less super-panicked about it, so here's the episode I'm currently listening to as I post, because it's pretty good.

The Dig - The German Question w/ Emily Dische-Becker

As you may know if you're following Israel/Palestine politics a little too much, Germany has turned fighting anti-semitism as a state religion but even that has been converted to Zionism along the way (with Germany providing about 30% of Israel's weapons during their current massacre on Gaza, compared to the US providing all but 1% of the rest). Denvir brought in a German anti-Zionist intellectual to discuss this question, and man it is wild. From a marked increase in Jews getting in legal trouble for criticizing Israel, recent German converts to Judaism becoming state-sponsored rabbis so they can tell who's a Good Jew and and a Bad Jew, to the anti-Deutsche movement (i.e. how some antifa white men have become staunch supporters of U.S. imperialism), to the AfD's multilayered instrumentalisation of anti-semitism, to Germans converting to Judaism already in 1948 because they thought it would give them a social advantage (!), to the leftist-Israeli and Palestinian diasporas living side by side in Berlin, to artistic censorship of other minorities, to fabricated anti-semitic mobs, to expecting Arabs migrants to identify with Nazis rather than the victims of the Holocaust, there's a lot mental backflips going on there. Dische-Becker has razor-sharp wit and lands many punches, enough that the usually cool Denvir cracks up in reaction to some the batshit crazy stuff that she reports on. Both highly entertaining and disgusting.