frandroid: Hammer and sickle logo, with the hammer replaced with a LiveJournal pencil (hammer and sickle)
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 [personal profile] 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.

--

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, [personal profile] 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...
frandroid: camilo cienfuegos in a broad-rimmed hat (anarchism)
A coincidental double-feature about Ukrainian history today!

The best podcast for Ukrainian history is obviously Timothy Snyder's fall 2022 Yale course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, which he taught in light of the Russian invasion.

But that's a pretty long thing to listen to! Romeo Kokriatski from Ukraine Without Hype has decided to also try his hand at a shorter version of it. He was aiming for one hour, he did it in two in 99: Ukrainian History 101. In a way I found it was somewhat complementary to Snyder's course, unless I have already forgotten large chunks of that! It was a good episode and I should listen to it again more closely so that it sticks... 8)

A more specific bit of Ukrainian history comes from Charlie Allison on
KPFA - Against the Grain: Ukrainian Anarchist. Allison wrote No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno published by PM Press, and he gives us a decent lecture summarizing it. I think as a podcast thing, Mike Duncan was a bit better than Allison talking about the more important aspects of Makhno's life during the Revolutions episode where he spent some time on him, but then again he wasn't trying to give a full biography.

My third recommendation today slightly touches on Ukraine but is more general. It's an episode of David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: [S5.5 E08] The Politics of Humiliation. Here Harvey discusses national humiliation, from the Opium Wars and Versailles, to the WWII settlement, the end of the Cold Wars, to the wars on Ukraine and Gaza. There's a funny bit in there about how Trump complaining about Fentanyl coming to the US from China is ironic considering the historical precedent of the Opium Wars... Anyway this was insightful and gave me much to think about, though I it missed a crucial element regarding Ukraine, aka Ukrainians' own aspirations.
frandroid: Drawing of sabotabby in revolutionary attire: beret, tight green top, keffiyeh, flowing red hair (revolution)

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.)

---


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...
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
Alright now I'm procrastinating at work, so let's see...

The Agenda with Steve Paikin - Still Plenty of Strange New Worlds for Star Trek to Explore

Fuck Steve Paikin, but Robert Picardo was in Toronto to shoot Starfleet Academy and Paikin got to interview him. Picardo is awesome, you can't really have a bad interview with him. His interview on InvestiGates was good too.


Free City Radio - Interview with Shir Hever on the call for an arms embargo on the Israeli state

Shiv Ever is an Israeli who now lives in Germany and spends a lot of his time working on the BDS campaign. In most of his interviews, he describes the negative impacts that war in Gaza has had on the Israeli economy. Let's say that it's kind of collapsing. He's full of hope for the future of Palestinians. Stuff we need to hear.


Disrupting Japan - The forgotten mistake that killed Japan’s software industry

Okay this might be the most niche I've ever gotten. Not that I was wondering why there wasn't a great software industry coming out of Japan before noticing this episode. Seriously though, it was such a behemoth of technology in the post-war era until 2000 (i.e. until networks and software started to matter more than hardware) that being told that its software industry is shit made me ponder. (I knew that the PS/2 or /3 was insane to develop for, and contributed to the XBox taking part of its market share because Microsoft had a developer-friendly platform that PC Developers already knew well... But I digress)


Movement Memos - Breaking Down Sudan’s Struggle: What the World Is Missing

A good overview of the conflict in Sudan, from an always great podcast. I wanted to share American Prestige's episode but it's members-only. This one is as good, and features Toronto BLM alum Yusra Kogali.


Ideas - Why the 1976 novel Bear is still controversial — and relevant

Marian Engel's 1976 ursosexual novel Bear was not a joke but a real literary work, and you may ignore it at your own peril.


__
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
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.
frandroid: (pirates)
It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.
frandroid: (black sails)
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 )
frandroid: A large sandworm in front of the fremen invoking him (Dune)

If you have been living under a rock, let me tell you: Tech Won't Save Us is one of the better podcasts out there. Now we're kind of living in the golden age of tech-critical podcasts (Better Offline, This Machine Kills, etc) but hey, the more the better. But this makes Podcast Friday even more important to really surface the best episodes to the surface, since we can't listen to them all. ;)

So I was browsing TWSU' archive and the golden words hit me in the face: Time for a Butlerian Jihad?: A ‘Dune’ Chat w/ Ed Ongweso Jr & Brian Merchant. As a committed Dune fan, I could not skip this episode. Basically discussing the necessity of a Butlerian Jihad in the age of AI, while geeking out on the release of Dune part deux. No great insights but a lot of fun all around. Apparently there's even a hammer ready for the jihad:

frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)

Tech Won't Save Us - What Elon Musk Won’t Tell You About Settling Mars w/ Zach Weinersmith. You probably know that space colonization fantasies are only that, but with Musk and Bezos building rocketships and speculating about that, and NASA adopting travel to Mars as its vanity project since the last little while, it’s worth taking a closer look at the topic.  Host Paris Marx’s guest Zach Weinersmith describes all the ways in which settlement on the Moon and on Mars are incredibly difficult and expensive ventures, which are absolutely impossible to become for-profit projects at this time even if they were doing it for the expensive minerals, and all the infrastructural, environmental and biological difficulties humans would face trying to make a go of it there.  It’s very thorough and amusing.

Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - suck my dick and balls i work for nasa: the naomi h story. I must say that the first few times I heard Jamie Loftus guest on Cool Zone Media shows, I wasn’t too keen on her, but she has really grown on me, and I’m enjoying this new podcast of hers. I feel like Robert Evans has to dig deeper and deeper into the annals of history to feed his bad guy of the week show, so this meme history podcast is a nice change of pace for CZM.

The Eurasian Knot - The Rise and Fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin. If you’ve been a Ukraine war watcher like me, especially listening to the Eastern Border podcast, you’ve heard about Prigozhin endlessly while he was running the Wagner group, all the way until his failed march on Moscow, and eventual airborne demise.  This post is a decent biography of him, which frankly I wish I had heard while he was alive, because they explained fairly succinctly how he came to be who he was and how he operated, something that Kristaps took many, many episodes to explain, between rants about this and that.  Though he did describe how Putin and YP basically work within a “prison rules” framework repetitively…

 

---

#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. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P

 

frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
Three entries this week! Actually they were last week's entries and I didn't get around to it.

Canadaland - The last ambulance. Karyn Pugliese interviews the editor of a site which documents the extreme fuckedupness of our EMS systems in Canada. If someone wanted to fix healthcare in this country, they could start there... This seems like this could be a long hanging fruit.

Wizards & Spaceships - In the Beginning ft. Shiraz Janjua. This is a cool episode about how to start a novel, or not. Writerly geekery at its finest.

Gom Jabbar: A Dune Podcast - Oscar winner Patrice Vermette and LEGO designer Mike Psiaki. I've been seeking Dune 2 movie reviews and interviews. This one features an interview with long time Villeneuve collaborator and Dune parts 1 and 2 production designer, Patrice Vermette. One of the parts I've found interesting is finally learning that yes, Villeneuve was a long time Dune fan, that the book was a big deal to him. The other guest is a Lego product designer that created a Lego ornithopter that became a commercial product. I don't care about the Lego but this was interesting nonetheless. The hosts of this podcast are good fans and they geek out big time with the guests here.
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
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!
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
American Prestige - Special - A Russia-Ukraine War Update w/ Mark Ames
I was wondering why there was no share button on this episode; it's members-only. :( But basically they describe how fucked the Ukrainians are because of how they have been driven to fight Russia and then left out to dry. It's an episode from the spring but even with more weapons as was voted recently it won't change the dynamic--Ukraine has a massive manpower shortage problem (see: Bakhmut), and Russia has re-established some of its weapons manufacturing capacity, beyond what Ukraine's allies are providing it. The one time in my life where I suddenly wish that Netanyahu and Erdogan had been successful (very early on they tried to negotiate a peace deal before the U.S. told Zelensky to ignore them).

The Dig - Thawra Ep. 16 – Siege of Beirut
The 1982 war marked the exit of the PLO from Lebanon, the last of the places where they had a solid armed militant presence. As Egypt and Jordan had made peace with Israel (and the U.S.), this was also the end of the era of Arab revolutions and resistance, and the beginning of Fatah's controversial engagement with accepting the 1973 borders, which would lead to Oslo. I found Rashid Khalidi's chapter (mentioned here Wednesday) more informative about the What but this podcast episode better about the Whys. (I'm really really glad I happened to read the chapter just before listening to the episode!) It's another two and a half hour corker. 🙃 (yeah I know, I used to attend multiple university lectures that long every week...)

The Secret Life of Canada - General Idea
I didn't know very much about this art group. This is a good introduction to them. Toronto should celebrate its better artists more. I had more to say when I listened to the episode but now it's all lost to time. :P
frandroid: The letter "L" followed by Mao's face, making the LMAO acronym. (mao)
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.

___

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.

___
#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.
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
The last few Thawra episodes from The Dig have been 2h50m long and it's like, okay that's interesting, but please spread it out??
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
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.

___
#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.
frandroid: (bad religion)
"This Platonic philosopher and the priest are the same person.
What do we call that person? Father. [...]
He's got a daddy too.
We call that guy The Pope.
Pope just means Father.
It means The Big Dad.
Our Father who art our father's Father.
The Representative of our Father who art in Heaven.
The Pope is also called the Patriarch of Rome.
It's Dads all the way down!!"

--Everyday Anarchism, episode 8, Anarchism is...Jesus of Nazareth - Part 1: Jesus Christ ?

And then it goes from there (all Old Testament, Jesus as Anarcho-Communist to Early Roman Christian Platonic perversion) straight to... Eisenhower!!!
frandroid: "The Tentacle goes where?" in front of Buffy and Willow looking at a computer monitor (buffy)
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.

---

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.
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
I've been listening to a few podcast episodes this week but nothing really stands out, other than The Eastern Border recounting how Soviet missile warning system programmer Stanislav Petrov saved the world from nuclear war and annihilation by trusting his common sense (and his critical sense of all things Soviet) rather than his own program when false signals indicated that the U.S. had launched nuclear missiles towards the Soviet Union. That's a well-known story. But hey I wrote this whole single-sentence paragraph about it, so here's a link anyway:

https://theeasternborder.lv/podcast/hero-of-all-mankind-stanislav-petrov/

(I just saw that there's a follow up episode with a guest that I find useless, we'll see how that goes!)



Anyway, I wanted to dig a bit into my to-post queue. Sadly half the episodes I can't recall well-enough to post a review about, but some still linger in my memory:

Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness - Ep.2 – The Great Armored Train by Nick Mamatas

This podcast reads short stories and book chapters of fiction from kindred spirits in the anarcho whatever sphere. This story here is some sort of magical fable happening on Lenin's armoured train when he was shipped from Germany to Russia and the Germans unwittingly triggered the second greatest world-historical revolution we had ever seen. I mean all this is true, but [livejournal.com profile] nihilistic_kid concocted a nice spooky story here. I greatly enjoyed this.



The Brief Podcast - Episode 35: Montreal's first Haitian street gang

Les Bélangers, the above-mentioned street gang, first came together to defend Haïtians from Montréal cops. Maxime Aurélien, the leader of that gang, has co-written a history of that gang with a Concordia prof, Ted Rutland. I intellectually know Montréal cops were even more racist in the 80s (in a way that clashes with our own perception of Canadianness, maybe not in comparison to American cops, who we just perceive the be "worse" because Canadian media are happy to not shatter our self-made image of a nice and gentle country. We never got a Rodney King incident on camera here, or an over-the-top killing like Amadou youtube Diallo spotify) but hearing the kind of harassment and brutality Haïtians (there is a large diaspora in Montréal, because of French speaking) in particular were facing first-hand is still necessary, and the whole thing is fascinating.



The Eurasian Knot - Mental Health in Wartime Ukraine

The Eurasian Knot is the new name of the SRB podcast, a long-standing and great Russian and Eastern European podcast. Here in this episode, host Sean Guillory interviewed two Pittsburgh-based, Soviet-Bloc born and educated psychiatry professors. They have been working with Ukrainians to help them weather the catastrophe that the Russian invasion has had on Ukrainians' mental health in general, and on psychiatric institutions in particular. There's also a good discussion of political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Bloc, as if I needed to learn about more horrors. But anyway, very good episode.
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (palestine)
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.
frandroid: Drawing of sabotabby in revolutionary attire: beret, tight green top, keffiyeh, flowing red hair (revolution)
So I'm kind of breaking my rule here, I'm recommending a whole podcast. But of course I'll recommend a specific episode as a representative sample.

Words to Win By is a podcast hosted by Anat Shenker-Osorio, who, in another podcast episode title, has been named The Magical Message Whisperer of Progressive Causes. (Haven't listened to that interview yet...) ASO is a professional progressive campaign message shaper, doing work that is not dissimilar to what Frank Luntz does with Republican campaigns, but instead of trying to shit on and destroy people like he does, she's helping uplift peoples' campaigns around the world. It's good political geekery for people who ponder on what makes effective campaigns.

People Seeking Asylum - Australia is her episode on working on four campaigns in Australia to challenge offshore migrant detention. It's quite interesting to see how she came to these campaigns, analyzed and focus-grouped their current messaging, found where it wasn't working, and turned it around so that the target audience would relate with migrants, beating the mainstream politicians at their own game.

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frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
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