frandroid

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 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.

Cops busted down the doors of many of my friends and activist acquaintances in the middle of the night to ransack their homes and arrest them due to alleged and trumped-up anti-Semitism accusations. I knew of the arrests but only now learned of some of the names of who was arrested (because they got plastered on the front page of the local right-wing tabloid rag). They had postered and painted slogans on the flagship Indigo bookstore, Heither Reisman's chain, to oppose the current invasion of Gaza. Reisman's foundation has long been funding foreign students to go serve in the IDF. Reisman and her husband Gerry Schwartz were also the architects of the coup that saw the dismantlement of the formerly somewhat liberal and democratic Canadian Jewish Congress, to turn it into the unabashedly Zionist Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.