Category Culture
The Homely Gangsters Episode 7
Are men just women with dangly bits? Why is there more pressure on women to make families and more pressure on men to succeed in their careers? Can we blame it all on the white man? Is it the work of the Illuminati? Would the world explode if we talked about gender politics without foaming […]
The Homely Gangsters Episode 6
Do you spend all day watching the news, terrified of gun violence and involuntarily urinating at the thought of armed neighbors? Is your front room filled with assault rifles, NRA posters and shrines to John Rambo? Check out the latest episode for a balanced examination of exactly what the whole gun thing is about. https://www.buzzsprout.com/255212/1093037-guns
The Homely Gangsters Episode 5; Immigrants
https://www.buzzsprout.com/255212/949615-immigrants-are-coming.mp3?download=true The brave Homely Gangsters dive into the immigration debate and find that, basically, it’s b.s. on both sides. What, really, are the pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant people after? Why do the rich and professional classes, in every society from Han Dynasty China to Brexit England, lean pro-immigrant? Why do the poor and laboring classes, in […]
The Homely Gangsters Episode 4; The Paris Agreements
https://www.buzzsprout.com/255212/949605-the-paris-agreement.mp3?download=true As the greenest podcast in the history of podcasting, the Earth-Mothers Mia and Jen team up with primitive survivalists Ben and Jamal to talk global warming, Trump vs. the UN and the largely ignored conflict between fighting climate change and helping poor people in industrializing countries.
Science Popularizers in the 19th Century
We are, as I’m sure you’re aware, in the middle of a boom for scientific prestige. Never before have we been so impressed with the scientist as a heroic figure and only once before have we been willing to listen seriously when scientists (like Niel De Grasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking) pretend that […]
The Homely Gangsters, Episode 3; Hannah Arendt and Victims
https://www.buzzsprout.com/255212/949600-victim-blaming-victim-culture-and-hannah-arendt.mp3?download=true Listen as your four intrepid podcasters take a journey with political philosopher Hannah Arendt to explore some unexpected aspects of victimization. For example, what happens when people latch onto their victimization? What are the benefits of “achieving” victimization? How do hero and villain narratives distort reality?
Immigrants and Equality
If you look carefully at the current immigration debate in the US, it pits immigrants, business interests and a thin layer of middle class do gooders on one side against nationalists and working class people in general on the other side. What struck me about this arrangement is that it’s exactly the same structure you’ll […]
Marx’s 200th Birthday
So, let’s start with the obvious stuff. The followers of Marx made the Nazis look like amateurs on the whole “mass murder” thing, the public ownership of the means of production has, whenever tried, either collapsed or led to authoritarianism and the economic part of Marx’s theory is charitably described as a confused version of […]
Guns
Gun control, especially on the political left, is almost universally framed as a matter of safety. The typical leftist argument for disarming the public goes something like this. “Guns are only used for killing things, they are often used by accident and they help people commit the mass shootings that terrify us so.” On the […]
Threats to Democracy
We tend to think of democracy as an inevitability. Indeed, Violet Brown, the current oldest person alive, was born in 1900, 124 years after the establishment of democracy in the US. Even my host country, South Korea, has been democratic longer than my sister has been alive. However, our current wave of democracy is only […]
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