Todd & Brian return discussing the direct parallels between ideological and theological religion and what Dan Carlin calls The Heat: trivial outrage manufactured to manipulate media consumers for advertising profits, and how it affects us as a society. And, does it matter if our outrage triggers are fake? Is social media contributing to a literal devolution and destroying eons of self-domestication? How do we reclaim our human empathy? Are we returning to naked barbarism as we become slaves to emotional impulses that just "must" be expressed/inflicted? Also, fertile revolutionary soil and how it's the suffering who are susceptible to Snake Oil Demagoguery, Manchurian propagandists, the Electoral College, and Mencken's disturbing concept of irredeemably. What if there is no solution?
Monday, October 26, 2020
10/26/20 - Addictive Outrage, Empathy's Path, A Nation in Heat
Monday, October 12, 2020
10/12/20 - The Whitmer Plot, Michigan's Militias, Socialism's Facade
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MUSIC: The Limbos & Paul Vernon
Monday, October 5, 2020
10/5/20 - The Trumptober Surprise; Leo Ryan & The Dennis Doctrine
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Thursday, October 1, 2020
10/1/20 - On Morality & Fanaticism; Conformist Suicide
"When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it... we join the fashionable madmen, and then...the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there." -Joan Didion (1965 )
As a follow-up to the last episode, this trimmed and updated re-post connects Didion's fanatic test to the moral certitude manufactured by propaganda and its architects using social media as a delivery super weapon. Also, public vs. private opinion, the Cradle of Reason, how propagandees can respond to competing propagandists, and keeping the you in you.
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Music: Yellow Candy & Paul Vernon
Monday, September 28, 2020
9/28/20 - An Invasive Species Gazes Into The Abyss
Todd & Brian discuss whether the "divine" human species is in fact both bipolar and invasive, the difficulties that come from gazing into the Abyss, and moral imperatives vs. self-righteousness: how narcissistic morality becomes naked authoritarianism. Also, where solutions to the informational anarchy crisis must begin, when the ends smother the means, how a species can summon both altruism and barbarity, and let's kill Rousseau's Noble Savage once and for all. Yes. More easy listening to help you escape the world's troubles!
Music: Paul Vernon and Yellow Candy
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Monday, September 21, 2020
9/21/20 - Steinbeck, Murrow, and The Social Media Disease
Continuing the Social Dilemma theme, Todd and Brian delve further into the social, psychological, and personal effects of more than a decade of social media, including meeting members of their direct families for the first time directly via Facebook. Also, Todd's argument against monetization, digital reunions and the bizarre new expectation that, somehow, everyone from every epoch of our lives now deserves a seat at our virtual table. We also discuss the failed utopian vision of "informational democracy" and the essential nature of gatekeeper, learning how to both use these platforms as tools and sabotage the Zuckorithm, as well as possible macro and micro solutions. Is this a triage situation? The show closes with a surprise appearance by Edward R. Murrow and why informational anarchy and intellectual autonomy, not climate change, is the crisis of our time.
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Murrow's Text: https://www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_lights_in_a_box_speech
Music by Paul Vernon