Podcast thread

Clovis8 · February 11, 2023, 1:08pm

His book is borderline unreadable but the central thesis is generally correct. There is very obviously a historic trend towards liberalization. So much so you could see it as an inherent feature of culture and political structures.

The critiques focussed on short periods of history, like 20-50 years, are simply missing the point. The problem with Fukuyama isn’t that he tried to argue too big a story. It’s that he focussed on too small a period.

McTrollson · February 19, 2023, 4:44am

Crow T Robot is a fan of 5-4.

pvn · February 20, 2023, 6:00pm

Ed Zitron is on Posting Through It this week, he’s super fabulous

very good points about how mainstream media coverage of the recent Microsoft/OpenAI news has fundamentally failed the public, etc

One thing I disagree with is Ed’s take on healthcare. This technology is almost certainly going to be a huge net positive for society in that domain. he’s right that the first time one of these algorithms misdiagnoses a human there will be four billion lawyers trying to get in on the action but overall these will probably be more accurate than human diagnoses within the next few years. Plus this should enable a lot of automation that should reduce human error in (e.g.) dispensing medication etc.

goofy · February 20, 2023, 7:06pm

I just heard of him (through his Substack articles) this past month, and yeah, seems like a super smart guy with good takes.

pvn · February 22, 2023, 1:55pm

today’s on the media is great, it’s not a usual mid-week broadcast, they’re just playing an interview of Brooke and her husband (Fred Kaplan) and they’re both just so good, it really makes you wonder what news would be like if we had more people with this kind of thoughtfulness and perspective and fewer of the dipshits that do well on TV.

McTrollson · February 22, 2023, 7:04pm

Brooke is a national treasure. I was upset when Bob left the show, but it’s clear she was the one carrying it this whole time.

goofy · February 23, 2023, 4:58am

5-4 had a premium episode titled “Prosecutorial Immunity, or ‘FTP’ Means Prosecutors Too” with some good stuff about how, contrary to federal law (“section 1983” which you might have heard of, part of the Ku Klux Klan act from Reconstruction), judges have just made up the idea that prosecutors, along with police, enjoy near-total civil immunity for the malfeasance they commit on the job. A couple great rants in this one - Rhiannon:

This brings me back to rolling back the promise of [section] 1983. Rolling back the promise of this initial, new Reconstruction Congress right after the Civil War. As the country is coming out of slavery times, there’s clearly this recognition of this idea in section 1983 that state actors themselves are complicit in racial violence, right? It’s not just rogue actors, it’s not just the KKK - you know, this is me talking, not Congress - but there’s this hint or this recognition that it’s the KKK, but the KKK is the police and the KKK is the prosecutor too. And you see the federal government beginning to think through what accountability for constitutional harm might look like.

But, of course, this is America. So all of this gets muddied, all of this gets interpreted through a judiciary that has this sole discretion, that can hide behind the rule of law when interpreting and ultimately policymaking outside of Congress, outside the congressional space.

…
Just like qualified immunity shields cops from liability, because every aspect of policing is fucked up, is racist, is predicated on social control of racial minorities, people who are disabled, people who are not wealthy - I want people to hear that prosecuting is one and the same. If you have been introduced to prison abolition, you may have a vague understanding that prisons are a social tool, where we process and intern and cage society’s undesirable people. Prison is a cage that we convince ourselves is a solution to the societal problems that we are frankly too cowardly and too violent to actually solve. And I want to invite people to think about prosecutors also, to think about them as the engineers of the prison-industrial complex, right in lockstep with the police.

Mass incarceration is fueled not just by police, but by the lawyers who police hand their cases to, the lawyers who stand in court every day and ask judges to cage people, because they don’t have money to pay to get out, to charge people for crimes of poverty and illness, to seek retributive and harsh sentences on people who have done so-called illegal activity, in a system where we have criminalized so much behavior that illegality is a joke. And even when someone has committed some sort of interpersonal harm or interpersonal violence, the role of the prosecutor is to railroad. To increase surveillance, to cage, and to introduce more and more and more state violence into people’s lives and their communities. The prosecutor does not have the tools to achieve justice. It’s not a part of the job, it’s not a part of the institution. It simply is not a tool at their disposal.

The role of the prosecutor is to seek legal punishment, over and over and over and over, in a system where we know that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t make us safer, it doesn’t decrease crime, it doesn’t provide justice and accountability, it doesn’t change people’s lives for the better, it creates more and more and more and more suffering.

So, fuck prosecutorial immunity that shields them from liability when they blatantly violate people’s constitutional rights, but fuck this whole system that normalizes that level of violence constantly on a micro and macro level every day for millions of people. And fuck prosecutors too.

Peter: Well said.

Michael: Except the few who listen to the show, them we love.

Rhiannon: [laughs]

And Peter on how this betrays the bullshit at the heart of conservative legal ideology:

You know, one point to make here is, in a post Roe v. Wade world, and with conservative lawyer self-righteousness at an all-time high, I think it’s worth contextualizing these immunity doctrines within the broader context of the conservative legal movement. The conservative opposition to abortion rights and sexual privacy rights are ostensibly that those rights are not found within the Constitution or any statute, that they’re made up by judges, right?

Yet here we have an immunity doctrine that shields prosecutors, completely made up by judges, despite there being a federal law allowing for lawsuits against all state officials when they violate constitutional rights, without qualification - where’s the conservative outrage? Conservatives would have you believe that their legal movement was formed in genuine good-faith opposition to a mode of legal interpretation rather than any more distinctly ideological goals. And yet, they spent 50 years frothing at the mouth about a very specific set of judicially-created rights, while ignoring others almost completely.

And that’s how we’re so confident on this show sometimes that they’re full of shit, that it’s a bad-faith operation, that it’s not a good-faith intellectual project but a defensive outgrowth of reactionary impulses. You don’t need to humor their bullshit when they start talking to you about the scope of substantive due process or whatever the fuck it is in any given case. They don’t care about any of that shit, we know they don’t, because you can look at it right here.

goofy · February 24, 2023, 2:21am

https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1628764105988521984

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1628866150808313856

Quote of the year:

McTrollson · February 25, 2023, 6:46am

On The Media putting out another banger this week, pure crack cocaine for weird lefty politics nerds.

goofy · February 27, 2023, 4:50am

I’m gonna try to listen to this this week, I think IBCK is also gonna do a premium episode on this subject at some point:

McTrollson · February 27, 2023, 5:23am

lol these dumb fucks. Nate is mad.

McTrollson · February 28, 2023, 3:33am

Aw yeah, this one is just for the super-nerds:

goofy · February 28, 2023, 6:42pm

This arrived much faster than I thought:

https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1630552363592458241

https://twitter.com/IfBooksPod/status/1630553191795539968

McTrollson · February 28, 2023, 10:08pm

Not looking forward to the 5-4 on this upcoming student loan case.

McTrollson · March 3, 2023, 1:07am

Rewatching The Prisoner along with the above podcast now as a 40-something instead of a teenager when I first saw it and the show mostly still holds up but I notice more now what a misanthropic asshole No. 6 is. Dude just has no chill at all, despite his incredibly chill surroundings. I’m also more wary of the way the show’s message can lead to a path that ends in a gross Libertarian/Alex Jones mindset. It’s such a different era now.

If you’ve never seen The Prisoner before, really, just watching the first two and last two eps is really the way to do it. As much as I love the show, there is a considerable amount of filler and stories that are just sub-par.

pvn · March 7, 2023, 12:41pm

Marc Benioff is fucking exhausting, dude was obviously unprepared for this interview and basically tried to filibuster his way out of it

boredsocial · March 7, 2023, 4:08pm

He recently decided to run his mouth to the media about how every CEO needed to find his inner Elon. Elon is running Twitter directly into the ground. Benioff is just trying to gaslight his workforce into believing they don’t have any leverage, which won’t work because they have all the leverage.

pvn · March 7, 2023, 4:30pm

yeah she hammered him on that and he tried the “well I didn’t know about all his problematic behavior, I only thought he landed a rocket on a surfboard and I completely did not know he was calling people pedos” line which went over like a lead balloon.

benioff is such a weird dude because he really does have some humanity deep inside there somewhere but it’s so caked over with multiple layers of billionaire shithead

goofy · March 9, 2023, 8:54pm

spit-take at the graph controlling for Milo

pvn · March 16, 2023, 5:05pm

this was a surprisingly good episode

cliffnotes: B&N has decentralized ops to compete with amazon, basically given individual stores near total autonomy to select inventory, what to promote etc; unintended consequences have included a radical change in leadership demographics (a lot fewer old white guys - essentially “go woke, avoid going broke”).

Sean Illing’s “Gray Area” is a fantastic podcast in general, but this episode really made me have to sit down to digest it (I’ve gone through it three times now)