The State of the Exception - August Update
Added 2022-09-03 17:00:22 +0000 UTCBen Howard returns to join Aaron and Seamus for our monthly Light Bringer Zoom session!
Comments
I'd love to get these going. I have the bare bones already with my obsessive teaching powerpoints.
Aaron Good
2022-09-12 17:58:13 +0000 UTCI don't know much about him fwiw
Aaron Good
2022-09-12 17:57:14 +0000 UTCThanks for hosting these great discussion sessions! I’m excited about the potential for these far-in-the-future Chinese and Japanese history presentations.
pod accoster
2022-09-12 17:42:42 +0000 UTCNo Olivetti discussion
Jed S Bickman
2022-09-06 16:07:31 +0000 UTCI think the Establishment has lost the plot. To be fair, they would seem to have no good options and it wouldn't matter who was running things. Obama couldn't have smoothed these things over with another four terms. What the US seeks is insane: imperial hegemony in perpetuity. The rest of the world has turned--and now, to oversimplify only slightly, it's just a coalition of colonizers ("the West" and Japan/SK/Taiwan) vs. humanity.
Aaron Good
2022-09-06 14:44:24 +0000 UTCI think Biden and Blinken are way out over their skis. Biden thinks he's an old hand, but was always more of a second-rate bagman and a hack than a confidence-inspiring leader. On paper, Blinken is more qualified with his Ivy League pedigree and career in the national security establishment. But he strikes me as someone whose self-estimation far exceeds reality. I don't think the empire is in good hands, but Biden and Blinken may be indications that the deep state is going to seed.
Hordeum
2022-09-06 02:26:13 +0000 UTCYes, I think that more people are waking up to the despotism of this regime. It will be interesting to see how things evolve if indeed the wheels do continue to come off.
Aaron Good
2022-09-05 15:30:15 +0000 UTCReally great episode I started listening to Peter DaLe Scott like 10 years ago and have been looking for books and similar knowledge for years and here you come along just in time to save my mind a little bit. Thanks for making it so digestible and understandable all you guys.
Jesse mead
2022-09-05 13:50:29 +0000 UTCThank you for the conscientious effort from Seamus, Ben and yourself on the zoom answer to the question about how to do the work and live with this messed up culture. Just got done reading Chris Hedges’ new substack article on - “Let’s stop pretending this is a democracy”(paraphrased) - if you get some time, would be interested in hearing your thoughts especially because of the overlap and how Hedges forces readers to sit with the unappetizing conclusions as a means for change. Thank you for all your hard work 👍🏼🚀
John McElroy
2022-09-05 05:16:13 +0000 UTCWhoops, got the author wrong...it's Holcombe: https://www.amazon.com/History-East-Asia-Civilization-Twenty-First/dp/052173164X
Aaron Good
2022-09-05 03:31:37 +0000 UTCHey, Aaron. Great episode as always. I didn’t catch the book on East Asian history. Was it East Asia: A History by Holbrook did you say? I can’t seem to find it
Sam
2022-09-05 03:28:47 +0000 UTCBen! Wonderful!
Brendan Garcia
2022-09-04 21:38:29 +0000 UTCI have been thinking about this myself...
Aaron Good
2022-09-04 15:44:27 +0000 UTCI don't spend a lot of time on morality or spirituality or metaphysics at all really. But the deep immorality of capitalism is something we should emphasize now and then. It needs to be delegitimized and demystified.
Aaron Good
2022-09-04 15:44:07 +0000 UTCHope you’ll have Pepe Escobar on again soon.
Joe
2022-09-04 15:21:43 +0000 UTCThanks for looking into the timing. Like I tried to say, this is just a hypothesis that I had in my head. I'd say that the idea that it was amplified into a cultural phenomenon to distract from JFK and HSCA is still possible even with that timeline. I too don't want to spend too much time obsessing over pop culture phenomenon connected to deep events. But there are some very weird things now and then...like the Dallas 'Who shot JR?' thing or the Lone Gunmen pilot episode.
Aaron Good
2022-09-04 15:21:19 +0000 UTCI certainly remember the "Who Shot JR" Dallas mania. The shooting episode was a season finale in May 1980. The super-high rated episode in which the shooter was revealed (millions of people participated in betting pools) came in November 1980. (Was it a distraction from the election?!) The HSCA final report was submitted to print in January 1979 (https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/report/html/HSCA_Report_0004a.htm). So certainly the show couldn't have been meant to distract from the HSCA release. More likely, the HSCA release inspired the script writers (or their handlers?) to do the "Who Shot JR" arc as a bit of ratings opportunism (or, if they did have handlers, which I do not believe, as an act of general confusionism around the terms "Dallas," "shot," and... "J"). I have a general problem with these distraction theories. People are always saying this new bullshit story over here has been released to distract from that bombshell story over there. But why? Usually the bombshell wouldn't be covered for more than a day, no matter how much of a bombshell it was. It is almost never necessary to utilize specific media distraction stories so as to assist coverups of embarrassing bombshells. Corporate media structure is sufficient for that. You can rely on them to kill, downplay, shuffle off, ignore, spin, or minimize a story that is bad for the permanent warfare-imperialism state. They don't need spook handlers to cook up distractions. They are already averse. And they can manufacture distraction out of thin air at any time. Someone wore an off-color suit! Kardashians! AOC! Distraction is an ecology. It's generalized. Everything competes for attention simultaneously in a total attention space. 99% of the distraction and stupefaction work is done by the normal daily activities of the industries of social media, TV sports, weather, news as entertainment and vice-versa, celebrity bullshit, etc.
Nicholas Levis
2022-09-04 15:04:19 +0000 UTCIn a previous episode, Aaron had cited morality as a reason to uncover the truth. I prefer the rationale he stated in this episode, which is that it is just better to know the truth than to be deluded. (paraphrasing) I appreciated the Sartre quote that he fights fascists not because he thinks he will win, rather, he fights fascists because they are fascists.
Hordeum
2022-09-04 14:13:38 +0000 UTC
