Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 59: Snapping Turtles All The Way Down

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

We discuss most of the events of this past week, and put a bow on it with details of Tarence's recent canoe trip. This one's got lots of tree philosophy.

my favorite and there's this there's an episode a few months ago with matt and carrie where we sort of talked about this but my favorite thing ever is when people do try to outwoke you on popular things like that yeah it's and it's like they it's like the night before you know july 3rd you know they're all in their bedrooms with like headbands on, doing sit-ups. It's like, all right. We're going to motherfuck America tomorrow. This is what we're going to say on the Facebook post I get. Post that gets 73 fucking likes.

They do the same thing. The Super Bowl, I would argue, they had as Columbus Day. Yeah, that's exactly. That was the example I used. Definitely that. But it's really stupid. It's really funny when people do it in personal conversation with me. Just one-on-one. Just like, oh, I don't really celebrate Fourth of July. It's just like, okay, what the fuck about me makes you think that I do?

Why are you trying to do this? Why are you trying to joust me here? I'm a communist and you know that. Yeah, it's like you said. It's still, I still get the day off work and that's all that fucking man and that's like and for workers and for poor working people guess what it's one day they don't have to fucking show up to their shittiness it's pretty it's pretty well i don't know that's probably less and less true but yeah traditionally it has been right right

right it depends on the job yeah. Yeah. But it is funny. I guess you could say virtue signaling or whatever, but just on a one-to-one level. Yeah, totally. Yeah, Columbus Day is the best, though. There's two statuses, and this is probably the wokest thing Jay-Z's ever done, but for the rap nerds, they say,

only Christopher I acknowledge is Wallace. And then the other side of that is, like, some sort of performative shit about the plight of indigenous people. Right. And it's just like, we know that. Yeah. Man. Well, it's just a result of people thinking that social media is the arena of politics and politics.

I don't know. I got into an argument a few years ago with somebody who my theory at the time, and I think it still holds true, my theory at the time and I think it still holds true is that I don't think there is one single person and this goes against Ray's Law way back this goes against everything Ray's Law postulates

this is big folks my theory is that there is not one single person in the world who has been won over by a Facebook argument that you could try to appeal person in the world who's been won over by a facebook argument that there's that like you could try to appeal to their humanity and just that just that medium just facebook not twitter not yeah not twitter not anything else just facebook it's twitter i feel like you can be shamed into taking the right position facebook there's just people on facebook just don't have

the chops to do that well it it creates social interaction in a way that's not natural Twitter is a little more natural just because it forces you to limit what you're saying but Facebook what it does is it says you have an unlimited character

amount say whatever you want so people structure their arguments it's like if you were sitting around with your friends and somebody said something you wouldn't be like like like like like i like that you know what i mean like well i guess some people do i guess in social justice circles you've got the whole like sparkly fingers is that i i would just pose that question to our listeners is sparkle fingers the thing that you all do, or is that just unique to the SJW world?

Or rather, maybe I should say, if in your dealings in the SJW world, do you come across Sparkle Fingers too, or is that unique to the Appalachian scene? Man, this email I got this morning, I was just reading about. Another thing that people do on Twitter that kills me, sort of in that same vein of like 4th of July outwoking,

you know, the Woke Olympics, is when people will exploit a tragedy like like the shooting that just happened yesterday and make it 100 about them yeah and they'll be like they'll be like i just got done crying for 13 hours about the the state of the world and and let me tell you a few things about what journalists actually do and they go on like an 18 fucking tweet thread yeah about it's just like what the fuck they are our bravest citizens they're the watchdog of society well it's just like you okay like you okay good right right right but it's it's but it's like but it's just a classic example of like making some you didn't just cry for five fucking hours.

I mean, even if you did, the only reason you did that is so you could make this Twitter thread so you could get 8,000 fucking tweets. Fucking likes, yeah. Well, and I think the thing, too, is like, this is a shitty reality of the human condition, but I think humans can recognize that for example

the situation in gaza like i can i can be outraged about that because it's fucked up yeah but like when people you don't know were like murdered or like something horrible happens to them if you didn't know them personally it's hard hard to have a visceral connection in that same way. I could think something's fucked up and be completely against that and we need to fight to make that right, but I'm talking like a journalist's gun down in Maryland is obviously a fucking terrible thing

and I'm mad about the conditions that created that, but it's hard for me to be like weeping and wailing for a dead journalist. You know what I'm saying? There's like this I don't mean that to sound callous. I'm just saying like it's just true. Someone's gonna cut that out. Completely

free of context. There's this interplay with like complicity and responsibility and like your ability to do something about it. For example, I remember, and I was much younger back then too, so I don't know. It's kind of hard to say. But I do remember being very emotionally disturbed by the Iraq War. Yeah.

That were coming out of it. And it was because it was this combination of helplessness and complicity like like oh this is you know who we are as a country and well but like when you heard about like pat tillman well i mean now it's kind of a little bit sadder because we know he's one of us but like but when you've heard like about an individual like individual, you just didn't get worked up in the same way. And it's the same thing with this shooting yesterday. It's like there's... I don't feel complicit in that in the same way that I do the things that are done for Empire and all these other things.

Did you read about why he did that? Was it the Milo thing? No, it was because this newspaper, this guy's name was Jared Ramos, this newspaper published... Did they get the shooter's name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They published a story about how he was harassing this woman online, like stalking her, harassing her.

Well, didn't she, like, she told local police that for years, that, like, he was going to, like, shoot, he was going to be your next mass shooter, and they just ignored it? I don't know. I don't know much about her, but this newspaper reported the story that he would not stop bothering us. Oh, so he got his spot blown up in the paper. Yeah, and this was back in, like, 2011. He held onto this grudge for years and, like, had a Twitter account that they found where he singled out the editors of this paper

and was basically, like, saying he was gonna kill them. So it's like he held onto this grudge for, like, nursed it for like five or six years and then just got a fucking uh shotgun that's what he had he did it with shotguns and uh and had like a bunch of like fake grenades and smoke bombs with him just went through the fucking office just taking people out. Isn't that dark? Holy shit. Yeah.

But it also sort of debunks the whole thing that like, oh, you can't pull off a mass shooting with a shotgun or whatever. You're right. Pokes a hole in that argument I've been making for years. Right, right. I don't know. Maybe we should be cavalier about this. People do say that, right? The same way that they say it with like knives. Yeah.

You know, or anything that's not like a, I mean like when people say, and I still think that, I mean maybe a common sense gun reform, heavy air quotes. Common sense. Might be to ban semi-automatics and all that kind of stuff. But this guy. You could pull one of these.

Reality is, if we're just talking, you could pull something bad off of just about anything. Yeah, this is one of those weird things where clearly the story here is, it's the same story with any of these other guys. Elliot Rogers and these other alt-right incel whatever you know i don't want to get into that debate but but there's the same story in the sense that like it's this guy who um who operated on this idea that he was entitled to anything including this woman and her attention and all this other shit, and when he was actually called out for that

and challenged for that, he lost his fucking marbles. Yeah. Yeah, it's complicated, because, yeah, he used a shotgun, and he didn't, it's not the situation where he used one of these high-capacity,

insanely efficient weapons like the Vegas shooter. So I just caught bits and pieces of this yesterday. Did he kill himself, or did they apprehend him? They apprehended him. And apparently he didn't have any identification on him, and he damaged his fingertips so that he couldn't be identified. Yeah.

It was like that scene. Fucking loser. That scene in Seven with Kevin Spacey. He's burning his fingertips off. Or in Men in Black. You remember that? Where they have to burn your, it's the last suit you'll ever wear.

Yeah. And they burn your fingertips off. That says a whole fucking lot. Yeah. The story here isn't necessarily about gun access or anything I mean it is but it's it also has a lot to do

with patriarchy and you know white male entitlement toxic masculinity as they say I guess that's probably the bigger story here the guy was clearly you know, white male entitlement, toxic masculinity, as they say. Yeah. I guess that's probably the bigger story here. The guy was clearly unwell, and, you know, it's just one of those things. But the larger point here is that people will read about something like that and they'll be like, oh, my God.

will read about something like that and they'll be like, oh my god. I have to be the one person to tell them, to tell the whole world what's going on here. What those people do in the newsroom. It's just like, just get on Twitter and follow what journalists are saying about the reporting.

It's the same thing, like you saw this around Anthony Bourdain too. You know, people like, let me tell you about what depression really is. And it's like a 20 tweet thread and it has like 14,000 fucking retweets. It's like, am I losing my mind? No, you're not.

I'm fucking going crazy. God, the Anthony Bourdain thing was still, that produced some of the worst takes I've ever seen. And a lot of people, Anthony Bourdain is kind of a strange case because he was a guy that was sort of co-opted across a broad spectrum of politics. Right. You know what I mean?

I saw downright fucking... Oh, yeah. I had MAGA friends on Facebook and Instagram and shit posting photos of them. Yeah. It was like my experience was the mega people weren't necessarily talking about like

depression and mental illness and all that kind of stuff I mean some of them might be but theirs was more like some of it was downright like pejorative it was like um man I liked Anthony Bourdain shame he took the coward's way out

yeah you know that kind of shit right right Man I liked Anthony Bourdain Shame he took the cowards way out Yeah You know that kind of shit Right right Well it's the thing that like I think I mentioned this on Twitter at one point It's like the Like the hottest take still

After all these years Is that like you go straight to hell When you commit suicide And like serious fucking like blue check journalists were saying that yeah yeah oh man oh yeah well it's just yeah i don't know serious i just remember that one guy said that and he had a blue check that doesn't necessarily make you serious the discourse is just driven by people who want to be the soothsayers and gatekeepers i mean it's even the j.D. Vance thing.

Even we do it. I'm not saying that we're immune to it. Of course I fucking do it. But also the thing, too, is I feel like one of the things about Twitter that is kind of difficult is like there's just this fucking race to have the freshest take. fucking race to have the freshest take. And at a certain point when you've exhausted all the reasonable takes, in that pursuit of the freshest take,

you get just... You get shit. Or, yeah, you just get pretzel logic. People just sort of contorting themselves into the most original... I don't know. It's really dark. This week I've decided I'm not very good

at Twitter, though. Why is that? I feel like I can make good declarative statements, but people will be like, oh, yes, smart guy, what's your fucking alternative? What's your blah, blah, blah? And it's just like... Okay, okay.

If fucking KFTC Rob is throwing throwing you off the throwing you off your game you don't need to worry about that not not just him but there's other there's other people too this is like um it's it's really hard to you fight you make these statements and then like people challenge you on it and then you're like i can't get into it on here because I lack the sort of prosaic skills, the skills at prose and others, you know, whatever, to accurately convey what I'm trying to say. Yeah, or just to fucking body slam them with a nice put down. Yeah. Sometimes I get so mad I can't find the right put down and it comes out so corny yeah i'm not very good on my feet like that i'm not but yeah it's been a weird week

it's been a uh it's been a dark week it's been an exceedingly dark week um and i don't know how much you want to get into that we should probably touch on it a little bit um i mean there have been a few bright spots but even the bright spots come with a lot of And, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, no, I think I was feeling a little bit, I think as a lot of people were feeling a little bit weird about the Anthony Kennedy stepping down thing. And I found a little hope reading that Alex Perrine piece last night. I didn't see it. About how it was called The Supreme Court Loses Its Conservative Majority.

How basically, let's not kid ourselves, Anthony Kennedy was a conservative at the end. He was, yeah. And in no meaningful way was he not. Yeah. And that now the court's 4-4 and that the Democrats, which they won't, but the Democrats should hang over the Republicans' head

how they were totally cool with an eight-person Supreme Court. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. When they thought that they couldn't steal one of those seats, which when people said that the Republicans stole a seat, barack obama fucking gift wrapped you and sent it to you with some fucking fruitcake that's safe but uh

i thought it was good i thought uh i thought uh if the democrats were actually good at politics they would do this they would just deny them a vote and keep it until fucking, for a year and a half, until Trump's officer. But they won't. And the reason they won't is Joe Manchin. Fucking Blumenthal. Bloomberg? No, that Blumenthal guy.

I forget his first name. He had that tweet the other day. It was like... Sidney Blumenthal? The guy that was a Clinton advisor? Some senator from Connecticut. Oh, okay. It was like...

What did he say? President Trump needs to ensure that this is a nice, moderate pick just like Justice Kennedy was. Well, it's funny that this happened on this week, because what it does is it immediately puts the lie to civility. And it's funny. Yeah, it just laid all that bullshit we were talking about a couple weeks ago bare. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that people I work with and I know who still adhere to the notion of norms and civility and all this other shit,

for the very, very first time, I now hear them saying, Oh, you know, what Mitch McConnell, likeconnell plays by a different set of rules like you know we'll look back on this in 30 years and you know it'll be insane how like obama who had every right or whatever to appoint a supreme court justice was obstructed by mcconnell and etc etc etc and it's just um and and so you know it's like they they will admit that like civility is completely bullshit but they'll insist on maintaining their dignity uh-huh or their conception of it yeah dude they're just like how do you fucking win like that yeah well even okay so what where this gets difficult for me is like even if you accept that even if you go back to the 2008 rule book which it looks like which is what just

kristin gilbert is trying to do even if you go back to that and put start positioning yourself um pretty far left on some of these issues so you know like like eyes yeah she said abolish eyes yeah you know and and i pointed this out on Twitter. It's just like there's no functional difference between her saying that and Obama promising to close Guantanamo. Yeah, I saw that. Or to end the Iraq war or any of this.

And none of that actually happened. None of it happened, no. And so even if they're still playing by those rules, granted, a lot of people are going to fall for it, and if we can't manage to build a sort of mass movement that offers an alternative systemic vision by 2020, 2020's going to be a dark year, my friend. It's going to be me and you in this fucking living room

feeling lonely as shit. Bunkered down. With guns. You know what's crazy about that, though, and I feel like this didn't exist in 2008 as a precedent necessarily, but when Obama was running on that sort of more radical, those radical reforms, Donald Trump's presidency hadn't happened yet. And so now we understand that like, oh, well, all this shit that like Democrats were saying Obama just couldn't do because, you know, he's just one lever of government.

There's also the House. There's also the Senate. There's also the Supreme Court. We know it's bullshit. We know. Exactly. We know it's bullshit. So in that sense, maybe it would be easier to hold a President Kristen Gillibrand to that, but they're still going to fight it tooth and nail.

No, they won't. It's impossible to hold them to that because they don't want that. Right. I'm not saying it's going to happen. Right. I'm just saying that now we know that if she's elected, she gets up there and starts hemming and hawing about like well we just need republicans to come to the table on this it's like it's even like the same thing trump did like last week about the immigration he's like i'm just enforcing the law people if the democrats want to come to the table and compromise on this we can't it's just like

fuck you we know full well that you can do a whole lot more than you know what i'm saying how can you not try well you have the pen right if nothing else and then you can do a whole lot more than, you know what I'm saying? How can you not try? You have the pen. Right. If nothing else. And then you can put the ball on their court to try to fucking challenge you on that. I guess what I'm confused about is, how can you not see that and chart a trajectory

from Obama refusing to deal with all these things when he had the complete power to do them and child concentration camps now yeah it it works hand in hand like the liberal idea of governance and the trump fascist insane ethnostate idea of governance they work hand in hand concert yeah it's true. And another thing people don't understand, I was talking to some of our more liberal colleagues yesterday, and it's something nobody wants to talk about. Like, I had made the point about Clinton gutting welfare and how, like, that reverberates in harlan county kentucky the same way it does

on south side chicago yeah and people need to be honest and candid about that like the democratic party has always been shit but it's damn sure not the party of the new deal anymore and it hasn't been since the 80s right okay the democratic party now is a party that that aesthetically appeals to this younger generation of liberals that like the look of doing the right thing that like sort of like you know that uh like yeah the pose of like being on the right side of history or whatever yeah but in reality in governance democrats have just made careers of being way too conciliatory to the republicans because that's what keeps them in office yeah yeah that's you know and that's just objectively true bill clinton was in no meaningful way well didn, didn't Katie Slinginger

point this out on Twitter, which is that any time a seemingly progressive politician does get into office, the reason they become immediately conservative is because we have a bourgeois democracy

that is focused on self-preservation. So they have no incentive to actually implement any of these no reforms or whatever in fact if they did it'd probably be bad for business you know and and one of the things that i think is interesting uh do you know what david harvey is i don't think so um he's like a an economist and he's done these lecture series and books on capital on marx's capital and he was on that jacobin podcast the dig uh maybe a few weeks ago but he he was talking about how early in the 19th century you

had um you know the early stages of industrialization and mark and capitalism and capitalist accumulation and you were just seeing some absolutely insane things you know just crushing poverty and starvation and all this other stuff and and there were socialists at that time who looked at that and made moral appeals to people and they said this is this is this is immoral this is wrong blah blah blah and and marx was so um he was one of a kind he was like one of the first people that came along and said you can't make moral appeals to the system the system is amoral you can't make moral appeals to so it's like what you have to do is change the system yeah you know and and so that's why kristin gillibrand or even or even the strategy of running like dsa as democrats is ultimately doomed to fail if we're

being honest that's not saying you can't celebrate the excitement around that because yeah there might be some generic benefit to having people of our bend in office in the current system, but it's not revolutionary. It's exactly. And you look at her platform and it's like, are you talking about Ocasio-Cortez? Ocasio-Cortez, yeah. It's like you look at her platform and it's like, all those things are great, sure. But yeah, but once you actually get into a position in which you're... Everything is working against you.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's just... And I think that's true of... I mean, look at Bernie. I mean, like, it's one of the weirdest things is I can remember when I first kind of got into, like, the DSA Jacob and left of thing, and followed my current trajectory, which is by no means finished and still a work in progress. But I can remember listening to something Bhaskar Sankara said that was like, no, we can't form coalitions with social Democrats. Like, the differences are too stark, and while their reforms are, you know,

preferable, ultimately socialist and communist, whatever you call yourself, we can't form coalitions with New Dealers and social Democrats. And then I see this motherfucker fucking tearing apart Sarah Jones' article about Bernie, which Sarah's just saying, if you can't come out against us,

if you can't come out against what's going on in Gaza, and I'm trying to think of other Bernie missteps lately. He's had several. Those are not left positions. Right. Okay? And now I see Vosker's like, why stop the momentum? because he's not perfect like

don't let perfect be the enemy of good or whatever it is it has been a bad week for punching left on twitter yeah i mean there have been i don't know how many goddamn tweets and takes i've seen of people saying um we can't all be cool and radical like you like you commies or whatever it's just like it's like i don't know how i don't know it's very depressing for me because you know it makes because it has this it's like sort of red baiting in a way it has this um effect of essentially making you feel isolated and like a kook. You know what I mean? You feel sort of like, oh, maybe I don't engage with reality.

Maybe I'm just like sort of some aloof, like cool dude who has these ideas that, you know, this is like, but, you know, if you're out there and you're feeling that way,

that's, I think that's natural and it's sort of like you sort of expect that but like but it's not true we engage with the world we try to like build out um i don't know it's like i was saying like you sort of even within dsa you can sort of stake out your position and you fight for it and you organize for it and like it's the same thing that like lyndon and the Bolsheviks did. You know what I mean?

You can have disagreements with other factions in your organization. That doesn't mean that I'm throwing a wet blanket on the Ocasio-Cortez people. Yeah. Or that I hope I'm wrong about that. Yeah. I'm just saying my hunch is that

we're just gonna get snuffed out once we get people there. Right. Because obviously we're not gonna have the numbers anytime soon to do anything meaningful. That doesn't mean it's not preferable, but I'm saying we gotta go further.

Yeah. Well, you know, R.L. Stevens made an interesting point on Twitter, which is that, like, you know, Ocasio-Cortez is not saying that the things she's proposing are socialism in motion, they're not socialism in effect. They're just the bare minimum amount of reforms.

And that's, you know, and I agree with you. R.L.'s favorite descriptor is in motion. Yeah, yeah, it does like that. I like it too. I like it, it sounds good. It sounds, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I think what we have to do is we're talking about offering an entirely new systemic alternative. All right.

And I don't see room to do that within the Democratic Party. But also, I don't think it's any more crazy or irrational than thinking we're going to take over the Democratic Party. Yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? No. Only because, only because. That seems extremely utopian. crazier or irrational than thinking we're going to take over the democratic party yeah yeah you know what i'm saying no only because only because extremely utopian like i think a lot of people would hear me say that and then and and i held this position a year ago maybe six months ago even like we got to operate within that system yeah i think people would hear me say that and say well you know we'll look at msnbc's having this thing they're talking about dsa's uh what they believe which was mainstreamed mainstreamed our position pelosi's on the ropes

like all these people are on the ropes and all this stuff and it's just like what you're forgetting is that these people are so committed to being the loyal opposition that they're willing to stop at nothing to hold on to power yeah okay they're willing they're chancing getting murdered in the streets to hold on to power because people are that angry yeah well they'll be there's probably no shortage of people that want to see chuck schumer fucking laying in a hole somewhere you know what i'm saying well they have no actual moral imperative or outrage or whatever about child concentration camps or any of these other things no they're all about self-preservation and self-interest they may

hate it in the sense that like okay that you know like that's a bad thing and like uh obviously that's like i but my hunch is that deep down they probably just look at the republicans like y'all are fucking up the bag right now yeah yeah we could just stay in power but y'all insist on doing all this wild shit you know i mean like we ain't challenging you just kind of calm down a little bit they don't realize that conservatives actually believe they actually have a politics yeah they actually believe in what they say. Yeah. And that's fucking terrifying. That's terrifying. I used to just think

that these people were just appealing to the lowest common denominator, but I don't think that's true anymore. I think these people really do want what they say they want,

and they believe it. 100%. Yeah. Let me take a quick break. I gotta pee real really bad i've been drinking coffee all morning but I'm not mine. Here Inside Inside Clap your hands, clap your hands

Can't see for any sound You lose the loathing running my heart You are just a moment's hate I got a follow from a real good Teacot account this morning. Did you? I think her name is Gretchen Smith. Oh, dude, I went down. Damn, are you a Teacot darling now? I guess so.

I went down a rabbit hole last night because I was reading a bunch of... How did I get into this? I was reading a bunch of Twitter comments about... I guess it was the shooting, probably, if I had to guess. But anyways, the teacots are really into dog tags. Huge into dog tags. What do you mean?

I don't know. They just like wearing them. Really? Yeah, I guess so. That's the definition of stealing valor. Yeah. Do you remember when that was in vogue in the mid-2000s like rappers would wear the iced out dog tags?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to return to this idea of conservatives having politics, a politic. And the reason why is because, again, I recommend you listen to that David Harvey interview. I found it pretty fascinating. And one of the things he said that I did find pretty fascinating was so we still live under what you could call neoliberalism.

Yeah. Essentially. And the policies that the Trump administration is trying to implement are neoliberal for all intents and purposes. Deregulation and, you know, all these other things. If I was smart, I could actually tell you what the... Carry on. Deregulation, neoliberal banking policies, low interest rates, all this other shit.

But he pointed out that what you're starting to see now, and you're starting to see a politics based around this, and actually the politics for this has been in existence for a long time. It's just that it didn't have a vehicle really until guys like Bannon and Breitbart and all these people started coming along. Yeah. Is a form of governance which is antithetical to the neoliberal form and and it is very bleak and he would he refers to it as basically sort of like an ethno-state autarky like so for example these tariffs that you're seeing these highly protectionist measures which is sort of antithetical to what the neolibs believe you know um which is free trade

and a globalized economy and all this that's one example another one is limiting immigration so that like you can uh create more or so that there are more jobs available for good americans you know what i'm saying so basically basically what you're doing is you are running society in a way it's a new economic model yeah and so and it's going to be very bleak it's going to be very it's obviously we're already seeing some of the uh the effects of it you know what i mean like the concentration camps and all that yeah and so in the face of that like we the democrats have nothing to offer because they are almost apolitical they believe in technocratic solutions and just running society in this technocratic business-like way. They don't have a politics or a vision for what society could be.

And the left's challenge is to present that political vision. And when I see guys like the Hawaii guy who was running, whatever, Kanila Ng, is that his name? I forget now, but he was like, no guys, you're not dreaming. That's MSNBC. That's MSNBC propagating our platform, whatever he said.

We don't have time for this. We're running out of time. We're running out of space. You know what I mean like we capitalism obviously is consuming itself it's it's uh you know you've got this you've got these you know and david harvey talks about this like what capitalism is now is just adding zeros onto things and creating more and more debt and not you more debt and foreclosing on the future. And when you've got that combined with what is looking to be like an ethno-national sort of autarky way of running the economy,

this protectionist, aggressive way of running the economy, like, our sort of democratic socialist proposals to that are incredibly milquetoast, in my opinion. Yeah. They're not going to fix the problem. They're not going to fix... I don't even think that's the intent, too. Yeah, Yeah.

Like, I think. It's a it's a dark situation, man. I don't think it's by design. I don't think they're meant to address any of those things. I don't. I think that the idea is to at best what the Democrats want is just kind of like to have kind of dysfunctional government where like you know they take the ball for a couple years and then the republicans do it then we just go with that back and forth because that keeps everybody in power yeah republicans aren't interested in that no because they're actually good at politics yeah they're terrible at governance

they're very good at politics well i was reading this I told you I was sort of going down the teacot rabbit hole last night and I was reading this one guy this one tweet had like 8,000 retweets and whatever and this fucking guy was like this guy was like like you know oh

if they don't want to be if they can't learn our language and whatever like this is America they should get out or whatever a comment like that you know, oh, if they can't learn our language and whatever, like, this is America, they should get out or whatever. A comment like that eight years ago would have been seen as like, oh, that's just what Republicans believe, whatever. Now you're seeing that it actually is genocidal. I mean, obviously, if you had half a brain,

you would have read that eight years ago and thought that it was genocidal. but now it actually has purchase because it's tied to a larger political economic vision yeah and there are people that want to implement that and so that's what's at stake yeah you know and and off and just positioning ourselves just a little farther to the left of people like kristen gillibrand and all this, running socialists in the Democratic Party, I'm not convinced that those things are going to address that. Right. And I think it's fine to be critical of that. And again, you know, it's just like,

I think it's just like you said, man. It's just like we're we're we've we've run we're running out of time we're running you know what i'm saying yeah it's like you know what they said about the long run we're all fucking dead you know i mean it's complicated because you need a you need a long-term vision about how we're going to implement this, obviously. And it's why it ultimately is detrimental to get really hung up on things like Anthony Kennedy retiring or the Janus decision or these other heinous things going on right now. You know what I mean. I don't mean it like don't get hung up on it. I'm just meaning it's crucial to have a long-term vision for how we're going to change those things.

But that's not to say that we aren't running out of time because we are. Yeah. And if it wasn't just climate change, we're talking about like what I was saying, a system in which the future is foreclosed upon for the vast majority of people in this country. Yeah. In some form or other, whether it's through debt, peonage, or whatever. Yeah. And so. You just said peonage, like peonage.

Peonage? How do you say that? Well, no, you said it right, but like, you mean like the process of being, or the act of being a peon? A peon? No. I'm a peon. I'm a peon. I get debt collector calls all the time.

I feel bad for my parents. They're all the time getting letters from debt collectors. My mom's like, is there something going on? Are you okay? I'm just like, yeah. I'm just not paying my bills. I'm just not paying my fucking debt. All right.

We're running out of time, Mom. We're running out of time. I'm hopefully just. Yeah, if they're going to round us all up and shoot us in the head anyway, I'm at least going to fucking enjoy what little money I bring in right now. Well, I don't know. I just feel very disappointed uh i just feel that it's very inadequate to posit this sort of democratic socialist vision and say you know and

just ride that full steam ahead yeah and well and you know and that's your thing that's fine you know and i do have a lot of respect for people that actually work and canvas and organize for that. It's a fucking big thing. And it's not like, and again, obviously it's preferable to having fucking Joe Crowley, you know, whatever. I'm just saying that we should temper our expectations and also not put that pressure on Ocasio-Cortez. Oh, I know. That's the thing. I've been reading all these headlines and articles.

Who is this new hero? It's just like, that is so much pressure to put on one single individual. And she's going to let you down. I've seen this before. I've, you know, again. And through no fault of her own. It's just. Yeah.

It's like, look, we got burnt with Obama in 2008. In the same way that if Bernie. We got burnt with Bernie in 2016. Yeah, and if he would have won, we would have been burned, so to speak. The don't don't. Hell yeah, we would have, man. Yeah, but... Hell, I failed it already when we were out there voting for him.

It's the same thing with her, too. And, you know, I don't know. I look at it like this. I look at it like this. I look at it like this. I look at it like there's these jobs, okay, 300 and something of them in Congress. And there's, like, I look at it as like, okay, do I want the mayor of my town,

even in this system, to be sympathetic to my ideas and worldview yes right you know what I'm saying right like I don't think that's a bad thing right what I'm saying though is that your strategy that strategy of like the socialist insurgents in the democratic party is a much bigger job than you think it is, and it's no more or less crazy than people over here wanting to upend the system. That's what I'm saying. Like, I'm not mad at Ocasio-Cortez.

I mean, that excited me. Yeah. But, again, that is, in some ways, it's almost a bigger project than upending the system. Yeah, because look at the task ahead. I mean, you've got to like... You have the most powerful people in the world with the most advanced military in the world wanting to quell your way by any means necessary in an effort to stay in power i think that with the existing party

infrastructure that we have i i think that like if you're going to the masses or whatever with a a vision i'm just not convinced they're going to get excited about that i'm just not convinced that they're going to be like yeah yeah, let's reform the Democratic Party. Let's turn it around and actually make it respond to our needs and whatever. I'm not convinced that that's going to work. Yeah. I mean, call me a cool, aloof radical. I mean, but there's room to debate all that stuff.

We don't need to be getting down each other's throat about that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, I mean, even if we do, again, this being good faith this is politics it's politics when i say that i mean i mean it in the same way that i mean politics with the conservatives i do ultimately want to defeat the people who think that way too yeah i mean because if you truly believe in what you believe in if you're passionate about it you want to see a better world, then you'll fight for it.

And you won't let, I don't know, you won't let people sort of shame you into being, I mean, I'm saying this more as projection, because I really do get down about this sometimes. I get in my own head about it, and I'm like, you know, I'm just a kook. I'm a wingnut. That's what I

feel like sometimes. But I don't know. Anyways, You know I'm just a kook I'm a wingnut That's what I feel like sometimes Yeah Yeah But I don't know Anyways It's early on a Friday morning And I'm having a hard time making Impassioned Please Because I haven't had anything to eat yet

I've only had a bunch of coffee You got a case of the Mondays on Friday I got a case of the Mondays on Friday I don't think we're gonna do do an episode next week, right? Maybe not. Are you going to do one? Maybe not. I don't know.

I'll be out of town. I probably won't. Let's call it what it is. I probably won't. I won't piss on you until it's raining. We're taking next week off. Yeah, I'll be out of town. The last few episodes we've had have been like an hour and a half long

so there's plenty of content there people go back and listen to the episode before this in which we're much more impassioned and uh hopeful i'm just feeling pretty saft of energy to be honest and i think a lot of people are feeling that way yeah that's all i keep saying i mean it's all i keep saying is people being like you know um i'm exhausted like i i i'm overwhelmed and i think that like a good antidote to that um and again i feel like i just cribbed most of my ideas from katie sleninger but a good antidote to that is Marxism. And taking a sort of long-term systemic view of these things and just stepping back,

that doesn't mean you have to ignore all of the heinous, just fucking blood spilling all around us. But it just means that you take a step back and you look at like who the players are where capital is flowing you know where people are being dispossessed and having the boot put to their neck and um yeah and just use your you have all the skills use your analytical clarity to clarity to look at what's going on right now and ask yourself, like, is democratic socialism or whatever, is it adequate to engaging with the problems and issues of our time? And I don't think that it is.

and issues of our time and and i don't think that it is and if you know if you say oh well communist we've tried communism and it didn't work whatever um a good response to that is let's not act like capitalism doesn't have its fair share of l's but yeah well that's another thing about it it's like if you're feeling insane right now like you're going crazy and you feel very overwhelmed just remember that you live in an insane system yeah you live in a system suicidal system yeah exactly a suicide a system that has to destroy itself periodically i think about those mites that live in our eyelashes you were talking about our our Halloween episode. Oh, yeah.

Eat their mother from the inside out. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's the system we live in. Adactylidium. Adactylidium. That's a good metaphor for our current state of affairs. And that's another thing David Harvey points out in his new book. That he used that analogy.

He used the analogy of madness. You live in a system that is quite literally mad. There's no rationality to it. It is all fueled on speculation. It is all fueled on... It's fueled on, really, defying things that are natural, like, natural, like, uh, finite resources, finite geography, time, and, and, and what it is, is it, it, yeah, it's fueled on speculation, on adding more and

more zeros, and more money, and it's just, like, infinite growth, there's nothing sane about that, there's nothing rational about any of it, so it's totally natural to feel totally overwhelmed, and like you're losing your fucking mind yeah i don't know um yeah this has been therapy with t-ray and i wanted to talk about the new drake album but yeah did you say listen to it no i'm gonna get around take my first spin with it yeah probably might report back on that week after next oh we there yeah i guess we could yeah did you stay up to listen to it nah I'm gonna get ready to take my first spin with it yeah probably might report back on that week after next oh yeah I guess we could

talk about culture that is one thing we do on this show from time to time yeah we yeah or experience I had a pretty good canoe trip I saw the biggest snapping turtle I've ever seen in my life and there's something that really it does something to you I mean it's like I saw the biggest snapping turtle I've ever seen in my life.

And there's something that really does something to you. I mean, it's like something so big. You know, because we've sort of eradicated most of the large fauna in this country. You know, and you see something like that that's so massive. It's prehistoric, you know. It looks just insane. It just really does something. It just activates something primal deep inside of you.

Yeah. I helped a snap and tore out the road the other day. Did you really? Yeah, I was afraid to. You know you're not supposed to grab them by the tail because that can fuck up their vertebrae. So you're supposed to. They've almost got little handles under the backside of their shell. Yeah.

You got to be careful because they got a long ass neck. Yeah, they can reach around there and get you good. They'll get your ass. But I opted to do none of those. I scooped, I like, got my tennis racket

under him and kind of flipped him up on my racket. Like a pancake? Yeah. Like a big turtle pancake and carried him to the other side

of the road and put him in. Just fucking flipping him. Yeah. I saw a lot of cool wildlife, man. I got to see a muskrat. A real muskrat, huh?

A real muskrat, very up close. I got a really good picture of it. A weasel. A weasel? A weasel. You sure you didn't talk about Alex? Yeah, man. Yeah, that's another thing.

I know it's a very privileged thing to be able to do that stuff, but, man, you got to get into, you got to watch natural systems at work sometimes. There's a huge fish called musky in the New River. I've heard of musky. You've heard of musky? Man, you forget I'm from out west, man. These huge sharks called hammerheads.

I don't think we got the musky out west, alright? These big cats, man, I think they call them cougars. Yeah, these big... Yeah, muskies have teeth. They'll fuck you up. Yeah, and they eat other fish. Yeah, they're like pike or gar, like big, almost barracuda-like.

Yeah. Not quite as big, but... Yeah, no. It's good to watch natural systems at work. I've been really learning about trees lately. I've been really into trees lately. Like, did you know... I don't know if i was telling you this the other day you can go out into the forest and um if you find uh you know you can find a little sort of beach tree like the size of your wrist or whatever um that doesn't just the size does

not mean that it's like a sapling, that it's young. They work in concert with other... It doesn't have big dick energy. I was going for a big dick energy joke there, but I pulled back. Yeah, I could see the look on your face. That's too easy. Yeah. No, they're very communal. Trees and tree, I mean, individual tree species are communal.

They're not individually competitive. Trees, I mean, individual tree species are communal. They're not individually competitive. So the mother tree will make her offspring live for like 80 years sometimes just in a small state, a little small state. Trees are mama's boys. Right. And trees are helicopter parents. Yeah, you could say that.

The ultimate. But it's not like a hierarchical thing. Right, and then once... Trees are helicopter parents. Yeah, you could say that. The ultimate. But it's not like a hierarchical thing. They're just looking out for everybody. They're looking out for the finite amount of resources in their little ecosystem. And so, yeah, when the mama tree will go down, you can't really gender it because a lot of trees are both male and female.

Hey, buddy, what's up? Yeah, some trees will even, they're at risk of pollinating themselves. And so they've devised all kinds of elaborate systems and ways of disseminating. Not impregnating themselves. Not impregnating themselves, right. Using bees and other pollinators and stuff like that. Trees can. If you're a bee, you're just a pawn in the tree's game.

You're just a pawn in the tree's game. Right. Yeah, no, some trees will also release certain chemicals that will be very bitter. Like if a certain sort of bug or invasive species is trying to eat at it. Yeah, it'll release chemicals that are disgusting. If a certain sort of bug or invasive species is trying to eat at it, it'll release chemicals that are disgusting. People need to study trees. They work well together.

They're very communal. They communicate with one another and share resources through fungal networks underground. They got everything you need for a good... Trees have a bitch and not life actually funny so funny you mentioned that they don't because they need sleep at night um scientists have documented this they'll hang their branches they they sort of droop their branches down but you know in the sun in the daytime they perk back up and that's why in cities trees that live on the side of the road or whatever

have a much shorter life expectancy than trees out in the forest because they've got all this light pollution and you know street lights whatever they need to be able to sleep yeah and so if you're just constantly subjecting it to i can't get you sleep for all this damn racket going on down there a big a big debate in my mind right now is what do you pull for? Ecosocialism or sort of industrialized robot communism? And it's hard. Maybe

there is a sort of balance between them. They both have their charms. Right. Maybe there is a sort of... But I really like, you know, natural systems. You're an eco guy? I guess so. I guess i am too just by virtue of being a provincial you mean like living out here is that you mean i just that's kind of the classy way to say hillbilly i've never heard that before the one being from the provinces. That makes sense.

George Eliot, Middle March. The subtitle is A Study of Provincial Life in England or something like that. I can't remember what it was. Yeah. Were we provincials? I think so. The provincials.

Damn. Well, okay. In conclusion, study trees. You know, if we haven't convinced you to at least look into communism. Give it a look. Study trees. They've got, they're pretty good communists.

Like I said, they're not individually competitive. They share resources. Not jealous. They can impregnate themselves if they choose to. I guess if we wipe out the bees They will have to Right Let's call it

This will be the first hour long episode We've had in a while Thank god People are probably not happy That we've been getting so digressive Anyways Like I said, no episode next week.

Maybe we can play that clip of the teacher in Dazed and Confused. It's like, just remember everybody, whenever you're celebrating your 4th of July barbecue, this country was built on by a bunch of slave owning. That's right.

Anyways, we'll see you all in hell.