Am late to this party, since I didn’t get a smart phone until 18 months ago, and even then just didn’t bother. But, thanks to, well, Dr Termagant, I finally started listening them, usually on long yomps up hills and around cities.
I listened to a bunch of politics ones, Meh. I listened to a few fan-podcasts of the wonderful show “Community” – also meh, I’m afraid (though The Darkest Timeline was okay, obvs).
Here’s a few that weren’t meh-
Citations Needed, episode 139- Of Meat and Men: How Beef Became Synonymous with Settler-Colonial Domination
“Beef. It’s what’s for dinner,” the baritone voices of actors Robert Mitchum and Sam Elliott told us in the 1990s. “We’re not gonna let Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cut America’s meat!” cried Mike Pence during a speech in Iowa last year. “To meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to, get this, America has to stop eating meat,” lamented Donald Trump adviser Larry Kudlow on Fox Business. Repeatedly, we’re reminded that red meat is the lifeblood of American culture, a hallmark of masculine power.
This association has lingered for well over a century. Starting in the late 1800s ,as white settlers expropriated Indigenous land killing Native people and wildlife in pursuit of westward expansion across North America, the development and promotion of cattle ranching — and its product: meat — was purposefully imbued with the symbolism of dominance, aggression, and of course, manliness.
There’s an associated animating force behind this messaging as well: the perception of waning masculinity in our settler-colonial society. Whether a reaction to the closure of the American West as a tameable frontier in the late 19th century or to the contemporary Right’s imagined threats of “soy boys” and a U.S. military that has supposedly gone soft under liberal command, the need to affirm a cowboy sense of manliness, defined and expressed through violence and domination, continues to take the form of consuming meat.
On this episode, we study the origins of the cultural link between meat eating and masculinity in settler-colonial North America; how this has persisted into the present day via right-wing charlatans like Jordan Peterson, Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson who panic over the decline of masculinity; and the social and political costs of the maintenance and preservation of Western notions of manliness.
Our guest is history professor and author Kristin Hoganson.
The Dig – Jesus and John Wayne w/ Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Dan interviews historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with the vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way.”
Philosophize This – (I listened to a couple of episodes about a gloomy guts Rumanian guy, Emil Cioran…
There were a bunch that I found particularly irritating. I think my major problem with them was the lack of research and the lack of interrogation of their own prejudices, and sloppy language (calling Extinction Rebellion a movement rather than a social movement organisation within a wider social movement). I found the recent (episode 31) of “Your Sea is on Fire particularly egregious, with its bizarre/silly view that pretty much everything was fine with XR until the Canning Town stunt…
But I am not going to waste my time and yours, gentle reader(s?) by writing about all the crap podcasts…
What podcasts do people like? Around social movements, transitions, technology, power, Community, etc
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