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Been making my through the last several episodes and just wanted to point out something that was driving me nuts but I'm sure no one else cares about. That Soldier of Fortune article from 2012 that was quoted is (shockingly) wrong when it says Ian Smith was the Governor of Rhodesia. He was actually the Prime Minister, and the actual Governor (appointed by the British) tried to dissolve Smith's government, and Smith basically put him under house arrest for the next four years until the governor finally decided to give up the ghost and go back to Britain. Which is important because the governor being put under house arrest and flying the Union Jack from the high commission was a sign that Smith's claim to be pro-UK monarchy but anti-UK government was a big lie. My dissertation was on Zimbabwean history which is the only reason I feel compelled to point this out. If anyone is interested, two good books on Soldier of Fortune and the American right in general's involvement in Rhodesia are Gerald Horne's "From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980" and Kyle Burke's "Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War." MonsieurChoc posted:Oh man I love Fantasy. I've got a bunch of WFRP books and the Geneviève novels. Kim Newman is a really good author. He's like the personification of 1970s British genre TV. Which is a know is an odd niche but his work gets that tone perfectly.
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Apr 7, 2020 19:16
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Samovar posted:I would like/probably hate to hear why he delivered a eulogy at Strom Thurmond's funeral. I mean... you probably already know why, in your heart.
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Apr 9, 2020 14:19
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I remember it came out that Mel Gibson at one point wanted to make a movie adaptation of O'Reilly's novel and even got the rights for a time. That seems like a match made in heaven.
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Apr 13, 2020 03:50
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From comments both of them have made, he doesn't seem to be widely liked in the family. I know at one point one of his aunts was making fun of him on Twitter and he blocked her.
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Apr 13, 2020 14:04
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I haven't listened to the episodes yet but I do love that Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche were prison cellmates. Though I'm willing to bet that the conversations were mostly LaRouche ranting with Bakker as a captive audience.
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May 7, 2020 16:53
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Hastings Banda, first president of Malawi, was also a medical doctor.
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May 22, 2020 20:57
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DC Murderverse posted:he does not appear to have committed a massacre, he was stuck on the "murder political enemies" and "establish diplomatic relationships with apartheid states" of terrible leadership. With that at least I am willing to give him some small leeway, considering that Malawi/Nyasaland was (and remains) very poor, with a large population, and a huge portion of its economy was the remittances sent by migrant laborers working in the Rhodesias and South Africa. The first African trade union in South Africa was started by a Nyasa migrant worker, and the first president of Zambia was the son of a Nyasa migrant. And the South African Detente was at least part of the reason why South Africa cut off support for Rhodesia in the last few years of the latter's existence. But even with that nuance, it's not a great position to take, for obvious reasons. There's a reason why Banda was arguably the most important nationalist leader in Central Africa in the period of the Federation, and then immediately bombed that reputation by recognizing South Africa.
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May 22, 2020 23:08
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Wohl is like a Nathan for You skit that has become (marginally) self-aware.
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Jun 5, 2020 18:33
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Started listening to the Mad Mike Hoare episodes. The start of the first one on H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain, Congo, and the Lost World genre leads me to shamelessly plug an article I wrote on that topic, based on a chapter I wrote for my dissertation: https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/18/hunting-dinosaurs-africa/
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Jun 12, 2020 01:04
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GunFondler42069 posted:this is a great article and I may steal parts of this shamelessly for an episode Absolutely! Knock yourself out. It would be an honor.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:39
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I've been catching up on some past episodes, and got through the Paul Manafort one. I live in Connecticut and his family's Manafort Construction company is still very much a thing, and it is really weird to constantly see construction sites with the Manafort name plastered everywhere. They get a lot of city contracts from the current (Republican) mayor of New Britain, too. Though not sure if they've gotten any business from the Indian casinos.
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Jun 14, 2020 23:53
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Bust Rodd posted:Well there are a non-zero number of people who trace the current COVID-19 deaths to the Trump Administration...and they believe that Steve Bannon used internet trolls to help Trump win the election... and those trolls came from 4chan... which is the run off of Something Awful... Not to mention the Slenderman stabbings. Actually speaking of 4chan wasn't there a mass shooter who posted on SA, too?
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Jun 28, 2020 17:55
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DC Murderverse posted:just do a "The Bastards of Something Awful". Lowtax, Caro, Helldump, make a brief mention of Aatrek (but don't do an entire episode on him because that would be a bummer) Any hypothetical "Bastards of SA" episode could be lightened by mentioning some of the less bastardy and more merely assholery things the site is responsible for, like sending Pitbull to Alaska or getting Smash Mouth to eat two dozen eggs cooked by Guy Fieri.
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Jun 29, 2020 19:32
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Bust Rodd posted:I’m sorry but in general I really don’t think any Billionaire should be in charge of our country and Oprah is like kind of a cool person with an amazing back story but she’s also a cult leader with more media power than Rupert loving Murdoch, I’m sorry but I don’t trust her. Same poo poo with the Mark Cuban episode, no one has ever made a billion dollars by respecting the people who work for them. Not for nothing, when Trump first ran for president in 2000 he said he wanted Oprah as his VP.
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Jul 8, 2020 14:27
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Finished the Bill Cooper episodes, and the talk about how good the cover of Behold a Pale Horse is reminded me of how I once taught a class on conspiracy theories, and I went over Cooper briefly. At the end of the semester a student told me that she looked up Behold a Pale Horse after I mentioned it, liked the cover, bought it, and had started reading it. Not one of the better ends of the semester, though hopefully the class had sunk in enough that she didn't take it as the truth.
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Jul 20, 2020 02:30
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Or like the Quaker Oats radiation study. Basically Quaker Oats funded an MIT study on how the body absorbs radiation, which it did by creating a bogus "science club" at a school for mentally handicapped boys and secretly feeding them oatmeal that had been laced with radioactive materials. The crazy thing is that Quaker Oats did this to get good promotion at a time when they were competing against Cream of Wheat, and this is part of the reason why Quakers Oats became so dominant and Cream of Wheat faded.
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Aug 13, 2020 19:41
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Okay, now someone HAS to make them eat some eggs as penance.
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Sep 8, 2020 17:21
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Speaking of the Tikal anecdote at the start of part 2, Gallo is pretty good.
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Sep 24, 2020 16:39
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Speaking to a comment made at the end of the last episode, I'd love an episode on Matt Drudge. Also somewhat related to Focus on the Family, when I was in college Ralph Reed came by campus to give a talk, though I have no idea why given this was a really small, very liberal Quaker school. I had the dubious honor of talking with him for a few minutes in the student union before I realized who he was. Now that's another good nominee for a BtB episode.
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Oct 3, 2020 19:37
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I read Robert Rotberg's book on the creation of Zambia and Malawi for my dissertation research. Came out shortly after those countries became independent in the mid-60s but was a pretty good political history. If anyone's interested in how Rhodes was remembered into the 1930s, there's a 1936 British biopic of him called Rhodes of Africa, starring Walter Huston. It's available on YouTube (actually used to be streaming on Netflix until not too long ago, surprisingly) and the end is basically Paul Kruger forgiven Rhodes for the Jameson Raid, then smash cutting to the end of the Boer War to show how Kruger forgiving Rhodes led to the unity of the white races in Africa. Lobengula is also played by Lobengula's actual nephew.
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Oct 8, 2020 19:48
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Just listened to the Jordan Peterson episodes. A lot new in there for me, especially the first one, and I liked the comparison of Peterson to Joseph Campbell. But I do have one quibble about the end of the second episode. As far as I know, Mikayla Peterson isn't married to the pick-up artist, the PUA is the guy she's seeing on the side, after having left her husband in Russia to look after Jordan while she went clubbing in Serbia.
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Oct 22, 2020 19:47
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The podcast Failed State Update just did a few episodes on a specific case from the Satanic Panic involving a group called the Finders, and how both the Finders and the law enforcement panic about them prefigured QAnon, for those interested in more content along these lines.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:10
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Listening to the second Satanic Panic episode made me realize how much overlap there was between the Satanic Panic and the explosion of alien abduction lore happening at the same time in the 1980s. Not only the actual accounts (repressed memories, quasi-medical experiments, reproduction, etc.) but also the methodology of people promoting it (hypnosis, gaslighting, even Oprah promotion). Does anyone know of any article or book that looks at this connection?
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Oct 29, 2020 19:55
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That's Lobstertainment!
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Nov 1, 2020 22:47
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But a lot of that is the developments in the UFO culture starting in the late 1970s from people like Budd Hopkins, Paul Bennewitz, Stanton Friedman, and John Lear. I mean, the Hills did have the element of hypnosis and the putative pregnancy test for Betty, but there wasn't really anything "experimental" beyond that, and no hybridization or the like. That's all stuff that really begins to emerge with Hopkins' 1981 Missing Time, who also cements the idea that aliens will walk into your bedroom at night, the idea that "phantom pregnancies" are alien impregnation and then harvesting them, and standardizes the Grey look and particularly sets up networks of hypnotic memory retrieval of abductees that sounded exactly like the Satanic Panic hypnotists. And the same time there's the Dulce Base theory that's emerging with a network of government insiders who are selling out American children to aliens living in underground tunnels, the "ritual" mutilation of animals, kids being abducted to see their missing "siblings" on alien ships, etc. All of which is introduced to the UFO lore in the 1980s at this exact time. Even Area 51/Roswell is from the late 1970s, with its cabal of pro-alien government figures hiding the truth from honest Americans. If anything, I think modern UFO culture tends to be a lot more from this than from the 1940s/50s/60s UFO culture which was a lot more nuts and bolts in their approach, and were very apprehensive about even talking about who were actually inside the ships. A lot of UFO people in the 60s were very wary of the Hills for that reason, talking about the ships was one thing, but talking about the occupants was beyond the pale for them.
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Nov 2, 2020 19:55
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I like the one about how CitiBank is there to help you through these hard times. I heard another one that was basically a short interview with some financial company PR person about how feminism has impacted female investment girlbosses. The one from the Mental Floss guy about gardening is also pretty bad, but mainly just because I feel like I can actually hear the smirk in his voice.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:13
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I'd love a Tim Pool one. I feel like he's the person in the general alt-right-o-sphere I know the least about, beyond the fact that he makes his henchmen live in a compound with him and he wears a beanie to hide his bald spot.
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Nov 25, 2020 01:34
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Just going from what Robert dug up in the episode, it seems like Islamophobia is the thing that started moving Rubin to the right (inasmuch as he was ever actually on the left). That also seems like a very aughts "intellectual" trend, particularly with people mentioned in the episode like Sam Hyde and Bill Maher.
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Nov 25, 2020 14:59
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I got some female empowerment athleisure ad for Q Clearance, which was especially funny because I feel like the target demo for that athleisure brand is probably the same group of Instagram influencers who got sucked into QAnon this year.
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Dec 4, 2020 03:24
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On the subject of potential topics, I know they came up a bit on the Andy Ngo episode but Claire Lehmann/Quillette could make for a good episode.
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Dec 9, 2020 00:27
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Thompson and his game crusade is also interesting because on the one hand you can link it to a ton of far-right views that were emerging in the 90s especially in reaction to Clinton's election, but also because the impact he had on 90s Democrats trying to ride his coattails - it's not a coincidence the 2000 Democratic ticket were composed of the two most anti-game Democratic politicians. Plus he pioneered a lot of the claims that the gun industry them jumped on after Columbine to deflect blame onto culture. Thompson works as a good microcosm of the whole US 90s political scene with Democratic centrist triangulation and Republican deep-dive off the right.
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Dec 11, 2020 18:46
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For whatever reason, a lot of the moral panic on the right is back to attacking Hollywood, rather than games. Probably because the Hollywood execs have a lot more money and audience to promote their generally liberal messages (everyone knows when an actor endorses Biden, when's the last time you remember Nolan North or Troy Baker talking politics?) but also that Gamergate and the crusade against "online censorship" became so central to the new radical right (see also vaping and anime). Actually that also might be an interesting subset of an episode on Thompson, the evolution of morality crusades with games on the right.
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Dec 11, 2020 20:23
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i am curious if we will get an episode or two or so on the capital capitol coup. like it sounds like house reps and senators and such may have legit helped plan this poo poo beyond the "cruz and trump screamed poo poo until it bit their faces" type deal. i guess we will see. Could be a good pairing with the 1930s Business Plot.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:51
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Considering that Scott Adams used to write a lot about being in MENSA, that doesn't surprise me at all.
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Jan 30, 2021 22:26
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After The War posted:My SO was involved in the decision to dis-invite Baen Book's publisher as Editor Guest of Honor from this year's Worldcon for refusing to moderate the house forums that have been taken over by Nazis. SA has been our go-to example that moderation is possible on a forum platform. Considering that Baen Books' stable of authors pretty much span the political gamut from far-right to outright neo-Nazi that doesn't surprise me at all. I always found it funny that like their one non-right author (Eric Flint) is also an outright communist. Robert, Baen Books might be a good topic for a future episode, I'm sure they were responsible for turning a LOT of nerds to the far-right in the 80s and 90s, and could work as a way to talk about the absurd right-wing extremism of the standard military-SF/space opera genre in general.
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Feb 28, 2021 04:58
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People here might be interested that the Know Your Enemy podcast (which does deep dives on the history of American conservatism from a leftist perspective) also just released an hour and a half episode on Rush a day or two ago. It might be a good complement to this if anyone is dying (heh) to hear more about Rush, as their episode is less biographical and more about the connections between Rush and the "conservative intellectuals" and how the latter weren't really as different from the supposedly more crass type that Rush unleashed. They also made some interesting observations about the fairness doctrine and how its demise leading to Rush's rise is at least partially a retroactive justification, and how during the 80s some major conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Gingrich championed its use and it getting gutted by Reagan was less a vendetta against the doctrine specifically and more just part of Reagan's general deregulation ideology.
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Mar 12, 2021 04:57
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I'm from Connecticut and it's almost entirely a mix of England or Bible place names, with the occasional standout. Probably the most notable of which is East Berlin.
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Apr 7, 2021 01:23
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Yeah, I've never listened to Chapo or Cum Town or any of those and Blowback was still great. I mean, it's a straightforward limited-series history of the Iraq War. I guess one of the hosts of Blowback is on Chapo as far as I know but I promise, you can even be uncertain of that, as I am, and still enjoy Blowback. Looking forward to their new season on the Cuban Missile Crisis, too.
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Apr 23, 2021 17:05
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My John Ringo story: I saw him at a convention (I think DragonCon) something like 15 years ago, and he was really pissed off that he didn't get similar numbers to his event that the Star Wars authors got. He also said he was going to try not to swear because there were kids in the audience and swore anyways.
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Jun 7, 2021 03:16
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Robert, if you still read this thread, I want to repeat my request for a Tim Pool episode.
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Nov 18, 2021 00:07
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