『Sluggish Schizophrenia = Trump Derangement Syndrome?』のカバーアート

Sluggish Schizophrenia = Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Sluggish Schizophrenia = Trump Derangement Syndrome?

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
We open, as always, by taking our own temperature. Dr. Craig lands on a five and immediately gets talked up to a six, because he started rubbing his eyes thirty seconds in and Nick knows a bamboozle when he sees one. What's eating Craig isn't even a single event — it's the seesaw of fake ceasefires and fake treaties around Iran, and more than that, the way the American and British press keep credulously reporting each new claim as if the last one hadn't just collapsed. He calls it about the clearest example of captured media he's ever watched. Nick comes in at a seven, up from six, because this particular morning delivered a new low: Todd Blanche was confirmed as Attorney General.And the Blanche story is the perfect cold open for this episode, because it's a small, funny, infuriating preview of the show's whole theme — paperwork used to launder intent. Remember the $1.776 billion slush fund Trump was building to reward January 6th defendants? A few weeks back the administration threw everyone a bone and said they'd stop pursuing it until Blanche was confirmed. We all took the win, because we're desperate for anything shaped like one. Turns out they didn't drop it — we just wanted to believe they had. Two Republicans who'd recently lost their primaries, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, held out on Blanche over exactly this. And the resolution is almost too on-the-nose: on Sunday they worked out a deal where Blanche pinky-promises, in ink, on hard stock paper — no PDF signature for old Todd Blanche — that he won't pursue the fund. It isn't legally binding. Trump didn't sign it. It's a prop. Now those two senators have a piece of paper to wave on their next TV hit so they can say they tried. A signature on a meaningless document, mistaken for a safeguard. Hold that image, because the whole episode is about it.From there we head home to Wisconsin, where things are about to get funky. Francesca Hong, a Madison state representative and committed Democratic Socialist, is on the verge of becoming the Democratic nominee for governor. Nick voted for her by absentee — honestly, as a protest vote, expecting her to pull maybe thirty percent and drag the eventual winner leftward. Instead every candidate with any juice has dropped out. Mandela Barnes, the strongest contender, folded last week. She was polling at 44 percent before he left. The primary's August 11th, so nothing's final, and her likely opponent, congressman Tom Tiffany, is running commercials that basically accuse her of witchcraft. It's the AOC question made local: what happens when the socialist isn't a spoiler anymore, but the frontrunner.The Hong surge also gives Craig a chance to draw a distinction he cares about — the difference between the democratic-socialist left doing the slow, unglamorous work of actually winning elections, and the online left that mostly performs politics for an audience. Which is how we get to Hasan Piker, and Craig is not a fan. He lays out why the biggest streamer on the left leaves him cold — the gap between the size of the platform and what it's actually building, the reach without the organizing, the influence that stays influence and never turns into power the way a Hong campaign is trying to. It's an honest bit of intra-left friction, delivered by the guy on the show most entitled to make the call.Then we close on the most ambitious single segment we've done: sluggish schizophrenia.In the 1960s, the most powerful psychiatrist in the Soviet Union, Andrei Snezhnevsky, invented a mental illness — because the KGB asked him to, and you didn't tell the KGB no. The genius of it was that you didn't need any symptoms to be diagnosed. Snezhnevsky defined the disease as slowly progressive, so the symptoms would simply show up later. And the symptoms he did name were things like an exceptional interest in philosophy, religion, and art; a struggle for the truth; and something he called reform delusion — the desire to improve the world. In a perfect society, wanting things to be better was, by definition, a sign you were sick. There was no sane reason to oppose the best country on earth, so opposition itself became the diagnosis. Thousands of dissidents were moved not to prisons but to psychiatric hospitals, to be cured, for an indeterminate length of time, of their need for justice.We tell it through the people it happened to. Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet, was one of a handful who demonstrated in Red Square in 1968 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia — one of the bravest public acts of the era. She was a new mother; she brought her infant son to the protest in his pram. Precisely because she was a new mother, the state didn't want the ugliness of a prison sentence, so it had her declared of unsound mind instead. And here's the line that says everything: they let her finish breastfeeding and weaning her baby before they committed her. Don't ever say the Soviet Union was a cruel place. Vladimir Bukovsky, the ...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません