Premium 117: Raceception (w/ special guest Aaron Thorpe)

The episode Not All Dogs is pretty great

There was one recently where Tom made Tarence recall the time he got busy with a war criminal lol (I can't remember which episode)

(The following is not said with any mean heartedness or snark - just want to advance the dialectic. I love you guys and will never stop supporting. Well, not until the hellish scourge of prostatitis is rid from the earth (and Tom and Tarence's balls 😘) Pretty disappointed in how goofy the materialist analysis of Jessica Krug got. Hear me out! I believe that we, on the left, have an urgent imperative to stop engaging in racial essentialism and pseudo science. 1) it mucks up a clear analysis of any sort (materialist or otherwise) and 2) at this point we KNOW that race is scientifically and socially unsupportable, and therefore has no material, biological basis (https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/04/we-need-to-abolish-race/). How is it that, broadly speaking, we've managed to de-essentialize gender from sex more clearly and quickly than "race"? (rhetorical) Put another way, we need to be careful not to do what liberals do and mistake race for an objectified and axiomatic truth rather than colonial processes/constructs whose boundaries depend on power, land and labor, which are then rationalized based on stereotypes about physical characteristics/phenotypes - and not the other way around (I will cite @drjonathanrosa here, whose language I am using). But to the case of Krug, specifically, I think a more cogent materialist analysis of her "race" fraud is right there in the word. It all goes back to improving her material circumstances vis-a-vis her career in the academy! As a result of there being fewer and fewer opportunities for secure, well-paid, dignified careers in the academy - as well as the broader economy - and some of that already small number being reserved for "diverse candidates," boom! Now an (average) white scholar gets a better shot at a decent life as an academic by muscling in on the territory reserved for the marginalized, a muuuuch smaller pool which they are better positioned to dominate due to their relative proximity to resources and institutional know-how. We just finished clowning the fuck out of our favorite Pretendian, E Warren, a couple months ago for doing this very same thing! I work in the tech industry and I see this happen all the time. It's a pretty exploitable grift tbh. Lastly, I think a lot of racial discourse and outrage about people "pretending" to be black/hispanic/brown or whatever is because a lot of marginalized folks have kinda slowly adopted an understanding of race that utilizes the logics of property rights. "I am [insert group], and as such only we are able to lay an exclusive and monetizable claim to [insert essentialized behavior, stereotype, pathology, aesthetic, etc.] in the market. Be that in the market of ideas, the actual labor market, or free market of commodities and services" More than "being Black is cool *right now*" as Aaron opined. Being Black/Playing to a white gaze of a fetishized Blackness/Lauding Black Aesthetics, etc. is highly profitable! We've got to challenge race through the logics of property rights too, as leftists I think. It perpetuates the racialization of social life and undercuts the cause of universalism and solidarity. It's ALL about the benjamins, baby! Thanks to Comrade Omar for reminding us 😉

I'm only 10 years older than yall but sometimes that makes all the difference in what random pop culture shit we remember! The gay cowboy song is a cover of Latin-country (Texas native) Ned Sublette's 80s song by the same name. Willie released it along with a funny line-dancing video that got a lot of MTV circulation towards the end of the Bush era, a few months after Brokeback Mountain, when supporting gay marriage was the defining feature of liberal identity. Willie's on the soundtrack too with a Dylan cover. No opinion either way on whether Willie's ever sucked a dick, but he was vocally pro-gay marriage, and the video of line-dancing gay cowboys was similar in spirit to more recent liberal depictions of Trump kissing Putin: a culture war thing intended to excite the libs and piss off the religious right. I think it's funny that you mentioned both things in the episode. Pansy Division covered the song too btw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MI5rtgor68

haven't listened yet but just want 2 run this idea by u: Amy McGrath cucking Mitch McConnell with Elaine Chao y/n/m?

I just became a patron and have been listening for a couple months. What are some of the best episodes I missed?

Nathan Gleason

Just wanted to share this relevant photo after listening to todays (9/10) free episode: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/09/10/opinion/10Sokolove1/merlin_176500839_6ff73459-a023-48ef-a020-f3479133f034-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=1200

Fellow Worker

Aaron impersonating Jessica Krug and saying “as a former black woman” was so damn funny. Great episode.

Thanks for the episode, way to engage the dialectics. I really enjoyed this one and the convo around race. Much love.

This is a really great episode. One thing that makes my head spin is to see 60’s black radical groups being venerated without regard to the fact that class politics were central to their focus and philosophy. You would know that by listening to 10 seconds of any Bob Lee or Fred Hampton speech. But who wants to listen to these “old cis men”? Great to hear Aaron on the show again.

Scott Moore

Tropic Thunder == raceception

If Jesus were alive today he’d be hawking some B A S E D Stirner memes.