#ezra klein show

[robynochs]

This Ezra Klein Show podcast titled "We Need Better Narratives About Gender," features a fascinating conversation between Masha Gessen and Lydia Polgreen.

After you listen to it, I would love to hear your thoughts.

[lenbryant]

Gender queer stuff

[deanmarywinchester]

reading this book called “everything for everyone: an oral history of the New York commune 2052-2072” (pause for someone to say “of course you, obsessed with new york and communal living, are reading something called that”) and I’m not very far in but conceptually it whips. it’s by these two academics and it’s a faux oral history of the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of a stateless society. and the introduction is so fun because it like imagines the future lives of the authors into this future that they’ve written about, talking about how they met in the 2010s, had careers as scholars and activists into the 2050s, and how they’re facing the end of their lives in the 2070s and this book is going to be their last big project. it’s one of those things that im having to read slowly because i have a lot of feelings about it but each chapter is an interview with a different person who lived through this rebuilding in the 2050s and it’s really cool.

[st-just]

Little I find stranger than the way that people who have made their entire careers and intellectual lives off of the internet treating 'screen time' like it's axiomatically a dead waste of soul-sucking entropy that everyone hates but is psychically dependent on.

Like I quite like being able to google trivia questions and type my random creative scribbling in a way that other people can read, personally.

[maaarine]

The Ezra Klein Show: How to Discover Your Own Taste

"I think a lot about the difference between what in my head is the push internet and the pull internet, which is not perfect language.

But the internet where things are pushed at you and the internet where you have to do some work, day after day, go in and visit a home page or whatever, you have to pull it towards you.

And the problem with the push internet is it’s not really under your control, right? It’s about what the force pushing is doing.

But as that became bigger, people stopped doing the things that allowed the pull internet to exist.

There aren’t so many blogs anymore. Not none, but there are fewer.

People put their effort — because it’s the easier way to find audience and eventually to make a living — into the algorithmic spaces.

And so there’s simply less of this other thing there to explore."

[panicinthestudio]

Best Of: A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe, March 31,2023

In last November's midterm elections, voters placed the Republican Party in charge of the House of Representatives. In 2024, it’s very possible that Republicans will take over the Senate as well and voters will elect Donald Trump — or someone like him — as president.  But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots; a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament; Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide; Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections; and Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil. Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems? Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/... which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read. In this conversation, taped in November 2022, we discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.

Mentioned:

Sacred and Secular (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

“Exploring drivers of vote choice and policy positions among the American electorate (https://perryundem.com/wp-content/upl...

Book Recommendations:

Popular Dictatorships (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Aleksandar Matovski

Spin Dictators (https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...) by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman

The Origins of Totalitarianism (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-orig...) by Hannah Arendt

The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times Podcasts

[thewomanwhobloggedlikeaman]

My therapist: The new Ezra Klein Show podcast thumbnail isn't real and can't hurt you

The new Ezra Klein Show podcast thumbnail:

[middleofrow]

Best Podcasts of 2022

Best Podcasts of 2022

(more…)

[a-very-tired-jew]

Dropout Discord historical revisionism and denialism

A few days ago someone in the discord lamented over the fact that Hank Green endorsed a certain podcast.

Fig. 1. User dislikes that Hank Green will be getting a show on Dropout because they apparently endorse a podcast that "spreads lies against Palestinians". The podcast in particular is the Ezra Klein show, which I will admit I don't listen to. However, the two attached photos are quotes from a guest on the podcast and the "lies" that the show spreads.

Fig. 2. Klein's guest, Yossi Klein Halevi, states that Palestinian leaders, to his knowledge, have not accepted Jewish indigeneity nor has there been acceptance of a Jewish majority state.

Fig. 2. Halevi claims that the average Palestinian does not see Israel as a legitimate country and that the Holocaust is a lie, which is pushed by its media and leaders. Let's look at these claims. The first purports that no Palestinian leader has accepted Jewish indigeneity to the region. Doing a Google dive finds that no leader has accepted this, but nor have they outright denied it from what I can tell (if they have I will edit this with examples). Other leaders have said that the Jews Zionists are outright invaders in the area (looking at you Faisal), and the terrorist groups have said this type of rhetoric as well. Acceptance of a Jewish majority state has always been an issue in the MENA region. Other blogs have gone over this more in depth than I will here, but it has to do with a combination of historical antisemitism and reducing Jews to second class citizens. Jews are now "uppity" because they have their own country and rights that they didn't have in many of the other places they used to live (Westerners if you don't understand this and you're mad about this statement, you really need to look into the history of Jews as dhimmis and laws made against us). These next two claims I can see where people get upset and decry them as a lie. This gets a bit into semantics and how people think though. Halevi states that the average Palestinian thinks Israel is an illegitimate country based upon Zionist myth and the Holocaust lie/exaggeration. Many of the individuals in this particular server, and in other spaces, will likely go "But I know a Palestinian and they acknowledge the Holocaust was real! This is a lie." However, Halevi is not talking about the individual, they're talking about averages and generalizations and how the populace is influenced by their leaders and media. It is correct to state that Arafat never denied the Holocaust happened. However, members of the PLO during his tenure often did on their own. The current chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, is a known Holocaust denialist/revisionist who wrote their PhD dissertation the Holocaust as a lie. He has repeatedly blamed the Jews for the Holocaust and played down the number of deaths. Abbas pushes the Zionist/Hitler conspiracy based upon the Haavara Agreement, makes false claims that less than 1 million Jews died, that the Allies made up the 6 million number, and that the gas chambers did not exist. There's a lot more nuance to things like the Haavara Agreement than I, an ecologist, can parse, so I leave that to my betters. However, just know that a small agreement like that does not support the claim that Zionists orchestrated the mass killing of Jews to steal land from Palestinians. That is outrageously antisemitic and relies upon a number of conspiracies. If we look at other leaders we will see denialism and revisionism as well. Hamas and its leadership has long denied that the Holocaust happened and they were upset when the UNRWA tried to include it in textbooks in Gaza back in 2009. Remember, Hamas is in charge of Gaza and their leaders are therefore Palestinian leaders for the area. Their denialism goes all the way back to the 00s where they issued the following statement in response to a conference on the Holocaust held in Stockhold at the time:

"This conference bears a clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis. . . . The invention of these grand illusions of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest of the nations." -This quote is originally from their old website palestine.info.org This sentiment and denialism is not new. I have posted an excerpt of this particular article in the past.

Fig. 4. Excerpt of Martha Gellhorn's article from 1961 The Arabs of Palestine - a camp leader states revisionism and conspiracy. Martha Gellhorn's 1961 article titled The Arabs of Palestine documents Holocaust denialism and revisionism throughout it. The excerpt posted above is from her time interviewing one of the camp leaders while being escorted by a Secret Service agent. It takes the Haavara Agreement into conspiracy territory and alleges that Jews (not event Zionists, just outright Jews) worked with Hitler to kill their own people. Hell, it actually doesn't go full Haavara conspiracy because the leader does not state this was done to force the Jews to emigrate to Palestine and "steal their land" as the article moves on after this section. I highly recommend reading Gellhorn's article as it highlights many of the sentiments that we see to this day, and it was written in 1961. Holocaust denialism and revisionism have been ever present. Some things have changed, such as other nations normalizing their relations with Israel and recognizing them, but others have not. And in the end, this is another example of young activists who think they're informed on a subject they recently became passionate about showing that they are in fact not as informed as they think.

[dhaaruni]

This article in 5 points:

The polls were right in 2022 and likely aren't wrong

This isn't 100% the media's fault

Voters are mad about prices and interest rates

Voters think Biden is too liberal and too old

Voters forgot how bad Trump is

Caveat that we're still 5.5 months out from the election but the clock is ticking and I agree with Ezra Klein that Biden's running the campaign like he's winning and not the underdog. AOC's making the best case for Biden of any elected Democrat and more should follow her example.

It's interesting that all polls show Democratic senators and candidates running well ahead of Biden in swing states but ticket splitting has been close to nonexistent in the last 2 presidential elections so the polls will likely substantially converge.

[at-thestillpoint]

People I want to get to know better ✨

tagged by @writergirl28 — thank you!

last song: Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You) by Kelly Clarkson, because it's near the top of her This Is playlist on Spotify. Sometimes, you just have to listen to The American Idol, you know? This also reminds me that I should bring Britney Spears back into my rotation.

favorite color: I'm going with forest green today.

currently watching: I am currently unable to take in any new screen-based media that isn't coming at me in snippets that I can 2x through, so I've been re-watching House and The Newsroom in fits and starts, and avoiding thinking about a potential Newsroom AU.

last movie: For reasons named above, I cannot remember the last movie I watched.

current obsessions: reformer pilates (who am I, Glen Powell?), white nail polish, the pure chaos that is Big Ten (18) football, autumn, the fact that I can get cold brew with apple cider cold foam right now, that it's almost Blundstone weather, Kelly Clarkson, Kelly Clarkson and Miranda Lambert covering Good Luck, Babe, planning for Ireland this November

relationship status: I remain, forever, protecting my peace. But I was also at a panel tonight where a Tinder executive convinced me (I am susceptible to a pitch) to re-download the app, so there's that.

last thing I googled: "When We Cease to Understand the World" after hearing Jia Tolentino recommend it on The Ezra Klein Show

no pressure tags: If you're seeing this, consider yourself tagged!

[dk-thrive]

I’m just very suspicious of any kind of summing up of any kind of this is who I am

“And I think that’s important, especially as an artist, to not always be looking for how we are seen. And I think about labels a lot. And of course, as people write headlines, people have to have labels. It’s understandable. There’s a Twitter bio. There’s all these things that — you have to sum up these things. And I’m just very suspicious of any kind of summing up of any kind of this is who I am. Because, first of all, who I am is changing rapidly all the time with what I’m reading, and who I’m with, and what I’m experiencing. And then the other thing is even I can’t sum up who I am. So I don’t know if I can trust someone else to do it."

— Ada Limón, from “Ezra Klein Interviews Ada Limón” (Ezra Klein Show, May 24, 2022)

[collapsedsquid]

Listened to the Ezra Klein show where he interviews John Ganz, nothing earth-shattering but Ezra Klein did mention the classic bit about how some rich people and especially the car dealership owners really like Trump as well to which Ganz didn't have much to say.

Reached the end though where Ezra asked for his traditional book reccomendations and was thinking it would be hilarious if Ganz recommended "Leviathan and it's Enemies"

[st-just]

Half listening to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show about the epidemic of loneliness among adults because, hey, background noise.

And like

a. It should be illegal to talk about the cultural and/or structural factors behind some change in American society without at least gesturing towards comparing it with other countries.

b. Not to sound unsympathetic to the issue but they keep talking about part of the solution being, like, not wearing headphones when you're out walking and making a point of spending time with your coworkers. To which my instant response is 'get fucked'

[maaarine]

Rachel Zoffness:

"Our neuroplastic brain will change with time, and practice, and experience.

So the piano pathway in my brain got bigger and stronger the more I played the piano.

Guess what happens in the brain the more it inadvertently and accidentally "practices" pain?

The bigger and stronger the pain pathway in your central nervous system gets. When that happens, we say that your brain becomes sensitive to pain.

Our finely tuned wonderful brain is now picking up on sensory messages from the body and interpreting them as dangerous, and amplifying that even though they’re not dangerous.

One great example is with my fibromyalgia patients who have chronic pain, and they go to the park for a picnic. And their brain gives them these loud danger messages.

I think anyone can agree that going to the park when you have fibromyalgia is not dangerous, but your brain is telling you that it’s dangerous anyway.

Pain is really a danger message, it’s a danger detection system, and it isn’t always right.

And if you’re someone living with pain, and you believe that it’s dangerous for you to go outside and go for a walk or see friends, you are never going to get well.

Because part of the chronic pain cycle is staying inside, in bed, missing out on life — and that’s understandable.

But with chronic pain, that cycle is the thing that ultimately amplifies pain, perpetuates disability, and prevents healing. (…)

The science all illustrates that trauma doesn’t just live in the brain, it also lives in the body.

It changes your physiology, your nervous system, your immune system, your endocrine functioning, muscle tension.

What we also know is that trauma also changes the brain to amplify pain. It makes your brain more sensitive, and more of a finely tuned instrument.

When you experience trauma, it means that your brain wasn’t prepared for the thing that happened.

So after a trauma, people experience a lot of different symptoms, and one of them is called hyper-vigilance: small bits of sensory information from your environment can trigger an exaggerated response.

The same thing happens with internal sensory messages also, your brain is also scanning your internal environment.”

Source: The Ezra Klein Show: This Book Changed My Relationship to Pain