Once again, the elite podcaster class is punching down at poor, defenseless legacy journalism institutions for something as trifling as not investigating the substance of a news story. One hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.

In the spirit of solidarity and celebration in the face of truly asinine forms of evil coming at us, let me say as a Chicagoan on this special night: okay fine, I guess bodegas are sort of different from just like a regular corner store.

This would perhaps get under my skin less if there weren't retVrn with a V idiots actively trying to harken back to something that never existed as they imagine it. Why are we conceding the past to our enemies?

And it just equally fascinates me and frustrates me that one of the successful legacies of these monstrous empires is that we view everything through a lens that centers them even when acting in opposition to them and their like. To a limited degree that's necessary, but it blinkers us quickly.

I'm maybe mixing up my It Could Happen Here hosts (sorry if so), but it reminds me of what I think @miawong.bsky.social said about learning about at least a single third fascist state other than Italy and Germany to compare to because there's no shortage. Evil presents itself in many forms.

Even if we're sticking to the specific parts of Europe that anglosphere secondary education happens to fixate on from that particular time period, you're still erasing contemporary phenomena ranging from, say, millworkers' culture across Britain to oppressive structures in Wilhelmian Germany.

This is not to underestimate the cultural and political might of a specific side of Britain at the time. But our imagining a monolithic set of values for the time period frankly makes those weirdos seem more mainstream than they ever managed to make themselves and is a posthumous victory for them.

(Which is to say you have a very clear voice as well as a good cadence to both your own speech and for how you interject for clarification and commentary in discussions. And that's more than I can say for a few of my other favorite podcasters in my Personal Parasocial Pantheon.)

I heard you mention this in the Gygax episode. I get that people have different preferences, but it's when I find myself thinking "Are we even hearing the same fucking audio?" that Occam's razor starts drifting towards some people just can't stand listening to femme-sounding voices. 🙄

"Extremely niche" does not mean "has significant popular support but is not current policy where I live nor is it likely to be in the near future," and conflating the two should be punishable by watching angry takes about how to pronounce the word "niche" while doing housework for a local linguist.

CTA and the Chicago Public Library system — two great examples of very flawed, underfunded public institutions made not just serviceable but frequently beautiful in the face of these problems by the people in this community who work against the odds to improve them.

If you refuse to shove together parentheses and em dashes in your critique — denying their union like the love that dare not speak its name (which only gives further proof of the Left's censorious nature) — I find it impossible not to multisyllabically support fascists.

... fuck that hurt to write.

It's almost as though something that traces its origins to when a Goldman Sachs economist wanted a catchy acronym to use in pitch decks almost a quarter of a century ago is not the most nuanced lens through which to view geopolitics or a solid foundation upon which to build international alliances.