Tom Roche

Sick of aiming for excellence and feeling miserable when you fall short? You’re not alone. Explore the upsides of imperfection, lowered expectations, and outright failure with philosopher Daniel Milo, writer Avram Alpert, School of Life teacher Sarah Stein Lubrano, and Zahra Dhanani, who has adopted the “good enough” life. *Originally aired on March 12, 2020.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a series of Persian travellers from Iran and India to visit cities all over the world. They wrote popular travelogues describing the cultures and ideas they encountered and asked the questions fundamental to all of us: who am I? What is our relationship to each other, and to the world? * Originally broadcast on March 9, 2020.

Behind the News, 3/26/20 - guests: James Meadway on economic aspects of the coronacrisis; David Quammen on animal-human transmission of infectious disease - Doug Henwood

Hear the full interview https://soundcloud.com/katie-halper/tara-to-post Read Ryan Grim's article https://theintercept.com/2020/03/24/joe-biden-metoo-times-up/ Support the show https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow Hear my interview with Lucy Flores here https://soundcloud.com/katie-halper/lucy-flores-final-4-2 Tara Reade has been trying to tell her story since it happened in 1993, when she was working as a staff assistant for Joe Biden. She told part of her story-- about how Biden would put his hands on her shoulders and run his fingers up and down her neck-- in the spring of 2019 after Lucy Flores accused Biden of kissing the top of her head and smelling her hair inappropriately. But Reade didn't tell her full story. As Ryan Grim reveals at The Intercept, Reade asked for help from Time's Up, but the organization said it could not support her because a case taking on Biden would jeopardize their non-profit status. Tara is finally telling the story she's been trying to tell for decades. While there were no witnesses to Biden's alleged sexual assault of Tara Reade, her brother and close friend, both of whom I've spoken to, recall Reade telling them about it at the time. The rest of the interview will be released shortly.

Episode link here:

https://elucidations.now.sh/posts/episode-124/

In this episode, Graham Priest returns to discuss Buddhist political philosophy with me and Henry Curtis. (Last month, we talked with him about Buddhist metaphysics.) 

Last month, we discussed the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: that suffering happens, that this suffering is (partially) caused by emotional attachment, that you can deal with it by changing your headspace, and that you can change your headspace by understanding the world, understanding your mind and body, and treating other people well. In this episode, our guest adds something to that list, which he calls the '0-th noble truth'. This is the idea that suffering is bad. That idea appears as a foundational premise across many different Buddhist philosophical traditions, and he suspects that it can be used as the basis for political philosophy.

You might remember last month's episode when we talked about 'anatman', which is the Sanskrit word for the Buddhist principle that there is no self. Priest makes the interesting proposal that the 0-th Noble Truth plus 'anatman' gives us the view that we should care about suffering equally no matter who is suffering. We should just try to reduce the global amount of suffering anywhere in the world.

Graham Priest then argues that industrial capitalism is the cause of a lot of the suffering in today's world. Countless numbers of people are compelled by circumstance to work in exploitative jobs that overwork and underpay them, while others reap the profit from their work. If that further claim is correct, then it would seem to lead to the conclusion that a political philosophy based on Buddhist ethics would have to propose some alternative to industrial capitalism.

Would a political system based Buddhist principles then have to look like socialism, or communism, or anarchism? Maybe, but the question turns out to be a bit complicated. Tune in to find out!

Would a political system based Buddhist principles then have to look like socialism, or communism, or anarchism? Maybe, but it's a bit complicated. Tune in to find out!

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Brian L. Frye (University of Kentucky) argues that we should think more carefully about our moral reaction to instances of plagiarism.

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pep talk time: Dan interviews Rep. Ilhan Omar to give us some perspective and prepare us for the fight ahead.

Please support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

From the Icebreakers Comedy Festival in Niagara on the Lake this past January, comedian Jenn Labelle paints the perfect picture of every Canadian family on movie night. The host of the even Jean Paul delivers a set that we are really hoping his wife doesn't hear!

Behind the News, 2/13/20 - guests: Yasha Levine, Lizzie O'Shea - Doug Henwood

Behind the News, 3/5/20 - guests: Andrew Bacevich, Chris Brooks - Doug Henwood

Behind the News, 3/19/20 - David Himmelstein on US health policies that led us to this sorry path; Helen Yaffe on Cuban biotech and the country's health system - Doug Henwood

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the bonds that Scottish Presbyterians made between themselves and their monarchs in the 16th and 17th Centuries, to maintain their form of worship. These covenants bound James VI of Scotland to support Presbyterians yet when he became James I he was also expected to support episcopacy. That tension came to a head under Charles I who found himself on the losing side of a war with the Covenanters, who later supported Parliament before backing the future Charles II after he had pledged to support them. Once in power, Charles II failed to deliver the religious settlement the Covenanters wanted, and set about repressing them violently. Those who refused to renounce the covenants were persecuted in what became known as The Killing Times, as reflected in the image above. With Roger Mason Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews Laura Stewart Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of York And Scott Spurlock Professor of Scottish and Early Modern Christianities at the University of Glasgow Producer: Simon Tillotson

Excerpts of the January 2019 program RussiaGate: The Absence of Evidence? – Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. His duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief to Ronald Reagan’s security advisers from 1981 to 1985. The material for this program came with a professional challenge – would TUC radio broadcast arguments that there is no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections? Now just over a year later there is renewed attention on election interference, the role of Russia, the working of the DNC in choosing the democratic candidate – and maybe most importantly of all [ . . . ]

Read More

Guest: Johanna Bockman on neoliberalism, socialist globalization, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The post Structurally Adjusting Socialism appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Friends of the show Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev on the latest news from Russia.

The post Political Diary from Russia appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Simon Jenkins talks about his new BBC radio programme, Wales: A 20th-century Tragedy?, which explores the difficulties faced by the country in recent history, and offers some opinions on its future. Historyextra.com/podcast

 

---

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Behind the News, 3/12/20 - - Doug Henwood

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catullus (c84-c54 BC) who wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic, and some of the most obscene. He found a new way to write about love, in poems to the mysterious Lesbia, married and elusive, and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others, yet his explicit poems were to blight his reputation for a thousand years. Once the one surviving manuscript was discovered in the Middle Ages, though, anecdotally as a plug in a wine butt, he inspired Petrarch and the Elizabethan poets, as he continues to inspire many today. The image above is of Lesbia and her Sparrow, 1860, artist unknown With Gail Trimble Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford Simon Smith Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, poet and translator of Catullus and Maria Wyke Professor of Latin at University College London Producer: Simon Tillotson

The politics of the economic challenges facing President Donald Trump from coronavirus, and the result of the Primaries, held yesterday in six US states?

The Catholic Church was a powerful force throughout the first half of the 20th century. It was a force for right-wing reaction. That’s what Dan discusses today with Giuliana Chamedes, the author of the remarkable book A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe.

Live Massachusetts Dig for Bernie! With Bhaskar Sunkara and Alex Press at Harvard this Saturday 2/2, 7pm: facebook.com/events/604111176850753/

Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

The evidence is in: Joe Biden has a habit of making things up. And it’s not just wrong — it could hurt him in a general election contest against Donald Trump. According to The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan, if you think the guy who made up getting arrested in South Africa, who falsely claimed to have marched in the civil rights movement, is the “safe” candidate against Trump, then you’re lying to yourself.

The post Forget the Gaffes, What About Biden’s Lies? appeared first on The Intercept.

Michigan holds a special place in the memory of Jesse Jackson and the supporters of his insurgent 1988 presidential campaign. It was Jackson’s Nevada, the moment that the party establishment realized this campaign it had long written off might just seize the nomination. 

At a rally in Michigan on Sunday, Jackson will endorse Sanders ahead of a do-or-die primary for the Vermont senator. 

Jackson’s Michigan contest in 1988 fell on March 27. After more than three dozen primaries and caucuses, a crowded presidential field had been winnowed down to three serious contenders: Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor and presumed frontrunner; Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt; and Jackson, a former close aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and the public bearer of the civil rights movement’s torch.

Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, had dropped out of the race following a plagiarism scandal and dismal polling numbers. 

Given Gephardt’s hard-hat, working-class brand, he badly needed a win in Michigan. He threw everything he had left into the state. Dukakis, too, wanted Michigan — to show that his appeal extended beyond the liberal confines of Harvard Square, and that he could win back those Reagan Democrats whose defection had cost Jimmy Carter reelection. 

Jackson spent that election day touring Detroit, hitting black churches and five different housing projects. The New York Times’ legendary political reporter, R.W. Apple, was on hand for the last minute push. Jackson, Apple observed in his election night dispatch, “had drawn surprisingly large crowds of both blacks and whites in the last few days,” adding that despite the black establishment’s support of Michael Dukakis — Detroit Mayor Coleman Young was backing Dukakis — Jackson won some Detroit neighborhoods by 15 or 20 to one. “But the surprise was the Chicago clergyman’s powerful showing in predominantly white cities like Lansing, Flint, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, several of which he carried.”

Indeed, Jackson did more than get out the black vote. Progressive white voters in the state also rallied hard to his cause. (Dean Baker, now a prominent progressive economist, was district director for Jackson in Ann Arbor.) 

The energy of the moment comes through in the Times dispatch. “So dramatically did [Jackson] seize the public imagination that he was able to counter successfully the notion that Mr. Dukakis was the Democrat with the best chance of nomination,” the Times wrote.

Jackson, after 37 primaries and caucuses, was now effectively tied with Dukakis in the delegate count — a stunning moment in American politics that has gone down the memory hole.

The victory generated two polar opposite responses in Washington, D.C., and Burlington, Vermont, both of which would have profound implications for the future of the party. 

In Burlington, the city’s independent mayor, an outspoken supporter of Jackson, had to decide if he would engage directly with the Democratic Party in order to help Jackson win. After the Michigan victory, Bernie Sanders went all in, calling a local press conference and announcing that he would be participating in the April Democratic caucus to back Jackson. “I am the only non-Democrat, non-Republican, independent progressive mayor in the United States of America. OK, it is awkward, I freely admit, it is awkward for me to walk into a Democratic Party caucus, believe me, it is awkward. I am not a Democrat. Period,” he said.

But he said the stakes were too high, and the opportunity too great, to stand aside on principle.  Jackson, he argued, could remake the Democratic Party in an image of social justice. “So while in fact, he may end up losing some conservative white votes, some racist white votes, I think there is a real chance that he could do what [Walter] Mondale couldn’t do in a million years. That is to bring millions and millions of poor people and working people into the political arena who in the past never participated.”

'Pick up your sling shot, pick up your rock, declare our time has come, a new day has begun!’ — Rev. Jesse Jackson's iconic ‘David and Goliath’ speech from 1984 is just as relevant today pic.twitter.com/uCbW2W5UFy

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 6, 2020

In Washington, though, the reaction was pandemonium. Just as party leaders melted down publicly after Sanders’s win in the Nevada caucuses, they did so after Jackson’s triumph in Michigan. Talk in the top echelons of the Democratic Party turned to panic, with David Espo of the Associated Press reporting that the establishment feared a general election blowout if Jackson was the nominee. Plans were being drawn up, he reported, to draft New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to challenge Jackson at the convention if Dukakis couldn’t stop the reverend. 

E.J. Dionne, then reporting for the New York Times, captured the sense of dread. 

White Democratic leaders who do not support Mr. Jackson admitted they were in a quandary, wondering how to confront the growing movement toward Mr. Jackson without appearing to be racist and without alienating the large core of activists, including many white liberals, that he has attracted….

Around Washington, the words used by leading white Democrats to describe their party’s situation included crisis, disarray, disaster, consternation, mess, and wacky.

“You’ve never heard a sense of panic sweep the party as it has in the last few days,” said David Garth, an adviser to Senator Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee.

Mr. Garth predicted that ‘”the anti-Jackson constituency, when the reality of his becoming President seeps in, may be a much bigger constituency than there is out there right now.”

Jackson, the Democratic political class argued, was simply unelectable, so the party should go with a winner like Dukakis. Rep. Barney Frank’s sister, Ann Lewis, was working for the Jackson campaign, but Frank was backing his home state governor. He explained to Dionne that there were two reasons Jackson couldn’t win. “One, there is unfortunately still racism in the country. … That doesn’t mean the whole country’s prejudiced. It means that if there’s an irreducible 15 or 20 percent prejudice against a particular group, you’re giving away an awful lot,” Frank said. “Two, he’s still to the left of the country, especially on foreign policy.”

Jackson’s opponents had argued that his proximity to the nomination would paradoxically push some white Democrats away from him. It’s all fine and good to vote for the charismatic black guy with the unifying message in 1988 — indeed, it was an anti-racist badge of honor — just not if he actually might win. The party establishment pulled the fire alarm. I asked Jackson, in an interview for my recent book, “We’ve Got People,” what kind of pressure he felt after his Michigan win. “The pressure was not on me,” he said. “It was the so-called Reagan Democrats who began sewing discord and spreading lies.”

At the April Democratic caucus in Vermont, Sanders spoke on Jackson’s behalf. The interloper’s speech did not go over well with every Democrat. As he headed back to his seat, a woman in the audience slapped him across the face, he later recounted in his 1997 book, “Outsider in the House.”

“Bernie represents direction not complexion. He stood up for me in ’88, and we won Vermont — the whitest state in the country,” Jackson recently recalled to Jeremy Scahill. On the back of the progressive coalition Sanders had organized in Vermont, Jackson won the Vermont caucuses 46 to 45 percent. 

 

Outside of Vermont, it didn’t go as well. Jackson had been polling ahead in the next state on the calendar, Wisconsin, but the party consolidation behind Dukakis, fueled by the panic, flipped the momentum, and Dukakis took the state. 

Over the next month, Dukakis would win Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Indiana, and while Jackson continued picking off a state here and some delegates there, the nomination contest was effectively over. As is often the case, political wisdom failed the party elite, and Dukakis was crushed by the unpopular George H.W. Bush.

Jackson’s endorsement comes in the wake of Elizabeth Warren’s departure from the race. “I will not go against Bernie, but I’ve not made a decision to endorse anybody,” Jackson said in a February episode of Intercepted. “And when we talk, I share with him observations. Same with Warren, share observations. I’m not endorsing either one at this point.”

But Jackson was clear on who he would not be supporting. “I think the idea that somehow Biden has largely inherited the black vote in South Carolina is not sound judgment,” he said. “We were saying no to Clarence Thomas; he said yes to Clarence Thomas. We were saying no to the crime bill. He said yes to the crime bill. No to the Iraq War. He said yes to the Iraq War. He’s on a different side of history. It’s his right to be there, but he might as well own up to his side of history.”

Jackson said that Biden had taken on the aura of Obama, though that misunderstood the role Biden had played on the Obama’s ticket. “Joe Biden is seen as connected to Barack. He was put on the ticket to balance the ticket not to enhance it. Barack was against the Iraq War. He was for the Iraq War. Barack was against the crime bill. He was for the crime bill. Barack was supporting Anita Hill, and Biden let Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court as a monument to his leadership in that committee. So his proximity to Barack gives the impression he is active in civil rights is clearer than it is,” Jackson said. “Biden was Barack’s right wing. With Barack out, there’s nothing left but the right wing.” 

Biden isn’t offering a vision that meets the moment, Jackson said. “His message does not address the pain of our people. I’m not sure what moderate means if people don’t have affordable health care. I’m not sure what moderate, ‘I’m a moderate’ means to us. In fact, it means very little to us,” he said.

Just as Biden isn’t moderate, Jackson argued, Sanders isn’t on the left. “What Sanders represents is not the left wing,” he said. “It’s the moral center. Health care for everybody is moral. Education even for the poor without student loan debt is the moral center. Middle East policy where you recognize Israel and Palestine is the moral center.”

Ryan Grim is the author of the book “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.”

The post Rainbow Coalition Comes Full Circle as Jesse Jackson Endorses Bernie Sanders appeared first on The Intercept.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman explains some of the most vital economic policy issues of our time. Private health insurance; accepting budget deficits – or not; putting tariffs on foreign trade. What makes economic sense and what’s fiscal myth? And he assesses some economic policies put forward in this US presidential election. Economy might decide the winner of this election and the outcome will reverberate across the world.

Historian Rachel B Hermann talks about her recent book No Useless Mouth, which explores how food and hunger played a critical role in the story of the American Revolutionary era. Historyextra.com/podcast

 

---

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 2021, there will be two vacancies on the High Court. Conservative groups are lobbying the government to appoint what they call BIG C conservatives to the court to stop the spread of judicial activism. What is judicial activism, where does it come from, and is it really a menace to society?

Guest: Vasili Rukhadze on post-colored revolution regimes.

The post After the Colored Revolution appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Dan interviews Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.

Come see Dan discuss All-American Nativism in Boston on 3/4 facebook.com/events/522615241724284/

Support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig