Spaghetti For Brains Spaghetti For Brains

Ben flies solo on this episode. You're not crazy for being horrified by the genocide in Gaza. The "rules based international order" = the Ugly American. Folk songs have been around for a long time because there's something good about them. A new symbol of a unified left.

YOU CAN NOW BECOME A PATRON: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spaghettiforbrains

Norm and Ben read this stupid article by a man who hates people, but most of all Taylor Swift: https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/05/taylor-swifts-popularity-is-a-sign-of-societal-decline/

Sneering isn't just ugly, it's bad criticism. The sixties are still around because private equity firms say so. What no cultural memory does to a mfer. Taylor Swift does a no growth. My narcissism is better than yours. The passion of Frank Costanza.

The auto workers went on strike at the same time that Ben was reading about the auto workers being on strike in 1936. Good Morning Britain flirt with Marxist ecoterrorism. America is made of plastic, and Americans are made of cars. The best pizza is really from Connecticut. Norm and Ben reflect on the state of the left since Bernie. "Make me care".

THE BOYS ARE BACK FOR "SEASON FOUR". We reflect on fake news and how funny it is that the very people tasked with questioning it are the ones falling for it the hardest. And the real news is so bad that it isn't worth reading, so you might as well relax because there's nothing you can do about it. Also Ben's infant son's favourite song is "problematic".

Ben reads a piece of writing titled 'The Passive Voice'.

'The Passive Voice' was pulled together from notes made in 2020 during the George Floyd uprising, reflecting on the history of American citizenship and its relationship to slavery. The causes of racist state violence and Black American resistance to it have a material basis of course, but our understanding of them is mediated by a dense web of assumptions and ideological sleight of hand—like a police report written in the passive voice. The disconnect between the material and the ideological is the subject of these notes.

The piece also featured in a recent episode of Ben's radio show Red White Blues: an Anthology of America’s Music, where we hear the entirety of Charles Mingus’s 1963 masterpiece The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. We’re up to episode five now and there’s a lot more in the pipeline about jazz, oil and the making of American power. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so at soundcloud.com/spaghettiforbrains.

You can also check out @__redwhiteblues on Instagram where you'll find the show notes and other fragments of research from the project.

The boys are back after Lord Eli graciously reinstated them. On this episode, Ben talks about having a baby and what fatherhood means when you're not one of the freaks and perverts obsessed with gender ideology (ie. ultra cishet people). Norm has a word for the haters.

For those who want to read up about the subject of miscarriage and why it's stupid that we have a taboo around talking about it, we suggest this article: ⁠https://www.vice.com/en/article/mv5knx/we-need-to-remove-the-taboo-of-talking-about-miscarriage-337