5 Star Tossers 5 Star Tossers

In this episode, we look at one of the longest running sitcoms in Televisual history (1987-1998), Married... with Children.

Ostensibly a misogynistic pigpen ripe for retroactive cancelation, we  Tossers find the show delightful and read an unabashed radicality into the relentlessly bitter depiction of the horrors of married life .

We bring up the Marxist tradition of family abolition to help think about the show's "study" of a starving lower middle-class family stuck together by  money they don't even have.

Alongside the capitalist reproduction of labor, we think about the reproduction of gender norms. Whether it is the stupidity of the "hot blonde," the goober patheticness of the young man, Al's refusal to have sex with his wife, and Peggy's shameless desire to watch TV all day.

Andy helps us read Peggy's refusal to feed her children, i.e., her refusal to be a good mother, as the most radical political action in the series.

Jake keeps telling us that he identified, identifies, with Bud, and that nobody ever recognizes how violent everyone on the show is to him (Bud that is): mocking his (Bud's) inability to woo ladies.

Jack takes us to  Ed O'Neil's future in Modern Family, helping us think of how different this future is form Ed's young, bitter pre-woke days.

Sagi, our resident scholar on all things Pride, helps us understand the hardboiled confidence that resides beneath all the misfortune.  He also thinks about the show's tone in relation to the new Network Fox, and calls the show prophetic in the wake of a woke era that would never let this show air.

Marx Grudge, Pervs R' Us are the main stars. 

In this episode, we discuss the thought-provoking 2019 New Inquiry essay by Asa Seresin "On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem."

Andy defends the future of heterosexuality from the sidelines so to say.

Jake introduces Lacan's "there is no sexual relation," gets personal, digs his own holes, holds back his tears, and offers the formula "the penis lies too" as a way for men and women to discuss the terror of their mutual performativity.

Our guest Anaís steals the show, offering up her own personal stories, parsing very subtle lines between the actual material vulnerability of women and the condescending failures of men occupying positions of allyship or sexual castration. She advocates throughout for a  near impossible conversation about mutual vulnerability and mutual desire.

Sagi wonders whether it is right to demand a certain emotional labor from man when there is a kind of instilled lack of awareness thwarting this capacity. He also makes sure throughout that we distinguish between resentment and ressentiment. Perhaps for the first time introducing his antipathological method, he describes how an initial resentment towards the failure of desire can ultimately lead to a new discourse or orientation.

Jack remains silent.

Greetings, audient!

Thanks for hanging in there. It can't be easy.

This episode tackles the Tossers' own Marx Grudge Star -- come to collect its resentful dues. Karma imposes its menacing presence in the form of a book by Daniel Tutt, with the provocative title How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left got High on Nietzsche. A unique pleasure it was to host Jamie, who joins us from a more Frankfurt School angle, and helped reign-in Sagi by riposting some of his cheaper jabs at our buddy Karlo.

So, as you can imagine, it was a grudge-bath. (Yep. Me no native English.)

At their best, our discussions turned, and tossed, the treacherous soils and soilings of ressentiment, a Nietzschean concept used against the working class to repress any uprising (for it will be ridiculed as a "slave rebellion" I imagine). Tutt lays this at Nietzsche's feet, the more general claim being that Nietzsche's philosophy is a status-quo machine, and/or an anti-revolutionary one, in the sense that it puts the kaibosh on any universal equality, ideational and/or actual, as some kind of (secret, cunning) axiom.
All this time we thought it was Reason -- turns out it was Nietzsche who was cunning.

We also admittedly devolve to devote some uneasy attention to Tutt's notion of the parasite vis-a-vis the act of reading/interpreting Nietzsche, which, if we're lucky, seems to only stumble over its own feet (the identity of the parasite shifting constantly, something narrated but never engaged with). If we're not, then Tutt's bulldozers will show those parasites 'how a real parasite does it,' becoming tone-deaf to the metaphysical critique that underwrites Nietzsche's contempt towards humanist ideas of equality in the process.

We will get into that. And so much more...
Stay tuned, won't you, audient?

Stars: Marx Grudge; WWJD

Sagi has recently learned about the Internet and relations that  people have on it. We discuss.

Parasocial relations lead us to think about a plague of narcissistic personality disorder that capitalism breeds.

Welcome back, listener!

No joke with the title, some real Hunter Thompson, Bazooko Circus vibes in here

And it seems to be spreading beyond the wrestlers, converting everyone in sight.
All are engrossed in a spectacle that permits no shadow and emits the meaning of the 'manifest' in all its glory. It is meaning that must be immediate, spectacular, the kind that bypasses judgment and obviates Law (and thought). The kind that can be used to justify shit like violence, or, in this case - as Sagi seems to argue - the ritualistic, and nihilistic, enactment of Sin.

Manifest is the best.

A surprise guest in our topics turned out to be the thing that is Donald Trump, which, we realize, becomes much more understandable once seen in the light of a WWE character (particularly his signature Pussy-Grab move, which I am sure he lifted from women's wrestling (pun? intended?))

We also tackle Greek Tragedy and the pagan rituals of 'carnival,' to mark similarities and differences with the WWE, with Sagi stamping every difference with metaphysical antisemitism, as usual.

There's a lot there. Even Roland Barthes!

Stars: WWJD (naturally); Pervs R' Us; Beast and Sovereign

PS
Despite the title, we had fun making this one.

The Tossers gave themselves  a rather impossible task: prove that  Barbie and Oppenheimer are the same movie. In typical Tosser fashion, we try to turn our failure into charm.  

Our sometimes quiet podcaster Jack comes out of the woodwork to take some heavy hits at Christopher Nolan's directorial chops and to educate Sagi on the reason why teenage girls hate their mothers. 

Jake is really out to lunch in this one, he tries to talk about the phallus, he quotes other podcasts, and forgets Margot Robbie's name.

Andy develops a  theory of the position of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real in Barbie. Ultimately concluding that cellulite is the Real. 

Sagi gives the most convincing praise of Barbie (which we all seemed to like better than Oppenheimer), explaining how this movie managed to survive all the possible insults that could have been hurled at it.

We discuss various critiques from the left, we ask whether Oppenheimer is a Zionist, and we wonder what was going on with Emily Blunt and Ben Safdie.

I would call this a light and enjoyable affair.