Red Menace Red Menace

Alyson and Breht discuss the student-led protests for Palestine sweeping across American universities, the reaction to them by the ruling class elite and their attack dogs (the cops), lessons learned from previous movements over the past decade or so, parallels to 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War protests, the current negotiations between the Palestinian resistance and Israel, and what it all means for the broader crisis (geopolitical and internal) racking the U.S.
 

In this episode, Alyson and Breht wrestle with the possible rise of artificial general intelligence and its implications. Together they discuss the Silicon Valley Techno-Cult and their dark religious search for immortality, their hubristic attempts to "build god" and escape death, their neoliberal subjectivities and how that manifests in their work, how AI might manifest under the capitalist mode of production, the horrors and contradictions of "capitalism without workers", deflationary critiques of AI, humans as transitional creatures, consciousness and its complexities, intelligence without consciousness (philosophical zombies), Nietzchean nihilism, real religion and what it offers, embracing the inevitability of your own death, and much more!

Alyson and Breht explain and explore this famous text from Karl Marx, in the process they discuss French history, class conflict, the peasantry and lumpenproletariat, Bonapartism and Fascism, history, the role of the State under capitalism, and how all of this helps us to make sense of our contemporary moment of crisis in the US and around the world. 
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Rest in Peace, Aaron. Free Palestine!
"To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with utmost courage, frankness, determination, and sincerity."
- Thich Nhat Hanh in a letter to MLK Jr. regarding the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monks

On this episode of Red Menace, Alyson and Breht had some things come up such that they couldn't record their planned episode on Marx's 18th Brumaire (coming soon!), so instead they have a deep, organic and wide-ranging conversation on mysticism; together they explore humanities religious and spiritual traditions and the mystical strain within them, discuss atheism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Sufism, mystical experiences, the role of suffering, holy union and oneness, the dissolution of subject/object duality, the role of psychedelics historically and experientially, dialectics, and whether or not any of this has any relevance for political struggle.
 
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All Music by Mount Eerie

In this Rev Left Family Annual Collab (Rev Left+Red Menace+Guerrilla History), Alyson, Henry, Adnan, and Breht sit down for a deep dive on South African Apartheid. Together they discuss its euro-colonialist origins, explain the significance of the Boer Wars, define and explicate the origins of apartheid, explore the political economy of apartheid and how brutal racism shaped it, examine the multi-faceted indigenous resistance to apartheid, analyze the end of formal apartheid as well as its ongoing legacy in post-apartheid South Africa, and try to extract important lessons from this history to apply to the ongoing struggle in Palestine.
 
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