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Show 259: Dagmar Herzog – Sex in Crisis

Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics

Audio Here!

From the Publisher:

“The Religious Right has fractured, the pundits tell us, and its power is waning. Is it true – have evangelical Christians lost their political clout? When the subject is sex, the answer is definitively no. Only three decades after the legalization of abortion, the broad gains of the feminist movement, and the emergence of the gay rights movement, Americans appear to be doing the time warp again. It’s 1950s redux. Politicians – including many Democrats – insist that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control. Fully fifty percent of American high schools teach a “sex education” curriculum that includes deceptive information about the prevalence of STDs and the failure rates of condoms. Students are taught that homosexuality is curable, and that premarital sex ruins future marital happiness. Afraid of sounding godless, American liberals have failed to challenge these retrograde orthodoxies.

“The truth is Americans have not become anti-sex, but they have become increasingly anxious about sex – not least due to the stratagems of the Religious Right. There has been a war on sex in America – a war conservative evangelicals have in large part already won. How did the Religious Right score so many successes? Historian Dagmar Herzog argues that conservative evangelicals appropriated the lessons of the first sexual revolution far more effectively than liberals. With the support of a multimillion-dollar Christian sex industry, evangelicals crafted an astonishingly graphic and effective pitch for the pleasures of “hot monogamy” – for married, heterosexual couples only. This potent message enabled them to win elections and seduce souls, with disastrous political consequences.”

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Show 258: The Scientific World View and Its Enemies

2-Hour Fund Drive Special w/Ann Druyan and Dan Agin

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“The Scientific World View and Its Enemies”

Global Warming is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

Evolution and Darwinism are seriously flawed and thus alternatives must be taught in schools across the nation.

Humans walked with Dinosaurs.

“Alternative medicines” are scientifically sound, but scientific medicine is bogus.

Genetically engineered food will kill us.

Pharmaceutical companies have your best interests in mind.

Humans are born lazy, greedy, selfish and violent … so a powerful state, war, and market capitalism best fits our nature.

Evolutionary Psychology is good science.

There is such a thing as race, and some races are smarter than others.

Welcome to the ideologies of thousands of Americans in the 21st Century; the Age of Reason seems to have taken a wrong step somewhere, and filling the void are fundamentalist religions, New-Age healthcare, techno-phobia, governmental manipulation, and corporate capitalist greed. Science and the scientific method have been the first casualties in this new century, and each of us will be the second, third, and so forth.

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Show 256: Labor Day Weekend Special! “Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR”

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Barry Seidman marks Labor Day with a discussion of the rhetoric and effects of the so-called Protestant Work Ethic, which has allowed a separation of work from “jobs” in the American mindset. If as humanists we value “the good life,” along with creativity, freedom and the interest in each of us becoming the best we can be, why do so many of us ignore or even encourage a socioeconomic system which deprives so many of us of these things?

Work in the normative sense is about the natural human proclivity to be productive, contributing members of society via creative, liberating and satisfying efforts. Such work is about freely associated labor, equal opportunity, the ability of each member of society to find and perform whatever kind of work he or she enjoys and can excel at, and work performed without relying on command authority or any other form of coercion.

Work as “jobs” (that is, work as we know it today under capitalism), is quite something else. We worship work (jobs) in today’s culture, identifying those who can’t work or find it difficult to find satisfying, joyful work, as lazy, deviant or “too picky”. When people can’t succeed in our work-money centered society, we blame them rather than the system they’ve found themselves in. We even go as far as to argue that those who don’t well adjust to the system are therefore mentally or emotionally challenged somehow!

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Show 255: Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II

Audio here!

Sunsara Taylor will speak with Douglas Blackmon about “the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude … and those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking,” as she uncovers the material basis which allowed such to occur (as opposed to some sense of divine working out of things or natural inferiority), and how the psychological burden of not having material explanations for this persisting inequality has had consequences right up to today.

A passage from “Slavery by any other Name“:

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Show 254: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age with Maggie Jackson

Audio here!

From the Publisher:

We have oceans of information at our fingertips, yet we seek knowledge in Yahoo headlines glimpsed on the run. We are networked as never before, but we connect with friends and family via email and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times. Distracted is a gripping exposé of this hyper-mobile, cyber-centric, attention-deficient life. Day by day, we are eroding our capacity for deep attention— the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress. The implications for a healthy society are stark.

And yet we can recover our powers of focus through a renaissance of attention. Neuroscience is just now decoding the workings of attention, with its three pillars of focus, awareness and judgment, and revealing how these skills can be shaped and taught. This is exciting news for all of us living in an age of overload. In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its losses, Maggie Jackson introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, and even roboticists. She offers us a compelling wake-up call, an adventure story, and reasons for hope.

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Show 253b: A Victory for Vengeance?: America’s Methods of Domination; Part Two

A Victory for Vengeance?: America’s Methods of Domination; Part Two

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For more than 30 years now, the United States has taken a turn to the Right in how we organize our society. Prison populations have skyrocketed, prison sentences and anti-crime laws have become more and more draconian, torture has been used at home and abroad in the name of security, and the state has tightened its noose around those of us not in the upper classes… especially non-whites and the poor. Why has this occurred? What role has the rise in political Christianity played in the push for far right policies? Are there underlying reasons for this sad state of affairs beyond religion and the conservative politics of the Reagan/Bush era that are not even being talked about? And what can we do to make America more democratic, egalitarian and humanistic?

These are the questions we asked of journalists’ Sasha Abramsky, author of American Furies: Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment and Kristian Williams, author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination and Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America.

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Show 253a: A Victory for Vengeance?: America’s Methods of Domination; Part One

A Victory for Vengeance?: America’s Methods of Domination; Part One

Audio here!

For more than 30 years now, the United States has taken a turn to the Right in how we organize our society. Prison populations have skyrocketed, prison sentences and anti-crime laws have become more and more draconian, torture has been used at home and abroad in the name of security, and the state has tightened its noose around those of us not in the upper classes… especially non-whites and the poor. Why has this occurred? What role has the rise in political Christianity played in the push for far right policies? Are there underlying reasons for this sad state of affairs beyond religion and the conservative politics of the Reagan/Bush era that are not even being talked about? And what can we do to make America more democratic, egalitarian and humanistic?

These are the questions we asked of journalists’ Sasha Abramsky, author of American Furies: Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment and Kristian Williams, author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination and Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America.

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Show 252: One-Hour Fund Drive Special: Celebrating Carlin!

One-Hour Fund Drive Special: Celebrating Carlin!

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George Carlin is famous in atheist circles for his outspoken critique of religion and religious faith. Overall, he seemed to view religion not only as pertaining to its false claims of the human condition – and of reality itself – but as Marx also viewed religion … ‘as the opiod of the masses.’ He viewed strong religious convictions, at least in regards to their affect on public policy, as one major reason so many Americans are apathetic to the real injustices done in our name by the State.

What fueled Carlin was his keen, if cynical, perspective on the power of power itself, and how we the people need to wake up to what is being done in our name and use critical thinking to bring about a more just society. With whatever one can say about Carlin’s take on human nature (it isn’t our best attribute, he might argue ;)), underneath the sardonic humor was at least a call to arms for the end of our class-based society and all the inequity within.

Carlin attacked conservatives and centrists (liberals) equally, and tried to take his audience a little to the left with every performance. Tonight we celebrate his legacy.

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Show 251: Alyson Cole on the Cult of True Victimhood (uninterrupted)

*An edited version of this interview was previously aired on the October 21, 2007 Fund Drive Special

Audio here!

According to the publisher, “Condemnations of ‘victim politics’ are a familiar feature of American public life. Politicians and journalists across the ideological spectrum eagerly denounce “victimism.” Accusations of “playing the victim” have become a convenient way to ridicule or condemn. President George W. Bush even blamed an Islamic “culture of victimization” for 9/11 … Cole investigates the ideological underpinnings, cultural manifestations, and political consequences of anti-victimism in an array of contexts, including race relations, the feminist movement, conservative punditry, and the U.S. legal system. Being a victim, she contends, is no longer a matter of injuries or injustices endured, but a stigmatizing judgment of individual character. Those who claim victim status are cast as shamefully passive or cynically manipulative.”

Alyson Cole is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Queens College, City University of New York. Her articles have appeared in American Studies, Feminist Studies, the Michigan Law Review, and the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. Her new book is called The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror.