Do you like cars? Do you not like cars? If so, then you’ll love this episode of Impolitic in which car-and-racing-lover Sean schools car-and-racing-apathetic Paul on the joys of motorsport. This tour down Gasoline Alley was prompted by our recent review of 2019’s Ford v. Ferrari, the greatest dad movie ever made and the latest installment in Impolitic Goes to the Movies, available only to our wonderful Patreon subscribers.
Sean asks whether the true epochal dividing line has nothing to do with politics but the end of high and mass culture in the 00s. (They sound just as cheugy as you’d expect of two geriatric millennials talking about the past.) Paul chips in with a little complaining about the CDC’s magic eightball approach to public health recommendations.
Sean and Paul talk about the current and historic sex trafficking moral panics, whether or not Foucault is overrated or underrated, and why the conviction of Derek Chauvin falls short of the kind of systemic change needed in American policing.
As you can imagine, Paul and Sean have rather different responses to the outcome of the labor unionization vote in Bessemer, Alabama, though maybe not quite as different in the end as one might think…
Also, is everyone a libertarian in a pandemic?
Paul and Sean locate the Atlanta murders in the United States’ century-plus history of imperialist violence in Asia. Paul introduces the world’s most powerful college administrator: Bob Jones University’s ‘Dean of Men.’ Sean asks for a reality check regarding some legal labor arcana. And they round out the show with a few thoughts on Netflix’s extremely horny documentary, The Last Tsars.
Better late than never, but Sean and Paul discuss the $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package and why, despite its size, it’s the product of thinking too small.
Look, when a member of Congress gets paranoid about Jewish-controlled, forest fire-starting space lasers, the Impolitic crew is going to talk about it. Sean and Paul situate Marjorie Taylor Green’s lunacy in a long history of American conspiracy theories, discuss the odds of QAnon dissipating, and what role social media played in its rise.
Greetings from a new epoch! In this, Impolitic’s first dispatch from the Joseph R. Biden’s Age of Malarkey, Paul and Sean do a deep read of Trump’s farewell address. They lament the tedium of liberal cultural hegemony, courtesy of America United, the star-studded inauguration night spectacular. And they think about the pros and cons of Big Tech’s seemingly (and perhaps temporarily) effective move to de-platform MAGA World.
Trumpists stormed the US capitol this week in the worst national insurrection since 1877. That’s it. That’s the episode.
This week, Paul and Sean discuss why they are optimistic about the 2020s given innovations in mRNA vaccines and battery technology. They also tease a special Patreon episode about the classic Christmas (?) movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
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