Richard H Brooks

The only thing I think these discussions miss is that nearly all the West is living beyond its means in government finance and this is more acute in Europe due to an older age profile and a dearth of cheap energy. A new world order for Europe must address the miltary, energy and finance crisis.

Great episode. It fascinates me why today's alt-right doesn't much care for defence or in Farage's case why more sovereign control of the nuclear deterrent might not be attractive to an isolationist. It feels like we've replaced former extreme right miltarism with alt right gerontocracy.

This is why people are choosing not to have children.

In an almost Shakespearian twist, without the USSR to embody the authoritarian threat we must strive against, faith in the importance6 of liberalism is hollowed out and we are unable to perceive our own declining institutions, which a bitter and corrupting Russia is keen to accelerate.

I found this a fascinating concept. Maybe, if reframed, the Cold War started with Waterloo and the uneasy Concert of Europe between the liberal Atlantic and authoritarian Continental powers, but also within our minds between traditionalist commutatian impulses and more individual rules based system.

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

Every one hour of an audiobook takes three hours of work. You burn hours trying to drink away mouth pops, redoing too loud or too soft lines, and forgetting how to say “penguin”

I wonder whose immortality he specifically has in mind.

For summer, a haunting and powerful audio drama you won't forgot in a while. A Haunting Beyond the Lake.

Vanishment Podcast

vanishment.podbean.com/e/a-haunting...

The sad irony is that the Matrix analogy is correct. We are the feed that enables AI to continually better itself. We have given any geninuely informed consent but we're lulled by the other services the digital revolution offers.

A new bottle of ketchup in a fridge. On it is a Post-it note that reads ‘do NOT squirt this directly into your mouth Angus. Love, angus xx’

It’s a shame, really, that it had to come to this…

I find it a weird cognitive dissonance. There are so many geninuely great, thoughtful, generous, and committed Americans I read, listen to, and work with, and then there is this mess of a movement which is like the popularist nut jobs elsewhere just turned up to 11 and on steriods.

I think navigation in the audio fiction space is a bit broken. A very low bar to publish is great news for creators but makes it a lottery for listeners.

That is so harsh!

Sadly, it'll probably pay well to bank on exceptionalism in the short term for oil and gas, though maybe less so with coal. Feels like the state is banking a lot on short term gain, though.

It's a hybrid production with multiple narrators/dialogues & sound effects, but noticeably no attempt was made to describe the dragons in sound, despite them being very tangibly present. Over 5 hrs it felt like have listened to a very immersive 20 hr audio book. A really interesting approach.

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My #AudioDrama tip for today is: Dragon Day on Audible by @bobproehl.bsky.social . I quibbled with some of the characters at the start, but the monologue descriptions wonderfully accomplished and the interview style was a very imaginative approach to audio drama.

www.audible.co.uk/pd/Dragon-Da...

Best in years, is possibly not as high a bar as it could be... but I'll take your tip and might give it a try. As a life-long fan from the '80s, I'd started giving up on it in recent years.

Thank you, I was wondering this. The implications feel very under explored in public discourse.

Incredible. I'm very picky with new indie productions, but that would certainly intrigue me to find out more.

In the UK at least, and probably for much of the West, the '90s was probably the peak of prosperity where the opportunities were the highest and basic needs like housing were still obtainable. And yet it produced some of best misery music ever, Radiohead, Portishead, Evanescene. Why?

I really like this!

The internal dynamics of Europe makes any army hard to coordinate but coalitions, especially around the Baltics sea looks increasingly credible. Bigger powers need to adopt a region.

Podcast Canon: Beef And Dairy Network's commitment to the bit is practically unheard of Podcast Canon: Beef And Dairy Network's commitment to the bit is practically unheard of

www.avclub.com/podcast-cano...

The AV club has written a really long piece about @beefanddairy.bsky.social

I really love this because:

1. it's so so rare for podcasts to be written about for longer than a paragraph

2. it really understands the show

🧵

I really enjoyed this one on the US/EU/UK intelligence fracture with respect to Russia. This one really nails the fact that Europe's military weakness is only partly due to underinvestment in defence, its also misaligned investment in supporting US operations whilst Russia seemed peaceable.

Or fascism.

Humanism became equality and enfranchisement as more humans were needed to fight total wars or mobilise the economy. But increasing it is algorithms expected to solve problems making humans less valuable, whilst biotech may also create new classes of human. Fertil ground for evolutionary humanism...

Ha ha. A few books recently, but I'd recommend Harari's Homo Deus. It makes the point that liberal democracy is undergirded by humanism, which emerged when science enabled humans to fix seemingly intractable problems of plague and scarcity, without the intercession of a diety. 1/2

Reading about some of the tech reasons societies are moving to the far right: People increasingly matter less. Less needed to win wars, less needed for productivity. Tech is making some people redundant, tech moguls see society as a series of fixes, ppl become more isolated from common experiences.

I'm quite surprised it's taken seriously. Why would the administration even respond? Weird, if maybe telling.

It honestly sounds like the wildest grounds for discrimination. The performing arts is often recruitment by clique, and that's one reason it is so unequal and individuals can hold disproportionate power.