If you like your podcasts focused like a laser, this isn’t your episode. Cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis are as scattered as the world itself in their takes on foreign crises in Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait and the weird prospects for the 2024 presidential election.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted American political leaders and media outlets to constantly speculate about other countries’ military aggression, whether it be the possibility that China would invade Taiwan or that Russia would next turn to the Baltic states. Rarely do they ever consider the fact that they themselves live in the most militarily aggressive country in the world, and that the world should be more afraid of us than we should be afraid of them.
China’s oppression of its Uyghur minority in the western province of Xinjiang has been well documented for decades but it’s only now, that China is hosting the Beijing Olympics, that the West is finally paying attention. Forgotten in the belated outcry is America’s own role in oppressing the very same people, doing China’s dirty work for it as part of the so-called war on terror.
An Australian study famously predicted that human civilization could totally collapse due to climate change by the year 2050. No one knows the precise time when that could happen, but it’s a pretty good guess. Feels like whistling past the graveyard when major emitters of greenhouse gases are promising merely to become carbon neutral after the end of civilization.
The Wall Street Journal has published “the Facebook papers,” which revealed that Facebook and other big technology companies have been more than willing to monetize disinformation and misinformation, even when it needs to people’s deaths. Legacy media is laughing, but they should look at themselves too.
Conservative cartoonist Scott Stantis and progressive cartoonist Ted Rall go even longer this time! Sparks fly over whether Colin Powell was a hero or a zero, Ted offers a primer on the internal politics of Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, Scott calls for a new Cold War against China while Ted deplores the old one against the Soviet Union, and Ted and Scott trade ideological places on whether transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg ought to take two months off from work six months into his new job. Plus more!
Now that the US military is finally out of the horrid occupation of Afghanistan, the clique of professional warmongers has convinced President Biden that China is a threat. What kind of threat, they can’t exactly say, but a threat.
U.S. Senators who want to read the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with Asian countries can’t get a copy to read. Instead, they have view the long, confusing document in a secret locked room where they can take notes, but not keep them. The only way they could credibly consider the agreement would be if they had a photographic memory.
Pundits like to say the problem with Washington is a lack of bipartisan cooperation in Congress. But we don’t need cooperation. We need representation.
