Is the Paw Patrol an unintentional conservative utopia? What can the show tell us about how the political spectrum views the police, its purpose, and its funding. For as little as $1 an episode (going forward) you can get early access to episodes, as well as exclusive author’s notes at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield. More information about the show and other formats in which it's available, including YouTube, can be found at https://literatemachine.com  Bibliography and Further Reading How the regulations around tv shows as toy commercials were repealed in the Reagan administration How square dancing was popularized as a tool of white supremacy How EMTs are underpaid, overworked, and underrecognized About police officer Joe Crystal, shunned by police for trying to hold them accountable Wikipedia entry on the Blue Wall of Silence NYPD internal investigator called a "rat" Prosecutors don't like to prosecute cops Attorney General Letitia James plan for civilian oversight of the NYPD Police departments aren't largely being defunded Crime is rising in cities that did not defund their police the same as those that did How torture doesn't work About Abner Louima who was sodomized with a broken broomstick by the NYPD The great Forced Adversity video about the Punisher/Police Problem Some More News video about the Warrior Mentality training given to the police How congress buys equipment for the military that it doesn't want or need as pork barrel Study finding conservatives lack a sense of humor Last Week Tonight's video about Tucker Carlson and his lightly veiled fascism and even less well veiled white supremacy Edmund Burke and the origins of conservatism Conservatism defending the status quo The myth of meritocracy Book about how billionaires are funding the radical right: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer On prison labor in America The Thought Slime video that covers the video where John Doyle says that conservatives aren't about equality, they're about hierarchy and natural law Police will tell you to obey them if you value your life Republicans legalizing the automative murder of protesters Poor people can't just get a better job Why conservatives are more punitive than liberals The penal system as slave labor 

Literate Machine

Defund the Paw Patrol

How Aaron Sorkin whitewashes the story of hippy activism, and how the hippy activists whitewashed themselves. Text and video version of this episode, as well as how to get it in your inbox, can be found at: https://literatemachine.com **Bibliography and Further Reading** * Abbie Hoffman testimony at the Chicago 7 trial: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Hoffman.html * Differences between the film and what really happened: https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/trial-of-the-chicago-7/ * Wikipedia page about COINTELPRO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO * _Do It!_ (1970), Jerry Rubin * _Growing Up at 37_ (1976), Jerry Rubin * A profile of Jerry Rubin from the 1980s: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1981/10/18/jerry-rubin/beb88e6b-ba7e-4839-80ac-4442f6d47809/ * Abbie Hoffman’s debate with Jerry Rubin in 1985, “Yippie vs. Yuppie” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOFBAJ8BlJs&t=913s, and another time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P1x9u-466A * NY Times obituary of Jerry Rubin: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/30/obituaries/jerry-rubin-56-flashy-60-s-radical-dies-yippies-founder-and-chicago-7-defendant.html * “The ‘Me’ Decade”, Tom Wolfe: https://nymag.com/news/features/45938/

How the Hippies Became Yuppies: The Trial of the Chicago 7

Pete Doctor takes us into the meaning of life, but is there something hollow at its center of it? Bibliography and Further Reading * Soul using uncomfortable blackface: https://noripatterson.medium.com/whats-wrong-with-pixar-s-soul-animation-racism-and-blackface-c9a7709cd50f * Tom Wolfe’s famous article declaring the 70s the “me decade”: https://nymag.com/news/features/45938/ * Google ngram of the term “personal fulfillment” showing its rise in the 1960s and 70s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Personal+fulfillment&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CPersonal%20fulfillment%3B%2Cc0 * How distrust of the government among the hippy movement led them to embrace Libertarianism: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/may/19/comment * Twitter thread about conservative’s using the “money can’t buy happiness” slogan to say we don’t need to raise the minimum wage: https://twitter.com/cons_owned/status/1372670714201968641/photo/1

Pixar's Soul: Finding Yourself Under Capitalism

What does it mean to be an artist? Corrections: * The high school students put one of Simon's poems into their high school yearbook, they don't post it up everywhere. Henry puts the poem up in the mute woman's store at her request. * Fay puts Simon's poem on the internet after Henry asks her to. Henry doesn't know how to use a computer.

Why Stories? Henry Fool and What the Artist is For

In the 1990s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold almost twice as many copies. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. Special call out to Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian (https://filfre.net) whose work covering early video games I drew on extensively. Some Corrections: * I mention the Nintento 64 as the rival to the Genesis when I meant the Super Nintendo * Doom was not Id’s last Shareware game; their next game, Quake, was also distributed as Shareware * First person mode was the primary mode of Ultima Underworld * There are 5 worlds in Myst, not 7 * Jimmy Maher points out the Lucasfilm’s games declined in quality after 1993, and so poor design may still have been a factor in the decline of Adventure games. Bibliography and Further Reading Computer Programming Used to Be Women's Work: https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding, https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/ Sierra c-founder Ken Williams on the future of the medium: https://community.telltale.com/discussion/23327/roberta-williams-josh-mandel-discussion/p6] On the development and reception of Wolfenstein 3D: https://www.filfre.net/2020/05/the-shareware-scene-part-3-the-id-boys/wolf3d/ On Doom: https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/ On Myst: https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success/ On Doom: https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/ Computer ownership in the 1990s: https://www.bls.gov/cex/research_papers/pdf/computer-ownership-up-sharply-in-the-1990s.pdf Example list of the most popular games: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/g30910862/best-video-games/ Feminist Frequency, feminist critique of gaming and target of GamerGate: https://feministfrequency.com/ More about GamerGate: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/gamergate-video-games-five-years-later.html, https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/video-games-shootings-el-paso-gamergate-8chan-connection.html

Doom, Myst, and the War for the Soul of Video Games

For 30 years, Dave Sim engaged in one of the most remarkable ongoing artistic endeavors ever while he gradually lost his mind.   Bibliography and Further Reading * A collection quotations of Dave Sim's most misogynistic writing: https://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/sim.html * An account of Sim's LSD epiphany at the unofficial Cerebus fanzine site: http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2016/03/sims-lsd-breakthrough.html * Sim on his schizophrenia diagnosis: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiAo4706PjqAhVqS98KHZxVBiAQFjAKegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fetd.ohiolink.edu%2F!etd.send_file%3Faccession%3Ddayton1304648596%26disposition%3Dattachment&usg=AOvVaw3KLMmd_z3nhKHTIG_i7Av_ * Tegan O'Neil's excellent posts on Cerebus have been a great resource for this piece, which are indexed here: https://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2013/10/fun-and-games-with-dave.html The comment about Sim and his interpretation of Genesis is found in part 1 of her series: http://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-we-will-read-cerebus-part-i-as-i.html * Sim on his injury and medical science: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dave-sim-admitted-into-hospital-for-surgery/ * The Cerebus in Hell Coronavirus special: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dave-sim-publishes-free-coronavirus-cerebus-in-hell-digital-comic/

Cerebus: Misogyny and Madness

How the worms ate into my brain, what I did and did not understand about The Wall, and what it tells us about the rise of the Alt-Right. Follow me on Twitter at @ericrosenfield Support this show on Patreon for as little as $1 an episode at https://patreon.com/ericrosenfield and get access to show notes where I talk about how I produce episodes and the current state of the show. Bibliography and Further Reading * The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline: http://[https://medium.com/@thomas.perrett97/from-hayek-to-hitler-an-analysis-of-the-libertarian-to-fascist-pipeline-dcd219fba473] * How Trump supporting figures like Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon literally don’t believe in Democracy: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-steve-bannon-peter-thiel-214490 * Study about how whites backed Trump because of the perceived threat to their dominance: https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/ * Interview with Michael Kimmel about how people get swept up in Neo-Nazi movements: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/27/michael-kimmel-masculinity-far-right-angry-white-men * Film Critics Hulk’s essay on the problems with Joker: https://www.patreon.com/posts/33213577 * And finally, Sean Skull’s essential deep dive into how The Bell Curve is based on sand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo 

Pink Floyd's The Wall and the Rise of the Alt-Right

What do you do when the authorities have been compromised? If you enjoyed this please tell someone about it, word of mouth is how projects like this grow. Bibliography and Further Reading More general information about abolishing the police: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/ Still don’t think the police need replacing? Consider this report from the inside: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759 Think prison is necessary? Here’s some information about that: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html PBS Newshour article on how white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement?fbclid=IwAR36X2ZT3-B499frCjRcHXraTK1kaLmOhUx31T0uYH5oObim_Vo3f2i96iE New Republic article about police taking the side of white supremacists: https://newrepublic.com/article/157981/police-take-side-white-vigilantes?fbclid=IwAR2omP9SMnAqJTv1Fzi8vI7o1OhIzRUgA5X4Mo2JqtP_dPVJgo1QsS8OizA Report on how trying to file a complaint about the police will get you followed and harassed (at least in Florida): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ5f1JMKns&feature=youtu.be How riots can lead to social change: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/30/8518681/protests-riots-work Actual Context episode 1 about the police’s unhealthy obsession with the Punisher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcrxePK1sno Some More News’ piece about how the police are trained to murder you: https://youtu.be/tuzQrbio2Qw Compilation of police brutality during the protests: https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1266917228752056320 Officers talking about calling in sick in solidarity with officer who beat a student with a baton: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-police-beating-temple-student-joseph-bologna-protest-20200605.html?__vfz=medium%25253Dsharebar Officers cheering for the Buffalo officers who pushed down an old man at their court hearing: https://mobile.twitter.com/Acyn/status/1269322620316442625 How Adrien Schoolcraft reported his fellow police and was harassed and forcibly committed for his trouble. It was only because he taped his superiors discussing their crimes that he was believed. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/nyregion/officer-who-disclosed-police-misconduct-settles-suit.html New York Times article about defunding the police: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/george-floyd-police-funding.html The Guardian article on how the implicit bias and de-escalation training in Minneapolis did not work: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/the-answer-to-police-violence-is-not-reform-its-defunding-heres-why The End of Policing, now a free ebook from Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing How Dallas has been dispatching social workers to some 911 calls: https://www.lightworkers.com/dallas-dispatching-social-workers-to-some-911-calls/ 

Superheroes and the Police

Literate Machine explores media through the lens of culture, history an politics, examining the ways capitalism, power, and ideology shape and are shaped by the stories we love. Written and performed by Eric Rosenfield, Literate Machine is available as blog entries, newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel. Literate Machine is available on Apple Podcasts and finer podcast apps everywhere.

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