Shawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz are the creators and hosts of the utopian leftist comedy podcast Srsly Wrong and also the creators of the new animated series Papa and Boy, currently making its debut on the worker-owned streaming platform Means TV. Papa and Boy is an absurdist comedy, but it's rich with political and social commentary. It's set in a dystopian world where fathers tyrannize over sons and justify their rule with a spurious ideology. Today Sean and Aaron join to discuss how they managed to make the series leftist while keeping it funny, and how Papa and Boy depicts:The role of propaganda in keeping populations docile and complacentThe way meritocracy forces those at the bottom to compete for scraps and meaningless baublesHow hierarchical relationships are not only oppressive but do not even serve the interests of those at the top of the hierarchyHow people who suffered personally sometimes use their own experience as a justification for keeping others in similar conditionsHow the oppressed are deprived of knowledge about the possibilities for alternate social arrangements and kept in the dark about the power of collective actionMuch else!The Current Affairs article Nathan mentions about meritocracy and bullshit jobs is here. "[The social order] requires the boys to be demoralized and it requires the papas to be fearful of what the boys can accomplish and to prevent them from collaborating, in the same way that in current society huge companies like Amazon and Starbucks are fighting tooth and nail to prevent unionization efforts, because they know that if workers work together they'll be able to extract concessions from them and to change how things are working.""If you can't imagine that another world is possible, or even that resistance to the current world is possible, it places you exactly where the hierarchical systems want you to be. That's why propaganda, and terms like 'It is what it is,' are so powerful in terms of keeping society the way it is, because they seek to limit the horizons of what people as see as possible. Having those moments of realizing 'Oh, maybe it is what it is but it doesn't have to be,' is so powerful." 

Some, including both geniuses like Stephen Hawking and nongeniuses like Elon Musk, have warned that artificial intelligence poses a major risk to humankind's future. Some in the "Effective Altruist" community have become convinced that artificial intelligence is developing so rapidly that we could soon create "superintelligent" computers that are so much smarter than us that they could take over and pose a threat to our existence as a species. Books like Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and Stuart Russell's Human Compatible have warned that we need to get machine intelligence under control before it controls us. Erik J. Larson is dubious about the chances that we'll produce "artificial general intelligence" anytime soon. He argues that we simply have no idea how to simulate important kinds of intelligent reasoning with computers, which is why even as they seem to get much smarter, they also remain very stupid in obvious ways. Larson is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think The Way We Do (Harvard University Press) which shows that there are important aspects of intelligence that we have no clue how to make machines do, and that while they're getting very good at playing Go and generating images from prompts, AI systems are not making any progress toward possessing the kind of common sense that we depend on every day to make intelligent decisions. Larson says that a lot of progress in AI is overstated and a lot of people who hype up its potential don't grasp the scale of the challenges that face the project of creating a system capable of producing insight. (Rather than producing very impressive pictures of cats.)Today, Erik joins to explain how different kinds of reasoning work, which kinds computers can simulate and which kinds they can't, and what he thinks the real threats from AI are. Just because we're not on the path to "superintelligence" doesn't mean we're not creating some pretty terrifying technology, and Larson warns us that military and police applications of AI don't require us to develop systems that are particularly "smart," they just require technologies that are useful in applying violent force. A Current Affairs article on the "superintelligence" idea can be read here. Another echoing Larson's warnings about the real threats of AI is here. The "Ukrainian teenager" that Nathan refers to is a chatbot called Eugene Goostman. The transcript of the conversation with the "sentient" Google AI is here.The image for this episode is what DALL-E 2 spat out in response to the prompt "a terrifying superintelligent AI destroying the world." 

Raina Lipsitz is a journalist whose book The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics profiles the young leftists who are bringing socialism back to American politics. Raina looks at high-profile campaigns like those of AOC and Bernie Sanders, but also at the left political victories that fly under the radar, occurring on city councils and in state legislatures. To anyone who wants to feel hopeful that a new generation of political leaders is rising that can take on the most serious challenges we face, Raina's book offers an encouraging assessment of the possibilities for a new movement. This episode should have come out yesterday but Nathan has COVID-19 and was feeling too weak and useless to press the "post" button. 

Sam Shain is a public school teacher whose book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness argues that K-12 students need to be equipped with the ability to analyze media and spot misinformation. This crucial skill, which helps them become informed participants in democracy and resist demagogues, is not actually widely taught. Shain explains how he teaches his students critical thinking, including playing "spot the fallacy" with Ben Shapiro videos and having students write their own piece of "fake news." In our conversation, we talk about why it's important to bring politics into the classroom and how to make sure kids hear dissenting perspectives without trying to indoctrinate them. Shain also recounts his own disturbing experience being forced out of a job after a complaint from a Trump-supporting parent. Nathan's recent article "Six Subjects That Should Be Taught In School But Aren't" can be read here. The book that Sam got in trouble for teaching, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, is available here. "If the teacher is merely teaching something that happened [in history], or teaching a book that might be a little bit controversial, [administrators] need to hold the line [against parent complaints]. And teachers need to do this sort of thing." — Sam Shain

Prof. Elizabeth Popp Berman is the author of Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, which documents how a style of reasoning that heavily emphasizes efficiency over equality came to dominate U.S. social policy. In our conversation we discuss the rise of "cost-benefit analysis" and how applying the economists' favored framework excludes important values from being taken into account. We talk about what the "economic style" misses and the solutions it leads policy-makers to embrace in areas like student debt, healthcare, climate, and antitrust. (We also make clear that not all economists are the problem. Karl Marx was an economist, after all!) The Boston Review piece discussing Thinking Like an Economist is here. The Adrienne Buller interview is here, although it was not from "last week," as Nathan says. It was from July, and Nathan just forgot that time has passed and it is already late September. The image accompanying this episode is a stock photo depicting "Cost-Benefit Analysis" taken from Shutterstock. 

Today we return to our interview with Dr. W.D. Ehrhart, for the second part of a conversation on what Americans should know about the war in Vietnam.The photograph is of Dr. Ehrhart himself in Vietnam. It appears accompanying his 2017 New York Times article "God, Jesus, and Vietnam." Edited by Tim Gray.

Dr. W.D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam veteran, poet, teacher, and essayist who was active in Vietnam Veterans Against The War and has written multiple volumes of memoirs about his observations of the war and his return to civilian life afterwards, beginning with Vietnam-Perkasie. He has been hailed as "the dean of Vietnam war poets" and "one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." His work offers a blunt and often haunting look at the realities of war. His collected poems, on Vietnam and many other subjects, can be found in the volume Thank You For Your Service. (Included are the poems featured in this episode.)Today, Dr. Ehrhart joins to discuss how the Vietnam War destroyed the image of America that he had formed during his upbringing in small-town Pennsylvania and give some insight into the true nature of the war for both Americans and the Vietnamese. It is a powerful and important conversation about a period in this country's history that we might rather forget but need to confront head-on.An article by Nathan on the Vietnam War is here. An old video of Dr. Ehrhart on YouTube talking about his war experiences has received nearly 20 million views and can be found here. Examples of Dr. Ehrhart's poems can be found on his personal website here.This is Part I of II. Edited by Tim Gray.

Alec Karakatsanis is one of the country's most forceful and persuasive critics of the criminal punishment system. Alec is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and as a civil rights lawyer he has fought against the vicious punishment system that cages the poor and plunges them into debt. Alec's work as a lawyer has been covered in the New York Times and he was recently a guest on the Daily Show. Alec's book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System is a stirring indictment of the legal system. Today, Alec joins editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss "copaganda," and how media narratives about crime and policing keep us from having an intelligent conversation on how to reduce violence in our society. We discuss: The human reality of mass incarceration, including the wage slavery, family separation, and sexual violence, and how sentencing someone to prison takes years off their lifeWhy tough on crime policies are not tough on crime: jailing people makes crime worse, not better, and Alec argues that responding to violence with more police and prisons is so irrational that it should be compared to climate science denialHow only certain kinds of theft are considered crimes, and why we focus on shoplifting while ignoring civil asset forfeiture by police and wage theft by employersHow Democratic politicians have completely failed to make the case for real public safety and keep falling back on failed, racist "tough on crime" policiesWhy inflammatory anecdotes about individual crimes are a bad way to assess whether a given reform policy is workingWhat we actually need to do if we want to reduce violenceWhy we shouldn't treat people who hurt people as mere "criminals" who have to be locked in cagesHow people can learn to read news reports critically and watch to see when they are being subtly influenced to support punitive policies that will actually make problems worseAlec's Copaganda newsletter can be read here. Alec's Current Affairs article responding to Matthew Yglesias' argument that we need more police is here. Alec's contentious exchange with Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks on criminal punishment is here. "One of the most profoundly depressing aspects of my current job leading a national civil rights organization is that I often find myself in conversation with Democratic politicians. And by and large, these people are profoundly lost. They have no sense of what the actual evidence is on these issues is, and that's largely because they don't care. They have no sense of how to speak about these issues in a way that's compelling. They don't understand how to build a popular political project that actually brings to people the things they want and need to flourish." — Alec Karakatsanis "Jails are what we call 'criminogenic'—they lead people to commit more crime in the future. So when you jail someone you are actually making it more likely they will commit crime in the future. As opposed to, for example, trying to understand what led that person to come into the criminal system and trying to address the needs that they and their community have." — Alec Karakatsanis"There's this tendency to define people who've committed a crime as bad people. And they committed a crime because of that evil. That just fundamentally, in my experience, misunderstands human behavior. The vast majority of times when people hurt each other in our society it is not because the person is irredeemably bad, but because of very particular circumstances in which they found themselves. And we have control to a large extent over those circumstances." — Alec Karakatsanis

"I will never again spend money on a Minion movie. ... I surprised myself. I went into this a huge fan of the Minions. And I thought 'Oh, they're so popular, we should talk about them on the left.' And I don't regret this conversation at all. It has deepened my understanding. But I have come out of it as an anti-fan." — Yasmin Nair Current Affairs podcasts have been deadly serious lately, with many shows devoted to U.S. foreign policy, including episodes on Palestine (Part I, Part II), Afghanistan, U.S. empire, and the threat of nuclear war. Today we take a break from eating our vegetables and indulge ourselves in a bit of dessert, with a much lighter subject (some might say a frivolous one): the "Minions" from the Despicable Me series. Films featuring the Minions have been hugely successful, being some of the top-grossing animated films of all time and spawning a multi-billion-dollar franchise with a vast range of products, from toasters that will imprint a Minion onto a piece of bread to toothpaste dispensers and Minion-shaped tic-tacs. On Etsy, one can choose among dozens of different crocheted Minion hats. The Minions have become ubiquitous in memes and a 2015 article called "How Minions Destroyed The Internet" argues that Minions have become a "template onto which we project ourselves." But can we learn anything from the Minions films? Today, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson is joined by editor-at-large Yasmin Nair and managing editor Lily Sánchez for a discussion about the Despicable Me and Minions films, probing such questions as:In depicting unfree and uncompensated labor by a mass of nondescript fungible workers, do the films implicitly affirm a Marxist critique of capitalism? (Answer: not really.)Should children actually watch Minions films, or will they be corrupted in various ways? (Answer: Do not let your child watch Minions films unless you want them to start imitating Minions for weeks on end.)Are these films entirely stupid or do they have artistic merit?Do the films have some uncomfortable ethnic stereotypes and some stuff that is weirdly inappropriate for kids? (Yes and yes.)Does the fact that Minions have to "serve the most villainous master" explain why the films had to trap them in a cave for the years 1933-1945?Why has Yasmin gone from loving posting Minions memes to being an "anti-fan"?Does Hollywood's relentless search for giant profits mean we will be subjected to new Minions films for the rest of our natural lives?"I think I feel about the Minions the way I feel about shopping malls, which is that I can go to them or see them as sociological experiments mostly, as opposed to genuine enjoyment." — Lily"I am surrounded by ever-growing piles of Minions in my dreams." — NathanThe scene of Minions being tortured can be watched here. The full "banana song" can be heard (if so desired) here. Lily's article about families is here and Nathan's about J.K. Rowling is here. The Cracked article alleging that the film leaves open the possibility that the Minions have committed murder is here. The Vox article "Labor exploitation, explained by Minions" is here. A more basic Vox "explainer" on Minions is here. The academic article "Beautiful Exploitation. Notes on the Un-free Minions" is here. "Are children who watch the first three Despicable Me movies going to grow up to become laborers who don't understand their enslavement? Given the way capitalism is crushing the world, I seriously doubt it. ... It's a kids' movie about a bunch of yellow pills who like bananas and run around speaking gibberish. Those kids will grow up, they'll be fine." — Yasmin "No! The movie normalized and accustomed them to situations of exploitation by depicting the Minions as content with their condition!" — Nathan Please enjoy our detailed analysis of Minions. As Nathan promises at the end of the episode, we will never be revisiting the subject, no matter how many more of these films are released. Minions Being Tortured: 

In our previous episode on Palestine with Rashid Khalidi, we discussed the early history of the conflict. Today we speak with Noura Erakat, human rights lawyer and professor at Rutgers University, whose book Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press) examines how international law does and doesn't apply in Israel and Palestine. We discuss why a two-state solution has not been implemented, and how international law has treated Palestinians over time.