#The Ezra Klein SHow

[maaarine]

The Ezra Klein Show: How to Discover Your Own Taste

"I think a lot about the difference between what in my head is the push internet and the pull internet, which is not perfect language.

But the internet where things are pushed at you and the internet where you have to do some work, day after day, go in and visit a home page or whatever, you have to pull it towards you.

And the problem with the push internet is it’s not really under your control, right? It’s about what the force pushing is doing.

But as that became bigger, people stopped doing the things that allowed the pull internet to exist.

There aren’t so many blogs anymore. Not none, but there are fewer.

People put their effort — because it’s the easier way to find audience and eventually to make a living — into the algorithmic spaces.

And so there’s simply less of this other thing there to explore."

[panicinthestudio]

Best Of: A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe, March 31,2023

In last November's midterm elections, voters placed the Republican Party in charge of the House of Representatives. In 2024, it’s very possible that Republicans will take over the Senate as well and voters will elect Donald Trump — or someone like him — as president.  But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots; a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament; Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide; Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections; and Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil. Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems? Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/... which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read. In this conversation, taped in November 2022, we discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.

Mentioned:

Sacred and Secular (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

“Exploring drivers of vote choice and policy positions among the American electorate (https://perryundem.com/wp-content/upl...

Book Recommendations:

Popular Dictatorships (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/...) by Aleksandar Matovski

Spin Dictators (https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...) by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman

The Origins of Totalitarianism (https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-orig...) by Hannah Arendt

The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times Podcasts

[thewomanwhobloggedlikeaman]

My therapist: The new Ezra Klein Show podcast thumbnail isn't real and can't hurt you

The new Ezra Klein Show podcast thumbnail:

[middleofrow]

Best Podcasts of 2022

Best Podcasts of 2022

(more…)

[deanmarywinchester]

reading this book called “everything for everyone: an oral history of the New York commune 2052-2072” (pause for someone to say “of course you, obsessed with new york and communal living, are reading something called that”) and I’m not very far in but conceptually it whips. it’s by these two academics and it’s a faux oral history of the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of a stateless society. and the introduction is so fun because it like imagines the future lives of the authors into this future that they’ve written about, talking about how they met in the 2010s, had careers as scholars and activists into the 2050s, and how they’re facing the end of their lives in the 2070s and this book is going to be their last big project. it’s one of those things that im having to read slowly because i have a lot of feelings about it but each chapter is an interview with a different person who lived through this rebuilding in the 2050s and it’s really cool.

[st-just]

Little I find stranger than the way that people who have made their entire careers and intellectual lives off of the internet treating 'screen time' like it's axiomatically a dead waste of soul-sucking entropy that everyone hates but is psychically dependent on.

Like I quite like being able to google trivia questions and type my random creative scribbling in a way that other people can read, personally.

[theweeklyshowwithjonstewart]

The Dangers to Democracy In A Digital World with Jon Stewart, Ezra Klein, & Tristan Harris

With the election just over a month away, Americans are caught between a flood of political promises and the reality that we live in a time of political dysfunction. Navigating a presidential election in a digital world has proved difficult due to the widespread misinformation and different realities we live in online. To get to the root of this issue and emphasize the threat to democracy, Jon Stewart sits down with New York Times columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, Ezra Klein, and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-host of Your Undivided Attention podcast Tristan Harris. They explore how social media’s effective tactics of personalizing users’ newsfeeds or 'For You Page' alters public opinion on hot-button issues and what we need to do to close the gap between political spin and public need.

[robynochs]

This Ezra Klein Show podcast titled "We Need Better Narratives About Gender," features a fascinating conversation between Masha Gessen and Lydia Polgreen.

After you listen to it, I would love to hear your thoughts.

[lenbryant]

Gender queer stuff

[maaarine]

Rachel Zoffness:

"Our neuroplastic brain will change with time, and practice, and experience.

So the piano pathway in my brain got bigger and stronger the more I played the piano.

Guess what happens in the brain the more it inadvertently and accidentally "practices" pain?

The bigger and stronger the pain pathway in your central nervous system gets. When that happens, we say that your brain becomes sensitive to pain.

Our finely tuned wonderful brain is now picking up on sensory messages from the body and interpreting them as dangerous, and amplifying that even though they’re not dangerous.

One great example is with my fibromyalgia patients who have chronic pain, and they go to the park for a picnic. And their brain gives them these loud danger messages.

I think anyone can agree that going to the park when you have fibromyalgia is not dangerous, but your brain is telling you that it’s dangerous anyway.

Pain is really a danger message, it’s a danger detection system, and it isn’t always right.

And if you’re someone living with pain, and you believe that it’s dangerous for you to go outside and go for a walk or see friends, you are never going to get well.

Because part of the chronic pain cycle is staying inside, in bed, missing out on life — and that’s understandable.

But with chronic pain, that cycle is the thing that ultimately amplifies pain, perpetuates disability, and prevents healing. (…)

The science all illustrates that trauma doesn’t just live in the brain, it also lives in the body.

It changes your physiology, your nervous system, your immune system, your endocrine functioning, muscle tension.

What we also know is that trauma also changes the brain to amplify pain. It makes your brain more sensitive, and more of a finely tuned instrument.

When you experience trauma, it means that your brain wasn’t prepared for the thing that happened.

So after a trauma, people experience a lot of different symptoms, and one of them is called hyper-vigilance: small bits of sensory information from your environment can trigger an exaggerated response.

The same thing happens with internal sensory messages also, your brain is also scanning your internal environment.”

Source: The Ezra Klein Show: This Book Changed My Relationship to Pain

[a-very-tired-jew]

Dropout Discord historical revisionism and denialism

A few days ago someone in the discord lamented over the fact that Hank Green endorsed a certain podcast.

Fig. 1. User dislikes that Hank Green will be getting a show on Dropout because they apparently endorse a podcast that "spreads lies against Palestinians". The podcast in particular is the Ezra Klein show, which I will admit I don't listen to. However, the two attached photos are quotes from a guest on the podcast and the "lies" that the show spreads.

Fig. 2. Klein's guest, Yossi Klein Halevi, states that Palestinian leaders, to his knowledge, have not accepted Jewish indigeneity nor has there been acceptance of a Jewish majority state.

Fig. 2. Halevi claims that the average Palestinian does not see Israel as a legitimate country and that the Holocaust is a lie, which is pushed by its media and leaders. Let's look at these claims. The first purports that no Palestinian leader has accepted Jewish indigeneity to the region. Doing a Google dive finds that no leader has accepted this, but nor have they outright denied it from what I can tell (if they have I will edit this with examples). Other leaders have said that the Jews Zionists are outright invaders in the area (looking at you Faisal), and the terrorist groups have said this type of rhetoric as well. Acceptance of a Jewish majority state has always been an issue in the MENA region. Other blogs have gone over this more in depth than I will here, but it has to do with a combination of historical antisemitism and reducing Jews to second class citizens. Jews are now "uppity" because they have their own country and rights that they didn't have in many of the other places they used to live (Westerners if you don't understand this and you're mad about this statement, you really need to look into the history of Jews as dhimmis and laws made against us). These next two claims I can see where people get upset and decry them as a lie. This gets a bit into semantics and how people think though. Halevi states that the average Palestinian thinks Israel is an illegitimate country based upon Zionist myth and the Holocaust lie/exaggeration. Many of the individuals in this particular server, and in other spaces, will likely go "But I know a Palestinian and they acknowledge the Holocaust was real! This is a lie." However, Halevi is not talking about the individual, they're talking about averages and generalizations and how the populace is influenced by their leaders and media. It is correct to state that Arafat never denied the Holocaust happened. However, members of the PLO during his tenure often did on their own. The current chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, is a known Holocaust denialist/revisionist who wrote their PhD dissertation the Holocaust as a lie. He has repeatedly blamed the Jews for the Holocaust and played down the number of deaths. Abbas pushes the Zionist/Hitler conspiracy based upon the Haavara Agreement, makes false claims that less than 1 million Jews died, that the Allies made up the 6 million number, and that the gas chambers did not exist. There's a lot more nuance to things like the Haavara Agreement than I, an ecologist, can parse, so I leave that to my betters. However, just know that a small agreement like that does not support the claim that Zionists orchestrated the mass killing of Jews to steal land from Palestinians. That is outrageously antisemitic and relies upon a number of conspiracies. If we look at other leaders we will see denialism and revisionism as well. Hamas and its leadership has long denied that the Holocaust happened and they were upset when the UNRWA tried to include it in textbooks in Gaza back in 2009. Remember, Hamas is in charge of Gaza and their leaders are therefore Palestinian leaders for the area. Their denialism goes all the way back to the 00s where they issued the following statement in response to a conference on the Holocaust held in Stockhold at the time:

"This conference bears a clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis. . . . The invention of these grand illusions of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest of the nations." -This quote is originally from their old website palestine.info.org This sentiment and denialism is not new. I have posted an excerpt of this particular article in the past.

Fig. 4. Excerpt of Martha Gellhorn's article from 1961 The Arabs of Palestine - a camp leader states revisionism and conspiracy. Martha Gellhorn's 1961 article titled The Arabs of Palestine documents Holocaust denialism and revisionism throughout it. The excerpt posted above is from her time interviewing one of the camp leaders while being escorted by a Secret Service agent. It takes the Haavara Agreement into conspiracy territory and alleges that Jews (not event Zionists, just outright Jews) worked with Hitler to kill their own people. Hell, it actually doesn't go full Haavara conspiracy because the leader does not state this was done to force the Jews to emigrate to Palestine and "steal their land" as the article moves on after this section. I highly recommend reading Gellhorn's article as it highlights many of the sentiments that we see to this day, and it was written in 1961. Holocaust denialism and revisionism have been ever present. Some things have changed, such as other nations normalizing their relations with Israel and recognizing them, but others have not. And in the end, this is another example of young activists who think they're informed on a subject they recently became passionate about showing that they are in fact not as informed as they think.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Re: your post about the Ezra Klein, Coates interview, and specifically the analogy you drew about civil rights; I’m kind of confused about how you came to the conclusion that the Palestinians haven’t tried doing nonviolence. Did the march of return not count? Furthermore, moral sobriety did not convince the American public that black people weren’t inferior. I think you calling Coates a polemicist was incredibly uncharitable and shows apathy to the point that him and Klein both agreed on: that Israel is an apartheid state.

Thanks for the comment. I'll presume your good faith and return the same in this longish answer.

You wrote: "I'm kind of confused about how you came to the conclusion that the Palestinians haven't tried doing nonviolence." 

Your confusion may be a result of the fact that I neither said nor implied this. What you're doing here is called a straw man fallacy.[1] 

What I did say was that Civil Rights activists led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress of Racial Equality were utterly committed to nonviolence. You can tell this is true by how they never committed acts of terrorism. 

You wrote: "Furthermore, moral sobriety did not convince the American public that black people weren't inferior."

I don't know what "moral sobriety" is. I don't know what moral inebriation would be, either.

I certainly didn't claim that moral sobriety accomplished anything and this is another straw man.[1] 

What I did claim was that the principled nonviolence of the Civil Rights Movement impacted public opinion sufficiently to get the  Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed. 

This is from the transcript of the Coates/Klein conversation[2]:

TA-NEHISI COATES: I can’t accept that your interest in a true democracy was destroyed by violence from your partner. I just can’t accept that. First of all, I think even in this rendering that we have here, I suspect that there are reasons for why that suicide bombing even happened.

'You' here refers to Israel. Coates is saying that Israelis must not be committed to peace because violence from Hamas derailed Israeli public support for a peace process. If this is true, why is it not also true for the Palestinians? This seems to me like both a double standard and terrorism apologetics.

You wrote: "...I think you calling Coates a polemicist was incredibly uncharitable…"

Coates himself acknowledges this. Here's a long excerpt from the transcript [2], keeping his comments in context:

EZRA KLEIN: Did you go around with anybody who would say, no, we’re doing the right thing here. Or even we’re not doing enough here.

TA-NEHISI COATES: No.

EZRA KLEIN: Why?

TA-NEHISI COATES: There are things in this world that I see that I just don’t want to hear the justification for. I just don’t think can be justified. I don’t want to hear — I don’t know what I can glean from a justification for — and I’m talking about in an American context — segregation.

I don’t know what necessarily I can glean from a justification for enslavement by hearing somebody like interviewing somebody and say, tell me why this is legal. Some things come down to, for me, just a moral decision. And I actually think journalists do this all the time. I think we all draw a line somewhere about what we feel is out of bounds and what we feel is beyond.

For me, I was willing to entertain probably a debate from people who were anti-occupation, but maybe not necessarily anti-Zionist. Maybe it would be classified as liberal Zionists even. All the way over to people who thought Zionism was a terrible idea and the worst thing that had ever happened. The justification for settlements was outside of my frame.

EZRA KLEIN: But that does wipe out all of Israeli society almost, right?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I was concerned with what I don’t know. And what I haven’t heard. And for me, Palestinian voices have been pushed so far out of the frame. Like that is the thing that is hard to access. And I think this is open for critique. But I made a conscious decision, frankly, in the language, you know what I mean?

Later in the interview, Coates returns to Klein's criticism:

COATES:... this was just a decision I made. OK, who am I not hearing from? Who have I not heard from?

And so that necessarily means marginalizing a portion of it.

Coates openly acknowledges that he decided consciously, deliberately, to ignore the parts he didn't want to hear in order to protect the narrative he wanted to focus on. He states that this is open for critique…which is what I'm offering. I haven't been uncharitable in any way. 

You wrote: "...and shows apathy to the point that him and Klein both agreed on: that Israel is an apartheid state." 

That's a third straw man[1]. Look again. How did my post start?

I agree with Coates and Klein both that the circumstances for Palestinians in the West Bank can be compared to apartheid. Israel within the green line can't be described that way, but the West Bank, in my opinion, can be described that way.

I think the West Bank settlements are indefensible. They are shameful and wrong. Israel could have protected its security without building settlements clearly meant to eventually annex the land into Israel. I have nothing but contempt and condemnation for them. 

Coates and Klein, however, also agreed about what would happen if Israel unilaterally pulled out of the West Bank as they did in Gaza in 2005. Again, here's the transcript:

KLEIN:...If we ever pull back, if we do what we did in Gaza, and allow this to be self-governed, an army will be raised, and what happened on 10/7 will be a small preview of what will be coming for us eventually.

That doesn’t make anything happening in the West Bank right. It doesn’t have any effect on the morality of it whatsoever. But it is the politics of Israel that somebody is going to have to deal with at some point or not. And then we’re just here. I’m not here to tell you I’ve come up with some answer. It’s just one of the things that has to sit in the pot.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Yeah, I don’t disagree with that at all. I don’t disagree with that at all.

Given this agreement between Coates and Klein that Israel pulling out of the West Bank unilaterally without enforceable security guarantees would result in disaster, what would you have Israel do? If it was up to me, I'd start with making water distribution fair in area C of the West Bank.

Now that I have defended my reasonable and supported criticisms of Coates from three straw man comments, I need to mention that the same category of error Coates gives us had a mirror image this weekend in Bill Maher.

BONUS GRIPE: Bill Maher does the same kind of thing as Coates, but in a mirror

Did you see this?

Set aside for a minute that Maher condescending to Chappell Roan and Roan's audience won't change any minds and set aside that Maher continues to be a living avatar for Peak Boomer Asshole Behavior - and what we're left with is a narrative about Israel/Palestine which is made to seem reasonable only by consciously, deliberately, dishonestly choosing to leave out utterly essential information. They're both writing for confirmation biases. There are only two differences between what Coates did and what Maher did:

1. Maher leaves out essential information about the Palestinian concerns and Palestinian realities while ignoring or downplaying Israeli failures…while Coates leaves out essential information about Israeli concerns and Israeli realities while ignoring or downplaying Palestinian failures. 

2. Coates at least ADMITS, when pressed, that he's doing this. Maher, smug prick that he is, does not. 

They're both wrong. It's assholes running the Israeli government, assholes running Hamas, assholes running the Palestinian Authority, and assholes running the Iranian government- and NONE of these parties has honestly sought peace for at least a couple decades. (Iran and Hamas have never sought peace.)

And with their deeply dishonest determination to serve their narratives by leaving out half the story, neither Coates nor Maher are helping elevate the conversation and fumble towards truth or resolution nearly as much as Ezra Klein does with consistent intellectual honesty.

[1] https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-ta-nehisi-coates.html

[collapsedsquid]

Seeing Ezra Klein interview Vivek Ramaswamy and Gary Gerstle back-to-back does make you think "OK this show is just lib Joe Rogan."

[dhaaruni]

This article in 5 points:

The polls were right in 2022 and likely aren't wrong

This isn't 100% the media's fault

Voters are mad about prices and interest rates

Voters think Biden is too liberal and too old

Voters forgot how bad Trump is

Caveat that we're still 5.5 months out from the election but the clock is ticking and I agree with Ezra Klein that Biden's running the campaign like he's winning and not the underdog. AOC's making the best case for Biden of any elected Democrat and more should follow her example.

It's interesting that all polls show Democratic senators and candidates running well ahead of Biden in swing states but ticket splitting has been close to nonexistent in the last 2 presidential elections so the polls will likely substantially converge.

[st-just]

Half listening to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show about the epidemic of loneliness among adults because, hey, background noise.

And like

a. It should be illegal to talk about the cultural and/or structural factors behind some change in American society without at least gesturing towards comparing it with other countries.

b. Not to sound unsympathetic to the issue but they keep talking about part of the solution being, like, not wearing headphones when you're out walking and making a point of spending time with your coworkers. To which my instant response is 'get fucked'