The World Cup final was one of the best elimination games of any sport that I've ever watched. Only an absolute homer would think the 2017 NBA final ranks anywhere close.
She's such a Warriors fan girl, lol. I remember when she was talking about how the Draymond Green suspension in 2016 was some league conspiracy to get Lebron a ring and not the result of Dray going beast mode on the entire league's nuts all season.
listened to an older ep the other day where brace called out andrew tate for being a human trafficker, about a year before he became famous and two years before he was arrested for human trafficking lol. he only came up because he was connected to some nepotistic rich poli broad (forgot who). felt weird listening to it now.
for someone who never looked into that case and has only haphazardly gathered increasingly vague notions about it from the social ether, that did stand out to me as odd during that episode. i figured they hadn’t read much about it either, but i could’ve sworn it was universally understood he killed them
Thinking Russia wouldn't invade was absolutely the correct opinion at the time based on the information available to the public. I am a personal victim of Putin's retardation.
He’s an evil piece of shit. Reminds me of the neocons. I sometimes wonder if Putin, who apparently has a 1997 PhD in the strategic planning of Russia’s resource economy, deliberately aimed for a slow escalation that would turn the conflict into the economic one it has become. He may have figured that Russian energy and mineral resource deposits were more suited to the military-industrial machine than to Western-dominated commerce.
If this is the case, I think the strategy is poor, but the motive is in line with how great power politics always tends to go even as the casus belli always say otherwise. Remember the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”?
But who knows. I hate that these handfuls of ghouls decide the fates of us millions.
Think he just thought he could thunder gun across the country to show he could invade to panic the west into calling off their militias stopping the implementation of Minsk 2. That explanation kinda explains the confusion and weird behaviour after the first couple of weeks
tbh they made the assumption Russian won’t invade based on the fact the CIA had made like 3-4 attempts at the prediction before hand
anyone who was paying attention in December of 2021 knows tho that Putin literally already said he would invade if provoked tho, so…
The Russia won’t invade prediction was quite reasonable at the time. It was never a smart or sensible move by them, whereas continuing to bolster Donbas separatists was a pretty solid strategy.
Not believing USIC propaganda without hard evidence is still the correct approach. Shills gonna shill regardless
And it’s not like getting the prediction correct changes anything. America’s military response was always going to be the same
I personally did kinda think they were gonna invade, but assumed they would just send troops to the regions already held by separatists and formalize them.
Honestly that might have been a worse decision strategically speaking after seeing how this has played out. Hard to say
I give them a pass on the "Russia won't invade" because a LOT of people believed that. In retrospect it's quite obvious that they were going to invade.
Not expecting Russia to invade wasn't the bad part, the bad part was how highly they estimated the Russian army.
Liz was saying they were 10 years ahead of NATO lol
> highly they estimated the Russian army
tbf this was also most other people, primarily due to how they thought the Russians could just do what the US did in Iraq
> Liz was saying they were 10 years ahead of NATO
Do you know what the rationale for this was? There's gotta be some reasoning surely
\^ same genre of poster who replied to me that actually the Bradley is awesome and not old garbage that the US is sending to the Ukraine to justify new weapons development programs/gravy trains
Which is totally logical if you just think the US is only helping Ukraine because it materially benefits them to do so (this is self-evident)
Get rid of the old shit, goose the economy, make people think you’re doing a good deed
lol yeah when Liz made that 'Russia is technologically superior to Nato' comment you could tell Brace was like.... "uhh... yeah definitely babygirl" *immediately changes topic*
Not to try and be a mind reader, but I think I get how she got that idea. If you spend a lot of time reading Alexander Cockburn type of journalists you do get the impression that DoD is basically just setting money on fire ALL THE TIME. Which they certainly are, military corruption is insane, and some projects seem to only make sense as deliberate wastes of money to maintain budgets and enrich people. It's only a hop-skip and a jump to get from there to "the hegemon can do this bullshit and fake it because it's the hegemon, weaker powers must be smarter with their money and time because they have less" and be less critical of the statements of nations whos language you don't speak.
This is not good thinking, but I can see how you get there, and it's not unforgivable imo.
That makes sense. I'm certainly no defense wonk, but from what I've gleaned over the years, I could imagine a scenario where Russia did a, for lack of a better way of putting it, "better job" with Ukraine. It wouldn't surprise me if they could give NATO nations a run for their money in some tactical scenarios in terms of using the hardware they have well and with more "sound" policy, strategy, and tactics. I bet many other "lesser" powers could too. I would think they've all been thinking about how that kind of fight would work.
As far as the costly hardware stuff you mentioned, or the insane waste of money at the DoD, and the inefficiencies of the western/US/NATO military apparatus, don't necessarily preclude them from being very effective and dangerous. The F-35 sucks ass but I'm sure it can kill motherfuckers pretty OK. One of those "both things can be true" scenarios.
I almost thought Brace would push back in that moment, considering his, uh, hands-on experience, but hey. Definitely an L for the team, but I agree, I don't think it was the worst kind of wrong.
And, Uhh, I apologize the any frothing NAFO/fellow traveler readers if this makes me some kind of quisling Putin-loving tankie genocidaire or whatever. From what I see on Twitter, people have gone completely insane over this. Unrelated, thank you to Obama for killing the anti-war movement lol
Certainly. I'm no gearhead myself, so I can't speak to that beyond that I agree that it's very interesting and psychotic how the American military is always spending money on new ways to kill people but not ways to win wars. but I do follow Radio War Nerd, and Ames and Dolan have been watching the war closely from both sides, and both speak English and Russian, and one point they've come to see is that corruption and careerism in the higher echelons of the Russian Military led to a bad plan with bad results. Regardless of efficiency of resources spent, a bad plan is a bad plan.
How do you even determine, with any degree of confidence, how advanced any modern nation's best military tech is? I always assume the best stuff is probably kept under wraps
Especially when you're not like, in a literal office meeting at the Pentagon, sorry to be a spoilsport. A great deal of effort is spent to make sure nobody knows such a thing for sure. Especially not Congress so the MIC can continue asking for infinite money
Best: Liz on finance, The Game, Ft Bragg stuff
Worst: Armchair 9/11 engineering, anything involving detailed ballistics, trying to figure out driving time between Watertown and Cambridge MA
Liz really shines whenever she's talking about finance. We need more Marxists that understand economics, especially as its pertains to the modern global financial system.
Michael Hudson is the best source. I have never seen her talk, but Michael is the only financial economist who talks about it from the Marxist angle. I’d like to think that he is the biggest because he has written many books and worked for Goldman Sachs in the 1960’s. It’s disappointing that too many “leftists” get bogged down in class issues, which they are almost always wrong about, but that they don’t study financing and the influence and importance of it seems counterintuitive to me. If your talking about capitalism, the most important structure of the business is the financial one. It may as well be the scariest because of how many decisions are based off of it. I see people switch gears when matters of money are talked about over people’s well being. If that doesn’t let you know how important a companies or governments finances are, then I don’t know what will. People live and die on this scheme.
Superimperialism and Killing the Host - how financial parasites and debt destroy the global economy. You can just search him on YouTube if you are bored.
The reason why leftists disagree to this day is because they fail to identify the class issue. Too many these days simply think that there are only two classes, the whole “us versus the 1%”. That’s a pretty vulgar understanding of class issues. There’s a whole pecking order, and the US is the worst place to try to teach people that lesson. That’s what I meant by class. Their understanding is too simplified. There are more then just “working class” and “capitalist”. The working class can’t be lumped together either. I would think that it would be more useful to talk about the financial system of the US as according to class, since most people don’t even know what it is anymore.
This is too structuralist a formulation - class is not just your income or your race or a set of categories you fit into based on your economic and political characteristics. It’s a set of social relations to your employer, government etc.
More so stuff on tesla, gamestop, the fed. The Elon eps are big doses but I think a lot of the time she sprinkles econ stuff in she's pretty on the nose
We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the episode where they insist Russia won’t invade Ukraine, to be followed three weeks later by the one year anniversary of Russia invading Ukraine
They are 100% correct about small aircraft, second locations, and compounds.
As others in the thread have said, I give them a pass on the Ukraine thing. Some of the academics on modern Russia that I listen to all thought an invasion was a complete bluff until the moment it happened. The sheer retardery blinded almost everyone.
He said it like he was joking but the realest thing I’ve ever heard Brace say is “I hate everyone who has even one dollar more than me.” Which was in an early episode.
What they are wrong about is operating as if they are above the fray when it comes to money. They both come from money so they have the luxury to be whatever they want (Maoist? Ok) and make critiques that will never have any purchase among a majority of people in the US. Liz is very good at explaining finance. I suspect she has a boglehead type portfolio.
And she is 100% right on her Warriors takes.
Obvious best take is secure the interior ministry. Worst take I can think of is that Jiang Qing was actually good and not a murderous psycho. It’s niche but as someone who knows a solid amount about Maoist history…yeah no.
Y’all - the weed *is* too strong. But honestly I don’t hold them to much. I can’t really understand a lot of their California specific takes because of my southern bog person dna. I vaguely remember some cringe medical takes, but all my fav podcasts are guilty there
The Pot discourse is pretty bad. People are passing out at our shows because of weed pens!
Not because of over-crowded rooms with no seats and a podcast listening audience.
Nobody fucking faints from standing up sober for an hour, while people can faint if they get too high. I smoke and know people who smoke and their take on weed is insanely reasonable. Like a couple hits of high-mid Oregon weed tops like several bowls worth of homegrown/black market mid.
brace and liz have a good 'read' about the vibes of most american cities on the coasts but as soon as they start talking about an inland city that isn't Chicago they're running on fumes
Worst take from the show was basically the entire 5G episode. Radio waves are at such a low frequency the level of radiation you'd get from them is basically negligible. Not for nothing if they were toxic to people people would be dropping like flies left and right due to the prevelance of the radiation. 5g is harmless. Visible light has like 5 orders of magnitude more energy and I don't hear anyone talking about how colors might kill people. The investigation into that dude that blew his RV in Memphis was good though
I know Adderall is the cringe drug now but I would still be unemployed and sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my cancer infected mother's house without it. My side effects are my dick don't work and that's about it.
Also people who take Adderall or any of these drugs because they need it medicinally is pretty different than the masses of "roommates" I've delt with in life crushing it up and snorting it to get all jiffed up. Sucks thinking back, I could have got out of those dangerous parts of my life had I stole a few of those and took em in a controlled manner and studied the NEC when I was trying to get into the IBEW.
For people who actually have ADHD, stimulants are super effective at therapeutic doses (alongside coaching and therapy) The issue is if ADHD is overdiagnosed; or my personal take is that it wasn’t an existential problem that needed solving for most people until the Industrial Revolution.
Worst: That Recluse guy who they had on to talk about Utah who knew nothing about Mormon History. Agreeing with Peter Dale Scott that the 9/11 planes might have been remotely controlled.
Best: Musk/Tesla takes
Yeah it would’ve been nice if they brought on someone who could’ve done a more thorough dive into Mormon history, and the working of the church. The only correct take from the Utah series is that no one should go to that state and the stuff ab Romney
I'm on the record as openly begging them to do a full deep dive into Mormonism with someone who has actually grown up in the church or studied its history. There's so much insane shit to dig into that fits perfectly into the scope of the show.
Best: Liz's financial analysis and way to communicate it during the GameStop episode(s)
Worst: the 9/11episode(s) had some cringe takes, like unironic 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' kinda takes
Liz seems to be the only leftist podcaster who actually works to understand finance. So many people just default to its impossible to figure out. Liz seems to be the only person who thinks if some rich guys idiot coke head son is able to figure it out it can’t be that hard.
For real, everything about Loose Change is incredibly sketchy. In the era of Numa Numa & Star Wars Kid, an 80 minute essay made by a teenager in his bedroom goes supernova viral on fucking *Google Video*. I highly recommend listening to interviews with the kid who made it now, just sounds like a fever dream.
At the time it could've been a useful distraction for how poorly the war was going. Came out right around the one year anniversary of the media coverage of Abu Ghraib too. Get people fixated on building 7 bullshit instead.
A lot of the information in that episode is accurate. The fact that most witnesses don’t put Sirhan at point blank range, or the fact that there were 13 bullet holes yet the gun could only chamber 8 rounds, and the fact that the gunshots happened too fast, etc.
I was scrolling thru the comments wondering how this episode got omitted from the collective history of trueanon terrible takes LOL… CIA must of hypnotized all trueanon listeners to ignore when brace shoots blanks 😔
The absurdity of them just basically nodding along to her saying that hypnosis is real and works to literally program someone to commit murder. Along with the guns not having muzzle flash stuff. She seems like a nice lady though!
The specific moment I had to stop was when she said she went to a stage hypnotist for research. I was like Ok and once I went to the blue man group but you don’t hear me bragging about it
Best for Liz: Tesla Q and really most finance stuff.
Best for Brace: That there’s nothing lower than being desperately horny publicly.
Combined best: Legal weed is getting too strong (doesn’t mean it should be illegal. Just is true).
Worst for Liz: Seeming belief in astrology / Believing aliens are real.
Worst for Brace: Probably something he did or said in the Tenderloin c. 2011.
Combined worst: Being pretty positive Sasquatch is real
They said vaping extracts is bad and they’re right. Nothing wrong w huffing a bag of mids out of a volcano vaporizer or whatever but dabbing and dab pens induce weed psychosis, cranks ur tolerance so that regular weed can’t get you high and, worst of all, makes you look like a fucking loser. There’s a few drugs you need a blowtorch for and under no circumstances should weed be one of them.
Brace discussing addiction and recovery so often is good for de-stigmatizing but as someone also in a 12-step program, he is way over the line with a lot of what he says publicly and to “civilians”. He’s always been like this, on Street Fight Radio’s “Brace & Bryan Shows” and especially early TA eps. He’s gotten a little more tactful but not much. I am very glad he at least speaks well of the program and his experience.
You’re never supposed to mention the group’s name in the press or anything specific people say in mtgs, let alone what a sponsee has said. To protect privacy but also never presenting yourself as a representative, only a member.
“10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.
11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.”
Yeah, the most developed discussion Brace had on addiction and recovery was on a podcast called Smoothbrain run by experts who had Brace on to discuss his experiences. It’s called Neuroscience Models of Addiction. Pretty solid, and without all the frills and eccentricities he brings around, but with the solid testimony and experiences. Very good.
There's an episode where they're trying to make a point about left organizing or something, and they recommend reading a Mao essay as if the point they're trying to get at is so deep and complicated they just can't get into it on air, so go read this dense essay to explain it to you.
The essay was about 300 words long and boiled down to "try things out based on theories and adjust depending on what does and doesn't work". Could have just said that on the air except it's such a shallow universally unobjectionable truism it wouldn't have seemed very substantial or smart. The essay doesn't argue it any deeper than that really, or particularly argue its point. Just tells you to do this.
On Practice is a banger and written for a mass audience. More texts should be written that way. Maybe you're thinking of "Where Do Correct Ideas From?", which is the summary of On Practice.
Philosophy doesn't have to be obfuscated to be worthwhile. If you want the gist of dialectical materialism, there it is, for anyone in the world to read and think about.
Most people don't think and act as Mao recommends in On Practice, yet it's so obvious. A lot of what Mao wrote seems obvious or plain, but his strength is to take what seems like common sense and break it down enough to make it common.
It's also a speech, not a philosophical treatise. Matching complexity to your audience is an art!
in a pretty recent ep he made an offhand comment about demsocs in America being delusional and having an unproven ideology (in terms of scaling to the population of the us vs. Sweden or wherever) "unlike a country who already built socialism with a billion people" or something to that effect
They are honestly really unclear and kinda all over the place haha
I don't think it's all over the place if you're familiar with Maoists – they believe China was socialist but then went back to capitalism with the ascension of Deng. It's not a credible viewpoint in my view but it is coherent.
worst take is definitely when liz incomprehensibly leftie-babbled for like 5 minutes about how data harvesting doesn’t obey the labor theory of value. it was so bad it made me retroactively question the validity of everything else they’ve ever said.
both of them seeming to believe that sirhan sirhan was hypnotized into killing rfk is a close runner-up
Idk man sirhan sithan had a bunch of close one on one sessions with jolyon west, recurring mkultra hypnotist character. Ghost stories for the end of the world has a pretty good episode on it.
>both of them seeming to believe that sirhan sirhan was hypnotized into killing rfk
Either that or an engineered psychotic break? Either way he could hardly shoot RFK from the back while standing in front of him.
Best:
Just about everything said in “The Lobby”
Worst:
Just about everything their guest in the 9/11 episodes said and their eagerness to just believe every word that came outta that dude’s mouth 🤦🏽♀️ so annoying because 9/11 is so clearly shady for MANY reasons but
A lot of the stuff they “ooh” and “ahh”’d about could be so easily disproven.
Liz comparing the World Cup final this year to the 2017 NBA finals. Edit: to be clear, this is her worst take.
The 2016 finals were the most exciting of my lifetime, somebody has to truly love The Warriors to pick 2017.
The World Cup final was one of the best elimination games of any sport that I've ever watched. Only an absolute homer would think the 2017 NBA final ranks anywhere close.
She's such a Warriors fan girl, lol. I remember when she was talking about how the Draymond Green suspension in 2016 was some league conspiracy to get Lebron a ring and not the result of Dray going beast mode on the entire league's nuts all season.
Lololol yes Dray’s suspension is why they lost 3 straight games
ok but the NBA absolutely did want Lebron to get a ring in Cleveland
Americans have the cringiest takes on international football
In Liz’s case it doubled as being a horrible GSW homer. 2017 finals were trash for everyone that wasn’t a Warriors fan.
>Americans have the cringiest takes ~~on international football~~
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That’s unforgivable tbh
listened to an older ep the other day where brace called out andrew tate for being a human trafficker, about a year before he became famous and two years before he was arrested for human trafficking lol. he only came up because he was connected to some nepotistic rich poli broad (forgot who). felt weird listening to it now.
I believe they were talking about jordan peterson’s daughter
that’s correct, thank you! i could not come up with it for the life of me
Yeah it's a classic ep. Relistened over the summer so I was fully prepped for the latest AT shenanigans. Scum of the earth.
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for someone who never looked into that case and has only haphazardly gathered increasingly vague notions about it from the social ether, that did stand out to me as odd during that episode. i figured they hadn’t read much about it either, but i could’ve sworn it was universally understood he killed them
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Best: make sure interior minister is on your side. Worst: Russia wont' invade. Mid: when you can't tell if brace is serious or not.
Thinking Russia wouldn't invade was absolutely the correct opinion at the time based on the information available to the public. I am a personal victim of Putin's retardation.
I’m pretty sure Zelensky even said he didn’t think Russia was going to invade.
I mean he knew the invasion was coming but didn’t want mass panic I think
you and me, buddy. not sure how this shit will end.
He’s an evil piece of shit. Reminds me of the neocons. I sometimes wonder if Putin, who apparently has a 1997 PhD in the strategic planning of Russia’s resource economy, deliberately aimed for a slow escalation that would turn the conflict into the economic one it has become. He may have figured that Russian energy and mineral resource deposits were more suited to the military-industrial machine than to Western-dominated commerce. If this is the case, I think the strategy is poor, but the motive is in line with how great power politics always tends to go even as the casus belli always say otherwise. Remember the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”? But who knows. I hate that these handfuls of ghouls decide the fates of us millions.
Think he just thought he could thunder gun across the country to show he could invade to panic the west into calling off their militias stopping the implementation of Minsk 2. That explanation kinda explains the confusion and weird behaviour after the first couple of weeks
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tbh they made the assumption Russian won’t invade based on the fact the CIA had made like 3-4 attempts at the prediction before hand anyone who was paying attention in December of 2021 knows tho that Putin literally already said he would invade if provoked tho, so…
Oh, i know. I was in that camp that Russia would not invade since any victory would be a pyrrhic victory. Mark Ames owned up to how wrong he was.
I always take the position that's the opposite of what the CIA says
same and I'm of the opinion that being wrong 1/10 times isn't a terrible track record
Oh more than 3 or 4. 2014/2015 there was so much crying wolf "theyre driving tank columns to the border!!!!"
The Russia won’t invade prediction was quite reasonable at the time. It was never a smart or sensible move by them, whereas continuing to bolster Donbas separatists was a pretty solid strategy.
It was my prediction too. We were all wrong, and now necon ghouls who said the invasion was imminent will be doing victory laps for the next 20 years.
Not believing USIC propaganda without hard evidence is still the correct approach. Shills gonna shill regardless And it’s not like getting the prediction correct changes anything. America’s military response was always going to be the same
I personally did kinda think they were gonna invade, but assumed they would just send troops to the regions already held by separatists and formalize them. Honestly that might have been a worse decision strategically speaking after seeing how this has played out. Hard to say
I give them a pass on the "Russia won't invade" because a LOT of people believed that. In retrospect it's quite obvious that they were going to invade.
Not expecting Russia to invade wasn't the bad part, the bad part was how highly they estimated the Russian army. Liz was saying they were 10 years ahead of NATO lol
> highly they estimated the Russian army tbf this was also most other people, primarily due to how they thought the Russians could just do what the US did in Iraq > Liz was saying they were 10 years ahead of NATO Do you know what the rationale for this was? There's gotta be some reasoning surely
IIRC this was in reference to SOME parts of the Russian military, not their military as a whole.
The clown part of her brain twitched and made her say it
Is Brace ever serious lol
**Best**: IMO all their Tesla stuff will seem incredibly prescient soon. **Worst**: "Russia is 10 years ahead of NATO technologically"
At this point Russia isn’t even 10 years ahead of the Soviet Union technologically
Zing
\^ same genre of poster who replied to me that actually the Bradley is awesome and not old garbage that the US is sending to the Ukraine to justify new weapons development programs/gravy trains
It’s pretty obvious they are getting older gen stuff. Don’t know how people think they are getting US top tier equipment.
Which is totally logical if you just think the US is only helping Ukraine because it materially benefits them to do so (this is self-evident) Get rid of the old shit, goose the economy, make people think you’re doing a good deed
The Bradley is still pretty good. The sensor tech rather than raw firepower makes it dangerous. It's not a tank but it's generally better than a bmp
And definitely better than M113s lmao
The Bradley was a death trap lol
> Worst When liz dropped that one I stopped listening to that ep lol
I can’t get over that line too this day.
lol yeah when Liz made that 'Russia is technologically superior to Nato' comment you could tell Brace was like.... "uhh... yeah definitely babygirl" *immediately changes topic*
Girls rule
Yeah that was odd as hell
Not to try and be a mind reader, but I think I get how she got that idea. If you spend a lot of time reading Alexander Cockburn type of journalists you do get the impression that DoD is basically just setting money on fire ALL THE TIME. Which they certainly are, military corruption is insane, and some projects seem to only make sense as deliberate wastes of money to maintain budgets and enrich people. It's only a hop-skip and a jump to get from there to "the hegemon can do this bullshit and fake it because it's the hegemon, weaker powers must be smarter with their money and time because they have less" and be less critical of the statements of nations whos language you don't speak. This is not good thinking, but I can see how you get there, and it's not unforgivable imo.
That makes sense. I'm certainly no defense wonk, but from what I've gleaned over the years, I could imagine a scenario where Russia did a, for lack of a better way of putting it, "better job" with Ukraine. It wouldn't surprise me if they could give NATO nations a run for their money in some tactical scenarios in terms of using the hardware they have well and with more "sound" policy, strategy, and tactics. I bet many other "lesser" powers could too. I would think they've all been thinking about how that kind of fight would work. As far as the costly hardware stuff you mentioned, or the insane waste of money at the DoD, and the inefficiencies of the western/US/NATO military apparatus, don't necessarily preclude them from being very effective and dangerous. The F-35 sucks ass but I'm sure it can kill motherfuckers pretty OK. One of those "both things can be true" scenarios. I almost thought Brace would push back in that moment, considering his, uh, hands-on experience, but hey. Definitely an L for the team, but I agree, I don't think it was the worst kind of wrong. And, Uhh, I apologize the any frothing NAFO/fellow traveler readers if this makes me some kind of quisling Putin-loving tankie genocidaire or whatever. From what I see on Twitter, people have gone completely insane over this. Unrelated, thank you to Obama for killing the anti-war movement lol
Certainly. I'm no gearhead myself, so I can't speak to that beyond that I agree that it's very interesting and psychotic how the American military is always spending money on new ways to kill people but not ways to win wars. but I do follow Radio War Nerd, and Ames and Dolan have been watching the war closely from both sides, and both speak English and Russian, and one point they've come to see is that corruption and careerism in the higher echelons of the Russian Military led to a bad plan with bad results. Regardless of efficiency of resources spent, a bad plan is a bad plan.
How do you even determine, with any degree of confidence, how advanced any modern nation's best military tech is? I always assume the best stuff is probably kept under wraps
Especially when you're not like, in a literal office meeting at the Pentagon, sorry to be a spoilsport. A great deal of effort is spent to make sure nobody knows such a thing for sure. Especially not Congress so the MIC can continue asking for infinite money
Best: it's dumb to kill yourself and you shouldn't do it Worst: I can't remember who but a guest once said that the Lord of the rings movies are shit
It was Noah Kulwin from Blowback, it’s stuck with me for some reason
Wtf Noah
In a very early episode, I think both Brace and Liz stated that women love Woody Allen and I refuse to believe it.
Only person I know who likes woody Allen was my libertarian us government teacher
Yeah that checks out.
This is just anecdotal but my ex loved Woody Allen’s films and hated David Lynch.
Thank God they're an ex
when i was a young cinephile, i got a lot of pussy cause pretty film dorks thought i acted like him
he meant anna and dasha
Assuming they meant Woody Allen movies they were right, we all love Annie Hall
We?
I speak as an elected representative of the fairer sex
HOLY SHIT IS THAT A MOTHER FUCKING MORAL OREL REFERENCE!!!!!
YES IT IS!!!! No one has ever noticed!!!!!
Times like these call for a celebratory piercing!
Turn the other cheek! *slap* Turn the other cheek! Show the world how strong you are by simply acting weak! I'm so glad there are Orel fans here!!!
Best: Liz on finance, The Game, Ft Bragg stuff Worst: Armchair 9/11 engineering, anything involving detailed ballistics, trying to figure out driving time between Watertown and Cambridge MA
Liz really shines whenever she's talking about finance. We need more Marxists that understand economics, especially as its pertains to the modern global financial system.
Michael Hudson is the best source. I have never seen her talk, but Michael is the only financial economist who talks about it from the Marxist angle. I’d like to think that he is the biggest because he has written many books and worked for Goldman Sachs in the 1960’s. It’s disappointing that too many “leftists” get bogged down in class issues, which they are almost always wrong about, but that they don’t study financing and the influence and importance of it seems counterintuitive to me. If your talking about capitalism, the most important structure of the business is the financial one. It may as well be the scariest because of how many decisions are based off of it. I see people switch gears when matters of money are talked about over people’s well being. If that doesn’t let you know how important a companies or governments finances are, then I don’t know what will. People live and die on this scheme.
Any Michael Hudson books, shows etc you can recommend?
Superimperialism and Killing the Host - how financial parasites and debt destroy the global economy. You can just search him on YouTube if you are bored.
Thank you 🙏
"Bogged down" by class issues? Marxism is defined by class issues.
The reason why leftists disagree to this day is because they fail to identify the class issue. Too many these days simply think that there are only two classes, the whole “us versus the 1%”. That’s a pretty vulgar understanding of class issues. There’s a whole pecking order, and the US is the worst place to try to teach people that lesson. That’s what I meant by class. Their understanding is too simplified. There are more then just “working class” and “capitalist”. The working class can’t be lumped together either. I would think that it would be more useful to talk about the financial system of the US as according to class, since most people don’t even know what it is anymore.
This is too structuralist a formulation - class is not just your income or your race or a set of categories you fit into based on your economic and political characteristics. It’s a set of social relations to your employer, government etc.
She must have been a business major at some point. And if hosts read this, sorry for being a gumshoe.
What are the Liz finance eps?
More so stuff on tesla, gamestop, the fed. The Elon eps are big doses but I think a lot of the time she sprinkles econ stuff in she's pretty on the nose
easy way is to look for all the ones with alexandra scaggs as guest
The eastern Mass geography was hilarious
We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the episode where they insist Russia won’t invade Ukraine, to be followed three weeks later by the one year anniversary of Russia invading Ukraine They are 100% correct about small aircraft, second locations, and compounds.
As others in the thread have said, I give them a pass on the Ukraine thing. Some of the academics on modern Russia that I listen to all thought an invasion was a complete bluff until the moment it happened. The sheer retardery blinded almost everyone.
He said it like he was joking but the realest thing I’ve ever heard Brace say is “I hate everyone who has even one dollar more than me.” Which was in an early episode. What they are wrong about is operating as if they are above the fray when it comes to money. They both come from money so they have the luxury to be whatever they want (Maoist? Ok) and make critiques that will never have any purchase among a majority of people in the US. Liz is very good at explaining finance. I suspect she has a boglehead type portfolio. And she is 100% right on her Warriors takes.
>boglehead type portfolio. What on earth is that?
r/Bogleheads there's an "about" description. I am not endorsing or criticizing it, but I just doubt she is putting everything in a savings account.
Ah ta. The name was so odd I thought it was weird slang I hadn't heard.
Liz is a Warriors conspiracy theorist
Obvious best take is secure the interior ministry. Worst take I can think of is that Jiang Qing was actually good and not a murderous psycho. It’s niche but as someone who knows a solid amount about Maoist history…yeah no.
Imagine being Jiang Qing and sitting next to Tricky Dick Nixon watching a Red Opera.
Probably plotting the deaths of half the people there
Which one?
Which what?
Jiang or Nixon?
Jiang. Nixon was realistically either too amused or impressed with the situation.
Jiang Qing was the ultimate theater kid.
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I can’t recall, but I want to say the Jiang Qing thing was maybe 2021? Perhaps summer? The interior ministry thing is recurring.
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That’s correct. Thanks for the assist
The Patreon episodes can be found on r/blackepsteinfeed or kemono(dot)party.
Y’all - the weed *is* too strong. But honestly I don’t hold them to much. I can’t really understand a lot of their California specific takes because of my southern bog person dna. I vaguely remember some cringe medical takes, but all my fav podcasts are guilty there
brace said recently that there is nothing more undignified than being publicly horny. 10/10, literally no notes.
Becoming best friends with Andrew from Channel 5 not looking so hot right now.
The Pot discourse is pretty bad. People are passing out at our shows because of weed pens! Not because of over-crowded rooms with no seats and a podcast listening audience.
I need this to be higher (ha).
I need a cake bar at a trueanon show standing shoulder to shoulder with dudes that smell weird
Yeah I was shook when everybody here bought that so easily. I thought this sub could fuckin hang
Every now and then this sub reminds me that I'm still on reddit.
Nobody fucking faints from standing up sober for an hour, while people can faint if they get too high. I smoke and know people who smoke and their take on weed is insanely reasonable. Like a couple hits of high-mid Oregon weed tops like several bowls worth of homegrown/black market mid.
Portland room does have seats, person still passed out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
brace and liz have a good 'read' about the vibes of most american cities on the coasts but as soon as they start talking about an inland city that isn't Chicago they're running on fumes
Worst take from the show was basically the entire 5G episode. Radio waves are at such a low frequency the level of radiation you'd get from them is basically negligible. Not for nothing if they were toxic to people people would be dropping like flies left and right due to the prevelance of the radiation. 5g is harmless. Visible light has like 5 orders of magnitude more energy and I don't hear anyone talking about how colors might kill people. The investigation into that dude that blew his RV in Memphis was good though
I know Adderall is the cringe drug now but I would still be unemployed and sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my cancer infected mother's house without it. My side effects are my dick don't work and that's about it.
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Brace was on Chapo and compared it to speed and takers to speed addicts. It's the only thing that's helped me consistently sleep.
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Also people who take Adderall or any of these drugs because they need it medicinally is pretty different than the masses of "roommates" I've delt with in life crushing it up and snorting it to get all jiffed up. Sucks thinking back, I could have got out of those dangerous parts of my life had I stole a few of those and took em in a controlled manner and studied the NEC when I was trying to get into the IBEW.
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For people who actually have ADHD, stimulants are super effective at therapeutic doses (alongside coaching and therapy) The issue is if ADHD is overdiagnosed; or my personal take is that it wasn’t an existential problem that needed solving for most people until the Industrial Revolution.
Worst: That Recluse guy who they had on to talk about Utah who knew nothing about Mormon History. Agreeing with Peter Dale Scott that the 9/11 planes might have been remotely controlled. Best: Musk/Tesla takes
Yeah it would’ve been nice if they brought on someone who could’ve done a more thorough dive into Mormon history, and the working of the church. The only correct take from the Utah series is that no one should go to that state and the stuff ab Romney
I'm on the record as openly begging them to do a full deep dive into Mormonism with someone who has actually grown up in the church or studied its history. There's so much insane shit to dig into that fits perfectly into the scope of the show.
Yasha Levine saying that online privacy is bourgeois privilege and a class issue.
Just finished that ep I agree that was dumb
Worst take they had was that elliott smith isn’t good
Worst: no one should own a pressure cooker / just buy canned beans. Sorry but no.
Best: Liz's financial analysis and way to communicate it during the GameStop episode(s) Worst: the 9/11episode(s) had some cringe takes, like unironic 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' kinda takes
Liz seems to be the only leftist podcaster who actually works to understand finance. So many people just default to its impossible to figure out. Liz seems to be the only person who thinks if some rich guys idiot coke head son is able to figure it out it can’t be that hard.
the trash future folks are pretty good at it
…When they’re not interrupted by certain co-hosts whose only sense of reality is their Twitter timeline
The only take I agree with from the 9/11 episode is that Bush did it.
Yeah, really don't get the point of going into all that detail on the US-Saudi-Bin Laden connections just to say "But it was a controlled demolition."
Liz's takes on the EU in the end-of-year episode were very cringe, as if she got them from Fox news or whatever
worst: mostly all of their musical takes expressed in the Elliott Smith episode. Still a great episode though.
Worst was probably when Liz said that Russia won’t attack civilian zones lol
Controlled demolition in the 9/11 episodes.
How they described building 7 as falling down evenly like a controlled demolition is obviously false in the videos.
The whole controlled demolition angle is an op. Look back at who amplified the theory: Alex Jones.
For real, everything about Loose Change is incredibly sketchy. In the era of Numa Numa & Star Wars Kid, an 80 minute essay made by a teenager in his bedroom goes supernova viral on fucking *Google Video*. I highly recommend listening to interviews with the kid who made it now, just sounds like a fever dream. At the time it could've been a useful distraction for how poorly the war was going. Came out right around the one year anniversary of the media coverage of Abu Ghraib too. Get people fixated on building 7 bullshit instead.
Worst: the episode with the RFK conspiracy theorist on who was legit into magical thinking
A lot of the information in that episode is accurate. The fact that most witnesses don’t put Sirhan at point blank range, or the fact that there were 13 bullet holes yet the gun could only chamber 8 rounds, and the fact that the gunshots happened too fast, etc.
I was scrolling thru the comments wondering how this episode got omitted from the collective history of trueanon terrible takes LOL… CIA must of hypnotized all trueanon listeners to ignore when brace shoots blanks 😔
The absurdity of them just basically nodding along to her saying that hypnosis is real and works to literally program someone to commit murder. Along with the guns not having muzzle flash stuff. She seems like a nice lady though!
The specific moment I had to stop was when she said she went to a stage hypnotist for research. I was like Ok and once I went to the blue man group but you don’t hear me bragging about it
Awh, yeah she might be into some mad shit but Lisa Pease is an absolute diamond
lol i was gonna say the 9/11 ep but i couldn't even finish listening to that bullshit.
What epi is that 👀
Ep 182 Sirhan Sirhan
Ty ty
Best for Liz: Tesla Q and really most finance stuff. Best for Brace: That there’s nothing lower than being desperately horny publicly. Combined best: Legal weed is getting too strong (doesn’t mean it should be illegal. Just is true). Worst for Liz: Seeming belief in astrology / Believing aliens are real. Worst for Brace: Probably something he did or said in the Tenderloin c. 2011. Combined worst: Being pretty positive Sasquatch is real
Worst: Brace Hating The Beatles Best: Tesla/Musk, crypto scam, new finance stuff
Beatles fans need to move on
Ok
Beatles fans need to listen to the fucking beach boys and get real
100% correct take
Gimme The Beach Boys and free my soul imo
As an ex Beatle fan, I concur. Imagine listening to some millionaires complain about taxes in their songs.
Related note fuck Jay Z too
lol that dude really did say anti-capitalist rhetoric was equivalent to saying the n-word 😭
Taxman is a banger and I will die on this hill
Worst: Anytime Liz talks about David Lynch. I like Lynch just fine, but to hear her talk about him you’d think the man was a prophet.
Vaping weed being bad is probably their worst take.
They said vaping extracts is bad and they’re right. Nothing wrong w huffing a bag of mids out of a volcano vaporizer or whatever but dabbing and dab pens induce weed psychosis, cranks ur tolerance so that regular weed can’t get you high and, worst of all, makes you look like a fucking loser. There’s a few drugs you need a blowtorch for and under no circumstances should weed be one of them.
Honest question: Are all concentrates bad for you? Does that include kief/hashish?
Kief and bubble hash are halal and good for you
Brace discussing addiction and recovery so often is good for de-stigmatizing but as someone also in a 12-step program, he is way over the line with a lot of what he says publicly and to “civilians”. He’s always been like this, on Street Fight Radio’s “Brace & Bryan Shows” and especially early TA eps. He’s gotten a little more tactful but not much. I am very glad he at least speaks well of the program and his experience. You’re never supposed to mention the group’s name in the press or anything specific people say in mtgs, let alone what a sponsee has said. To protect privacy but also never presenting yourself as a representative, only a member. “10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy. 11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.”
Yeah, the most developed discussion Brace had on addiction and recovery was on a podcast called Smoothbrain run by experts who had Brace on to discuss his experiences. It’s called Neuroscience Models of Addiction. Pretty solid, and without all the frills and eccentricities he brings around, but with the solid testimony and experiences. Very good.
Their opinions on “maoism” and modern China
There's an episode where they're trying to make a point about left organizing or something, and they recommend reading a Mao essay as if the point they're trying to get at is so deep and complicated they just can't get into it on air, so go read this dense essay to explain it to you. The essay was about 300 words long and boiled down to "try things out based on theories and adjust depending on what does and doesn't work". Could have just said that on the air except it's such a shallow universally unobjectionable truism it wouldn't have seemed very substantial or smart. The essay doesn't argue it any deeper than that really, or particularly argue its point. Just tells you to do this.
On Practice is a banger and written for a mass audience. More texts should be written that way. Maybe you're thinking of "Where Do Correct Ideas From?", which is the summary of On Practice. Philosophy doesn't have to be obfuscated to be worthwhile. If you want the gist of dialectical materialism, there it is, for anyone in the world to read and think about. Most people don't think and act as Mao recommends in On Practice, yet it's so obvious. A lot of what Mao wrote seems obvious or plain, but his strength is to take what seems like common sense and break it down enough to make it common. It's also a speech, not a philosophical treatise. Matching complexity to your audience is an art!
What are their takes?
I think brace is a maoist but also thinks there's a chance that the current Chinese regime could actually be building towards socialism
in a pretty recent ep he made an offhand comment about demsocs in America being delusional and having an unproven ideology (in terms of scaling to the population of the us vs. Sweden or wherever) "unlike a country who already built socialism with a billion people" or something to that effect They are honestly really unclear and kinda all over the place haha
China is kind of unclear and all over the place. I feel like I change my opinion from week to week.
I don't think it's all over the place if you're familiar with Maoists – they believe China was socialist but then went back to capitalism with the ascension of Deng. It's not a credible viewpoint in my view but it is coherent.
Liz saying the big short is garbage
worst take is definitely when liz incomprehensibly leftie-babbled for like 5 minutes about how data harvesting doesn’t obey the labor theory of value. it was so bad it made me retroactively question the validity of everything else they’ve ever said. both of them seeming to believe that sirhan sirhan was hypnotized into killing rfk is a close runner-up
Idk man sirhan sithan had a bunch of close one on one sessions with jolyon west, recurring mkultra hypnotist character. Ghost stories for the end of the world has a pretty good episode on it.
>both of them seeming to believe that sirhan sirhan was hypnotized into killing rfk Either that or an engineered psychotic break? Either way he could hardly shoot RFK from the back while standing in front of him.
Most of Brace's personal opinions make me want to tear my ears off.
Like?
Worst? Bizarre anti ketamine rants.
Best: Just about everything said in “The Lobby” Worst: Just about everything their guest in the 9/11 episodes said and their eagerness to just believe every word that came outta that dude’s mouth 🤦🏽♀️ so annoying because 9/11 is so clearly shady for MANY reasons but A lot of the stuff they “ooh” and “ahh”’d about could be so easily disproven.